A wounded man in partial mail; a frazzled yet beautiful woman with a Magister’s staff; a girl with armor, a sword, and Elven bow: they made a conspicuous party for an urban environment. Regardless of whether Lukon succeeded in his directive they would not be difficult to identify in this place. Eris led a disoriented Rook and sulking Aletheia into an alley, where she used Arcane Semblance to make them less recognizable. She sculpted Rook and Aletheia’s hair into brown while her own into blonde and whittled her staff into a mundane walking device.
The other armaments were more challenging to conceal, but with the staff she found it easy to sustain so many illusions, so she settled for blurring the party’s blades into more mundane varieties—so they would not be recognized—and turning Aletheia’s bow into a simple, if over-large, hunting weapon. Last were their eyes.
“You look pretty with brown eyes,” Aletheia said.
“I always look pretty,” Eris said as she concluded the spell. She glanced at her reflection in the hand mirror Rook gave her. It was very strange to see herself with the wrong hair.
“Can I be green?”
“You will also be brown, like most Kathars.”
“But my eyes used to be green,” the girl said.
“I do not care,” Eris said. “Green eyes are rare. They will make you more noticeable.”
Rook put a hand on her shoulder. He had been at the alley’s entrance, standing watch, but now he said, “Let her have her eyes back, Eris.”
She glared at him. “Who is this strange man with dark hair behind me, who feels it meet to tell me what to do?”
“None other than the Duke of Korakos,” he said.
Eris sighed. “Far be it for me to disappoint a doukas. Very well.” She reformed Aletheia’s eyes in a natural shade of green, then brown for Rook.
The whole procedure was much like applying mana as makeup. It was silly of her, after such a horrifying week, but she enjoyed the process more than she was likely to admit. Covering scars and blemishes. Realizing each companion’s potential. Aletheia was almost pretty by the time Eris was finished.
Eris withdrew the arcane focus. That was impossible to glamor, but easy enough to conceal. She gazed into it—and concentrated. The orb became hot to her touch as it took off from her fingers and rotated inches above her palm, the black surface bubbling with brown, yellow, and green.
She tapped it with her staff. The colors sparked, then became still. She felt a new muscle somewhere beyond her body. She needed only to flex it…
The arcane focus had recorded her sustained enchantments. When she activated it with her mind, with only a brief amount of focus toward contracting that invisible arm, they all took on their camouflaged appearances simultaneously. When she relaxed, the enchantments dropped.
She wouldn’t need to make them over again any time soon. They would be able to move in disguise easily now, even between days.
“Do you think Pyraz made it to Seneria?” Aletheia said.
“How should we know?” Eris said.
“I think so,” Rook said.
“I think he did,” Aletheia said. “He had to.”
“There is no such ‘has to’ in this world,” Eris said. “But I hope you are right.”
Rook led them through the great gates that divided the quarters, away from the waterfront.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m rather exhausted,” he said.
“It has only been four days since my last night of sleep,” Eris said.
“I know a hotel in the Merchant Quarter.”
“Which we will afford with what specie?”
“Antigone donated her treasury to us. Six thousand drachmae.”
Eris stopped in the streets. “Antigone?” She looked to her staff, and suddenly she realized. “What did you—what happened?”
“We had to find Aletheia before we came to Pyrthos,” Rook said.
“We killed her,” Aletheia whispered.
Eris stared. “Perhaps you had best tell me the whole story.”
“Later, in the hotel,” Rook said.
“Rook—if we have six thousand drachmae, we do not need to find Jason for his funds! We could have gone anywhere!”
He turned to look at her. His demeanor was different in this place. Not hostile, but colder. “You were too persuasive. It’s time I found my uncle, I agree.”
The feelings Eris had on this matter were very complicated. But she nodded. Within half an hour they found themselves in a place that swarmed with purple-cloaked merchants and overdressed women in magnificent dresses, where the towers beside the road were well-kept and through the windows burned candles, lanterns, and manalights. Rook brought them to a large building, ten storeys, that occupied a block unto itself. Within its lobby were servants and well-armored guards standing watch, and although the halfling who appeared to run the facility was surprised at the appearance of these newcomers, Rook convinced him to part with two rooms for two nights at twenty silver coins a piece.
“We will be broke before long at those prices,” Eris said. She admired the premises idly for a moment, then when Rook approached the staircase with their keys she realized what he had said. “Two rooms?”
“Is that a problem?” he said.
“There were three of us when last I counted.”
They entered a stairwell. “Fifth floor. Well,” he continued while he walked, “I thought you and Aletheia might share a room.”
“Please no,” Aletheia said.
“She is your pet, you may sleep with her at your feet,” Eris said.
“You girls are too catty. You need to spend some time bonding,” Rook said. “You can talk about boys and—knit.”
The girls stopped at a landing and stared at each other. “Knit?” Aletheia said.
