the edge of the receding glacier
Five weeks, six days to Beltane, 1017 II Age
There was no more magical sight than fog rolling in over the high peak above Mosciren, coming over the ridge to wrap the mountain in silk and wool. Patchy fog had been the course of the evening; hasty clouds that drifted between the earth and the stars, which even now threatened to obstruct the perfect circle of moonlight overhead. Yuri stood barefoot on the summit, with no recollection of how he’d come outside or why he stood where he stood now, looking over the Alcazar in his sleeping robes.
Except that, now that he was outside, he did not much feel like going in. The sound of hoofbeats still haunted him, though whether they followed his steps or if he was drawing nearer, it was impossible to say. He had the strange, curious sense of climbing, of the work it took regular mortals to get to this peak. Elves were lithe and light and he balanced on the treachery of the pass without care and without fear.
Breath warmed his shoulder, and when Yuri turned into it, because that seemed the most natural, obvious thing to do, he stared into two large, dark eyes; big and soulful and deep.
A unicorn. To rest his hand on the horse’s white nose, below the incandescent sheen of the horn, seemed the most natural thing in the whole world to do, but the answering whinny shook him from sleep, into a reality where the outline of the same creature hovered at the edge of his bed, nosing just beyond the edge of the sheers laced into twisted bits of birch and willow.
A unicorn. His heart beat as fast as those running hooves:
“I thought I told you to be a snow leopard,” Yuri murmured, reaching up to rub sleep from his eyes, and it must have been the wrong thing to say, because already the horse was backing up, shimmering, becoming less and less something he could believe was real.
“Wait! I didn’t mean it —“
But with one last starlit twinkle, it was gone.
- - -
Predictable. This was the one word Yuri might’ve used for the process of watching his brother practice archery in the long salle of their father’s hall, only half listening to the stretch of the bow and snap of its string, never failing to be rewarded by the answering thud of an arrow hitting home in the sweet heart of the target. There was no better archer than Vitya, for no other reason than it would’ve been literally impossible to beat him, so long as he had the luck of the stag on his side. Even without magic he was formidable; the challenge the bow presented was the sort of thing Viktor could never have backed down from: the coming together of a dozen different calculations about distance and the speed of the wind and the movement of a target.
The finesse of it. The cold, angry art. As though he were the hunter and not bearing the very emblem of the hunted.
From time to time even Viktor seemed bored, and then he’d sometimes honor Yuri with a lesson in something else. Fencing, perhaps. Even there, though, it was difficult to outmatch Viktor’s longer reach, infuriating to realize that when he scored it was because his brother was purposefully held back, actively preventing the interference of his own magic. Then Viktor would smirk at him subtly, and gesture someone else in, a stand-in for Yuri’s flashes of temper. Today that was Otabek, their newest Captain of the Guard, who swept a long-staff under Yuri’s legs for the second time and knocked him to the floor without warning or ceremony. They’d been fighting for what felt like an hour, though there was no way it could possibly have been that long, and Yuri’s forearm hurt from each stroke he’d deflected with a shield, and his swordhand trembled, wrist weak from impact after impact.
The dark elf offered him a hand to get back on his feet, impassive, unreachable. Nothing seemed to phase Otabek and that was infuriating, too. Viktor had evidently seen enough. “You want to tell me what this is all about, Yura?”
I found my familiar, he thought, irritably. There was a way to think words across the family bond between them in a way that could send them like daggers, an art Lilia had demonstrated time and time again in her cold conversations with their stoic father. He tried, and failed, not to think about the unicorn itself, but it was too late: Viktor’s curiosity was piqued and now he was walking over to study his younger brother. Heedless of the sword, or the shield, for that matter, he hooked his fingers under Yuri’s chin and lifted his face up for inspection.
“But you can’t summon it,” Viktor concluded after a moment, and he let go. Yuri’s eyes narrowed and he gave chase with the flat part of his blade, eager to repay his older brother for making such an admission in front of someone else, even if Otabek’s impassive face revealed absolutely nothing, even if he seemed the sort who could promise to take a secret to the grave and mean it. Viktor, with liquid, infuriating grace was already out of his reach, and threw back the shower of silver hair, fixing Yuri with a cold sapphire gaze that was unsympathetic. “What did you do?”
