Chapter Text
The storm blew itself out quickly, as Fitzroy’s storms often did.
They tidied up the refuge, and talked, and ate, and Pali pretended that she was not pricklingly aware of the door at her back and its failure to open. Fitzroy was not in any danger; he had disappeared more inopportunely, and for longer, and always returned whole and hale and often with a new song. And yet the conversation, and Pali’s thoughts, seemed to curve back to him no matter which way they went, like a path in a Faerie wood.
Dark had fallen by the time they arranged themselves to wait on the steps of the refuge. It was a glorious night, stars blazing against the inky spill of the sky and magic warm in the crisp mountain winds, the last remnants of Fitzroy’s windstorm. They amused themselves for a time with elaborate tales of all the fantastical places and predicaments which might have befallen him, but it all seemed less amusing when Pali thought of that smothered, golden stillness, the utter lack of reaction save in a howlingly rageful gale. If Fitzroy was going to trip into Fairyland or fall through a crack in the world, he surely ought to be laughing or singing or spouting nonsense while he did it—or at least, to be howling his anger with his own unquenchable voice.
Fitzroy had always been a glutton for freedom, greedy for joy. He spilled over with them, shared them, utterly selfless in his selfishness. Where had all that selfishness, all that wanting gone?
A sense of wrongness washed over her suddenly, from nowhere in particular, a prickle of unease like fingers up her spine. She unfolded herself in one fluid motion and stood, adjusting her robes to ensure her sword hilt was easy to hand.
“Pali?” Jullanar said in alarm. “What is it?” Pali could hear Jullanar and Masseo rising to their feet behind her, and held up a hand to still them, listening hard. Nothing but the expected sounds of the night, crickets and wind, a nightjar whistling somewhere off to the west.
“Something is different,” Masseo said, his voice low, and Jullanar drew her breath in sharply. Pali’s hand tightened on her hilt.
“The sky,” Jullanar said. “Fitzroy’s magic was all over it, even I could see it. It’s stopped.”
Pali slowed her breath, deliberately, allowing herself to pass into the calm place where all could be pushed aside until the battle was won. There were many reasons why Fitzroy’s magic might have ceased acting on the sky here.
“Perhaps he went into the borderwoods,” Masseo suggested, echoing Pali’s thoughts. “Or fell asleep.”
“In either case, I don’t think we should expect him back tonight,” Jullanar said, but no one made a move to re-enter the refuge. The hairs on the back of Pali’s neck still prickled with a nameless wrong, the sense that somewhere something very important had fractured, and it was only a question of when they would discover the leak.
After a few minutes of silence so profound Pali swore she could hear everyone trying not to think, Jullanar and Masseo seated themselves again on the steps. Pali did not join them this time, unwilling to sit, unwilling to relinquish her readiness. She paced across to check on her mare, who had her head down in a sound sleep, then stepped out into the deeper dark, listening hard as if something might have changed. It was not until she had started back towards the refuge that a slight noise, nearly imperceptible, caught her attention, and she spun.
It was only by training and a dash of luck that she did not impale Fitzroy as he lurched out of the darkness nearly on top of her. She dropped her sword to catch him as he tripped and swooned neatly into her arms.
His eyes were heavy-lidded, lambent gold in the firelight spilling from the door to the refuge, and he grinned up at her with an ease and openness she had thought never to see again.
“You are magnificent,” he proclaimed, his voice somewhat slurred. “We should get married.”
Congealed anger crawled up her throat, that he would make light of that now, after everything— She almost dropped him to the ground then and there. “Are you drunk?” she snapped.
"Only on life, my dear! And perhaps a liberal dosing of... something's magic." His expression drew down into something distant, the look he had often taken on when he was tasting some swirling magic the rest of them couldn’t touch. “Oh, yes, that’s very strange. I think I might—” He blinked, smiled, and passed out entirely in her arms.
Fitzroy slept the rest of the night, and much of the morning. Pali was glad to have the time to catch up with Masseo, who was much changed, and of course with Jullanar, who was ever more delightfully Jullanar. There was no need to tiptoe; he slept the sleep of the dead, so utterly still that she itched to hold a mirror up to his lips to check his breathing, but Masseo and Jullanar only gave the occasional frowning look of concern, so she refrained. In the morning she saw to her horse and then performed the steps of the shēhen in the crisp dawn air, with golden light turning her sword to molten fire just the color of Fitzroy’s eyes. After her second stumble she went back inside, more unsettled than when she had begun.
