“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. But then the rain comes, too.”
– The Stranger
⛈️
Morri Calloway doesn’t ask for small favors.
That’s no surprise to Orym, not after twenty-some years of knowing the imposing Calloway matriarch. She grants favors for a price – steep but fair, Morri always takes only what is the commensurate payment for what is asked of her – but now it’s Morri indebted to Orym. It’s created an odd imbalance of power between the two of them, a creature beyond even the powers of the Archfey and a mere changeling.
Between he and Fearne, too, but there is no commensurate payment for what Orym has done, is doing. He knew that when he made the oath at the gate, knew what dangers Morri was asking him to subject himself to, and then offered himself up for Fearne’s sake anyway. Freely given, without hope or expectation of repayment, the oath Orym swore was neither fey nor divine. It’s something else, something grander and more mundane than either. A wholly mortal thing to give, even love feels incomplete when Orym tries to explain what it is.
Whatever it is, it barely feels like enough now.
Orym sits down in the chair in the corner of the tavern, less graceful descent and more flinging himself into the only scrap of respite the two of them will see today. Dismal grey skies greeted him and Fearne when the foothills of the Summit Peaks gave way to the broad, flat plains, and haven’t let up for weeks as autumn spreads across Tal’Dorei. Just in time, Orym supposes, though the only autumns he’s seen in more than two decades are the sort that come and go in a day, or stretch for eternity in certain corners of the Feywild.
Those dark skies spun up into a spectacular storm that swept the last of summer’s warmth away and hasn’t broken three days later. Bad weather alone wouldn’t ordinarily be enough to put Orym in a bad mood, it’s just the final straw tonight.
“Someone must be very angry,” Fearne says sagely, sliding into the chair across from him and wringing her hair out into a puddle on the floor. It’s a small comfort that Fearne is unbothered by the events of the day, but comfort nevertheless. Orym doesn’t have the heart to explain to her that the weather patterns of Exandria are determined by forces that have nothing to do with the whims of the Archfey.
Adventuring was a fine idea when they were first leaving Zephrah, an echo of something familiar that reminds Orym of the best of his years with Fearne. Like everything else in Exandria, it’s simply different. There’s no shortage of need among the people, even in the reasonably well-off region around Westruun, where they’ve stopped over on their journey west. The job they took off a tavern board – to clear out the haunting of a lesser noble’s house here in the city – seemed like just the sort of thing that Orym and Fearne could handle without issue, a way to ease Orym’s worries about how they’ll manage with a dwindling amount of coin.
When they presented themselves for payment, though, scuffed and only a little worse for their efforts in purging a few minor undead, the nobleman had taken one look at the pair of them and underpaid them by half. Orym hadn’t even understood what was happening, how they’d failed to meet expectations until the man adjusted his fur collar and looked scornfully over Orym’s head, shivering rather than meeting his eyes, and then it was a little like being back in Zephrah, with mistrustful whispers following Orym through the village.
I don’t make deals with the fair folk, the man had said at last, dismissing them with a flick of his fingers. Never mind that they’d done just what he asked and no more, that the only deal was for services rendered. Nor that he’d have paid thrice the amount on the tavern advertisement to bring in some other adventurers or else needed to wait until someone else happened along.
And they say the fey are the fickle ones.
The rest of the day was lost to dragging Fearne on to the next town while she cheerfully fantasized about setting the man’s fine house ablaze. Far worse than a minor haunting is a slighted fey, Orym knows, but it’s not worth the trouble for a few gold. But the day is done now, they’ve made enough money to pay for tonight’s bed and a few more along the way to Emon, when neither of them can countenance another night out in the rain.
So, Orym negotiates a reasonable rate for the night, orders dinner, and, when Fearne looks at him with indefatigable hope, agrees to spend an hour or two in the tavern before giving himself over to the sleep he so badly wants, barely hopeful that tomorrow will be better.
Even as complicated and unsteady as fey court politics are, Orym misses the familiarity of his life as it was in the Feywild. At least when he was failing to be just what people thought he should be, it didn’t come with the disorienting sense he was an object of suspicion rather than simply an oddity.
That’s part of what went wrong today, he thinks. Even before he was spirited away to exile in the fey realm, Orym would be a stranger to life in parts of Exandria he’s never been before, which is almost all of them. That naïveté cost them fair payment for their work today, but now Orym can’t stop thinking about all the things he doesn’t know how to protect Fearne from. The weight of his vow to Morri. A nagging question he can’t shake: We can’t be expected to just run for the rest of our lives, can we?
