a silver splendour, a flame

Here you are, Yakov. In the presence of the phoenix.

Yuuri squirmed, suddenly uncomfortable, and he started to sit up only to feel the brush of one of Viktor’s hands against his back, encouraging otherwise. He looked up to catch Viktor’s blue gaze, which was steady and curiously focused. What he felt was something different and separating the threads of it was a new and clumsy effort: Viktor was angry, it seemed, at Yakov. Or … Indignant was a better word. Underneath this was a steely resolve that Yuuri would not have wanted to be on the other side of, though Yakov himself seemed unaffected by it, and a possessiveness that might’ve made him blush if he hadn’t already been terribly embarrassed, having been caught in such a state by the King. “My name is Yuuri,” he explained, mortified.

Yakov barely spared him a glance, grunting: “I know who you are. Get dressed, Vitya. We’re going for a walk.”

“There’s nothing you could possibly have to say to me that I wouldn’t repeat to him.”

One of Yakov’s eyebrows rose as he looked at Viktor pointedly. Really, thought the King dryly, and, having correctly called his son’s bluff he stood up, walked over to the trunk on the floor, and promptly threw a tunic in Viktor’s direction. “Now,” he emphasized, and then he stood up, and walked back to the door, and let himself out.

It did not close behind him, a purposeful gesture that drew another flicker of irritation from Viktor, who fell back down among the pillows and deliberately ignored his shirt. His hands roamed Yuuri’s back, nothing more than a reassurance of the Halfling’s presence, and after a moment he turned his head, sought out the soft light of a good morning kiss. Every morning, he decided. Yakov and Lilia were bonded and could hardly stand to share the same space, their individual personalities too big and too strong to share in the physical present. He was never going to make the same mistake. Every morning and every night would start and end with this softness, gentle as a lapping wave.

The floor shook suddenly, ominously; Yakov’s stone magic at work, the pounding of the ancient grizzly, rumbling through the earth. It startled Yuuri enough to rattle that persistent cough which clung to him, these days, and Viktor’s anger came swiftly once more and almost immediately burned back out, the first flash of a promised thunderstorm replaced instead by an enveloping worry.

Don’t, Yuuri wanted to say, because he didn’t want to spend a whole season talking illness, thinking too long on death. Instead he thought pointedly about the things he did want: the bright joy of dancing together, and the cool softness of Viktor’s hands, and the perfect comfort of lying together, like this, with the morning light streaming through the window. Viktor gave a long-suffering sigh and reached for the shirt he’d been thrown, pulled it on over his head. He kissed Yuuri’s forehead and climbed out of bed, then strode barefoot and unkempt for the door. “Don’t worry about this,” Viktor promised. “I’ll take care of it.”

- - -

The interrogation began as soon as they hit the courtyard. “What are you thinking?” Yakov swore, shaking his head. “Did you even think at all? Don’t answer that. I know the answer.”

Viktor found a wooden beam, sturdy but carved into an intricate spiral, the way everything in Ast Petyriel was, to lean against and stared back. He crossed his arms in pointed silence. It a practiced means of granting his father’s demands: he hadn’t answered, and yet, because he hadn’t answered, because he stood there in such insouciance, Yakov’s face turned redder, his voice booming like earthquakes, like thunder:

“Viktor, you have obligations —“

“I’m aware. You’ve spent the better part of one hundred and twenty years reminding me of them.”

“This will be easier if you try not to back-talk.”

“This will be easiest if you accept that I have no intention of changing my mind.”

Yakov’s eyes narrowed sharply. “You cannot have me believe that you intend to spend one quarter of the year tending a steadily declining invalid and another season of it mired in grief,” he argued. “That you will willingly plunge the ruling clan of the aes sidhe into mourning every Samhain, that you will bring heirs into a family that suffers this annual breaking, that —“

“I do and I can and I will,” Viktor shouted suddenly, tired of this tirade, only half-listening to Yakov’s words. He’d learned long ago — from Lilia, of all people — to rely on the subtle insights of the family’s bonds instead, to listen to the undercurrents beneath all of Yakov’s gruff and bluster. He will bully you too much otherwise. He’s had too much practice. He pushed off from the stone, put both of his hands on his father’s broad shoulders, closed his eyes.

