a silver splendour, a flame

The day after Beltane, 1017 II Age

By the late afternoon, after they’d all slept away the morning, Viktor looked as calm and collected as he’d ever been. A man in the habit of building walls had no trouble reconstructing them. Yuri wasn’t sure which troubled him more: the strange dichotomy of the night before, still unexplained, or the way his brother had so swiftly put himself back together. He hardly had the time to consider either option; a messenger rang at the guest house; Phichit, he recalled absently. “Vitya, it’s for you.”

Viktor had put away his circlet and his cloak, but they might as well have remained; he walked out into the entryway in the manner he sometimes stood in Mosciren next to their father, tall and impassive. Unreadable. He smiled politely, thinly, Yuri thought. “What can I do for you?”

Phichit looked up, startled out of his thoughts. Viktor raised an eyebrow. Had the messenger been worried? What about? “Ah — Guang Hong requests your presence; he’s at the summer hall. If you’re willing to come now, I can show you the way.”

“Is everything alright?”

“… Aah, I think so.” Phichit ran a hand through the inky black of his hair and then smiled quickly and brightly. “Apologies. I’ve been thinking about a friend of mine.” At the guest house for the Easterlings, Yuuko had turned him away; Yuuri, evidently, had still not gotten out of bed. “Guang Hong didn’t tell me what this was about, so.”

“I see.” Viktor murmured. “Am I to come alone?”

“That is his preference.”

Before Yuri could protest; after all, he was a Prince, too, Viktor shrugged and gave an absent nod.

“Very well. Let’s be off.”

- - -

Had he been in a better mood, Viktor might’ve taken the time to slow down and admire the ornate carvings of Shen-Osheth’s summer hall, the place where its rulers congregated to hold council and oversee; the way great sweeping boughs met overhead; the tapestries on the walls or the painted designs on the bottom of the reed-thatched roof. Paper lanterns hung from each overhead archway, gently glowing in a dozen different colors. It was nothing like the stone splendor of Mosciren or the intricacy of Ast Petyriel; the crafts had diverged centuries ago. Still, he’d once walked through this place when he was young, traveling the wheel with friends of his own before everything had gone wrong. Back then he’d admired it. Back then Shen-Osheth’s open city walls had challenged him: there’d been a handful of humans in Hasetsuil, but here they were everywhere.

He was older now. Had thought he’d known better. Had even believed that he’d learned. “You wanted to see me?” There was a certain irony in being summoned by Guang Hong, who, like every other of the noble elves, ultimately owed his allegiance to the north. Nonetheless this was his family’s hall, and in it, Viktor could summon at least the appearance of cordiality.

Guang Hong was seated next to one of the Westerners; there had been no introductions when their group arrived, weary from travel, and Viktor had not inquired. “Leo,” he murmured, with an uncharacteristic, subtle frown: “Please tell Prince Viktor what you’ve shared with me about your journey here.”

Leo looked uncertain, staring at Viktor for a long time with a careful dread that he couldn’t entirely hide, until Guang Hong laid a hand on his shoulder. Slowly the brunette’s eyes slid sideways, and then he sighed and began to relay the tale, looking down at his hands, worrying at his nails.

“The sunset road is more treacherous than it’s ever been,” Leo began quietly, uncertain. “Don’t get me wrong, we’re accustomed to it,” he muttered, summoning the courage to look up at Viktor with briefly narrowed eyes. “Jean-Jacques has been doing what he can, and the rangers patrol, sometimes; they ride west from the canyon south, but there’s only so many of them … Some years it’s a little better, but on the whole, all of the elders, they say it’s just gotten steadily worse.”

Viktor had only ridden the Sunset Road once, and it had been a wild, untamable place, coming across the desert, not entirely safe but not worthy of this description, either. He walked up to a nearby chair and sat, drawing a hand up to his chin. “Go on.” It was not really a request.

“We were two days out of Vaux Romandith, just coming up on the valley of the poles when we saw our first wraith. That’s the nearest any caravan’s recorded them to the city itself, so alarming that we sent one of our own back to alert the council. The rest of us carried on. The valley runs perfectly north-south, so —“

“I’ve been.”

“Right.” Leo swallowed. “So it’s covered in shadows. Normally pilgrims camp halfway to save their strength for the desert ride. We met revenants three times and had to scare them off. It’s another three day journey across the desert. By then we split up into watches, tried to keep moving — a couple of us have air magic, levitated people while they slept …”

“You encountered revenants even in broad daylight?”

“Yes. Revenants and worse. One or two other wraiths, I think. Spectres. My friend Emil swears he had a dream about one so great that it took the form of a giant —“

“Dragon.”

“You know about them?”

“I’ve only heard rumors.” Viktor looked over at Guang Hong, then, and the young elf’s face was set into a determined, disapproving frown. “The captain of my father’s guard was a ranger.”

“You will be lucky to travel with one,” Leo said, quietly.

“I get that a lot.”