“Or cast spells. You know. Bond.”
Their voices echoed along with each footstep.
“If ‘tis all the same to you, I would prefer my own room,” Eris said. “As I have had every night for the last three years.”
“I can stay with Rook,” Aletheia said.
Another landing. Here Rook stopped, and he reached out for Eris. “Actually,” his voice was quiet, “I thought you and I would share a room, and we might save twenty silvers.”
This was a ploy. Eris should have seen through it sooner, it was so obvious—but she realized that she did not mind. She was overcome by a very unexpected tingling in the top of her head.
“Ah,” she said.
“If you really want to be alone, I can get another key,” he said. She felt his breath against her face.
She brushed a spot of dust from his half-ruined jacket. “That—will not be necessary. I am sure Aletheia will not mind being alone.”
Aletheia gazed up at the couple from several steps down. She shrugged. “Yeah.”
A feeling of weakness crept through Eris’ skin and penetrated her bloodstream. She did not want to be near the girl any longer, or out in public. She said nothing else as she followed Rook to the hallway, then to a door that looked as though it once possessed a lock of mana. Now it was unpowered, replaced by a simple latch. Aletheia disappeared through a similar door at its side.
They slipped within.
----------------------------------------
No enchantments. No illusions. No spells at all in this place. A single window looked down on the busy nighttime streets of Katharos’ nighttime district, a place that never slept. Yet still, with blues and purples for curtains, black marble walls painted white, an empty tub, real wooden furniture cast with soft orange light off lanterns—it was a place worth twenty drachmae a night.
Rook collapsed onto the bed without delay, peeling off his bloody, sweaty, torn shirt and jacket and letting them fall to the ground with the padded clinking of concealed mail. Eris leered at him, but kept her distance by the door.
The preceding four days since her capture had seemed to play out over the course of a year. So much had happened in a single week. It was not seven days ago that she told Rook they could never be together. She swore they would never share a bed again—that they would never see each other again.
Now her desire to leave was banished. And with a moment to think back on all that had happened, she found herself awash in doubt. So much drove her forward, so much peril, the odds of escape so improbable, that she hadn’t stopped to think about what it was that was happening, beyond to note surprise that it happened at all. But now…
Rook was slashed badly across a thigh. They had wrapped it in haste when they found a spare moment, but the bandages and all the trousers around were soaked red. He hissed in pain as he positioned himself.
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“Can you help me?” he asked. Eris watched for a moment, then nodded, and she aided him as he replaced the bloodied cloths. As she finished tying it off their eyes met. He added with a smile, “You are absolutely filthy.”
She felt filthy. They both were. She hung her head with a grin.
“Can you fetch a servant and tell her to draw a bath for us?” he said.
“At the same time?” she asked.
“That’s up to you.”
The tingling returned. She had to look away from him. It was ridiculous, but she covered her face with a hand. She hated feeling this way—yet she didn’t want to leave.
She did as instructed, fetching a servant who brought in a towel, but this ancient building had indoor plumbing from the Old Kingdom. A twist of a tap and the tub filled itself. Heating came from a fire beneath it, like a massive cauldron atop a stove, but Eris decided she could substitute for such a mechanism easily enough. Having demonstrated this technology the servant departed. Then they were alone again.
Eris let the illusion fall. Her hair darkened back to brown.
She became very quiet. There was something she needed to say, but she was embarrassed and uncertain how to speak her mind. It was infuriating. She felt like she stood in the path of an avalanche and had no choice but to give up running. She took a seat in a nearby chair.
Rook limped to the tub in silence. She heated it for him and he undressed to climb within, gasping as he was submerged. It was impossible to look away. From every angle he was more impressive than an Esenian statue. This was what she had wanted to walk away from?
Blood, dust, and grime floated to the water’s surface as he submerged his head. The tub was clouded by detritus. Eris watched it swirl against his movement, head against her hands, then melted it away with Hydropneumonic Purification. The water was left perfectly clear and clean.
This encounter seemed very familiar. She wondered if it would go as it did the last time.
He put his head back, breathing heavily. She watched his neck. His jaw. His chest, seeing each scar. Finally she worked up the courage to speak her mind.
“I do not understand,” she said.
He sighed, though not pointedly. “Me?”
“Yes. I…” Her mind bubbled with too many thoughts. She couldn’t stay focused. She loved to speak when it came time to throw an insult, or demonstrate intellect, or wield her wit. But this was impossible.
“There’s nothing hidden between us,” Rook said. “You don’t need to hesitate to speak your mind with me.”
“That is not it. Only…why.”
“Why?”
“Why did you return for me when I told you I did not want your company? When I promised you that we would never see each other again?” She nearly felt tears in her eyes, which was unacceptable; she paused to wipe them away, then hesitated until they were gone. Then continuing, “You embarked on a suicidal quest, for which there was no hope of reward or success, for no purpose but to rescue an estranged companion from a fate of her own making. Why?”