“I tried to love someone the way you wanted once, Yakov —“

“Don’t you dare lay that at my feet, Vitya,” Yakov murmured lowly.

“For once in your life, listen to me.” It wasn’t words that Viktor spoke; he leaned into his thoughts instead: I tried because I wanted to please you. Who’s at fault doesn’t matter anymore. I tried because I didn’t know enough about myself. I knew who you were. I knew who Lilia was. I knew who I was supposed to be.

I’ve spent a century knowing all those things without ever knowing who I am and I’m tired. “Maybe it’s a coincidence that Yuuri’s first magic was fire and mine was water. Maybe it’s a coincidence that his secondary power is life and mine is fortune. Or maybe we have these things because that’s who we are and maybe I love him because  —“

Because I cannot imagine a better compliment.

“You can think whatever you want about the fact that he’s a halfling,” Viktor murmured lowly, reciting the facts that had just been so furiously thrown into his face. “You can regret the fact that someday we’ll have to talk about who to adopt, if we ever want a family of our own. If you like, you can even wish that he was one of the Princes, or more readily connected to their families, although the healing springs at Hasetsuil are legend and magic too, and I think looking down on them is a mistake. You can think all of those things. But if you tell me one more time that someone who has the strength of character to stare down his imminent death, over and over again, and still come back and rise … if you tell me that is weakness, you and I will never speak again.” Viktor’s blue eyes narrowed and his voice fell even further:

“… If that is what you have to say, then someday you will make your way to the Havens, the way Christophe’s family has, and you will leave this place, and I will not say a word to you while you depart. Your legend will pass wholly unremarked upon, little more than a whisper, and if you think I cannot manage it, if you think I can’t and won’t erase you from history, then you don’t know the son you’ve been raising after all.”

Mountains, Viktor had learned, re-routed rivers for only a time. It was water that turned stone into sand; it was ice that broke through boulders.

“Are you threatening me?” Yakov snorted, both eyebrows raised. He had raised Mosciren from stone and crag; he had put the strength behind the North that had changed the West; he had been the first bearer of the crown after the four families divided, following the first age. “That’s bold, Vitya.”

“… You told me a long time ago, when we first went off to make Christophe abscond that my first mistake had been making empty threats, Father.” Viktor drew back slightly, to look Yakov in the eye, unwavering. “You told me Northerners don’t make threats. We make promises.”

Idiot boy. That’s not something we do to each other. Not in this —

“Family, I know.” He closed his eyes and raked a hand through silver hair, catching fingers on the tangles not yet combed out, this early in the morning. “… I don’t want to do that. You’re my father, you’re the King, you’ve spent your whole lifetime preparing me for moments like this one, where I have to make difficult, maybe even impossible decisions. I have decided that an answering joy is worth the grief, better than a life lived in the nothingness of the middle, where I’ve spent far too long away from all of our people, aloof. Here is where we find out how committed you are to the education you provided: someday you will be gone, and I will make choices that arise from the best of my wisdom and from the depths of my heart, and if that truly isn’t what you wanted, or if your damn pride is worth more to you than the love of your child, then we are at an impasse.”

Yakov said nothing, but the bent of his thoughts was mixed; drifted, periodically, towards Lilia, and the way she’d trained both of their sons in her own curious art: cutting with words instead of swords. “Tch,” he grumbled, the way Yuri would’ve, sentiment. Viktor stepped forward, squeezed Yakov’s big shoulders, and then padded backwards, clasping a hand over his heart, performing the perfect Northern bow. “Your majesty,” Viktor said, “can I go back to bed now?”

