The pact with the fey was simple: Orym’s life was the price of his father’s power.
The things he was meant to be, the comfort of his mother’s arms, the dreams of his life in Zephrah, his love for a boy with smiling golden eyes and black curls that frothed like gathered lace down his back.
Not his death, his life.
And yet you are still bound, Morri Calloway told him on the journey to the gate, after he gave his life for Fearne’s, while he held Fearne’s head in his lap as she slept fitfully, unwilling to be far from him. Your life to hers. Fate holds you together for purposes even I cannot understand.
And Orym does feel it, just as powerfully as he ever did before. He feels the pact that named his life as Fearne’s as much as he feels the tethers of those other strings which willingly bind them together.
And the newest one, still unexplored and unfamiliar to them both, which has led him here: to the place he was never meant to return.
🌸
The first view of the Summit Peaks is no bigger than the stones beneath Orym’s boots as he leads Fearne across the wide open plains. They’re days away, at least, and the mountains are so distant and small that it would bear no mention at all were it not Orym’s first sight of home in decades.
Even Fearne knows it when she sees it at the same moment Orym does, when his feet fail him and he stumbles over a far nearer, far less meaningful stone. She reaches down and catches him with both hands, searching his face with such earnest sweetness that Orym feels the pleasant strum of a familiar chord across the strings binding them together.
Orym has longed for this place so long that it feels that missing home is etched on his bones, as much a part as his name or his love for Fearne. For years it has been immovable in his mind, a place frozen in the last glimpse he had of it, the one thing Orym knew about himself.
But time is a thief of all things.
Even those far-away mountains will be washed away by rivers and rains, reduced to nothing but the rich earth beneath his feet, from which new life will spring. Even the memories he once had of the peaks of Zephrah feel smoothed from all the times he reached for them over the years, until all their sharp-cut edges were worn away. He can’t think of home without remembering all the times he lay in Fearne’s arms, watching the stars pass overhead and telling her stories of it.
Staring at the ascending path through the mountains, holding the hands of the fey he’s bound to thrice over, with the pact of his blood and by his own vow and in love freely given, Orym knows that there’s more he’s lost to time than he even knows.
“You’re afraid,” Fearne says in her gentle, musical tone, seeing his fear like it’s a tangible thing around him. “We could turn back. We could go somewhere else.”
Orym doesn’t know anywhere else they can go. He vowed to protect Fearne and he knows too little of the rest of Exandria to know where they’ll be safe. It no longer matters if he’s ready to face whatever it is he’ll find when they finish the ascent.
“No,” he says at last, turning his hands in Fearne’s so that he can hold her up now. “It’s time.”
🌸
Orym has faced fiercer beasts in the halls of the Queen of Summer than those which rise up from the canyons of the Summit Peaks. The greater challenge is finding the path where it’s shifted, looking past the landmarks Orym knew that are now so long gone that there’s no trace of them: the crooked tree that grew stubbornly out of the shorn cliffs, the old griffin’s nest once suspended between a split boulder, the way the path once curved around a now forgotten patch of wildflowers.
The shape of the landscape is the same if Orym looks out at the mountains, but the rest of it is as unknown to him as the windmills dotting the peaks along the road and the sparkling taste of magic entirely unlike that of the elemental rift.
They’ve only just come around the final bend overlooking the village, windswept and weary, when Orym stops so suddenly that he feels Fearne’s thigh bump against his shoulder.
“It’s changed,” he says before she can speak the question he can feel vibrating the air around her.
“The Feywild was always changing,” she reminds him in a voice that’s meant to be encouraging. A reminder of the inverted logic of the place she’s from, how strange Fearne finds it to be on a plane where she’s more tightly confined to the form she’s chosen for a time. Even Orym has found it strange to be back in a place where the seasons aren’t dependent on the whims of those in highest favor and power.
There isn’t a chance to reassure her before Orym feels the wind shift around him, bending to accommodate nearby bodies rapidly moving toward them. He’s halfway to reaching for the sword on his back, turning back toward the path to see, when he hears the sharp command issued in Common.
“Stop there. Weapons down.”
There are five guards in armor Orym recognizes instantly, bearing the angled sigil of the Ashari. The swelling relief of homecoming in his chest deflates instantly when the guard nearest lifts her spear and thrusts it in Fearne’s direction, so close that she gasps. He steps in front of Fearne without hesitation. The spearpoint inches from his face, he slowly releases the hilt of his sword and lifts both hands, nudging his elbow back into Fearne and gesturing for her to do the same.
“I thought you said this was your home.” Fearne plants her staff in the stony ground and holds up her hands anyway.
“It is,” he answers cautiously, daring to look up at her. He hadn’t accounted for an outright, armed threat when they arrived and as well as he knows her, Orym can’t always predict what Fearne will do. “But I’m different now, aren’t I?”
It’s not only the unfamiliar glow of his eyes staring back at him when he looks in a mirror, a shade too bright to be a natural green where they’d once been plain and brown. It isn’t only the fey mithral sword he carries, or the leaf and flower armor Morri gifted him, or even the way his hair grows so fast that he needs to cut it every third day or else braid it. Some intrinsic part of him has shifted, some fundamental piece that once recognized this place as home and finds it as strange as a dream now.
But Fearne looks down at him with such fondness reflected in the pools of her eyes that it pulls answering warmth from his chest. “Not to me,” she says meaningfully. “You’re still my Orym.”
It’s only when the guard behind the one wielding the spear shudders back a step that Orym realizes they’re speaking Sylvan. It’s been weeks since they last passed through a town. Orym tries to remember how to form words in Common, how to speak without the lilt and sway of the fey, drawing on the intrinsic shape of the world around to punctuate his tone.
His mouth opens to assure her they’re no threat to the Ashari, but the words feel wrong in his mouth and he clamps it shut again.
“Stand back.”
The guard draws back her spear and snaps to attention, although her eyes don’t move away from them. Sure now that the focus of his attention should be elsewhere, Orym allows himself to look past her shoulder and nearly drops his hands in shock.