She was genuinely confused. She could make no sense of it.
Rook shifted toward her. Water trickled off his arms and he leaned toward her, now with open eyes. “For the same reason I went back for Aletheia. I don’t leave my friends behind.”
“I think I had told you quite succinctly that we were no longer friends before we were ambushed, had I not?” He didn’t respond quickly so she went on, “That cannot be the real reason, even for one so sentimental as you. Is it because you wish to continue sleeping together?”
He smiled. “Of course not.”
“You say ‘of course’ as though other men would not be motivated to rescue me from danger at the prospect of sex. I believe they would risk much more than their lives for a night with me.”
“Eris…do I really need to explain it?”
“I can understand—and appreciate—the incentive of lust. It is a principle that has animated me…often. But surely you understood that there was no promise I did not depart, as I said I would, once I was recused. If I was recused. Yes? Would you have tried to stop me if I had? If I still do?”
“No, never. You’re not my slave.”
She frowned. “That cannot be the right answer. For if I will not be your friend, and I will not have sex with you, and I will not be near you, then you may as well have let me stay in the dungeons of Pyrthos. Why rescue me?”
“Because I love you,” he said. “And if you had become a Servitor like Lukon, and I had known, much less known there was something I could have done to stop it, then my life would have been over. I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself. Even if we’d never seen each other again.”
This was the most perplexing line of thought Eris had ever encountered, but she was in such a place at that moment as to not dismiss it out of hand. Now the tears were impossible to keep back. She buried her face in her palms.
“You should have left me.”
“What?”
“Because I want you to be selfish,” she sobbed gently, “I want you to be like me. That I could understand.” She looked up at him. “Yet instead you are—ruthlessly selfless, and heroic, and handsome, and it drives me mad. I could understand the man who does not suicidally charge into the Dungeons of Pyrthos to rescue Eris, but you are a person who sees me for what I am and does—idiotic things, for no gain, anyway. And this…” She snorted, but with a breath controlled herself. “Because of this. Because of you and your idiot heroics, and lunatic notions of love, I have been spared the worst fate imaginable.”
He leaned toward her, over the edge of the tub, their eyes meeting. “I told you love wasn’t a weakness,” he said softly. “No one can go through life alone.”
“Yet it is!” Eris snapped. “There were ten million ways you may have found yourself dead in this expedition. You understand how absurd it was—how absurd it was that it worked—and we are not clear yet. The Magisters will hunt us to the ends of the Earth now. We have gone from minor annoyances to their most wanted fugitives. Only an idiot would refuse to see this! And yet still—if you had left me, I would be a Servitor.”
That was just it. That was the rub that drove her mad. If only Rook had gotten himself killed then she would have been proven right all along. Yet for his love for her, her life was given back to her. She was not blind to contradictions and this fact she saw as clearly as clouds overhead. That dreadful thing, that dependency, that compulsion and neurosis of ‘love’ which she hated so much and had cause her so much pain, was just the thing which had saved her life. And not just her life. Her memories. Her dignity. Her body and her very soul and existence, all of which would have been raped and defiled and ruined by the Magisters.
She wanted to hate Rook for laying bare this contradiction. It was his fault, she thought, that for the rest of her life she would be a hypocrite.
He grabbed her wrist and held it.
“Do you find me attractive?” he said.
Eris was so caught off-guard by this, so lost in her own thought, that she only exclaimed, “What?” When given a moment to appreciate the question—a ludicrous question—she shook her head, but responded affirmatively, “If a woman did not find you attractive, I should hope she was hanged.”
He laughed, hanging his head, then said, “Why?”
“Why?”
“Why am I attractive?”
Now she shook her head in honest confusion. “Is this a trick?”
“No, I want to know. When you look at me, how do you know?”
“You are…tall and strong. You have broad shoulders and—many muscles that are hard when we draw near each other, which I enjoy to feel myself against. You smell as a man should, in the most intoxicating way…shall I continue?”
“But those are just the things you like. I like your nose, and the way it sits so perfectly between your eyes, at such a perfect angle. I like the softness of your skin and its hue like pure frost and the shape of your hips and the color of your hair, so brown, like flowing chocolate not half so sweet as your lips. But why those things and not some other? Why do you like my shoulders?”
“…I do not know. Because they are manly, that is why. Every inch of you is manly…”
“But can you express what it is about my shoulders that attracts you? Why that ‘manliness’ draws you near?”
She scoffed. This was a silly game. “You might just as soon ask why what is sweet tastes good while what is rotten is foul.”