Fearne isn’t the sort of person who will ask him directly what’s going on in his head. She might bother him about it if he falls too deep into a sullen mood, needle and tease him back to good humor. She may even try to come up with her own solutions to problems she imagines he has. They’ve had one another for so long that her guesses are reasonably good, even if her methods of solving Orym’s troubles aren’t what he would consider ideal.
After a solid hour of watching her flit around the tavern, challenging people to teach her card games and looking utterly and fascinatingly fey, Fearne sits primly across the table from Orym with drinks for both of them, sliding a heavy tankard emitting spicy steam in front of him. He knows what she’s here to do, even before she folds her hands, cocks her head to the side, and asks him what’s wrong. In her own way, of course.
“The tavern keeper said that’s not quite in season yet, whatever that means, but it’s what she suggested when I asked for something to warm you up.” She nudges the heavy tankard closer until Orym picks it up with both hands. It’s twice as big as his head, but the wine is good, rich with honey and cinnamon and a bit of clove. “She said it’s a halfling recipe from Turret – Torfield?”
“Turst Fields,” Orym provides before taking another drink, closing his eyes and separating the flavor of the dark fruit from the spice, like he could taste the earth the grapes were grown in and the flowers the honey was made from, like they could tell him some secret of this land he’s found himself in. Instead, he’s pitched headfirst into a memory he’d convinced himself to forget years earlier.
Once upon a time, in another life, Orym’s first kiss tasted much like this does. He and Will had drunk enough to make their cheeks glow, even when they slipped out to get more wood for the fire. Kissing Will tasted like the wildflowers that grew in the valleys between the Summit Peaks, the cardamom his mother used instead of clove, woodfire smoke and the sharp winter cold while they clung to each other next to the woodpile.
He opens his eyes and tries to dispel the memory, lovely as it had tasted once. “Might be too sweet for me,” he says, pushing the tankard back across the table to Fearne.
“You know what might make you feel better?” Fearne asks, pulling the tankard back and giving a satisfied hum when she tastes the wine.
“If you suggest that I find someone to take to bed–”
“I wasn’t going to!” Fearne looks mock-offended, but then a smile uncurls on her mouth and she props her chin up on her fist, her voice like warm honey, messy and dripping with sweetness. “Unless you think it would help.”
Orym doesn’t laugh, but he feels bad for it, too. Fearne is clearly trying to cheer him up, but he’s not in the mood for it and he knows it’s made him churlish. Sighing, Orym sits back in his chair, pulls one knee toward his chest and turns his head to look at her directly, the beads braided into the small twist beside his ear clattering in a cheerful manner entirely at odds with how he feels.
Maybe if he’d cut his hair before the job today, something not so obviously fey, although even that’s a futile hope. It would just grow back within a few days and Orym has now spent most of his life chafing against the expectations other people have for him. He’s Orym of the Air Ashari, that hasn’t changed simply because he’s also fey-touched and a changeling.
Fearne sits back in her chair and kicks one hoof up onto the chair beside Orym, who immediately reaches down and strokes his small fingers across the crook of her fetlock. She’s grown flowers all along the outside of her hooves, chains of oleander and cherry blossoms coiled up her legs, and Orym touches them carefully, not wanting to disrupt her work.
“Okay,” Fearne finally sighs, like it’s distasteful to have to be so direct about anything, pursing her lips together thoughtfully. “It’s only that I thought that maybe you’d be happy to be back home, on Exandria, and you aren’t.”
“Three days of heavy storms wouldn’t bring out the best in anyone,” he deflects without looking up, scratching his fingernail through the deep groove carved into the table. They’re letters in a language he doesn’t speak, which is most of them on Exandria. Even his Halfling is rusty from disuse and he still hasn’t gotten used to regularly speaking in Common.
“You’re feeling sorry for yourself.” Fearne lifts both her eyebrows at him, a coy sort of smile on her pouting mouth. “Which is fine, if that’s what you want to do, but I’m not thinking about that horrible man from earlier today and you shouldn’t waste another moment thinking of him, either.”
“I’m not,” Orym protests, then clenches and unclenches his teeth at the kneejerk lie. He and Fearne don’t lie to one another, not even about hard things, and he doesn’t want to start now. “Rather – it’s more what that makes me afraid of. What are we doing, Fearne?”
“Going to Emon.” She taps long fingernails against the tankard, a bright ting ting ting in time to the music from the bard playing in the corner.
Orym manages not to give her too dark a look, because he doesn’t think this is one of those times she’s being purposefully obtuse, as she is when he says things she doesn’t like or want to hear.