The half-elf striding past the others is taller than Orym remembers and he never once wore such a dark and forbidding expression when he was a young man. Certainly he never did with Orym. His loose, black curls graze the back of his neck rather than cascading down his back, and his shoulders are wider than before. It wouldn’t matter how he changed, Orym would know him immediately.
His tongue unsticks from the roof of his mouth. “Will?”
It’s been twenty-two years. It would be a portentous number among the fey, if not for the circumstances that led Orym here. But the years have been good to Will. He was a handsome youth, but he’s grown into a beautiful man: tall and plainly respected, with a shield that Orym recognizes as his father’s strapped to one arm. An apparent echo of his father’s tattoo spreads over his bare right arm, clouds and wind and the twin moons of Exandria all swirled together.
And his beloved, startled face, searching Orym’s with his gold-brown eyes wide with fear before grasping the shoulder of the guard with the spear.
“Fetch Maergit,” he says without looking away from Orym’s face. “Run. Tell her that her son has come home.”
🌸
Orym has never loved anybody the way he loves his mother, the first person who loved him without expectation, without restraint, without fear. He’d once thought she could do all things.
It was the basis of everything he knew until the day he was taken. Secure in his mother’s love, sure of his place among the Ashari in Zephrah, warm with the glow of first love, assured of the life he was meant to live, Orym hadn’t wanted for anything. Not even the sudden return of a father he’d never met had shaken his confidence, not even when he’d been abducted to fulfill the elder Tarrintel’s bargain with the fey.
And so Orym learned that his mother was capable of many things, but not even she had the power to overcome the pact his father made.
Even when he was sure he would never see her again, Orym dreamed of this, seeing his mother again for the first time in years. He thought it would bring him back to that boy he’d been. It ought to bring him to his knees. Instead, it turns him to stone.
The flyaway hairs at Maergit’s temples have faded to streaks of antiqued gold among the brown from years in the sun. The crinkles at her eyes from smiling have faded rather than deepened. She’s smaller and more delicate than he remembers, or perhaps Orym is only taller than he was at sixteen. But her eyes are the same shade of cherry brown, the whitened calluses on her fingers where she grasps Will’s arm at seeing Orym are the same shape as they were when he worked in the garden with her as a boy.
Mother and son stare at one another, as though taking stock of the years standing between them, unable to move until Fearne gives Orym a gentle shove.
“Go,” she says in urgent Sylvan, pushes him again until Orym relearns how his feet work, staggering on uncertain legs to catch his mother in his arms when she trips forward.
Folding her up against his chest, Orym feels the dull throb of some forgotten ache, like a broken bone that was never set properly and healed out of place.
He’s never heard his mother speak his name while crying and it tastes of salt and aconite and the cold ashes of an abandoned hearth. Maergit’s shoulders tremble with sobs, unable to choose between cradling his face in her dirt-smeared hands and pressing her face into the blooming oleander stitched over his heart.
His knees feel weak and he’s holding onto her so tightly that he’s sure he’ll never let go. Orym hasn’t cried in decades, not since he was a boy, never once in all the time he was among the fey. And so it must be the shock, he thinks, that has him trembling the way he is. He was the same the first day they stopped on the way to the gate, curled up in Fearne’s arms and shaking until the moon rose and he had to start walking again.
“Mother,” he finally says in Sylvan, and it feels like a lifetime of longing and tastes of blood and cold starlight. But he says it again and again, in every language he knows, pushing at the wall of stone in his chest until it crumbles and finally – finally it tastes of sunshine and bitter medicine, of things lost and then returned, the sting of his first tears in a lifetime.
🌸
“I knew it would be different,” Orym tells Fearne as he finishes braiding her hair for the evening, standing behind her as she lounges out on the floor of his childhood bedroom. He’s telling her as much as himself when he adds, “I knew I was different.”
Fearne’s shoulders lift as she takes a breath, about to tell him that he hasn’t changed at all, but then she looks up at him and sags without saying so. It would be pointless, anyway. Fearne and Orym know one another far too well for lies, even sweet ones.
Orym tugs on Fearne’s braid gently. “I would have been different if I’d spent twenty-two years anywhere else, too.”
“Your eyes have changed,” she begins, leaning back until her head rests on his shoulder and a fond smile lights her face like the sun over the horizon. She’s smiling while her sharp fingertips graze over the tattoos on his arm, rivers and flowers and a stone gateway between two worlds. It falters when she finds a fresh, knotted scar on his shoulder, where he took a blow meant for her, but she goes on: “You’re more beautiful than you were. Your magic tastes like home to me now. And yet, you’re still that same bold boy I knew would be mine.”
Orym rests a palm on her cheek and Fearne turns to him with a glad sigh on her parted lips. “I am,” he says, a willing declaration that doesn’t feel so warm as it normally does. It feels like strings tied around two parts of him, pulling in different directions.
🌸
“None of your old things will fit you now,” Maergit tells him the following morning over breakfast, after waving him away when he first came out to help her with morning chores. Though her eyes still follow Orym wherever he is in the room, she’s apparently recovered enough to turn to practical matters. “You’re bigger than any of my brothers ever were.”
“I outgrew my clothes the first year,” he says, staring at the coffee in his cup and trying to remember how he liked to drink it before. Black, he’d thought, but it tastes foul to him that way now. “I’ll buy some cloth and sew something that fits in better.”
“You sew now?”
“I made my own clothes.”
Grimacing at his coffee, Orym finally stirs in three spoonfuls of honey and enough milk that it’s nearly white. It doesn’t taste right, but it’s at least passably drinkable. It seems like something Fearne will like, though, so he sets it aside for her when she wakes up.
“They didn’t give you clothes?” Maergit’s voice rises sharply and his face must show his surprise at hearing her shout, because she takes a steadying breath and settles back in her chair with her shoulders tensed.
“The Calloways gave me everything I needed,” Orym assures her quietly. “I don’t prefer fey fashions, that’s all.”
Her eyes linger doubtfully on the iridescent glimmer of the pink and gold threads in his green tunic, where he’d stitched his and Fearne’s flowers together. But Orym had unpicked the seams of his clothes and sewed them together until he was sure he could do his best to faithfully recreate his Ashari clothing, even if the fabric Fearne gave him was undeniably fey.