“What I’m trying to say—” he said, still holding her hand, “is that the lust and passion you’ve felt is no more rooted in logic than love. These things don’t make sense when you think deeply about them. There’s nothing in your square jaw better, in a cosmic sense, than a triple chin. Why should I prefer one over the other? I don’t know, I can see a world where I feel the opposite—yet I don’t notice the fat-faced woman, and you are more entrancing than the dancing of a fire. And like a fire, when I see you, you’re always new. Never old. I could never grow tired of you. And no matter how different we are, when we’re together, you warm me to my soul.”
He was deploying his poetic aptitude to woo her. She wondered if this worked on other women. She didn’t want it to work on her. And yet as he finished, she saw one clear antidote to her hypocrisy. She needed to do nothing more than shed her preconceptions. Give in. Then all her problems would be solved. Truly, in an instant, all the anxieties which had plagued her, and now this new frustration over her own rescue—if she only took a taste from the goblet of this ‘love,’ she might know whether or not it truly was as poisonous as she thought.
Yet sipping poison to determine its lethality was a dangerous game. It ended one of two ways. Either she would be assured the drink was safe to consume, or…she would be dead.
She did know one thing, however. In the meantime, before her death came, the drink would be delicious whether it was toxic or not.
“…dependency is a weakness. Love is a chain between souls that leads to destruction,” she protested weakly.
He stood from the tub, a hand on her arm, and put his head against hers. “Without each other,” he whispered, “we would have been destroyed a long time ago.”
It was a decision like jumping off a cliff. But then Eris remembered who she was. She who had pressed one step farther at the top of the Tower. She who used the manaforge one extra time. She who never relented in her search for the Archon’s Vault. When had the cliff ever stopped her before? Why was she letting it stop her now?
She pushed Rook back into the tub. Then she slipped from her skirt and dove in after him.
----------------------------------------
They were beneath the covers together. She could have kept going until dawn, but after one session of play in the water and three in the bed Rook was a cadaver beneath her. Instead she clutched her arms around his torso and let her head hang beside his. She felt his breath. She admired his muscles. The way his arms made her feel so small.
She often, in the past, felt intense affection for him after their encounters. It was the strangest thing—the only time she was anything but a bad girl. She would giggle and tease and kiss his scars while he stared at the sky.
Now she felt differently. Now she recalled what it had felt like to be alone in that cell, certain that rescue was not coming, certain she had no friends left in the world, and her grip around him tightened. By the dead Regizars she was acting like Aletheia. And yet…she did not want to let him go.
This was what he had wanted from her. This ‘cuddling.’ Before she was always afraid to spend too long near him, lest either one of them get the wrong idea. Now she couldn’t imagine getting up. She wished the night would last forever.
Rook traced her back. They basked in each other. Neither fell asleep. For some hours he told her the story of Antigone and their raid on her tower in Chionos. She told him what little there was to tell about the dungeons. Then they discussed their pasts, until neither knew what else to say.
Silence reigned until Rook spoke.
“Is this as bad as you thought?”
She didn’t reply for a long while. Then, “No. ‘Tis far worse.” She sat up to kiss him on the lips. They both laughed. Then, with a sigh, she said, “We are very different people.”
“Of course we are. You’re a woman and I’m a man.”
“Yes, I noticed. Rather explicitly.” She swallowed. “You know we will fight.”
“Yes.”
“And disagree about everything.”
“Disagreeing is fun. No matter how petty the topic we always get to insult each other.”
She laughed, but he wasn’t joking. “All is to say…I do not think it will be easier between us.”
“It’ll be harder. But love is something you work at. Like beauty. Do you wake up every morning looking perfect, or does it take effort?”
“Some effort,” she said. “Not much for me. Perhaps more for you.”
“A great deal. You’ve never seen me pluck my nosehairs, it’s hours out of my day.” Eris coughed in disgusted surprise. She checked his nose, as if to make sure he was joking, but he slapped her softly to assure he was. “My point is—nothing worth doing is easy.”
Killing Jason would be easy, she thought to herself. As would be abandoning Aletheia. But she took his point, and nodded. She barely recognized herself, nodding along to the pronouncements of a man. She did not feel nearly dominant enough to be Eris. But she was very inexperienced. She had much to learn about men yet.
Through their room’s single window the glimmer of the dawn appeared. The sky brightened around the horizon. “Dear Leaina,” he swore. “Aletheia will want to be up soon. You’ve kept me up all night.”
“I kept you up, hm?”
“Yes, I think so.”
She smirked. “Fair enough.”
“We should try to get some sleep.”
“If you insist…”
He leaned down to kiss her forehead. “I love you, Eris,” he said. “Goodnight.” He turned away from her and went to sleep.
She was left on her back, staring at the ceiling, while her mind was set buzzing. Everything calcified into reality in that moment. She felt terror and anxiety flooding through her all at once as she realized what she had gotten herself into—yet when she remembered all she had been through, and all the night’s discussions, she stilled her heart a modicum, and she assured herself she made no mistake.
“Goodnight,” she said. “My…love.”