blood and bread, flowers and prayer
The day after Litha (Summer Solstice), 1017 II Age
He woke to the rise and fall of Viktor’s chest, steady and predictable as waves, an early curling that always preceded the subtle beat of his heart, the way lightning always came before thunder, but gentler, soft-handed as the mists of spring. Yuuri, always an early riser, studied Viktor in silence: the wild splash of silver hair on the pillow, the shadow left by long-lashes on the noble line of his cheeks.
It struck him from nowhere, the errant thought: I could do this forever.
Every place he looked was a new memory; the shoulders his fingers had curled around, and left temporary, crescent-shaped craters speckled over. The elegance of Viktor’s throat and the perfect hollow of his collarbones. Viktor wasn’t the only one who’d begun to take advantage of the subtle bond between them; Yuuri was a quick study, eager to please, and it was little things that made Viktor’s breath catch and made his heartbeat pick up: nibbling on an earlobe, for instance, or kissing his abdomen on the strong, lean plain near his navel, or soft skin on the inside of his wrists, more regularly covered in bracers for archery. Viktor had no doubt compiled a similar list; he’d fallen over Yuuri with a navigator’s hands, had searched out all of his edges, mapped every landscape.
He looked so peaceful in his sleep. So content. It was humbling to consider that he might’ve had anything to do with that, to sit and look and to sweep Viktor’s silver-silk hair through his fingers because he couldn’t not touch him. The enormity of the choice they’d made together should have terrified him. For a moment, for a morning, Yuuri could look at Viktor while he slept, and feel at ease.
The Prince stirred, sweeping his fingers over Yuuri’s hipbones and across the small of his back, and then Viktor’s eyes parted slowly, and Yuuri let himself fall into the bright, perfect blueness of them, the one bit of summer sky in the whole mien of his winter prince. “… What are you thinking about?”
“You.”
One corner of Viktor’s mouth quirked upwards, and he leaned up to press his smirk to Yuuri’s mouth. “Fascinating,” he teased, and let the first kiss be followed with another, and then another. “Tell me more.”
Like tides. You’re so beautiful. “You looked happy.”
“I am happy,” Viktor murmured, and now his hands were at work again, the irresistible press of his body, his heart-shaped smile, his sparkling eyes.
Yuuri threw himself into the waves.
- - -
Vitya?
Yeah, Yura?
Make Christophe make Jean-Jacques give you a room.
…
- - -
Three weeks to Lughnasadh, 1017 II Age
The next wave of revelers arrived, this time with some fanfare: Guang Hong led the processional of pilgrims up, riding alongside Kenjirou, followed by the Easterlings, the Westerners, and the Southrons alike. Overnight, Vaux Romandith became a bustling place; more pavilions were pitched in the meadow, filling up half of it with travelers; Christophe and Jean-Jacques walked among them, establishing the new order of the West, playing at politics and diplomacy and talking down the shock factor of Christophe’s return from exile.
Viktor took council with the other Princes, consulting about the status of the desert and the recent rides of the Rangers, and Yuuri finally got the rest of his possessions back, helping Seung-gil move into the Eastern pavilion at the same time as he planned to take his things out of it. Phichit had barely stayed with the Southrons before he’d come rushing over, wanting a full explanation for Yuuri and Seung-gil’s sudden departure from Shen-Osheth. “You’re not staying in the Easterling camp?”
“I … No.” In theory it was a simple thing to explain, but for some reason the words were clumsy in Yuuri’s mouth. “Viktor’s staying as a guest of Jean-Jacques in the village proper,” which was curious, in terms of its timing, but he was glad to be a little further away from Yuri’s green-eyed glare, “ … and …”
“And you’re staying as a guest of Viktor?” Yuuko asked suddenly, with a subtle smile, and a dangerous knowing. Phichit looked between the two of them, shocked, and then he demanded details:
“Explain yourself,” he said, poking Yuuri in the sternum with an outstretched finger. “At once.”
“We’re … we’re …” Yuuri struggled, and closed his eyes, zeroing in on the distant thrum of Viktor’s pulse, steady and sure in the back of his thoughts. “He’s courting me.”