Yakov, Lilia’s voice echoed, I don’t recall giving you permission to wake my whole household with all this shouting —

— Woman, you’re enough trouble for four hundred lifetimes, leave me in peace —

Shutters were thrown open overhead, with an irritable blond staring out: “Are all of you idiots done arguing yet?” He asked, and then pointed towards sunrise. “Some of us were still trying to sleep.”

Yakov gave one of his long-suffering sighs, and waved Viktor off. “Permission granted.”

- - -

Yuuri, sitting alone in Viktor’s bed ran his thumbs across the lines of his palms, listening, in a strange and new way, to the ebb and flow of Viktor’s reactions to whatever conversation he was having with Yakov. For one moment he’d been rattled, almost wounded, and then that glacial, steely resolve was back, cold enough to make him shiver again, and burrow more deeply into the blankets. Then it seemed over and by the time he heard Viktor’s soft footsteps he primarily detected relief.

He looked up as the door closed, and watched Viktor come closer, smiled subtly as he climbed back into bed. “That was rude,” grumbled the prince, who drew Yuuri close once more, tilted his head to press kisses to the plane of his throat. “We’re staying in until lunch.”

Distracting as that was Yuuri wasn’t deterred yet. “What did you tell him?”

I told him the next time he insults you that I’ll erase him from history. Viktor did not say that. Yakov had been right, after all: it was too soon, perhaps, to fully expose Yuuri to the machinations of his family, norms of strength and power set in place for hundreds of years. “… I told him that someday I’m going to be a better King because of you,” he said instead, which was also true, a gentler truth but no weaker for its softness.

“You didn’t need me to come along to be a great King,” mumbled Yuuri, and Viktor’s brow furrowed at the subtle flickers of doubt in his mien, the cares and anxieties he could never quite manage to fully erase. The halfling squirmed to sit up and Viktor followed him, fluid, draping his arms over Yuuri’s shoulders, kissing the edge of one blush-burned ear.

“No,” he agreed mildly. “I needed you to be a kind one.” He pressed his lips to Yuuri’s cheek, to the fine sweep of his blush. “A just one.” Viktor’s hands drifted, and this time one hand curled along the side of the halfling’s face, along the opposite cheek. “It’s important that you understand this, too,” he murmured against the corner of Yuuri’s mouth, smiling slightly at the pick up in Yuuri’s fluttering pulse, terribly pleased by a fresh wave of want between the two of them. “You woke up a sleeping heart,” Viktor hummed, glancing upwards to study Yuuri’s wide eyes, to let himself sink into devotion. “You did that. Only you.”

Yuuri kissed him then, all feverish heat, and Viktor, grinning against his mouth, fell backwards and made Yuuri follow him down. We’re staying in until lunch had not been a threat: he was going to spend his whole morning swept up in this attraction, intended to relish it.

It had been a promise.

- - -

Otabek hadn’t slept well. Lilia’s people had escorted him into the guest wing with the halfling’s parents, and he wasn’t lovesick or sentimental enough to blame that, though falling asleep next to Yuri out in the moonlight and under the stars had its merits. Nor did he blame Yuri for their current separation, or particularly need to stay twined together, the way Viktor and Yuuri did. This was no surprise either: for years now, he’d watched one of his own travel back and forth from A’ve Palmera, bound but still also restless, and at ease with his restlessness, his need to walk moonlit plains.

He’d had no other expectations, really.

Perhaps it had been the room itself, too ornate, too comfortable, too boxed in. He’d felt the same way in Mosciren, from time to time, trapped amidst tapestries that belonged to the aes sidhe, serving under their King for a time while he tried to study, tried to learn, tried to find a way to make the future look a little differently than the past. Then the morning’s rumble of stone had all but announced the King’s arrival and he’d gotten out of his bed and purposefully avoided them all, picking up his staff and then walking to the forum alone along the empty high street, for practice.