“Why do you always jump to a conclusion that everything is my fault?”
“Because you usually prove me right,” Viktor murmured tersely. “Here you are still, throwing a fit like it’ll get you what you want. Magic doesn’t work that way, Yuri. Time to grow up.”
“Oh, here we go.” Yuri advanced on him now, working his way back across the room. Otabek glanced at his brother for orders, which was infuriating, too. “High Prince Viktor thinks I need to live up to his standards,” he snapped. “Like that’s easily done, living in the shadow of the most famous elf in all of the four kingdoms. The lucky stag! Catch it and it grants your wishes, makes all your dreams come true.” He dropped his sword, drawing a pool of magic to hand, a swirl of white light, and threw it, forcefully, across the room at Viktor, who raised his hands to form a shield of crystalline ice.
The light hit it and crystals of ice shattered and fell around Viktor’s feet, like glass slivers, like snow. Yuri felt the malice in his smile grow. He hadn’t been able to do that before, had only ever managed spells with fragile little wisps of light. “Careful he doesn’t take you and your whole country to war afterwards though. He’ll win. He always wins. He can’t not lose.”
It was a sensitive topic. The one weapon he had that he knew always struck home, the thing that would make Viktor’s blue gaze turn brittle. Except now Otabek stood between them. “Enough,” he said, quietly, his back to Viktor and the focus of his gaze on Yuri.
“Why dredge up the ghost of the past?”
“I imagine you know a thing or two about ghosts, don’t you?” Yuri looked up at Otabek, both his brows raised. “Banshee.”
“Yura, that’s enough.” Viktor stepped forward, readying something that might smooth over this breach of protocol. Otabek’s distinctive looks; the way he stood out among the elves of the north, it was all obvious. Otabek was looking at him now and didn’t even seem wounded, which was disappointing; Yuri wanted to break something and Otabek had been standing there, convenient.
It wasn’t that he cared about the old stories, the really ancient ones that talked about all the elvish clans, the high kings and their misunderstood brethren, who preferred to walk in night. He didn’t. Viktor might’ve; Viktor was judgmental and classist, too accustomed to all the power and privilege he’d been born into. What Viktor cared about at present was that it was considered rude to call this difference between them out so directly. Callously, his brother argued; and Yuri resisted the urge to roll his eyes. The truth stood before him, impassive, unbreakable; why pretend differently.
“It’s fine,” Otabek murmured calmly, “Go.”
Strange, that Viktor would heed the words of a banshee, but he did just that, leaving Yuri alone in the salle with Otabek and the sinking feeling of failure; of having come here to learn and still accomplishing nothing. Two fingers brushed his cheek, set the blond of his hair back behind one pointed ear. “What are you so angry about that it’s worth trying to break everything?”
“I was going to finally show him,” Yuri muttered, glaring at the doorway Viktor had disappeared through.
“Show him what?”
Indeed. Yuri pursed his lips, trying to match words to the feelings that had lingered between him and Viktor for his whole life, growing up in the long shadow of the stag’s legend. Except it wasn’t even a shadow, really; it was white, and frozen, and cold.
Yakov’s second son; the other prince; an irrelevance.
“That he’s not untouchable.”
“I think he knows that already,” Otabek said, not unkindly, and maybe it was something about the words, or something about the way it was Otabek delivering them, stoic and calm, that made Yuri almost, for a moment, believe him.
- - -
“Hey, get back here, you —“ That was the voice of Mari, chasing down her tanuki guardian as it bolted around the corner and into Yuuri’s room with a four-tailed fox on its heels.