“I knew it!” Yuuko crooned triumphantly, and then blinked as both Phichit and Yuuri fixed her with wide-eye stares. “What?” She asked, pursing her lips and folding her arms. “Takeshi told me about what happened on the Ardor.”
Now Phichit was even more scandalized: how dare Yuuri not mention these critical details, when they’d been together at Beltane? “What happened on the ship?!”
Yuuri pinched the bridge of his nose, hiding a smile. It was going to be a long afternoon. “Nothing happened on the ship.”
“You’re a terrible liar.”
“… We spent the night together on the ship. Because I got soaking wet watching Viktor use his magic to help Takeshi steer us through the thunderstorm.”
Yuuko grinned broadly. “He didn’t mind, you know,” she teased, with a toss of her hair and a too-pleased smile. “Gave him an excuse to come find me when the first mate took over.”
“Now, see, that?” Yuuri murmured, almost thoughtfully: “That I’m not sure I needed to know.”
Yuuko hit him with a pillow, and then so did Phichit, and if for a few moments the Easterling tent was ensconced in nothing more than a series of shrieks and giggles, nobody in Vaux Romandith noticed. Yuuri’s things were no more organized after than they had been before, and both he and Phichit emerged from the pavilion carrying them in piles, hair mussed and cheeks flushed.
“… So you love him, huh?”
“Yeah,” Yuuri replied, certain of that, at least. “I do.”
- - -
Assembled in the council room high in the trees, the cadre of Princes met: Viktor, who had thus far avoided the seat at the head of the table left for him; Yuri, who’d adopted a perch in an open window; Guang Hong and Kenjirou, each still weary from travel and doing their best to represent their older relatives; Jean-Jacques, looking rather determined to do his best while Christophe lounged idly on a bench on the far wall, pretending as though his presence wasn’t an extraordinary surprise.
And Otabek. The banshee stuck to a corner, leaning back idly, his arms crossed. “We seem to have broadened our ranks, Prince Viktor,” Kenjirou murmured, which was the most circumspect way he could manage of asking what are they doing here, of assuaging a natural, fox-like curiosity reflected in the cautious sniff and dart of his familiar, floating around the edges of a few unfamiliar faces. Yuri and Jean-Jacques and Christophe all spoke at once; two of them in defense of the Ranger in the shadows:
“Otabek speaks for the Rangers —“
“He’s here because he’s Christophe and I need his help —“
“Because he’s a Ranger, of course, Princelet —“
“Well,” Viktor murmured dryly, glancing over his shoulder at Yuri with a brief flicker of amusement, and then across the way at Christophe, who did not look back but instead lifted one sinuous arm, twisted up in python, and waved an idle hand with an ironic smile. “now that that’s clear. Otabek is here because of those presently assembled he’s the only one who’s been to the Cauldron in recent memory; Christophe is here because he can’t resist gossip —“
“I resemble that remark.”
“— and also because, I suspect, Jean-Jacques would have relayed our conversation regardless, because he’s got tremendously inconvenient ideas about loyalty and honor and courage.”
Jean-Jacques sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose, leaning back in his chair to murmur to Christophe: “Are his compliments always so back-handed?”
What he received in return was an answering smirk. “Only when he’s trying to insult me.” Christophe grinned, and it was Guang Hong who cleared his throat slightly, and asked the question, tried to bring them back into some sort of bounds:
“So you’ve seen the Cauldron, Otabek? What was it —?”
“What was it like?” Otabek glanced up, his dark eyes slightly narrowed. “The actual forge of creation? A volcano in the middle of the desert sitting right at the end of the scar of the first age, surrounded by revenants and wraiths your people are responsible for making? What do you think it’s like —“
“Beka,” Yuri murmured, with uncharacteristic softness, and Christophe smiled slightly to himself, looking between the two: Viktor’s brother, cast in the light of the window-frame, and the Ranger Captain, keeping to the shade of the corner. Otabek looked at him, still and silent. “… Do you intend to punish all sons for the sins of all fathers?”
Otabek’s gaze softened somewhat, given away by a tell-tale twitch of a small muscle in his cheek. “No,” he said quietly. You know that.
“We’re trying to help.”