It wouldn’t do to let the soft bed, with its silk sheets, the luxury and sheen of this place, the way it imposed a perfect natural order, bleed into him somehow. Change him.

Even that was a lie, though. Yuri’s heartbeat was smooth and steady in the distance of his thoughts. You’re changing already.

He pretended not to notice the King, when Yakov arrived, preoccupied with the twist and flow of the staff.

“… You know what I don’t understand,” Yakov murmured slowly, deliberately. “I’ve heard the whole story. Nights out in the desert bleeding out magic from a dragon’s wound and somehow Vitya’s still here.”

“Your majesty.” He turned and clasped a hand over his chest and did not bow. It irritated Yakov, but it was an irritation he’d learned to live with in exchange for talent. The ban side would not bow to the aes sidhe ever again. They’d been vanquished enough. “You have your other son to thank for that.”

“Ah, yes. I thought of that.” Yakov watched as Otabek’s quarterstaff made another fluid sweep, as he proceeded swiftly into the next phase of his practice, unwilling to stand at attention for long. “I thought: perhaps Georgi and Mila helped him, but then they, too … Those wounds are a void, who held them out from it, and so on.”

They were men of actions, not words. Otabek sighed to himself, and turned back around, leaning his weight on the staff. “Do you have something you’d like to ask me?”

“It was you, holding Yura.” A ban side. They knew the darkness well, were too acquainted with the things that had once walked in the night.

There was no point in lying. The solution was plain. Besides, he’d never do Yuri the injustice of the denial, had known from the moment he’d beheld the unicorn for the first time that there was no real danger in handing Yura his power. “Yes.”

One corner of Yakov’s right eye twitched, and then he drew in a big breath. What he shouted was this:

“LILIA.”

What he thought was something different, directed at his entire stupid family, although judging by the current state of Viktor’s mind he wasn’t going to pay them a single bit of attention:

Yura. Get down to the forum at once.

Yuri, who’d tried to go back to sleep, glad to finally be back in his own house, in his own room, sat up suddenly with a fierce scowl and narrowed eyes. “Shit.”

- - -

When he got to the forum Yakov was waiting, heavy arms crossed while Otabek stood nearby, expression neutral and heartbeat elevated from exercise. Yuri spared a moment to glance that way, at the mess of the Ranger’s hair and the cooling sweat on his brow; the quarterstaff, currently going unused. One corner of his mouth twitched with the temptation of a smile, quickly cut short by the reminder of the fact that he’d been summoned here, and how. “You called?”

Yakov merely pointed in the banshee’s direction, little more than a jab of one thumb. “Tell me at once, Yura. Are you bonded to the banshee?”

The banshee. Something about the way it was said set Yuri’s teeth on edge, though it was a turn of phrase that wouldn’t have phased him a few months ago, before he’d met Otabek at all, and begun collecting a different set of ideas, ones that suggested that nothing was one hundred percent black or white, love or war … He looked from Yakov to Beka now, schooled his expression into an imitation of the aloof neutrality Viktor was so good at assuming, from time to time. “Partially.”

“Ridiculous,” said Yakov, who let himself call, mentally, for Lilia again. She had nothing kind to say about the matter:

You blustering fool, I’m not your servant.

Our son is bonded to a banshee, witch-woman.

Yakov swore he detected the mental edition of an eye-roll, something Yura had no doubt inherited from the woman who was the source of all of his woes. “And do you have any intention of breaking that bond?”

Yuri gave the question its due consideration without looking back at his father. Vaux Romandith had settled something like an intent between the two of them and yet he wasn’t particularly eager to rush to the place Viktor was, ready to hand over heart and soul and mind.

It didn’t mean he wanted Beka kissing someone else. He’d been too fond of that predatory smile, of the glittering dark in Otabek’s eyes, of the strength and subtle ferocity with which their lips had met.

