Jonathan had never been happier. He certainly hadn’t since he’d left Dalmarin at least. After he’d started working with Kaspov and when he’d come back to Khaghrumer as a renowned trollslayer, were both great moments too, but the evenings he spent with Anda were a secret joy. It was something he couldn’t share with anyone, except her, and that made them all the sweeter. The secret was only hard at first at least. Eventually he got good at hiding those smiles from the dwarves he worked with, and the only sign that something was amiss was his rapid improvement with the stone tongue.
Spending all day without Anda only to be able to share a precious few hours with her in the evenings quickly became a torment in itself though, and it never got any easier to deal with. Even the rare feast days where he didn’t have work offered no respite, because without work of her own, she was usually forbidden from leaving her family's compound. It was so backward that Jonathan found it frustrating, but there was nothing he could do, and no one he could complain to.
Still, they made the best of it, and every evening for a quarter of a watch they shared their own little world in his warehouse. It wasn’t the prettiest or cleanest place, though Jonathan had borrowed a broom from work so he could fix that shortly after she started coming over, but it was a world of their own where she wouldn’t get in any trouble spending time with him, and for now, that was enough. Mostly they just talked, while he practiced his letters, and she mocked him playfully for how slowly he learned. “Come on Jon-all-thane, what comes after klar,” she teased whenever he forgot a letter. It wasn’t his fault that the dwarven alphabet had nearly forty letters, and some of them looked almost identical to others. Eventually he could write his name though, which was a start.
Other words followed from there until he could read the most basic children’s storybooks she brought him to practice with. Inevitably every dwarven fairy story had one of three villains: the elves, the gobblers, and laziness. Usually even if a gobbler or a troll was the bad guy, it was because an elf put them up to it, but neither of them were ever as damaging as a dwarf who shirked their duty to the clan. All the worst endings were caused by laziness. Jonathan was appalled by some of the stories she gave him to read. “But everyone died. How is this a story for children,” he’d asked once after they’d finished reading a particularly awful picture book. It vividly depicted a cavern collapsing because of a series of unlikely events that had started with a dwarf leaving work early rather than finish tightening all the bolts his foreman had assigned him.
While they worked, he would tell her stories of the world above, and describe all the sights he’d learned to take for granted, and she would teach him new words so that he could do a better job of painting pictures for her with his words. Sometimes those words still didn’t fit quite right, but he did the best he could stringing together words that didn’t always make sense together to get the meaning across. Most of the time he told her about simple things, like the way the seasons changed, or how the ocean looked during a storm. She had trouble accepting that the weather changed from month to month in the world above, didn’t believe him that snow existed, or since the wording he had to use was icerain, that ice could fall from the sky.
“I know that ice is what mountains are made of,” she’d said, completely certain that he was crazy, “But it only exists in high places the same way that Aetherite can only be found in the deeps.” This became a regular argument, until one day Jonathan had took her back to the tunnel he showed magic off to her last time, determined to show her ice. He’d recovered quite a bit in the weeks since the troll encounter, and by really straining himself he managed to pull all the fire from a bowl of water, freezing it solid and showing her that ice could exist anywhere - that it was just an absence of fire. Snow wasn’t a miracle he could pull off in this heat, but he wished he could figure out a way to show her that too.
After that she’d believed him more readily when he told her about such minor miracles as thunderstorms, kite flying, and wildflowers. The idea that perfumed blossoms just sprung up at random, and no one seemed to care blew her mind. He told her about more exotic places too, like the white city of Lloren and the high road that spanned the whole of the kingdom of man, but she was more interested in the simple things than the big ones. She wanted to know the answers to questions like what bird song sounded like, how flowers looked when he tried to draw them for her on his slate, and what milk tasted like before it was turned to cheese and salted butter to make the long trip down to the deeps. There were no words for the richness of flavors that the deep dwarves would never know though, in the same way that he could never really explain how flowers or the air after a thunderstorm smelled.
