those red heart-shaped vacancies on the page
Three weeks, six days to Beltane, 1017 II Age
It had been, Viktor decided, far too long since he’d rested a while in Hasetsuil’s hot springs, which had a sweet-smelling mineral that cleared the mind and a fierce heat which healed the body. Minako sat nearby, one leg dangling into the spring he’d immersed himself in after the stewards settled them into guest quarters. So far he’d been able to ascertain that Yuuri had a sister with a mischievous raccoon familiar, a mother and a father with kind, ordinary faces; nothing whatsoever that would explain what he was certain he’d seen at sunrise. Yuuri had remained tight-lipped and polite as they gathered the rest of the northerners, and then, Viktor suspected, he’d used the eagle as an excuse to keep his distance, flying above and slightly ahead of their racing horses.
“… So you’re really not going to tell me anything about him.”
Minako’s smile was a little crooked as she nursed a cup of mead. “He’s my best pupil,” she said. My brightest.
“Your best pupil is a halfling?” Viktor glanced over his shoulder, raising an eyebrow as though to ask what the high elves of Hasetsuil were doing with their time while a mage’s son outshone them in the eyes of their elder.
Then again, the world of Hasetsuil was softer, younger. All of the oldest things were in Mosciren. The Easterlings were newer, Yakov said; even the earth upon which they walked was coming of age. Then again, to Yakov, by comparison, almost everything was new. Fresh, came the word, unexpectedly, and Viktor turned his head to look at the steam, watching it shift until his stag came darting through on the surface of the water, punching new holes in the rising vapor. He did not have to be looking at Minako to feel her smile. “… The world works in mysterious ways, Viktor. Some things may yet surprise you.”
There was truth in that, at least. “I assume you’re taking the eagles down the southern road to Shen-Osheth?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. With you here we’ll take a ship.”
Viktor’s eyes lit up. A week on the open sea.
“It means less trouble on the southern edge of the wastes,” Minako murmured, as though she hadn’t noticed the curve of the Prince’s smile, or the way his eyes had brightened at the prospect of time out on the ocean. Too many years spent in isolation in the North. Best not to comment on Viktor’s happiness when it flickered to life; it was too elusive a thing now that he was grown.
- - -
“Hello, cousin.”
“Otabek.” Seung-gil’s dark eyes narrowed thoughtfully, and he swung the door of his house open, three-headed hound a dark shadow drifting about his feet and then coming to sniff at Otabek’s tunic. “It’s been a long time.”
“I was a bit surprised to find you here.”
“Not as surprised as I am to see you traveling with the Princes instead of out in the ranges.” It wasn’t an answer, not really; and Seung-gil shrugged off the narrowing of Otabek’s eyes as he moved aside to let his cousin in. “I have an unusual obligation that brings me east from time to time.” He glanced down towards the hound. “It seemed logical for the time being to remain.”
Otabek blinked at him once, and then flashed a tiny, wry smirk. “As enigmatic as ever, I see.”
“Fine words, coming from you.”
It is the nature of shadows to be ill-understood.
- - -
Three weeks to Beltane, 1017 II Age
The ship’s name was the Ardor and Yuri hated it.
For one thing it felt small. There was no place he could get where he wasn’t brushing elbows with the Easterlings or with his own tribe. Of the Eastern group, neither Kenjirou nor Yuuko behaved the way Yuri had come to expect of high elves: Kenjirou was far too curious, and hadn’t yet given up on figuring out what Yuri’s guardian was, and that fox of his got everywhere somehow. If he didn’t know better, he might’ve suggested the young elf’s guardian was chaos incarnate. Yuuko was far too pre-occupied with the ship’s captain to be decent company: spending time with her meant spending time with the mage, who was big and loud and just generally tedious. Naturally the two of them got along spectacularly with Mila. Their happiness aggravated Georgi’s foul mood, which meant he tended to hog the cabin during the daytime, still in a sulk. At least the halfling, the steward who’d come to greet them, had the good sense to try to stay to himself. Of course this meant he kept showing up in all the places Yuri was trying to sneak off to in order to be left alone. Inevitably staying there was always a bad idea: Vitya would come around, sooner or later, and whether it was the fire mage with the weird Eastern bird he was looking for or his brother, Yuri could never actually say.
Viktor was in entirely too good of a mood, traveling out on the open ocean like this. With the coast off to their right, always in the distance, he had entirely too much water to draw on, more than enough magic to ward off any ailment. Yuri felt claustrophobic, trapped by the ship, even, and he’d be happier, he knew, when they made it to Shen-Osheth and stood back on dry ground. What he wanted was a quiet place, alone, to sit and summon the unicorn back. Someplace where the ship might finally feel still, someplace where he could think.