So, he leans a little closer across the table, releasing her leg and allowing her to draw it back under her skirts. “I mean the big picture. Will Morri be able to find us if we’re meant to return? Are we going to stay on Exandria forever?”
He doesn’t quite say Are we ever going home? because he’s not sure he wants to remind Fearne of the simple fact that they each call different places home, that Orym isn’t even sure where that is for him anymore. He knows he’ll spend his life with Fearne, but that might mean that he’s never going to find out where that is. Orym keeps that to himself, not quite a lie, though it curdles in his stomach like one.
“Well, you and I decided to go adventuring, right?” Fearne hums, a satisfied sort of noise, like she thinks she’s landed on a simple answer. “That’s what this is. Seeing where you come from. Seeing what there is here. Going on an adventure with my best friend.”
That finally does make him laugh, although it’s not funny at all to think about the terrifying day that sent them fleeing from the Feywild. Knowing that the same terror visited Zephrah, that he has no idea if it might come for them again, that he doesn’t even know what he’s supposed to be looking for, what signs would portend the same danger that left him dead once already.
“This is running for our lives, Fearnie,” Orym says, looking between his fingers – small, too small, how am I supposed to uphold an oath that big with hands this small? – to find her making a different face than he expected. She doesn’t look flippant at all. Mostly Orym thinks she just looks sorry, that same expression she wears when she thinks she’s taken too much from him.
“I’m sorry,” Orym sighs, reaching back for the tankard and smiling for real when she scoots it out of his reach and pushes her whiskey toward him instead. “I don’t want to worry you and I know you don’t like thinking about this. I’m only worried about – you, mostly. The oath I made, what that means now. We’re no closer to finding out what happened that day in the garden and we aren’t going to figure that out by ourselves. Not here.”
“They attacked your home, too,” she reminds him, nudging her hoof back into his hand and smiling when he massages two fingers between the flowers, scratching the tuft of fur on the backside.
“Then we know even less about them than I thought.” Orym drinks the whiskey all at once and shudders, folding in over himself at the unfamiliar, harsh burn of it.
“Yes,” Fearne says patiently, leaning over the table toward him. An ember leaps from her fingers to his shoulder and it soothes the burn in his throat enough that he can stop coughing. “Does it help to know that I’m afraid sometimes, too?”
As his throat clears, Orym remembers that Fearne only learned that she likes whiskey in the last few weeks, when they’d stopped in a small town celebrating their harvest festival and she’d charmed everyone there. The lingering spice and smoke that remains on his tongue reminds him only of how her mouth tasted after they retired to bed that night, when he’d fallen asleep with Fearne’s head on his chest, her arms holding him so tightly that they didn’t detangle themselves until late the next morning. It had been a good night, one bright moment where things hadn’t seemed so bad.
“No.” He pushes his face into her fingers, like a cat seeking comfort, reaches out and squeezes her bare arm.
“Good,” she says with finality. “Because I’m never afraid when you’re around. So, you can see why I thought – well, there’s nothing we can do about that. But we can keep going and see what there is to see here. Even if we never go back, we’ll have each other.”
“And if something goes wrong? If something happens to you–”
“Orym.”
His mouth snaps closed mid-argument. Fearne isn’t usually so direct, Orym can’t even remember the last time she was. But her jaw stiffens like she’s made a decision and she’s still holding onto his shoulder with one hand, her thumb pressed up against his small cheek, her eyes warm. He can feel her pulling at the bonds between them, deft as playing an instrument, a vibrato that pulses between both of them.
“I made an oath, too,” she says at last, sliding her fingers over his mouth so Orym can’t interrupt or argue. “Before we left Zephrah, your mother asked and I did.”
Orym reaches up and moves her hand out of the way, his voice thunderous when he demands, “You what?”
“I wrote it all out for her,” Fearne carries on, holding up her forefinger, as though the practical details are what matters when Orym feels like he’s just taken a crushing blow to the back of his head, like he finished that entire tankard of mulled wine on his own, ears ringing and vision blurring around the edges. “We signed in blood. I gave her a stem of oleander.”
It doesn’t make sense, what boon his mother would ask for, what oath Fearne could swear to her. He’s thought very little about that strange shift in their bond that he felt back in Zephrah, like weight moving from one edge to another, shifting the balance of power between them. He’d thought it had something to do with him, something lost when he left Zephrah for the second time. He’d never dreamed – hadn’t even considered–
“For what?”
“She asked me to make you happy.”
“Why?”
Fearne returns her hand to Orym’s face, undeterred by his strangled outburst. Her smile is a little thoughtful as she apparently studies him, her eyes moving from his mouth to his eyes to his hair and then back down to the scars visible just next to the collar of his tunic.
