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The mood in the kitchen was, honestly, pretty fucking awkward.
It wasn’t like Beau didn’t trust Essek, or that she was uncomfortable with him, or that she didn’t like him. He got on her nerves sometimes, sure, but she lived in a pretty much constant state of mild annoyance, so it wasn’t like he was special.
No, today it was that she had better things to do than to babysit Caleb’s situationship while he taught whiny magically-inclined prepubescents how to turn rocks into bigger rocks (or whatever the hell went on in his classroom). She could, for one, be at her house, watching her wife sweat in the garden through the living room window. Beau was very fond of that window, for numerous reasons (i.e., a very wide sill).
But no, she was here at Caleb’s shitty table, across from Essek, who’s boring holes into the rough-hewn wood with downcast eyes. The thing about Essek, she muses, was that he felt that he was so indebted to the Nein that he was willing to do almost anything to avoid being an inconvenience. Which might, she thinks, be sort of toxic.
“Do you want, like, some tea? Or something?” That settles it, the one thing Beauregard Lionett hates more than her father: playing hostess.
Essek’s face does something complicated, and settles on a vague grimace. Beau can’t help but be slightly irritated at his rejection of her small talk, which, no matter the circumstance, has never changed,
“I don’t, like, know where any of Calebs’ stuff is, but I’m sure I could find something…” This disgusts the part of her that enjoys feeling cool, so she glowers about it and sits on her hands.
“It’s, uh… I know where his kettle is.” Essek is very much not looking at her, which means that he is embarrassed by this, which means that he doesn’t want her to know about his erratically timed sojourns with Caleb, which is unfortunate, because said Caleb lives across the street from an Expositor of the Cobalt Soul, motherfucker.
“You been messing around with Caleb’s kettle?”
For the longest time she’s had trouble telling when Essek’s blushing (perks of being purple) but she is having no such complications now. His face has gone a pleasant plum, and he shades his eyes with one delicate, hand.
“Common may not be my first language, but I was at court long enough to recognize euphemism, Beauregard, and I do not appreciate it.”
“Damn, man, I was just kidding around.”
There’s a pause.
“Hey, you know that I speak Undercommon, right?”
Essek looks up at her, the hand falling from his face.
“What? You do?”
“Uh, yeah, dude.” And for good measure, “Ein eemsorr.”
His stupid big violet eyes are wide as they look at her, almost like he’s seeing her for the first time. And, for reasons unfathomable to her, they begin to well up with tears.
Beau has seen Essek cry once, and that was in her periphery (she was otherwise occupied, what with her friends’ corpse cooling in front of her), so to say that she is bewildered is an understatement.
Almost to make things worse is how embarrassed he obviously is, but he just can’t stop, putting his face in his hands and silently sobbing. Beau spares a minute to think about having to explain to Caleb why his kitchen table is warped from the saltwater leaking from Essek’s face, and decides she has to stop this.
“Essek? What’s wrong, man?”
He sniffles shaking his head from under the lattice of his fingers.
“I’m so sorry,” he takes a minute, “I just. I never thought I would be able to hear it again.” Beau, who largely considers herself aware but not entirely sympathetic to Essek’s situation, is knocked flat by this statement. And, for a brief moment, she thinks of her own home. She didn’t love it, could hardly stand it, and yet imagining if the choice to go back if she chose to were to be removed upon pain of death, that she couldn’t even get any sort of closure, that (and here she went a little out of the metaphor) the language she had grown up speaking was shut off from her, the possibility that she would never hear it spoken from the mouth of another…
“Essek. That’s fucked.”
He looks up at her with bloodshot eyes through his elegant fingers, his rings outlining the delicate lines of his face.
“I’m serious, that’s gross. I’m… I’m really sorry. Like, obviously there is a very clear reason for why this is happening to you, but. Any way you spin it it sucks. I’m not making excuses for you, you’re like a million years old, you’re basically an old man, you knew what you were doing. But I’m sorry anyways.”
They sit in silence for a moment, before Essek speaks.
“How old do you think I am, exactly?”
“Dude, I don’t fucking know the human to elf year exchange rate. To a human, anything over a hundred is borderline ancient.”