“Not currently,” he said, which was the truth, and Beka offered the ghost of a smirk in return. Viktor had already promised his halfling forever, over and over again, and Yuri felt more inclined to take his life a day at a time; imagined Otabek still present tomorrow but was more interested in the reality of him today.

Yakov pinched the bridge of his nose, muttering into his open palm. “I send you away for a few months and one son comes back wanting to marry a halfling, and the other one’s making eyes at a banshee …”

“His name,” said Yuri, citrine eyes narrow and sharp, “is Otabek.”

“I know his bloody name,” Yakov snapped back. “For gods’ sake, I hired him.” His eyes flashed in Otabek’s direction, ominous, as though he considered the current events a breach of some unspoken contract; something about not seducing my sons —

“You’re right,” Otabek murmured carelessly. “I should have let them both die.”

“That is treachery.”

“No,” said the Ranger Captain, the ban side noble, and the King’s guard, all at once; Otabek’s chin lifted and his eyes narrowed: “It was duty and I’ve delivered it. You solved the puzzle yourself, your majesty, will you deny it?”

“Perhaps you led them into danger yourself —“

“Father, that is ridiculous.”

“Yes, and then brought them here.” Otabek snorted. “I confess. Your tactical mind is losing its edge in its twilight years —”

“I will not be insulted by a banshee.”

“Then be insulted by a Queen instead,” Lilia said from the doorway, her lips drawn into a deep frown. “What is the meaning of this,” she demanded, and when Yakov started to speak the Queen held up a hand glowing green in warning. Not in my house, Yakov. “Yura. Explain yourself.”

Yuri turned and looked at his mother for a long time, irritable, silent, and then his expression softened by degrees. “In Shen-Osheth the Westerners and Southrons told Vitya about how dangerous the Sunset Road had become, and he decided we could clear it. We fought revenants, wraiths, and a dark dragon came last, and it was after me, but … but …” Rather than say the words, he thought them: Vitya jumped in the way. “I don’t know what it did, but Otabek called for help, and then … I used my magic to try to keep Vitya stable, and Beka …” He looked from Lilia to Otabek, took in the steady, stoic planes of the ban side’s face. The ranger did not smile, but he tilted his head just slightly, and he held Yuri’s gaze without once wavering. “Beka held me.”

“I see.”

“This is your fault,” Yakov interrupted, looking at Lilia. “Too many nonsense stories about love, and now I have sons with heads full of nonsense, too.”

“I seem to recall you changed the world for love once,” Lilia murmured archly.

“Look what good that seems to have done.”

“Twin capitals of the North, the fealty of three other noble clans, two sons who are the envy of the whole world for their talent, who will both someday be the stuff of legend …”

Yakov appeared unconvinced by this argument, fixing his Queen with a simmering glare. “One son who is going to shatter himself annually and another intent on bringing an enemy into our household,” he reminded Lilia, who shrugged in return and looked at Otabek instead:

“You understand that if harm comes to him because of you there is no place on this earth where you will be able to hide from me, correct?”

He’d always heard such stories of the witch of the North. Beka was beginning to take a shine to this woman. On this point the two of them were in perfect alignment, like passing planets, both miracle and mystery at the same time. He nearly smiled. “Oh, yes,” he agreed. “That part is perfectly clear.”

“See?”

“He isn’t an enemy,” Yuri muttered, tired of standing by and listening to the argument about him pass by without including him. Yakov and Lilia both turned to regard him with blank stares. “We took war to the ban side,” he said sharply, and for the first time Otabek’s expression registered subtle surprise, his gaze sharpening and softening at the same time: the focus of it intent on the younger Prince, with a slight smile that this time he did not possess the art to entirely hide. “We were the enemies. We were the ones who marched through the world to do harm.”

“A war is always fought on at least two sides, Yura.”

“I’m telling you to relax. If he was going to kill me in my sleep he’s had plenty of opportunity already.”

“Is that so?” Yakov’s voice took on an arch edge. “… How marvelously encouraging.”