The paradox of their twin oaths strikes him then, that neither of them may be able to fulfill their oath so long as the other does. But, then again, Orym’s oath to Morri shouldn’t have been possible by the laws of the fey, either. Those magics that are older and more fundamental than that. He wonders if Morri knew that when she asked.
But now Fearne’s done something else, something that’s changed the shape of their bond, a near alchemical shift that binds her just as tightly to Orym as he is to her. Something reckless, too, dangerous and foolish and entirely for love of him. For a wild moment, he wonders if this means he’s failed Morri by allowing Fearne to make oaths without him knowing, particularly as they relate to him.
“I didn’t ask,” he protests weakly, wishing he hadn’t finished the whiskey yet. It feels like a betrayal to say the rest, but Orym forces the rest of the truth out. “I don’t even know what that would mean for me. To be happy.”
“I don’t know, either,” Fearne says, turning his hand over so it fits inside her larger one, turning her head to the side. He’s reminded of the first time they spoke to one another, when she brought him home and tried to entreat him to eat by offering him more food than he could have eaten in a month. “We’re going to spend our lives together, though, and I do want you to be happy, so it wasn’t much to swear.”
“Not too much to swear?” Orym can hear how his voice is going up, growing loud enough to cut through the noise of the tavern around them. A few people are beginning to look in their direction. He pulls his hood up and Fearne reaches across to peel it back again so she can see his entire face, bright eyes and all.
“You asked what we’re doing now, Orym, and that’s what we’re doing. We’re going to go on living and somewhere along the way, I’m going to figure out what it means to make you happy.”
She says it as though it’s as simple as that, to know what would make oneself happy and to then provide it, but if Orym could believe anyone just then, he knows it’s her.
“Together,” Orym amends when he finds his voice again, clearing his throat. “We’ll figure it out together.”
“Finish that and maybe you can come help me cheat in cards.” Fearne nudges the tankard back toward him and beams when he takes his next drink, the sweetness washing over his tongue.
This time, he doesn’t push it away.
⛈️
The human man is cheating.
So is everyone else at the table, Fearne is pretty sure, but she’s mostly sure about the man sitting opposite her. The tiefling is counting cards, the dwarf has used some sort of magic to keep the others from noticing that he’s stashing gold from the pot in his pockets, and the human man has been faking his discards for most of the game.
Fearne only notices because he’s sitting in front of the mirrored wall over the tavern’s bar and she’s been watching his hand all night. It would be easier if Orym was helping rather than sitting sentinel in the corner with a tankard of mead he hasn’t touched, but he never helps Fearne with cards. It’s some sort of principle of his, although Fearne has tried convincing him that winning a few of these games would surely help them more than taking the odd job off tavern boards. Playing cards certainly seems more fun to Fearne than a trip to an erupting crater of flame in the center of city, which is what they’re meant to do in the morning.
Something like a stray, insistent breeze nudges at her, making her turn her eyes to him now. And now that she is, Fearne sees that someone else is looking at Orym, too. The bard may be playing a sweet ballad on his lute, one that’s familiar to the tavern’s patrons even if not to Fearne herself, but his gaze returns again and again to Orym’s corner.
Together, Fearne and Orym attract quite a lot of attention, even in a city as large and busy as Emon, but most of that attention is on Fearne. When Orym has his cloak on and his preternaturally green eyes lowered, as he does now, he doesn’t look much different than the other halfling traveler currently singing drunkenly at the bar.
Someone paying attention to her Orym is interesting in itself, but that it’s this man-shaped shred of the sky on a perfect summer’s day is fascinating.
The genasi man finishes the song he’s playing on his lute, smiling as brightly as the sun when he waves at the woman who drops him a gold coin for it. Then he stands and straightens his shoulders, evidently mustering the strength to do something, and starts toward Orym with that same, performative smile that Fearne knows Orym will see straight through. It’s rather charming, really, and Fearne thinks she’d like to see how Orym answers the offer of company that the bard is about to offer.
From the corner of her eye, Fearne sees the human man slip a card from his sleeve into his hand. She might be willing to ignore it and let the game proceed, but the addition to his hand makes it far better than her own, and Fearne doesn’t care to lose.
“Excuse me,” she says sweetly, setting her cards down on the table facedown. “It’s rude to cheat in cards.”
The dwarf looks up from his hand with a guilty flash that he covers with a charming laugh, scratching his ruddy beard and an apology already half-formed on his mouth, when the human man throws down his hand and draws a dagger from his belt.