He smiles wryly, the effect only dimmed by the drying tear tracks on his face and the redness in his eyes (which doesn’t suit him, crimson is not his color). “When I had dinner with you all, I told you. I’m one hundred and twenty-three years old.”
Beau waves her arm in the air to make it appear like she has won. “Exactly. Old as shit. Old as balls.”
Essek laughs (it’s pretty gross, there’s a lot of phlegm).
“If we’re talking about the ‘human to elf year exchange rate’ I would be maybe… twenty? Twenty-one, perhaps. It gets pretty vague, I’m not sure on specifics.” Beau has been making a habit of being flabbergasted, apparently, because she’s on her feet at this revelation.
“Dude, you’re younger than me? What the fuck? Can you, like, drink yet? Oh, what the fuck. I’m going to have to have a talk with Caleb, he’s fucking cradlerobbing! It’s been like five years since that dinner, what were you then? Nineteen? Oh my god, you could be younger than Jester. How young were you when you traded away the beacons? Seven?”
He has taken this ribbing with soldier-like courage, but as soon as she mentions Caleb he folds into himself, and the second she brings up the beacons, he deflates. But he speaks, like the words are being drawn out of him by some sort of magical compulsion.
“I first contacted Ludinus Da’leth when I was seventy-five. That translates to fifteen, or something equivalent. The actual exchange was only a few years ago. Rest assured, I was fully an adult.” Beau is also, apparently, making a habit of being horrified on Essek Thelyss’s behalf, because she has trouble breathing for a moment.
“Fifteen? You were fucking… Oh my gods. Sweet Lady Ioun in all of her fucking Infinite Wisdom, oh my gods, Essek. You were a kid.”
He is completely confused by Beau’s reaction, because of course he is. And she almost regrets making him say it, because of course she made him, didn’t she? Because it’s that thing with him, again, where he won’t deny any of them anything because he thinks that they own him, or something, and he will spend the rest of his life giving them every piece of himself that he thinks he owes them, when he saved the entire world with them but will never, ever stop trying to get them to forgive him when Jester loves him and Caleb loves him and she fucking loves him too, because you can’t go through Aeor together and not care about each other, and she’s so fucking angry.
And maybe it’s because she turned fifteen the summer that she got sent to the Soul, and she knows exactly how it is to be fifteen and alone, and she wants to tell him all of this but she’s chickenshit and hates being vulnerable and doesn’t want to relate to a person who could start a war for nothing but knowledge, but sometimes she thinks that she might do the same if it were up to her and it scares her, which is stupid, but she’s so angry that she storms right out of Caleb’s shitty little kitchen to the living room so she doesn’t have to stare at Essek’s stupid, young face.
And in Caleb’s living room, on top of the dinky piano he’s been learning (doggedly but poorly, she lives across the street and had to invest in ear-plugs), there’s a book, nicer than anything Caleb would have bought for himself. She storms over to it and tears it open, flipping through blank pages of outrageously thick paper. She gets to the front, where a small dedication has been written.
‘My only hope is that this book may serve you well and keep you well, for there is no world worth living that does not contain you. Che, Essek.’
And on the first page of that (ridiculously expensive, she’s sure) spellbook, is a spell that she recognizes. In the same looping, beautiful script, ‘ Widogast, Brenatto, and Thelyss’s True Transformation’. And she stares at this gift, this little part of Essek’s soul, and maybe it’s the fact that Essek put his name last in the order of inventors of the spell, because of course he did, but she spins on her heel, re-enters the kitchen with purpose, and throws her arms (maybe a little violently, but it’s the thought that counts) around a stupendously confused Essek.
“What-”
“Shut up.”
“I don’t understand. What’s happening? Why is this happening?”
She flicks him on one purple ear. “Usstan phlith dos.” The insult doesn’t do much for his attitude.
Essek is not cooperating, so she says, “I saw the spellbook, on the piano. It’s… Caleb will love it. Totally and completely.” And, because she can’t resist, “Che , huh? Moving pretty fast. No hanky-panky before marriage, copy? I’m not babysitting your lovechild.”
His breath rasps into a laugh, and he may be crying again, and you could probably fit the hugs he’s endured on one of his very shapely hands, but he’s enduring it for her, and maybe for himself a little too. He breathes in, then out, and speaks.
“Bel’la dos.”
Thank you.