Late at night, stirred by dreams that he couldn’t remember but which wouldn’t let him rest, Yuri wrapped himself up in a cloak and made his way topside, holding a small pool of light in his palm — an echo, a pale imitation of what he remembered from the spirit — wincing as he saw two other figures on deck; Seung-gil, the only Easterling who seemed to know how to mind his own business and Otabek, who turned to look back at him, gaze clear-eyed and steady. Yuri lifted a hand, greeting enough, he decided, and walked along the starboard side of the boat up towards the front. He settled there, back to the place where the wood of both sides came together in a neat point; fixed his eyes upwards and began to count constellations. He’d been a child once, and back then Vitya had told him stories; had smiled softly and pointed out the bear, the bow, the wheel.
Focused on the pinpricks of stars, their light so distant and so pure, he felt rather than saw as Otabek came to sit next to him. When Yuri turned to acknowledge him he saw that Otabek’s gaze was directed towards the flickers of light curling around his palm, delicate as stardust and perhaps as faint.
“You’re still having trouble with your familiar.” It was a statement, not a question.
Yuri sighed heavily, and clenched his fist, closing the light in until only small trickles of it could be seen through the seams of his fingers. “Yes.”
Otabek, though; Otebek reached over and gently unlocked Yuri’s clenched fist, until it lay flat in the cradle of his own palm. “Tell me what you remember,” he murmured calmly, and for a moment, Yuri nearly indulged him.
“I remember I’d been dreaming,” he said, flatly, tonelessly. “I woke up and there was a unicorn.”
To his surprise, Otabek chuckled. “Such reverence. No wonder it won’t come.” He lifted his opposite hand, and shadows curled around his fingertips; darker even, somehow, than the twilight in which they were sitting.
“Everyone says that.”
“Are you going to let me help you, or?”
Yuri sighed and looked down again at his hand; their hands, the sort of thing that could be a revelation if he thought about it too much, and so naturally he refused to do so. Otabek seemed still as a statue, impossibly calm, and took Yuri’s silence for acceptance of a sort, lifting his free hand with its tendrils of shadow and waving it in front of Yuri’s face.
He was shrouded in an impossible darkness. “I can’t see.”
“Tell me again,” Otabek murmured, and in the cocoon of those shadows his voice seemed closer somehow. “What was it like?”
He closed his eyes uselessly, pointlessly, and talked about the beating of hooves and the steady twinkling of cold silver bells that had lingered in his dreams. He talked about the cool silver light of the moon and the distance of the stars. Of the walk that must have been more dream than it was reality, climbing up and over Mosciren’s highest peak, wandering through wisps of white fog with the whole world beneath him.
About the dark pools of the unicorn’s eyes, and their deep incandescence. The way its coat had a subtle, pooling glow; so white that to call anything else but the stars or the moon white was forever going to be a well-intended lie.
“… how could I be responsible for something that pure?” Yuri murmured, barely audible, and when Otabek didn’t answer he opened his eyes and the darkness was different: like the clouds got after a storm, when streaks of sunlight burst through, as tangible as light ever got. He blinked and blinked again and the shadows around him dissipated.
The unicorn stood in front of them now, and bent its long neck gracefully and with such care of the long point of its horn, to nudge at his bended knee. He didn’t notice the still cradle of Otabek’s hand, or the way the banshee had cradled his shoulders with another arm. Instead he reached up with great care and touched the sides of the horse’s head. I’m sorry I sent you away.
“Yuri,” Otabek murmured, and there was some strange, foreign note to his voice, another one of those mysteries Yuri couldn’t unravel: “how could you not?”
He felt himself smile and stood up to wrap his arms around the horse’s neck, to sweep fingers through its starlight mane. “Beka,” he murmured, the diminutive easy somehow, inevitable as his gratitude: “this is my guardian.”
His mother was leagues away now and still she radiated approval when he let his thoughts drift that way. He understood a little better, now. About beauty. About righteousness.
“… So,” Yuri murmured, sliding a hand over the horse’s shoulders, along its back: “where’s yours?”
Otabek stood up slowly and laughed. “It might make your horse skittish.”
“My unicorn,” Yuri corrected, with an unrepentant grin. He looked at the unicorn again, more and more tangible under his hand; almost as real as Viktor’s stag: “Never.”
“You might get irritated.”
“Not now,” promised Yuri, which felt more like not ever but was probably truer, given the tempers that ran so strongly in his family. Passion, his mother had insisted once, defending her decision to stay away from Yakov for the third time, in spite of their soul bond or perhaps even because of it: passion does not suffer slights.