“Mother,” he finally sighs. “I can always go buy something new. I know Fearne and I stick out.”
“Is she–”
Orym sees the moment that Maergit decides that she won’t ask about the specifics of his relationship with Fearne, whether she’s friend or lover or something else entirely, and he’s glad for it. He doesn’t know how to explain it to her anymore than he knows how to say that his life among the fey wasn’t a terrible one, except that he was away from her when he hadn’t wanted to be. That his life isn’t a tragedy, only one entirely different than either of them dreamed.
“She won’t need new clothing,” he rescues his mother from the pain of not knowing what to ask, pushing back from the table with the coffee in hand. “But I should go wake her anyway.”
They’re spared some of the awkwardness of not knowing how to talk to one another for the rest of the day, because Zephrah is a small village and there is a day-long parade of people who heard the news and come to visit. Some of them Orym hardly remembers. Others are newcomers he’s never met, but who care deeply enough about his mother to come meet her wayward son.
Orym is just beginning to wonder if he’s some sort of spectacle in the village when Will comes with another half-elf man with gleaming chestnut hair, delicate features and a shy smile. It’s impossible to stand next to him without seeing the distorted mirror of someone he might have been in this man living the life that Orym was supposed to.
Even though Orym counted out sixteen years in the Feywild and knew it must be so, Orym can’t make himself smile when his mother introduces the man as Will’s husband, Icæril. Another newcomer to the village, he’s a druid with magic powerful enough that Orym can smell it from his pores while he hangs half a step behind Will and clings to his hand.
Orym can feel that he’s not being sufficiently warm to this man, who looks at him with the strange sort of pity of someone who knows far more about who Orym used to be than Orym knows about him. He feels the imbalance between them keenly and can’t even make himself feel particularly sorry for Will when he looks at the two of them with widened eyes as they exchange too-formal greetings.
“I apologize for the cold welcome yesterday,” Will says politely to Fearne while Maergit goes to the kitchen for cake and Orym busies himself with making tea for the five of them. “We’ve had reason to be particularly cautious of visitors from your realm, my lady.”
Fearne looks at Will with her head tilted curiously and doesn’t answer. Orym knows she’s getting the measure of both of them, but then she leans in and inhales deeply.
“You’re the boy Orym loved, aren’t you?”
Icæril makes a soft noise in the back of his throat that makes her turn toward him with a piercing stare and blink her wide eyes innocently. The air is thick and heavy with the way Fearne has stripped away all pretense that this is a perfectly normal, cordial social visit like all the others. How she’s returned the awkwardness of Will bringing his husband with a reminder that she now knows more of Orym’s life than he.
Swallowing around a choking lump in his throat, ignoring the sharp thrust of pain it sends through the scar over his heart, Orym sets down the tea tray and says, “That was a long time ago.”
“Yes,” Will agrees instantly, the word hanging heavily between them with gratitude that Orym doesn’t want. It tastes like night dew and cooling perspiration, the musk of sex and whispered promises under Catha’s soft, full glow. But where it tasted like golden ichor long ago, it tastes saccharine and stale to Orym now, a fond memory gone rancid.
When they bathe together that night, Orym asks Fearne to help him cut his hair back to what it had been when they met. He's only thinking it might be easier for people if he resembles the man he was meant to be. When he catches a glimpse of his reflection in the tin basin, though, Orym sees nothing of that naive boy in himself. He doesn’t even look like who he is now. He looks a little like a poor imitation of himself with a shy smile and a soft voice.
“Come here,” Fearne breathes when she sees him tugging on the front of his hair. She draws him against her chest for a kiss that tastes like tea and wildflowers growing on mossy forest floors, the home he can’t find between the remnants of what it once was. The fresh crackle of petrichor and ozone promising renewal in a midsummer storm far away, but drawing nearer.
Orym wants to give himself over to this familiar comfort, but he can’t quite make himself forget they’re sprawled out on the floor of his childhood bedroom, tangled in quilts his mother stitched for him when she was still pregnant. Orym stuffs his fist into his mouth to keep quiet and Fearne takes it as a challenge. When he finally gives up on silence, it’s with the fervent hope that his mother’s hearing isn’t anywhere as good as his own.
When he finally resurfaces, lying breathlessly on her chest, his sweat-damp hair has grown out so much that he looks exactly as he had before the bath.
🌸
Days pass, time pulling him along like standing in the shallows of a river, the water tugging insistently at his ankles.
Orym tries to retrace his steps through most of the village, although he avoids the places where he thinks the dissonance between his memory and reality will be too strong. But everywhere he goes feels different. He can still smell the strange magic, carried on the winds like the motes of fresh-ground flour from the windmills. There are still so many more faces he doesn’t recognize than those he does and they all look at him with the same suspicion.
Changeling, they whisper when they think they’re well beyond his hearing, and Orym nearly agrees with them before he remembers the word means something different here.
“Of course you’re a changeling. I don’t understand why they look like that when they say it,” Fearne says to him when they walk together. She still speaks Sylvan with him, which certainly doesn’t help with their shared reputation anymore than Fearne flirting with elementals from the rift when they go to the tavern, although Orym finds it more comfortable to speak than Common.
“It means impostor here,” Orym says around a grimace when someone stops to stare at the two of them.
“But you’re one of them. You’re Orym of the Air Ashari.”
Fearne once told him it was the bold certainty of who he was that she most admired about him, the thing that bound him to her from that first moment he declared himself to the Queen of Summer. For years, he’s held fast to that because it was the only thing he had, but now he’s less certain. He never fully gave himself over to becoming one of the fey and it’s likely saved them, but whether he saved that old version of himself is something Orym simply doesn’t know anymore.
Whatever he is now is unknown to him as much as it is to these people who once knew his name and face and didn’t shy from him.
“I suppose,” is his only answer. At Fearne’s uncharacteristic frown, guilty and sad, Orym smiles for her and gives her hip a bump with his elbow. “Whatever else I might be now, I’m still yours, Fearnie. That’s enough, isn’t it?”
She doesn’t seem convinced. But, then again, neither is Orym.