Guang Hong had evidently had enough of listening. “Are you going to sit there and deny that this is, in some part, your fault?”

“Pardon?” Viktor turned to face the southern elf’s ire; inspired, he supposed, by protectiveness of his friend.

“Leo could have been killed.” Strange; in all the stories he’d heard of Shen Osheth’s youngest noble the word fury had never been included. There it was, though; the hard edges of it in Guang Hong’s gaze. “Are you going to sit there and pretend that your decision to force their leader to abdicate hasn’t left the wilds without a strong hand to keep the revenants at bay?”

Christophe. Christophe’s memory was a ghost that had haunted their entire journey; in part because the last time he’d completed it, Christophe had also been on the pilgrimage, and they’d come of age together at the same time. “… I do not deny it.”

“You destabilized an entire country,” Guang Hong said, “and it’s hurting people I care about.” I won’t forgive you.

“I can see that.”

“Can you?” Guang Hong’s temper flared again, bright and hot and for a moment Viktor’s mind wandered completely, considering smoke and flame and … “Then tell me, Prince Viktor: what do you think is going to happen when two of the direct descendants of the ancient kings go across that road with a whole caravan of revelers.” His eyes narrowed. “The revenants may just be echoes of what they were in the first age but they’ll have a sense for you. They’ll come hungry. They’ll be out for blood.” He sighed heavily. “I intend to give this information to the Easterlings and the rest of my court. They’ll want to take council to decide whether or not it’s even worthwhile to try to proceed. But my people will travel. We have to see our friends back to their homes. What are you going to do?”

“The answer is perfectly obvious,” Viktor murmured, more calmly than he felt. He had decades of practice pretending. No reason to stop now. “The Northerners will leave early and clear the way.”

“That’s … are you mad?” Leo’s mouth hung slightly ajar and he quickly closed it, recovering in his seat. Perhaps Viktor was mad. The stories of him in the West, the way he’d swept in to unseat and exile his own lover; they certainly made more sense that way. “… It’ll be dangerous.”

“As you already pointed out, I’m traveling with a Ranger, and I have luck on my side.” Viktor glanced over at Guang Hong, his blue eyes narrow and sharp. He’d taken quite enough criticism for one afternoon. “And as your friend has so bluntly reminded us all, I share responsibility with your former prince. If there’s nothing else, I’m leaving now. We’ll make arrangements to depart in a week’s time.” A glance towards both of the others assured Viktor that he’d receive no rebuttals. He stood, and unrepentantly pulled rank. “Your family guards a wayseeing stone,” he told Guang Hong. Viktor made himself the picture of perfect calm, but he felt unsettled, tossed about the way the Ardor had been at sea. Normally he loved storms. At present he felt at the edge of otherwise perfect control, still imbalanced. “I would like to use it.”

“Of course.”

He nodded, and turned then, taking several strides back towards the large wooden doors, and then paused halfway, looked over his shoulder at Leo, who still sat in his seat, fiddling with his hands. “… Where is he, these days?”

“Who?”

“Christophe.”

“… He’s still in exile.”

“Yes.” Viktor’s temper flared. He was intimately familiar with that fact. “I remember that, too.” Leo frowned, still reluctant, and Viktor sighed heavily. “… Child,” he grumbled, entirely out of patience, “… The war between our houses finished a hundred years ago. What’s done is done. I am not here to reopen those chapters or revisit those ills.”

Leo glanced sidelong at Guang Hong, who gave a slight nod, and then spoke:

“… Nobody knows for sure, but there’s rumors. You might find him at the Oasis of A’ve Palmera.”

- - -

The Wayseeing stone stood alone in a shrine the Southrons had erected to the heroes of the first age, resting atop a column of intersecting reeds that had been draped over with southern silk. It shone perfectly clear, transparent and yet as he approached it became opaque, responding to the intent of the call he was going to make. Viktor picked it up, wrapping it up in cloth; the conversation about the West had left him feeling strangely depleted, and he had no desire to stand. Instead he sat in a corner, rested the stone on his raised knees, and gently laid his hand upon the side.

Lilia, he thought. I want to see Lilia.

It took minutes, maybe, before the elves in Ast Petyriel took note, before they got to his mother. Vitya?

She had such a severe, proud face, his mother; and yet the nickname, it undid him.

“… Mama,” he murmured, hardly himself; he hadn’t called her that since his childhood. Not even at the peak of betrayal had he allowed himself the sentiment. “ … I have made so many mistakes …”

Before he knew what he was saying the story itself was ripped from him; the unrest plaguing the West, the way his own history had weighed on him from the moment of their departure from Mosciren, the fact that sooner or later there was a legacy of suffering he’d come face to face with again. Viktor had considered himself prepared for that.

He had not been prepared for the fire halfling with his unimaginable powers, or for the way he’d lost himself in a single caress. What revisiting that did when he considered it in stark contrast to the past. Can you imagine, Viktor scoffed, choking on every attempt to not return to the tears of the morning. I told myself I didn’t affection. Look at what it got me, the last time … So starving that a halfling’s kiss has me intoxicated, out of control, offering up little pieces of myself —

Lilia listened for a long time, her expression unchanging.