Darkness swooped overhead and came crashing into the deck. Charcoal scales gleamed in the moonlight, only properly called that because the creature’s eyes were black and dark as the shadow Otabek had twisted him up in earlier. Giant wings — wider than the ship, it almost seemed, when they were extended, folded inwards and Otabek rose to go and greet the guardian he’d summoned, folding a hand over his chest in a curious gesture, honoring somehow, nearly like a bow. Then he put a hand up on the reptile’s snout, well over his head.
“… Otabek,” Yuri murmured, mouth slightly agape: “You have a dragon?!”
“I have a wyvern,” Otabek murmured, one corner of his mouth drawn upwards in a cool bemusement that Yuri liked. “Dragons are much, much worse.”
“Well,” he replied in a huff, smiling nonetheless: “he doesn’t scare the unicorn.”
“I can see that,” Otabek replied, “and I’m glad.”
Me too.
- - -
Two weeks, two days to Beltane, 1017 II Age
Viktor had warned them of the storm. More than once had Takeshi indicated that the owed the smoothness of their sail to the Northern Prince, whose water magic worked in their favor, but evidently this was beyond Viktor’s power.
No, that wasn’t quite right: Takeshi had asked as they met for breakfast whether or not it was beyond his power, and Viktor had implied something different instead: that it was beyond his choice. Who was he to stop the arrival of a spring storm on the coast, where whole ecologies depended on the arrival of rain to grow and to thrive, for their simple convenience. “I’m not going to let anything happen to the ship,” Viktor had promised, and it was so easy to believe him, so simple. As though nobody would turn the high prince into a liar. “It’s just going to be an uncomfortable night.”
Uncomfortable had been something of an understatement; the ship rocked and shuddered in the waves, and not for the first time, Yuuri couldn’t sleep. Mari had gone right to bed, and even Kenjirou was asleep or pretending to be, but he’d struggled all week shut up in the cabin.
A ship was too much like a cage.
His familiar hated it.
Air. I need some air. Nobody had needed a warning to stay below deck, where it was warm and dry even if the ship rocked and shuddered and hurled itself amidst the waves. Yuuri stayed there until he couldn’t stand it, and then he grabbed his cloak, wrapped himself up in it and climbed topside.
Takeshi was at the helm, and overhead Yuuri could see the grey bands of magic that held up the sails and informed them with a push of the mage’s wind magic, keeping their course steady.
The only other man on deck was Viktor, all the way up at the front of the ship, where the rise and plunge of the bow constantly splashed him with wave after crashing wave. The storm had destroyed any semblance of the order of his braids, had unfurled the length of his platinum hair like a wild banner, defiant in the wind, and he exuded magic, surrounded by a stormy, slate-blue sort of glow as he commanded ribbons of it to follow the leap of the white stag over the deck, sending water back out over the edges of the ship, or cutting the waves in half, like a tremendous, terrifying dance with something utterly and completely primeval.
The stories, then; the legends: they must have all been true. He’s so strong …
Until this precise moment, Yuuri decided, watching from underneath a hood that was already soaked through with rain, transfixed, even: he had never really understood the meaning of the word awe.
He stood there for hours until the waves began to lessen and the rain settled into a drizzle as they came ahead of the storm. Takeshi leaned over the ship’s great wheel, exhausted, and Viktor threw his head back and laughed, turning back to congratulate their captain. Instead, his blue gaze settled on Yuuri, who felt with sudden certainty that the prudent thing to do would be to run.
He was tired, though; exhausted as though he’d been the one expending all that effort, though none of it seemed to show on Viktor; frozen. Cold. Cold was the sensation he was feeling. He’d nearly forgotten it.
Viktor’s hands were on his face then and his triumphant smile faded: “you’re freezing, Yuuri,” he said, a sudden reprimand, and before Yuuri quite knew what was happening he was being hauled below deck and pushed into the captain’s quarters, where Viktor determinedly began stripping him out of his cloak. “How long were you out there?” He demanded, sternly, and Yuuri felt himself snapping back into the present as Viktor magically rang the water out of the garment and then released it back into the air.
“I don’t know,” he admitted, and Viktor felt his forehead again, brushed his damp bangs aside. Yuuri wasn’t sure what he’d done to earn such worry, and shook himself a little bit, particularly as Viktor’s hands reached next for his tunic. “Stop - stop — I can do this —“
Fire, though; fire felt very far. It was harder than it should have been, to call pools of heat into his palms, and the phoenix didn’t come. Smothered. Smothered was the word he would have used. Smothered was what he was, suddenly, pulled into the circle of Viktor’s arms as more tendrils of the high elf’s magic swept over him, wringing the water from his clothes as he steadily began to warm up.