🌸
It takes very little time for Orym to realize that Will’s routine visits aren’t about Orym at all, but the continuation of a long-held habit of visiting Maergit three times a week with the benefit of keeping an eye on the suspicious pair of fey visitors. Still, it stings that Will never quite manages to make eye contact with Orym anymore, as though looking at him now is painful.
Aside from being his first love, Will was once his best friend, too. Orym has longed to know who he grew into just as much as he longed for all the other once-familiar comforts of home. So the next time Will comes, Orym greets him from the garden, where he’s sharpening his sword with Fearne dozing in the grass next to him.
He can see the moment Will decides to wait for him, how his shoulders set back and his eyes narrow. Will isn't able to notice the way the light bends around him, sharpening all his features, but Orym does: he’s done the same trick to make himself more noticeable when Fearne has been threatened.
“Hang on,” Orym calls, sheathing his sword and bending over Fearne to tell her he’ll be back soon. She’s apparently been faking sleep, because she instantly grabs him into a lush kiss that leaves him pink cheeked when he finally staggers toward the front gate.
Will is staring at his boots when Orym joins him at the gate. “Yeah?”
“I need to visit the smith,” Orym explains, gesturing toward town. “And we haven’t talked much.”
“You’ve been busy since you came home,” Will says diplomatically. “I can introduce you to Nya. She’s the new smith.”
The old smith was nearing their elder years when Orym was a boy, but the knowledge of one more thing changed sits like lead in the pit of his stomach as they walk together in silence.
Orym had always imagined he and Will would fall into the same old habits, pick up where they left things with all the same rapport they shared, except of course they can’t. Orym remembers cataloging things to tell him when he first arrived in the Feywild, things he was sure Will would want to know, but he can’t remember any of them now.
So, he turns to the only thing he can think of while replaying the conversation from that upended meeting between Will and Fearne.
“You told Fearne you had reason to be suspicious of the fey,” Orym begins thoughtfully, folding his hands behind his back as a gesture of peace as they step past the invisible boundary that divides the main part of the village from the outer circles of homes along the mountains. “That isn’t because of what happened with my father, is it?”
“No.” Will looks down at him with surprise, his dark eyebrows pulled tightly together. “Not after – no, we had an incident about five years ago. Someone made an attempt to kill the Voice of the Tempest.”
Orym starts, nearly pulling his hands free from their bind before stopping himself. “It was fey?”
“We don’t know.” There’s a tight heaviness to Will’s voice that Orym doesn’t recognize at all, as though he’s talking to someone he’s never met instead of his first love, his best friend, the person who was second-most important in his old life. Then he looks down and searches Orym’s face with an expression that belongs to someone who is none of those things.
“People were killed,” Will adds darkly. “Black figures that manifested from nowhere, melted to nothing, left no trace when they were gone. My father retired after that.”
“To nothing,” Orym echoes, feeling the cold sensation of iron bands tightening around his chest. Black figures raining down from a hazy summer sky, Fearne dripping water and blood and fire, the beating of raven’s wings overhead as he fell.
“Is that anything you know about?”
Orym feels himself pause for too long, not answering the question because he doesn’t know how. He has no more answers than Will does, only the creeping dread that the rot that drove him and Fearne from the Feywild goes much deeper than any of them thought.
“I don’t know anything, it’s only familiar. It sounds like something that happened before we left. I don't know whether it's fey,” he finally says, looking up at Will urgently, as though it might make him believe. Will only holds his stare for a moment before looking away, his shoulders trembling with a suppressed shudder.
Orym stops where he is, that chest-cracking sensation pulling at his ribs again. “Will. You don’t think I had something to do with that?”
“I think you’re–” Will finally turns and looks at him and Orym sees it: all his mistrust and fear of what Orym might be. “I think it’s strange, that’s all. We’ve found new ways to protect ourselves if something like that were to happen again.”
Orym forces himself to keep his hands clasped, decades of learning fey etiquette alone keeping him still. “Is that the magic I taste? I wondered when we arrived. It doesn’t feel like the rift.”
Will’s voice is cold and sharp when he asks, “What are you talking about?”
It would be far more troubling if they didn’t know that the air in Zephrah is suffused with magic. Orym sees things he hadn’t been able to before, but he’s sure this is new, not simply something he hadn’t been able to perceive before.
“There’s a strange magic in the air,” he explains slowly. “It’s like the flour from the windmills. Fearne said that it makes her sneeze. Even I can feel it and I’m not really much better with magic than I was before.”
“No. You must be mistaken.” Will’s voice is flat with the lie, as though he isn’t trying especially hard to hide it from Orym.
This time it’s Orym who can’t bear looking at Will, at this man he’s become. Orym drops his eyes to the ground and makes a fey gesture of contrition, something that would be instantly recognizable as an apology in the Feywild, but Will doesn’t make any of the answering gestures. Of course he doesn’t.
They don’t speak for the rest of the walk to the smithy.
There hadn’t been time to repair or replace his last shield before they left, but Orym will need to. He’d thought bringing Fearne to Zephrah would be sufficient to protect her, to uphold the oath he made to Morri, but he knows now it isn’t. The conversation with Will lingers like the taste of salt and iron on his tongue when he first came back from that darkness, looking up at Morri and Fearne.
Still, none of the shields here feel right on his arm. Too cumbersome or ill-fitted, and Orym has no answer for Nya when she asks what it is he’s looking for in one.
“I can try again,” he says as much to himself as to Will when he steps back outside, who’s leaned up against the smithy with his arms folded and that same, troubled expression on his face. “I appreciate you waiting, but I’m sure I can find my way home from here.”
“Your mother would expect you to do the same for me.” It’s not exactly an accusation, but something of it feels like walking in a meadow and brushing up against a thistle. “And as you said, we haven’t had the chance to talk much since you came home.”
Orym bites back a sharper retort, that he’s the only one who’s been trying to talk. Even if he’s not sure what he’s doing here with Will, looking for something that’s already passed them by, it certainly won’t help to vent his frustration.
Will pushes off from the building and lifts his chin to the ring set up near the smith, where they once watched the warriors of Zephrah test their skills against one another. “We could spar.”