I don’t think it would take just anyone to get to you, Vitya. His mother, underneath the diamond exterior, was a poet. His father was the pragmatist. Viktor opened his mouth to argue and cut himself off; he’d wanted so badly to believe in Lilia’s world of righteous beauty, and not Yakov’s, of hard truths. He’d called for her in the stone and not his father. Lilia, who while physically separated from Yakov had never once bothered to deny the nature of their bond.

Your father and I are powerful forces, she’d told him once, before she’d left Mosciren for Ast Petyriel again. Like the planets. Sometimes we are very far apart. It does not make our eventual alignment any less inevitable.

He’d always thought of that as a very strange way to love, had promised himself that he’d do differently. Then he’d met Christophe on the wheel; Christophe who was a high elf, too, and noble, and so he’d tried to choose. Tried to learn how to be close to him.

It was an unmitigated disaster.

Just make sure you’re not volunteering for this to get away from the boy, she said, when he’d calmed down enough to take deep, measured breaths.

Viktor laughed, dryly and without joy. He must have been terrifying, at Beltane. He would have fled, too. “Of course that’s why I’m doing it, mama.”

Lilia flashed a stern frown. It’s not courageous to be brave in the face of one danger only because you’ve substituted it for another.

“The rest of the revelers need a safe path,” Viktor reminded her quietly. “Whatever my reasoning, we can provide it.”

For everyone's sake, I certainly hope so. Give Yura my love.

“Always,” he promised.

- - -

Kenjirou had been the first to check to see if he was awake yet; after the all-night festivities of Beltane it wasn’t uncommon to sleep through lunch.

Yuuri pretended not to hear the knock at his door.

After that it was Phichit. Yuuko. He smiled thinly and lied to them both, because the truth was complicated and this was easier for everyone: I probably just had a little too much to drink. Across all the miles between Shen-Osheth and Hasetsuil, the gentle waves of Hiroko and Toshiya reached for him, along with a smoky sliver of Mari’s curiosity. Yuuri pitched his thoughts far away from family, stayed away from the bond that knit the Katsuki clan together.

There was nothing else to think about but that dance with Viktor, how impossibly easy it had been; how he’d known without ever consciously thinking about it that not once would Viktor accidentally step into the ribbons of phoenix-fire, or smother him in water and ice.

Nonetheless it had been stupid to allow the kiss. Stupid to feel his cares lifted away for a moment on the rhythmic steadiness of Viktor’s heartbeat in his ears, as slow and certain as the tides.

His parents had an easy, gentle kind of love; soft and enveloping as the healing springs of Hasetsuil. He’d never known them younger, couldn’t really imagine the early stages of their courtship. They’d done nothing but offer him a net of safety, and then that first Samhain had come along, and everything Minako had taught him, had told them, the co-bearers of his secret by necessity, had not prepared anyone for that shattering.

By Imbolc they were always waiting, warm and ready and safe once again.

Viktor was something else. Fleeing the festival, Yuuri had only dared to look back once, and Viktor hadn’t been looking at him. He’d held one hand outstretched in front of him, studying it, impossibly still. Frozen like a statue. Quiet as the grave.

He was lightning and gravity. He was the strangest, fiercest kind of beauty. He was also the high prince, and Yuuri a steward, and there was an inevitable bleakness coming, a burden Viktor did not need to share. Perhaps in time he’d learn how to be satisfied with the one strange night, the magic of Beltane.

It had not really represented the reality he lived in, but it was a beautiful dream.

- - -

“You could have told me how bad the wastes have been getting.” Viktor’s voice was strange even in his own ears; he’d meant for it to sound cool and hard, but somehow he’d twisted his own phrase, left it on the upward lift of a question he hadn’t meant to ask. Why didn’t you?

“I spoke with your father, when I joined the guard.” Otabek’s brow furrowed subtly. Pleasant conversation that had been, traipsing through the traditions of the high elves and attempting not to place the blame that certainly belonged at their feet. He didn’t particularly feel like revisiting it here and now. “… He made certain assurances.”

“How perfectly illuminating.” Viktor cast a wry glance in Otabek’s direction. “I’ve just assured the Southrons that we’re going to clear the road. I hope you’re feeling up to it.”

Otabek glanced up, subtly surprised. Viktor’s intervention in the West was an unexpected variable. Perhaps it had something to do with the man he’d seen briefly in the earliest hours of dawn, showing, for a moment, every inch of the underlying fragility that Otabek had always known had to be in there somewhere. Nobody was invulnerable. “It’ll be dangerous.”

“Are you afraid?”

“We have nothing to fear from the revenants,” Otabek murmured mildly. “It’s you they still hate.” He looked up at Viktor, decided to drive home the point: “What you represent. You and your brother.”

“I know.” Was that something like the shadow of regret on Viktor’s face? “We’ll be careful.”