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Jon understood her desire for the little things though. Even though he was desperate to find out what she tasted like, in the end it had taken him weeks to work up the courage to kiss her. He’d been about to, on their fourth visit before he found out that she was several years older than him. Down here it had been difficult to track time, but Jonathan was fairly sure that he was about to turn 17, so it had come as a real shock to both of them when Anda had told him that she was 25, almost one and a half times his age. She’d laughed when he told her that if she was human she’d be a mother of three already. Apparently dwarves matured more slowly, because they lived much longer than men. Anda couldn’t provide much explanation on it, because she’d never given it much thought before. Adulthood started at 30 to them in the same way it started at 16 or 18 in the world of men. Even so, Jonathan hadn’t thought she was much older than 15, and she’d assumed that he was in his forties.
Apparently just about every dwarf he’d ever spent much time with was at least a century old. Jonathan had known that they were all two or three times older than him, of course, but he’d never suspected that most of them were at least twice as old as that! Even dwarves like Kaspov, who had made his name fighting monsters for hire on the surface, hadn’t actually started doing that until he’d completed his apprenticeship at the age of forty. That was crazy to Jonathan. By forty he hoped to have a family, and lands of his own. If he was only just getting to where he was now by then, he’d have considered himself a complete failure, but then he supposed that if he planned to live to be at least 300, he might look at things a little differently.
That revelation had killed the budding romance between them for a while, but in time it blossomed again. There was an attraction there that Jonathan didn’t claim to understand, but was powerless to resist. He couldn’t figure out if Anda was attracted to him, or just the taboo nature of their relationship and her only avenue of exploring the world beyond her own, but it didn’t really matter. Over the months that followed lazy days spent just laying there and holding each other while they talked replaced work with the slate as often as not. Jonathan knew that his brother would never have approved of this sort of slow courtship. He’d heard Marcus tell his friends that if you couldn’t charm her out of her panties after a week or two it was time to move on to the next one. That attitude disgusted Jonathan as much as it baffled him. He’d never treat Claire, Anda, or any other woman that way.
Not that she wanted anything like that either. She knew that sometime in the next five years she’d be married off to a stranger at the behest of her father, and that a real relationship with a human was beyond impossible. To the stone men marriage was a business decision, like anything else and she was obviously dreading it. Jonathan tried to sympathize with her. He told her that he’d been in much the same situation before his father had passed away, and there’d been a girl he’d very much wanted to marry, that he knew he’d never be allowed to, because the differences between their stations were simply too great.
Age was hardly the only difference he learned about between their cultures. Tucked away in the train yards he was in what the dwarves considered to be the roughest part of their society. Even a miner that came home filthy every night, or a smith that was permanently stained with soot were more respectable professions. There wasn’t anything wrong with working on the rails, per se. It was just that it was connected with the surface, and any respectable dwarf resented everything about the surface, except of course the food that came from it. Anda couldn’t count the dinner parties she’d been dragged to, to be shown off to potential partners, where the richest stone men she’d ever met would go on long diatribes about how everything a true dwarf needed could be provided by the deeps, before he washed his words with a nice tall glass of hops and hypocrisy.
“Why is it that those who hate men most forget where all the wheat for their bread and the barley for their beer comes from?” she asked once, laughing in a way that was almost musical. Jonathan didn’t answer. Not because he didn’t have an answer though, but because he hated to interrupt her when she was being so adorable. He’d let her rant about almost anything as long as she just didn’t stop talking. Hypocrisy seemed to be her favorite critique of the men that ran her life, but for some reason she couldn’t see it in herself when she was defending the system that oppressed her so much.
In some ways, dwarves were decades or centuries ahead of any humans he’d ever known, but in other ways they were so backwards that it was a wonder they’d ever come so far. How could they have invented an engine powered by steam and their impossibly dangerous dwarf powder without ever figuring out how to incorporate justice into their laws, magic into their worldview, or giving their women even a modicum of the rights that men had? Anda tried to explain it a few times. She even defended the way that women were treated as necessary because of what a dangerous world it was, but Jonathan didn’t buy it. He had a hard enough time accepting that in a year or three she’d be married to a stranger, and then she’d probably never leave their home again without a chaperone. It was a bizarre thought, and it hurt Jonathan to think that he’d never see her again, but hopefully he wouldn’t have to worry about that for a long time.