Looking at this stern, stony man, it’s hard to see the boy that Will had once been. Orym’s oldest friend, it had only taken Orym deciding that he would join the Tempest Blades to persuade Will to do the same. The hours they’d spent together every week was a natural extension of their friendship, but Orym doesn’t think he’d ever have fallen in love with Will at all if not for them.
Of course, only one of them had gone on to live the life they’d dreamed of together, and what promises they made in the first blush of love were broken just as easily as they were offered.
It’s as good as talking, Orym supposes. At least for them. Maybe it’s all that’s left for them.
“I’m curious how good you’ve gotten with your father’s shield,” Orym says when they step into the ring, stretching his arms across his chest. A few people passing by have stopped to watch, but he tries not to look directly at them when reaching up for the hilt of his sword.
“Real blades?” Will asks with some surprise, already unlacing the scabbard from his belt.
Orym hesitates. In all his remembering those years of training together, he’d entirely forgotten that the two of them have never sparred with anything more deadly than a stick. Even that was before they even began proper training with wrapped, blunted old swords.
There are no practice swords in the Feywild. Orym may have begun his training with that gentler method, but he mastered swordsmanship at the pain of the thousand tiny scars on his hands, arms, and thighs.
“No,” he says and reaches instead for the straps that attach the scabbard to his armor. “Of course not.”
“Hand-to-hand combat might be better,” Will suggests and sets his sword to the side.
“No real blades,” Orym assures him, “I’m sure you’ll have no trouble dispatching a halfling in unarmed combat.” Before he can finish untying the sword, a soft murmur comes up from the people standing by.
It isn’t their noise that makes him turn as much as the sudden waft of flowers: foxglove and cowslips and oleander. Fearne, Orym realizes immediately, before he even turns to look at her with the same bloom of warmth in his chest as always. He’s glad to have her familiarly comforting presence with him now.
She’s looking only at him when she rests her forearms on the stone wall around the sparring circle. “Picking fights, Orym of the Air Ashari?” Fearne calls in Sylvan, ever the sunshine through Orym’s gloom.
Grinning back at her despite himself, Orym draws the mithral sword and salutes her with it in a spectacular mockery of fey chivalry. The display earns him Fearne’s merry laughter as she draws a stem of larkspur from her hair and leans precariously over the side of the wall to tuck it into the small braid framing his face.
“My favor for my brave champion,” she says with lavish joy, apparently unaware of the way the rest of the onlookers watch the two of them with some trepidation.
He sheathes his sword and hands it up to Fearne. She takes it gladly, holding it against her chest like it’s as precious to her as Orym himself.
When he turns back to Will, there’s a dark shadow on his face, eyes fixed suspiciously on the flower in Orym’s hair. “What was that?”
“Her favor,” Orym says simply, still smiling as he plants his feet into the ground and waits for Will to make the first strike.
It’s nothing but a tentative blow to feel out Orym’s reflexes. In fact, all that Will does for the first few minutes is work Orym in circles to gauge his abilities. It’s a suitable tactic for the respected guard to the Voice of the Tempest that Will is, but Orym holds himself back and waits to see what else he’ll reveal. He relies more on his left hand than his right, but Will should see right through the ruse. Orym has never been left-handed in all his life, yet Will keeps leaving his guard down on that side.
Orym lands a few light hits, mostly feinting to the side and surprising Will from behind after dropping into a tucked-in roll through his legs. Will changes his approach, his hits coming down harder, although he catches Orym less often. Fearne is an enthusiastic spectator from the wall, though Orym is just glad that she’s calling out suggestions to him in Common rather than Sylvan.
Will takes advantage of his relative lack of attention for that moment and kicks his feet out from beneath him, apparently going for a grapple that Orym dodges. Rolling up to his feet, Orym leaps deftly into a showy twist, planning to land behind Will and use his own weight to knock him to the ground. He’s already in the air when he realizes it’s a trap. Will is already reaching out to grab him out of the air and drop him into the dirt.
Instead of allowing Will to reach him, Orym drops through the mists at the last moment and lands with a perfect flip on the opposite end of the sparring ring. Will’s momentum carries him through toward the ground, but he catches himself and whips his head to where Orym stands up straight.
The air between them has the faintest smell of vetiver and spice, the distinctive signature of Orym’s fey-touched magic, and Orym realizes that he’s fallen for a far different ploy. Even Fearne is quiet, apparently sensing that something important has happened aside from a stalemate. The other onlookers disperse, heads bent to whisper furiously to one another.
Will’s face is stone when he lifts his chin and asks, “Not much better with magic than you were before?”
“Yes.” Orym wipes blood from his chin and stares back at him, but Will says nothing else.
He wants to argue the point further, to explain that passing through the mist is about as small a magic as producing a gust of wind, which he can’t do at all anymore. It doesn’t matter, though, because the test was never whether Orym was still terrible at druidic magic. The test was something Orym should have seen coming from the moment Will asked if he knew anything about the attack in Zephrah.
Will’s stare is unblinking as he gathers up his things. Orym returns to Fearne and ties his sword back to his armor with his head down.
“You were better than him,” she whispers in Sylvan, looking over Orym’s head at Will. “Is that why he’s angry?”
“I don’t think he’s angry,” Orym says, squeezing her hand to reassure her. “He was testing me. I reacted differently than I would have before.”
“That’s silly.”
Orym meets Will’s eyes directly when he passes by them, trouble weighing heavily on his brow. Trouble that Orym brought there. Fear that Orym knows something of the magic in the town, fear of what Orym has become, that he’s now a threat to the place he once called home.
It takes no imagination at all for Orym to know he’d do the same as Will if their roles were reversed. It’s foolish, but it still stings like betrayal, like a breathy promise of forever made by moonlight and then broken.
“It was clever of him,” he answers in Common, pulling on Fearne’s hand and leading her back up to his mother’s house. “I’d have done the same.”
🌸
The night in Zephrah is quiet, but it’s nowhere so silent as Orym once thought it was, back when he wasn’t so intrinsically aware of everything around him. He can hear the swirling vortex of winds out on the mountains, the trees swaying, the nightbirds calling to one another, the slow music of the crickets beneath his window. It’s so loud that he can barely hold himself together. The only thing that feels familiar to him now is the steady rise and fall of Fearne’s chest behind him, her arm braced around his middle, the puff of her breath over his hair.