“That is the way of the high elves,” he murmured carefully, still looking at Yuri, rather than the rest of the assembled council. “To leap for solutions. To the men who have the hammer, everything begins to look like a nail.”
“Then help them see differently,” Christophe murmured calmly, looking up from his chaise to study Otabek with an expression that was surprisingly serious. “You know it can be done. I was told you left intending to try.”
“Did you?” Viktor echoed suddenly, glancing over to Otabek with a new, calculating kind of gaze: like there were new details, new variables in an equation that he’d probably solve before the rest of them.
“I did,” Otabek confirmed: “For my whole life, the Cauldron’s gotten more volatile; nothing that would make anyone believe disaster is imminent, just a slow, steady simmering. We consider it holy ground —“
“So do we,” Viktor murmured.
“You didn’t, back then.”
“I,” Viktor reminded him, pointedly, “am tired of reminding King and Ranger alike that I was not aliveback then.” For a moment their gazes met, equally assessing, equally calculating, and then Otabek continued his story as though it had not been interrupted at all.
“— and that has always seemed at odds, to me. If it’s a holy place, it ought to be better tended. After I came of age I stayed to study it further, spent as much time there as anyone, and then I decided I could not let another thousand years pass in idleness, hoping that the pax of the tribes alone would be enough. My decision to leave was not particularly well-received by some of my clansman, particularly when I announced which Court I intended to join.”
“So you came to us in study of your enemy?” Viktor asked coolly.
“I thought so at first. My opinions are … becoming more nuanced.”
Sometimes, the High Prince had more than just magic made of ice; sometimes it crept into his voice. “I should hope so.”
“Vitya.” Yuri’s voice, now, had a subtly warning edge. “He’s not wrong.”
No, but he’s not quite right, either, and I think for a very long time he’s believed he was, which is nearly more dangerous. Still, Viktor glanced back at his brother, raised an eyebrow to underscore the point, and sat back in silence. For a moment nobody spoke, and then Christophe reached out with a toe to nudge Jean-Jacques’ chair, a prompt that was in no way subtle but which shook the newest Prince into the discussion.
“It would partially explain the higher number of incursions if the region’s more volatile as a whole,” he said, carefully; partially because after Christophe lost the right to rule, even his parents had chosen to go man the havens to the Far West, and for too long they’d been left with a throne that was empty, which now he was meant to sit upon. “How was the trip coming here?”
“Nothing like what you seem to have encountered,” Kenjirou said, speaking up: “Yuuri and Seung-gil left in such a hurry…”
“We encountered a few revenants. They were small. No sign of a dragon.”
“... Others of my clan came south from A’ve Palmera to help, after the battle on the Sunset Road.”
“Your father will want to hear of all this, Vitya.” Christophe murmured. “Do you want the stone?”
“Perhaps later,” Viktor murmured thoughtfully, lacing his fingers together. “… But I would not count on the bear of the North for this. The strength that built Mosciren is not what it was at the dawn of this age.” Behind him, Yuri frowned subtly, crossing his arms, and across the way, Guang Hong looked elsewhere. It took Kenjirou’s curiosity to ask the question:
“What are you trying to say?”
“I am telling you that if this is a problem meant to be solved,” Viktor said, “it will be met by the generation of Princes in this room, and not the ones who forged the first years of this age.”
Later, Viktor found Yuuri on the edge of the meadow, slipped close, pressed a kiss to his forehead. From a distance, Yuri studied this: the newfound softness of his older brother, cold edges made gentler, smile more genuine than it had been in years. Together the edges around the two of them blurred; Yuuri’s smile was soft, too, and he briefly touched Viktor’s face, while Viktor’s fingers curled over his hips.
In this picture there was none of the storm or stress of his parents when they collided; it was gentle, made him think back to Otabek, trying to explain something about light and purity and weakness. He wasn’t alone in this observing; Otabek, too, was making calculations, and Christophe’s keen perception never seemed to let up:
“He was like that when he was younger, if that’s what you’re wondering,” he murmured quietly. “Don’t get too worried. It’s a good thing.”
“Nobody asked you,” Yuri muttered darkly, waving Christophe away; the Western steward merely shrugged and flashed another one of his too-charismatic smiles, because of course Yuri had sat there, wondering, and the empath knew it, as plain as day: didn’t you, though?