“Yuuri!” That was the voice of Kenjirou, another one of Minako’s pupils, evidently hot on her heels. Both of them burst into Yuuri’s room as he leaned forward and snuffed out the candle he’d been focusing on, whatever focus the meditation asked for shattered by this interruption. The raccoon raced up the maple branches that made up his bed, stopping just out of reach of the fox he didn’t recognize. “Yuuri, look!” Kenjirou was ecstatic, grinning nearly ear-to-ear as he reached over, scooping up the orange bundle of light that had evidently shattered this morning’s peace at Katsuki House. “I got my guardian last night,” he crooned, burying his nose into the impression — it wasn’t fully corporeal, after all — of softness and fur. Never, Yuuri thought, had he seen such a close physical resemblance between spirit guardian and master. He found himself smiling in spite of himself. “Isn’t it great?”
Mari snapped her fingers for the tanuki, who leapt in one sure leap onto her shoulder and then vanished there with little more than a curious wave, as though it had never been in the first place. On the windowsill his phoenix preened its feathers in the sunlight, glorious and scarlet. You always look your best this time of year, Yuuri thought fondly, momentarily distracted by the bird. “That is great, Kenjirou.” Kenjirou was a late bloomer; had been waiting with baited breath and thinly veiled impatience for this moment for as long as Yuuri had known him. “What does Minako have to say about it?”
“She’s pleased. Keeps telling me to take it easy, but look!” Kenjirou rubbed his hands together and then pulled them apart, revealing a bell between his two hands. “I can conjure things,” he said, beaming, as he lifted the bell and rang it with a broad smile. “… Of course none of it lasts very long,” he admitted, as each of three rings sounded weaker and weaker until the bell vanished from between his fingers: “but I’ll get better, like you did.”
Yuuri wasn’t sure he’d gotten better at all. There were the obvious things, of course; he could come through fire dancing, now; had no trouble, whatsoever, pulling heat to his fingertips. In the one, obvious, troubling matter: the one that loomed every Samhain; he’d made no progress.
That first year had been awful.
Kenjirou showed no signs of slowing down: “ — Plus I get to go on the wheel now! Minako’s going to draw the straws for who all is coming along with me,” he added cheerfully. “I hope she picks you! It’s a shame you never got to finish your trip.”
Yeah. A shame. That’s what it had been: to have fallen so ill on the road to Mosciren that his family had skipped Samhain entirely, and brought Yuuri home without the last festival entirely.
And then what came after …
He looked at the phoenix, so bright and beautiful now. He wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Yuuri swallowed and put on a smile, aware that Kenjirou was looking at him now, bright-eyed and hopeful. “Yeah,” he replied gently. “We’ll see what she says.”
- - -
The community ceremony, later, chose seven of them, and his name was one of them. “These seven will represent Hasetsuil as they accompany Kenjirou of Minami house to the other three capitols for introductions at court,” said Minako. Takeshi. Yuuko. He could be glad of that, at least. Then his own name. Bound with it, Yuuri already knew, was another: Seung-gil.
“You two already know each other?” Seung-gil wasn’t easy to talk to, but it hadn’t stopped Kenjirou from trying. There weren’t many people in the East like him, and his familiar was a big, scary, three-headed dog: enough to send Kenjirou’s fox hiding behind his heels, though Yuuri’s vermillion bird hadn’t so much as blinked.
Seung-gil did not smile. “After a fashion.”
Yuuri shivered, and pulled his cloak closer in the darker part of the night. “Seung-gil helped out last year when I got sick,” he said, which was a way of telling the absolute truth and a damnable lie at the same time. Seung-gil is there every time I get sick.
They were bound together, it seemed, two sides of the same blessing, the same curse.
Kenjirou didn’t notice. “Any friend of Yuuri’s is a friend of mine,” he decided, and then knelt to look at the three-headed hound:
“Can I pet your dog?”
It was a question Seung-gil clearly had never expected to answer, and Yuuri, in spite of himself, gave into laughter. It was better than the alternative, after all; than worrying too much today about a fate they both knew wasn’t due for months.
“Did I miss the joke, Katsuki?”
“Lighten up,” Yuuri quipped with a mild smile.Here he was, cracking jokes with Hasetsuil's only banshee. Spring would bring summer and these were his months; months where he felt strong, in his element even. “It won’t kill you.”
Seung-gil’s lips twitched. It wasn’t a smile; but it might’ve been a start.