The board outside his room creaks under someone’s soft footfalls. His mother, pausing outside the door before she continues down the hall, where a low voice greets her with more familiarity than even Orym has.
He doesn’t want to be jealous of Will, but it scorches the inside of his ribcage just the same to hear his mother’s musical answer, imagining Will folded up in her arms. He can feel decades of memories in this house, Will visiting his mother and carrying on as the son he might have been to her, and now it’s Orym who’s the outsider.
If he could only sleep, he could put all this aside. Nothing is ever so bad as it seems by the dark of night. It’s one of the only things that remains as true in Exandria as it is in the courts of the fey. Will has been a comfort to Maergit for twenty-two years. Whatever he's here to talk with her about doesn't need to concern Orym. Whatever love they have for one another needn’t come at Orym’s expense.
Orym closes his eyes and that’s when he hears his name.
Maergit answers, “He’s sleeping.”
There’s a moment where Orym hears nothing at all, presumably as Will and Maergit have some near-silent exchange, because it’s not long enough for them to have moved out of earshot. They would have to leave the house entirely before Orym would be unable to hear them with perfect clarity.
Finally: “Yes, she’s with him. You’ve been to see the Voice of the Tempest, then?”
“I had to tell her what happened at the smithy. He knows about the residuum. And that fey creature he’s brought with him… It’s a little too much of a coincidence, isn’t it? The attacks on the convoy to Whitestone last month. Some elemental disruption at the Flamereach Outpost a few weeks ago.” There’s the long, groaning noise of Will’s sigh, rough like a river after a storm, with none of the lightness and joy Orym remembers of him. He sounds older even than he had been when Orym first saw him again. “It starts to look like a problem, Maergit.”
Maergit’s voice is sharp when she says, “That’s my son you’re talking about.”
“You’re sure it is Orym, right?”
The crack of flesh on flesh is so sudden that Orym sits up, blanket pulled back and halfway to his feet before Fearne blinks awake with a soft groan. His heart is like a rabbit running, expanding out of the confines of his ribcage so fast it might shatter, that pulling sensation across his chest along the seam of the scar aching like nothing he’s ever felt.
“You think I don’t know my own son?”
Maergit’s voice rings out like a blast of winter, ice and fury, but it’s the sob that comes after that’s a dagger through Orym’s chest, bleeding out with his grief. He wants to go to his mother now, wants to be the one holding her against his chest, begging her to see through the fey glamour, to look past the glow of his moss-green eyes to see the dun-colored little boy who loved her more than the sun.
But no, it’s Will who will do that now.
“I know,” Will says in an infinitely patient voice, muffled as though it’s filtered through Maergit’s hair. “He’s different. It doesn’t even feel like him anymore. His eyes sort of–”
“Looking through you,” Maergit's voice quavers around a sob. “But he’s still Orym. How could you think otherwise?”
Fearne sits up behind him, watching silently for his reaction. Orym climbs up onto her lap, pushing himself up onto his knees so he can fit his face into the warm crook of her neck. Fearne closes her arms around him and hums a soft, fey lullaby. He wonders if her mother sang it to her before she was banished, or if it was Morri who comforted Fearne on nights when she cried.
“That was an unkind thing he said about you,” she whispers into his ear when she finishes.
“I hardly blame him. What’s left to recognize of the boy he loved?”
“Love,” Fearne answers immediately. “Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be, especially when you love each other the way you did? You recognize someone by the love you had for them?”
“Neither of us are the people we were. But I thought it would–”
“Be like it was when you left?” Fearne hums softly, considering. “Do you still love him?”
“Some part of me still does, the boy I was,” he says, voice cracking on it. “I spent all those years trying to hold onto myself, but if the two of them can’t recognize me, then what did I keep of myself?”
Fearne grazes the soft pads of her fingers over the scar, pushing a little ember of healing into it. It won't ever fade entirely, the physical reminder of that day, but it spreads through him, like a drop of warm, fragrant oil on his skin. “When you first came back, I was afraid you’d changed, too,” she begins, as though she’s telling him a secret. “And you were still my Orym. Now your mother sees you, too. You heard her.”
“It’s still breaking her heart to see what I’ve become.”
Fearne hums again, flat and pensive, and pulls him back into the blankets with her, tucking his head under her chin and curling around him. Orym feels his heartbeat slow to match hers, his breath finally evening out. “It doesn’t feel like that to me. She has regrets, but they aren’t about you.”
“I hate the idea that I’ve brought her trouble.”
“Not trouble,” Fearne says, her voice lowering as she pulls him closer to kiss the point of his ear. “Do you know how a summer storm seems to parched flowers after a long drought? One of those great, big ones that boil up off the horizon. You can smell them coming.”
“That sounds like trouble to me.”
“It might seem like that at first, when you can only see the clouds and lightning and feel the sting of the wind.” Fearne touches the scar again, only for a second, then gathers his face in her palms. “But then the rain comes, too.”
🌸
Maergit doesn’t mention Will’s visit the next morning when Orym presses a kiss into her hair, inhaling sun-warmed rosemary and the flour dusted on her hands. She does squeeze his hand a second longer than usual before he goes out into the pre-dawn fog to begin the same set of chores he’d done thirty years before, in another life.
Orym doesn’t look back to see, but he feels her eyes on him as he hauls water, gathers eggs, and pets the gangly ewe in her pen when she anxiously shoves her silken nose through the fence.
Some farewells are slower than others. Some never happen at all.
Orym finds reasons to be away on errands for his mother when Will comes to visit Maergit again. There’s no reason to say goodbye, because Will is never exactly gone. Zephrah is too small for them to never see one another again, too big that they need to reconcile the gulf that's grown between them.
It seems cruel and wrong that someone can go from one of the most important people in Orym's life to nothing at all, but it isn’t as though it simply happened in a single conversation. The string holding them together was all the things they should have been to one another, and now they're none of them. Pulled taut, it snapped rather than stretch to become something else. The twin curses that stole away the boy Orym loved are nothing but time and life itself.