- - -
One week to Lughnasadh, 1017 II Age
Festivities began with a parade of flowers, a procession of mages each holding a platter of harvest grains and freshly-cut flowers arranged for an autumn offering. The order of the processional began with Isabella and Jean-Jacques, carrying a bright array of sunflowers and ivies and deep red chrysanthemums artfully placed inside of a pumpkin. Isabella, who Viktor had learned at Litha had a knack for this sort of thing, had declared the processional’s order thereafter, surprising even Viktor, who watched as Kenjirou led the Easterlings forward, bearing a minimalist arrangement of autumn leaves and twisted wheat, berries, and a single, bright sunflower. It was graceful but sparse, crafted on the balance of its elements rather than the brilliance of them, and in that alone came the answer:
Minako.
Of course; one of his mother’s first students, the artist of the East. She’d called Yuuri one of her best students in turn. Viktor smiled to himself, appreciative: Yuuri hadn’t mentioned that he’d be helping the Easterling Prince at all, and yet here he was, surprising him still, and someday, someday soon, Lilia was going to have the opportunity to watch him dance, and to see what it was he saw when the halfling disposed of his anxieties and revealed his underlying graces. Yura followed with Mila, their bundle of flowers made up primarily of whites and reds and subtle streaks of autumn gold. He was, no doubt, irritated by Isabella’s choice to place him behind the revelers from the East and their young Prince. Guang Hong came last, walking along with Phichit, both carrying a bouquet spread out on the platter that was, perhaps, too much of everything: yellow roses and bright sunflowers and red snapdragons, big and mixed and bright. Still, even that reflected Shen-Osheth, forever a mix of a thousand different influences, the Southerners unwilling to adhere to the neat lines of his father’s preference for clean and cold tradition.
He had watched the festivals pass all these years with such relative disinterest, as though there was nothing new to learn from them.
Even though harvest was coming, Viktor was finally starting to feel alive.
- - -
The week of Lughnasadh, 1017 II Age
The Westerners couldn’t be satisfied with just the one event. Lughnasadh stretched into a week of games and contests, each one different, each one followed by harvest feasting and the sweet, pale ale made by the farmers of the plains. Yuri sipped at a mug of the stuff, watching as Otabek prepared to face Georgi for the title in the evening’s event: sparring with a quarterstaff, and, almost blithely, he leaned over and murmured to the person sitting next to him:
“Beka’s going to win.” Great plan, except:
“You think so?” The person next to him wasn’t Viktor, or even Mila, for that matter; it was the damn Halfling with his stupid phoenix familiar, left there by the two other traitors who’d gone … somewhere. Yuri thought food might have been a part of that equation. One of the bakers had made great loaves of braided bread, which Viktor had declared amazing! in such a delighted tone that Yuri had nearly begun to inspect his older brother for a head injury.
“Yeah.” Georgi was plenty good with long weapons like this, had grown up studying the longsword and the spear, and Yuri’d gotten into the sparring arena with him plenty of times and lost. He’d come to realize, though, the difference: Otabek had grown up in the wilderness, had fought with shadows for his entire life, and the banshee’s instincts were no accident: they were the result of practice. “Too bad for Georgi, he’s usually pretty good…”
“Mm.” Yuuri smiled gently, and then glanced back over at Yuri: “You must be proud of him.”
Here was dangerous ground, the strange dance they were all doing around each other while trying to acclimate. Yuri glanced over sharply, trying to read the polite mask of the halfling’s face, and received no answers. Sometimes Yuuri could be as aloof as his brother; other times he was more legible than any scroll in Lilia’s library. “Which one?”
Yuuri’s smile grew. “All of them,” he said then.
“I am,” grumbled Yuri, and then he stood up. “You need a drink.”
“Do I?”
“I’ve just realized how like Vitya you are: not presently tipsy enough to be honest.”