“You’re a liar, I’ve watched you cheat all night!”
Well, that was a mistake.
“Then you are cheating!”
The tiefling jumps to their feet and flings a handful of razor-sharp barbs and pandemonium erupts like wildfire across the tavern. Every pocket of tension at every table flares to violence before Fearne even has a chance to reach for her staff. The human man shakes off the sting of the tiefling’s spell and lunges across the small table for Fearne, but she isn’t afraid.
Fearne isn’t ever afraid.
The human doesn’t even see Orym until after he’s jammed one edge of his shield into the median nerve at the corner of his wrist and he’s dropped the dagger to the floor with a clatter. Orym kicks one foot out from beneath him and sidesteps the vines that erupt out of the floorboards and twine their way around the man’s body.
By then, though, there’s more people fighting than not. Fearne lost track of the tiefling, but the dwarf is ducking just behind a human woman in pink leather and hair like moonlight. The cheating human man struggles against the vines, swearing violently at her. She barely dodges an empty tankard that flies dangerously close to one of her horns before Orym yanks her to the floor with him.
“You never make this easy, do you, Fearnie?” Orym says into one ear with fond warmth, kicking the table up onto its side to give them a little more cover from the ongoing brawl.
“He was cheating,” she protests, reaching out to grab her staff before someone accidentally kicks it aside. “And I knew you were right there.”
Orym’s sword is still peacebound with a twist of flowering vines around the guard. His hand twitches over his shoulder before clenching a fist as he decides against it and instead grabs a sheathed dagger out of his boot. He’s only just shoved himself to his feet, standing over her waist and holding his shield over her head, when a third figure ducks behind the table, clasping a lute protectively against his chest.
“Oh,” says the handsome bard in a startled voice, as though he hadn’t expected to find himself eye-to-eye with Orym in these circumstances. “Hello.”
Fearne knows how fate feels like the wind: sometimes a gentle suggestion and sometimes an insistent gale shoving at her. How it curled around her the day she met Orym. She feels it again now, only it’s like the three of them are sitting in the calm center during the birth of a whirlwind.
An oath made at the gate between two worlds. The possibility of something waiting to be claimed. A vow she made and signed in blood.
“We need to go,” Orym says urgently in Sylvan, urging her to her feet as though he’s blind to the intertwined strings of fate tangling around the three of them. To this beautiful man staring at Orym like he’s the first bud of earliest spring after a hard winter, Orym asks, “Do you need help getting out?”
“I can probably manage it,” he answers in stilted Common. “But perhaps I can clear a path if you need help, too?”
Orym nods, gripping the sheathed dagger in whitened fingers. “We’ll go together.”
And so they do.
The three of them fall through the side door of the tavern into a deserted alley and Fearne is already laughing before Orym pulls her clear of the steps. The genasi man slams the door shut behind them and pauses with his back pressed against the door, now only staring openly. Which Fearne likes, because she wants nothing more than to stare right back at him.
His clothes are finely made, if a little rumpled from the brawl, shades of blue with the peek of dawn along the interior of the cape falling over his shoulders. The silver embroidery along the hem of his tunic matches the delicate silver chain attaching a filigree ring to the cuff at the point of his ear. His skin is the deep, velvety blue of a midsummer sky and his black hair fades to twilight grey and white.
“I’m Dorian Storm,” he says in that strange, formal voice of his, looking between the two of them with wide, cerulean eyes.
Storm.
Fearne blinks at him owlishly before looking quickly to Orym, who doesn’t react at all. He just waves nervously from her side, where he’s breathing through the remains of his adrenaline rush now that she’s out of immediate danger.
“That’s funny, I’m Dariax,” a voice says from behind them and Orym pushes Fearne behind him so fast that she nearly trips on a loose stone. The dwarf from the card game is bent over with his hands on his knees while he catches his breath. The human with the moonlit hair is behind him, a pair of pink and gold daggers clasped in her hands.
When Dariax unfolds, he’s grinning impishly at Fearne when he adds, “That guy was about to clean us both out. Good thinking, starting that fight when you did.”
“I don’t like losing,” Fearne says serenely, ignoring the way Orym rolls his eyes.
“That’s wonderful,” Dorian Storm says, jogging down the stairs and ushering them all to the end of the alley. “But we should get out of here.”
Fearne looks quickly in Orym’s direction, cocks her head to the side, reaching to pluck the strings between them. Together? she asks through the bond, expecting him to answer in kind.
“Together,” Orym says aloud, slipping his hand into Fearne’s and pulling her after Dorian.