Though Fearne won’t ever complain, Orym knows that she can’t stay here forever. Not even the vibrant glow his memories cast on this place can make it what it was, not anymore than he can seize back the life he would have had here.
Something in the air has changed. Something in him, too.
He hears it in the echoes from deep in the valleys between the mountains and smells it on the winds that protect this place from all the danger that awaits. It tugs at all of him, the draw of something more than fighting to remain what he once was. It whispers of a life he hasn’t dared dream of yet. It promises rain.
🌸
“I thought he’d stay away,” Fearne says to him at full volume when Will passes them on his way to see Maergit a few days later. She’s laid out on her back with her feet up against the tree in front of the house, skirts pooling around her waist, while Orym breathes his way through slow-motion sword forms he hasn’t done since he was a teenager. Even as well-toned as he is, the unfamiliar movements make his muscles burn and stretch his concentration.
Giving up, Orym sheaths his sword and drops into the grass next to her. Fearne hooks an arm around his middle and it ends with Orym draped backward over her hip. Staring up at the late summer sky, such an endless, velvety blue that Orym longs to reach out and touch it, he catches his breath.
“He’s been like a son to her,” he finally explains, sensing that Fearne is still annoyed at Will’s visitations while obviously ignoring the both of them. “That has nothing to do with me anymore.”
“She’s your mother.”
Orym turns his cheek into her stomach with a half-smile. “That’s true, but she isn’t betraying me by loving someone else who’s been here with her all these years.”
Fearne makes a soft harrumphing noise, but she doesn’t argue with him. Orym can count down the seconds after Will disappears down the road before Maergit leans out one of the windows and calls for Orym to come help her with something inside the house.
“He’s been making trouble,” Fearne says darkly, her fingernails lengthening to sharp claws like a big cat stretching menacingly. She retracts them when Orym lifts her chin with his forefinger and thumb and kisses her quickly.
“We are trouble, Fearnie. Just not the kind he thinks we are.”
She pouts beautifully, even as Orym presses his thumb gently into the swell of her lower lip. “Very well. He could ask questions and try to understand instead, though.”
“Would you, if you were him?” Orym waves her back to her comfortable place among the roots of the tree. “Rest,” he adds before he goes to his mother. He hasn't yet told Fearne that they'll leave soon, though he thinks she knows. Even if he rarely voices them directly, Orym wears his emotions as openly as the sword on his back.
It’s as he expected: Maergit doesn’t need his help for anything but reaching the tea on the top shelf of the cabinet, but then she offers to make him a cup.
“Will didn’t look happy when he left today,” he finally says when his mother has fussed over the kettle for longer than usual without getting to whatever conversation she’s brought him here for.
“Will is having a hard time keeping his concerns about the safety of the village separate from his tendency to listen to tavern gossip,” Maergit says, setting tea out for both of them and sitting across from him with her hands folded on the table. “I assume you heard him the other night.”
Seeing no more sense in lying to his mother than he ever had, Orym winces. “I did.”
“He meant well, but he was wrong.”
“I should be grateful he’s looked after you the way he does for so long.” Orym looks down long enough to pour for both of them, pausing with the teapot lifted over her cup to see her looking over the table at him with her brow furrowed.
“But you aren’t?” Maergit pushes the honey toward Orym and gestures toward his tea. Even in the short time since he came home, his mother has made herself learn as many of the ways that Orym’s tastes have shifted as she can.
“I am.” Orym sets down the teapot and reaches across the table for her hand. His chest aches, but it’s somewhere deeper than the scar. Some much older hurt that never faded, because Orym used it as an anchor. “But I wish it had been me here with you. All those years–”
“I would rather have had you,” she says simply. The light changes in the room and Maergit’s eyes darken with grief, her fingers clasping his. She’s afraid, too, Orym realizes with a painful split in his chest. “We all thought you were gone forever. That was what your father told me when I found him again. That there was no way I could shatter that bargain he made.”
Orym sits up in his chair, his teacup clattering onto its side with a splash of scalding tea he hardly feels on his arm, barely keeping hold of her hand. “You found my father? When – after?”
“Yes.”
Something about the steel in her gaze when Maergit looks over the table at him reminds him of all the years he longed for his mother to come for him. How sure he’d been that she’d come one day, even when he knew it was impossible. But his father was right: Maergit had no power to interfere with a bargain that had nothing to do with her. And yet, Orym hadn’t been able to crush that hope.
Neither, apparently, had his mother.
Maergit’s voice is grim when she goes on. “I nearly killed him. I thought it would break that pact he made if he was dead. I thought it would free you. I was willing to do anything to have you back.”
“It doesn’t work like that.” Orym feels numb from his ears to his toes, the only warmth in his body from her hand in his. “It’s my life that’s bound, not his.”
Maergit nods once, a quietly accepting gesture Orym recognizes in himself, even now. “I guessed. To Fearne, right?”
“She wasn’t the one who made the deal with him, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“No.” Her head shakes quickly, dismissing the concern. “I don’t understand, but I can see she’s important to you.”
“Fearne is–”
Orym has never been able to answer what Fearne is to him. It’s easier to name all the things Orym is to her: friend, bedmate, confidante, sworn sword, companion. Fearne claimed his life as hers, not his death, but Orym has freely given her both.
“You love her.”
“It's not even as simple as that.” Orym’s smile is thin, but no less sincere for it. “I'm sworn to her. She's my dearest friend. I – yes, I love her in a great many ways, but that hardly describes everything she is to me. I would give anything for her. I already have.”
Maergit hesitates, her eyes drifting to the scarring visible at his neck and back to his eyes. He can see she's finally arrived at the thing she called him inside for. The thing he’s known, but she hasn’t been able to make herself say since the confrontation with Will.
Orym grips her hand tighter. He can spare her the pain of asking.
“I have to leave again.”
“Yes.” She closes her eyes, taking another of those same steadying breaths as before. “I know. I always knew.”
“I wanted to come home so much,” he says, near a plea for her to understand. “I meant to stay.”