The rest of that evening had passed in a blur: Yuri’s prediction proved prescient, because he was soon celebrating with Otabek, who wound up awarded a crown of leaves for his victory, and then Christophe had come along, and there’d been more ale, a tremendous amount of dancing …
… Viktor had taken his shirt off, complaining about the heat; then someone had incited an awful lot of dancing, and … Yuuri woke up with a hangover and the fingers of a northern prince sweeping through his hair, soft as feathers. “You put my brother to shame last night,” he crooned, grinning bright and fond:
“I barely remember it,” Yuuri grunted, miserably, closing his eyes while the room swayed to-and-fro, almost the way the Ardor had, across the waves, except that had been soporific and this was anything but: “don’t ever let that happen again.”
Viktor looked entirely too pleased, and he was; had laughed and laughed and laughed the night before, whirling through the trees, a whole new self. “Never,” he said smartly, and then he laid back down, settled in as something cool and strong at Yuuri’s back, the point of his chin pressed into the halfling’s shoulder. There was something steadying about the cradle of their bodies, and the idle drape of one of Viktor’s arms over Yuuri’s waist. The smirk, too: Yuuri didn’t need to see it to feel it. “You looked entirely too good doing it to make that sort of a promise.”
- - -
There were other games, too. Kenjirou, trying his best at archery, did not manage to unseat the High Prince, and Yuri won a race of horses on the track around the lake. What are you competing in, then, he’d wanted to know, and Yuuri told him: marathon, the runner’s race on the lakeside trail.
To run at distance was a challenge of mind over matter. He never felt as strong at Lughnasadh as he felt at Litha or Beltane, not quite so young or nearly as invincible, but he was healthy enough; could ignore the protests of his bones as he pressed onwards, chasing the red bolt of the phoenix as it flew steadily ahead. The bird looked older, at this time of year, mature and regal, in its last days before the decline.
Yuuri ran anyway, more and more miles, because what he wanted was more and more life.
Viktor was there at the finish line, arms open, solid and steady as the distance Yuuri had crossed, nothing fleeting, everything sure.
- - -
On the last day of the games Yuuri learned something new, watching Viktor swim, putting a steady and growing distance between himself and the weather mage they’d first met, Emil. It put all new meaning to the phrase in his element, the elegance with which he cut through the water, all agility, finesse, and ease.
Shaking out the silver of his hair created a whole burst of droplets, each one refracting the late summer light, and before Yuuri knew it, he was being splashed by the elder prince and casually shoved off the dock by the younger, punishment, apparently, for the precise way in which he’d been staring.
- - -
The week of Lughnasadh, 1017 II Age
At the end of the week it was possible to feel precisely as exhausted as summer was, ready for the coming of the seasons of rest. Of all of the revelers who’d traveled only Guang Hong, Phichit, and Kenjirou still had the energy to keep dancing around the harvest fires with their Western hosts; Yuuri had long since given up, tired, and gone to lay down on a long bench where eventually and steadily three others had gathered. First there had been Viktor, who’d merely rearranged Yuuri’s head so that it lay in his lap, and who had sat in companionable silence, linking up their hands while the sun set, and then Yuri, perhaps in search of his brother, and finally Otabek, who sat on the far side of the row they made together, and who shifted subtly to make his frame ready for the slope of of Yuri’s shoulder.
For a long time they sat like that, and said nothing at all, and Yuuri was almost asleep when Otabek murmured:
“Do you really think you can help it? The cauldron?”
Fix what, Yuuri had wanted to ask, opening his eyes but not yet ready to move.
“I don’t,” admitted Viktor, “but I’m currently receiving an education on how not to do things alone, and evidently I’m welcoming a ban side to the family, so …” He turned his head and flashed a wry smile. “One makes due.”
“Could be worse,” Yuri quipped lazily. “Could be a halfling.”
“Hey,” Yuuri mumbled, though somehow he wasn’t particularly offended; perhaps because Viktor had reached over to give his brother a shove that reverberated onto Otabek, something that felt easy and comfortable and familiar.
“Quit complaining,” Yuri shot back, smirking in the dark, but it sounded like a welcome, something like: welcome to the world’s most dysfunctional family, their first collective joke.
After a moment, even Otabek was laughing.
- - -
The morning after Lughnasadh, 1017 II Age
He woke early, before dawn, with the marathon’s ache still in his limbs and a phlegmy kind of cough, the sort of nuisance that Yuuri knew could work its way through lungs and into bloodstream and bone.
Harmless now.
Fatal later.