Distantly, Yuuri knew that it should have felt invasive, to be so washed over, so examined; it was strange that it did not. Slowly golden light flickered in his palms and ran up his forearms; the tension in Viktor’s shoulders eased somewhat, as he brushed a hand over Yuuri’s cheek: “Better,” the Prince murmured, distantly. “You’re meant to be warm.”
It should have felt invasive but it didn’t. Wrapped up in the fading tendrils of Viktor’s magic it was a difficult fact to examine. He’d turn it over in his mind for hours afterwards.
Viktor, suddenly exhausted, felt disinclined to lift his chin from Yuuri’s shoulder; Yuuri who was steadily turning into a bundle of warmth and heat and something like comfort. The captain’s bunk was close, and while Takeshi might’ve ruled the ship, Viktor was going to be king someday and he felt no remorse whatsoever for pushing Yuuri into it, and climbing in afterwards:
“Viktor?” Everything with the halfling was a song of questions, an uncertainty he didn’t understand.
“We’re going to sleep,” said Viktor, far too at ease with telling someone else what to do, and already more than halfway there himself.
When Yuuri woke he was back in his own bunk, and though he could still feel the curious light of Viktor’s gaze following him whenever he moved about the ship, nothing was said about the night of the storm, or the way he’d fallen asleep with his head pillowed against Viktor’s chest, listening to the steady rhythm of a heartbeat that was nothing at all like his own.
- - -
Two weeks to Beltane, 1017 II Age
The Ardor swept into the harbor of Shen-Osheth as though it hadn’t just come through the heart of a thunderstorm, no worse whatsoever for wear, and Yuuri was privately glad to leave it behind as he descended the gangway from the ship onto the southern capitol’s broad docks.
Green, red, and white banners with a yellow mayflower flapped overhead in the wind, and everywhere lanterns were lit with bright, yellow fire; fueled, Yuuri knew already, by magic of the Southrons. He’d come here before, traveling on his own wheel, and couldn’t help but smile ever-so-slightly at the memory. Hasetsuil, for all its fame, was rather small in comparison to Shen-Osheth, whose advantageous position in the bay of crescents made it a busy port for trade, the sort of place where someone could find anything they were looking for and plenty else besides.
Guang Hong Ji stood at the gates at the end of the docks with their welcoming party, with a three legged crow perched upon his shoulder. That was new; the last time he’d come through, traveling in an attempt to complete his own circle of the wheel, the city’s youngest noble hadn’t yet managed to call his familiar. He was smiling, and made it through the formalities of the words of welcome when:
“Yuuri!” He knew that voice from anywhere, recognized the bright spring of Phichit’s rabbit. The mage stepped forward from the rest of the Southrons, following the bounce of the spirit, and sprang forward to envelope Yuuri into an inescapable hug. They’d traveled together, back then, before Yuuri’d abandoned the road leading up to Samhain, too sick to carry on and unaware of what awaited him. “Gods, it’s good to see you.” How he’d earned the fierce warmth of Phichit’s friendship, Yuuri Katsuki wasn’t sure he’d ever know. “You’re hungry, I bet, I never eat well on those ships — oh my — is that —“
“I think Phichit has the right of it,” Guang Hong murmured with a careful smile, even as he looked up to study Viktor, to take the measure, somehow, of the family from the far away North who held the rights to lead them all, even as his own family ruled here. “I’ll take you all to the kitchens. We can manage introductions there.” The temptation to stay away from his friends proved too strong for the young noble, who drifted towards Yuuri and Phichit while they walked, instead of to the fair Northerners.
Guang Hong’s smile was all summertime sunlight. “We might even have your favorite,” he confided to Yuuri later, as though sharing a great secret: “Eastern traders landed here last week and they’ve got a spectacular chef.”
Phichit threw his head back and laughed and it was the sort of thing that warmed Yuuri’s heart to hear it. In two weeks they’d light the summer bonfires for Beltane; nothing at all like the tower of flame that he still remembered in his dreams, but kindred, close. The Southrons would drink too entirely too much mead, and they’d dance around in great circles, singing and laughing at everything and nothing all at the same time and for a night, perhaps, he’d get swept away into the brilliance and cheer with which they heralded in the summer.
For a night the phoenix would dance. There’d be no avoiding the lure of the flames.
Every year summer meant that winter would still come but the magic of Beltane was the audacity of the high season, the promise that maybe someday everything might live forever.