“And you can't. I know,” Maergit repeats, pulling his hand a little closer to get his attention, and standing when that doesn’t get his attention. She’s barely taller than him, even standing while he sits, but his face fits against her shoulder the way it did when he was small. As though the past twenty-two years were nothing more than a long day or a bad dream.
“Bargain or no, I knew this day would come, Orym. You might allow yourself to imagine what might come to pass, but every parent knows their children will grow into the person they're meant to be and leave. It’s meant to be that way.”
“Not like this, it isn’t.”
“You never know what your children will grow up to be, of course. You were bright and bold and I let myself dream of another life. Of course I wish you could stay.” She holds him out with her hands on his shoulders. Her fingers stroke through his hair, long and unruly, where he hadn’t braided it this morning. “But you’re just the sort of man I thought you’d be.”
“This could not have been what you imagined.”
When Orym starts to look away, Maergit turns his face back toward hers. Her eyes search his face with that bittersweet longing that suddenly doesn’t feel like loss anymore.
“Would you like me to show you?”
Her room looks more or less the same as he remembers. There’s the bed beneath the window so she can wake with the sunshine in her hair, the smell of the cold mountain air and rosemary on her pillows. An old lantern half-filled with oil on the table. A leather-bound journal. The heavy trunk in the corner releases a puff of sharp cedar when she lifts the carved lid and reaches inside for something heavy and wrapped in cloth.
Orym traces fingers over the worn engraving of a pastoral scene. The mountains above and the village of Zephrah as he’d known it as a boy. He’s still pressing his fingers into the time-worn, wooden peaks when Maergit drops the last of the linen on the floor.
“I meant to give this to you.” His mother’s voice trembles and she swallows it back, remembering something he doesn’t. Some private memory that he was never there for. “You told me you were going to join the Blades. That you’d marry Will. I remember thinking you were far too young to be talking of leaving me already, but by then you were nearly grown.”
The shield she passes him in shaking hands is perfect, Orym knows it even before he turns it over to see the front. Though it’s a whole piece of heavy wood, it’s not nearly as heavy as it seems it should be. The tree in the center is a near perfect copy of the cherry tree in the village, the individual branches so perfectly rendered that they feel like living bark, as though they might explode into bloom at any moment.
“You see,” Maergit says softly, reaching for his fingers and drawing them to trace the miniscule letters etched into the trunk. Written as though carved by children years before and grown over to heal into a perfect scar, his name.
“I always knew who you are, Orym.”
🌸
It’s before even the faint tinge of gray dawn when Orym finally makes the climb to his favorite overlook. It’s to pay his respects, he tells himself. A final farewell to the life that might have been before he gives himself over entirely to whatever life he and Fearne will have now.
The climb to the peak of their favorite mountain was a long one when Orym was a boy, too slow and exhausting to be worth the effort to many others. But when he and Will pulled themselves over the final crest and found themselves staring out across all of Zephrah, Orym had never been able to feel anything but glad they did.
The path is rough with disuse, though the dark has a magical sort of reverence to it as he walks. Even the maelstrom of the rift is quieter than usual, as though everything is holding its breath, waiting for something to happen. Orym steps through the mist until he’s near the summit, holding his breath that he’ll find it changed, too.
When he pushes past the brush, though, the overlook itself is unchanged. Sparse mountain flowers grow up out of the craggy soil, clinging to the cliff face to sway elegantly on the comparatively tranquil breezes inside the whirlwind. The creaking windmills are audible even from here and the shape of the village is different than it once was, but Orym settles near the edge with his eyes closed and it’s nearly the same as it was then.
He listens for the sway of the branches over his head, the sounds of people carrying on their lives as they have for ages. As they will for ages more. Extending further, he feels for the edge of the rift, then pulls back when he tastes the sharp flavor of it on the back of his throat. There’s still the thrum of untapped power swirling through the air like dust that catches in his lungs.
All the things that trouble him remain. The attack at the water garden and another one here. The dark shroud of fear Morri wore the entire journey to the gate. The deep rot that’s been spreading through the Feywild for years, a rising new Queen of Winter.
But for a moment, it’s close enough that Orym feels like he could fall back through time into his younger self. Enough that he allows himself to dream of what might be, rather than what could have been.
He isn’t sure how long he’s there, listening to the sounds of Zephrah as it is, before he hears the sound of someone climbing up the path, pushing past the brush, the familiar smell of flowers and the answering pull in his chest.
“You’re awake early,” he says without looking back to see Fearne. “We aren’t leaving for hours.”
“Your mother said I might find you here.” Fearne settles on the cliff face beside him, reaching for one of his hands and drawing it into her lap. “She said it was your favorite place to come, but you’ve stayed away.”
“I was afraid it would be different.”
Fearne inhales the cold, thin air with apparent delight, her ears twitching curiously as dew forms on the fur. “I think you were afraid that you would be different.”
She’s right, of course. They don’t lie to one another. Orym sighs and rests his cheek on her arm, taking in the combined smells of Fearne and Zephrah. They’re quiet together for a long time, watching as the sky pales, then erupts in color as the sun bursts over the Summit Peaks. The view is brilliant here, but Orym thinks he sees clouds boiling up in the distance to the west.
“It’s exciting,” Fearne says reverently. “Not knowing where we’re going. What we might find.”
He looks up in time to find her smiling at him fondly, but when Orym feels around the bond, it feels different than before. The shape of it is different, like there’s something new that he’s not yet familiar with. It feels a little like the oath he made to protect her, something freely given to him that hasn’t been defined just yet.
“It might be like it was before,” he says, releasing the bond back into its place and standing up so he can reach her face. “Traveling together. Adventuring.”
“There might be spiders,” she warns.
“I’ll handle the spiders,” he assures her. She leans back back coyly and laughs as Orym steals a kiss from her smiling mouth.
Orym is adjusting the flowers in her hair while the sun overhead burns the mist away from the mountainside when she asks, “Do you think we’ll meet anyone new?”
“I’m certain we will, Fearnie. It might be more danger, too.”
“I suppose so.” She rests her chin on top of his head and folds their hands together for their last look out at the mountains. “But don’t you smell the rain coming?”