She could feel the magic at play on Fitzroy as he slept, something sinuous and oily just out of the range of her conscious senses: a prickle on the back of her neck, a rattle just on the edge of hearing. It was neither the brilliant cacophony of Fitzroy's own magic nor the regimented drumbeat she had felt in Solaara, but something different entirely, wild and dangerous.
(Fitzroy was wild and dangerous too, of course, but—but she had never felt in danger, except when she looked into his brilliant sunrise eyes and felt their tug upon her heart.)
By late morning she was reduced to removing everything from her bag to sort through, all the remnants of a settled life that now seemed as distant as a dream. She had just begun to return everything to their places when Masseo, whittling something with a precision of knifework which Pali envied, cried, “Ah, so Aurora wakes from her slumbers at last!”
Fitzroy, propped up on one elbow, blinked around at the refuge and his nest of cushions in bewilderment and then frowned up at Masseo, looking as though he were probing for a missing tooth, before his face cleared and he cried, "Masseo!" in delight and recognition. "By the gods, you've gotten old."
Masseo chuckled, not at all offended. “What, since yesterday?”
“Surely it’s been longer than that.” Fitzroy sat up, evidently too quickly, for he swayed and steadied himself on Masseo’s arm. “I remember…” He took on that tooth-probing look again, his brows drawing down. “The Silver Forest… something was chasing me… and then nothing.”
Pali stared at him, flabbergasted. “Nothing at all?”
“Oh, a few flashes here and there.” He waved a hand, careless, carefree. “Entirely nonsensical. I think they must be dreams.”
Jullanar bit the tip of her thumb, her eyes wide and a little teary. “Oh, Fitzroy.”
Pali realized she was nearly strangling the scarf in her hands and set it down, smoothing the creases over her knee. Her finger traced the indents in the silk, which could not be wiped away so easily as with a swipe of her hand.
A thousand years of suffering, of loneliness, gone in an instant. Artorin Damara, whom Pali had admired and criticized from afar, whom she had been unable to reconcile with the man she had loved—gone. Fitzroy was only Fitzroy.
(Fitzroy had never been only Fitzroy.)
“What did you meet out there?” Masseo asked. The unspoken question: What kind of bargain was it?
“I haven’t the faintest idea.” Fitzroy smiled around at them all, the sunniness in his demeanor not clouded one bit by their astonishment. Well, it had been part and parcel to him, in the old days. Even once the Company became accustomed to his antics, he had always found new ways to surprise them. “Have I missed something?”
“You could say that,” grated Pali, harsh even to her own ears.
Masseo gave a brief outline of Fitzroy’s life as he knew it. Pali held her tongue on a lifetime of scholarship on Artorin Damara, who was not at all the man who stood before them.
"Lord of Zunidh, am I?" said Fitzroy thoughtfully. "Well, no wonder I'm on the hunt for a successor—it seems dreadfully dull."
He rolled to his feet with his long-limbed clumsiness of old. He had always reminded her of a gangling newborn kid, still learning where his limbs belonged. She realized suddenly that this was one of the things that had so disturbed her about his new demeanor: his considered movements, his unbreaking poise. Fitzroy Angursell had been many things, but dignified was rarely one of them.
He had shaken all that off now, along with the stillness of his face, the evenness of his tone. He was as animated and lively as he once had been, and in the process of getting up he stuck his rump straight up in the air and then nearly tripped over the cushions.
“Are you hungry?” said Jullanar. “It's nothing special, I’m afraid, but there’s a bit of cheese and bread left, and potage from last night.”
“That sounds like a feast fit for an emperor,” Fitzroy laughed, patting his stomach. Pali nearly flinched at the easiness of the joke.
As Jullanar went to heat up the remainder of the soup, Fitzroy wandered across to Pali, gnawing absentmindedly at his bread and cheese. She finished rolling up the shift she was holding and replaced it in her bag with more care than was perhaps warranted.
“What have you been doing, then, when I was”—he waved an indifferent hand—“otherwise occupied?”
She gritted her teeth against this blasé description, and answered, “I am—was—a professor of Late Astandalan history at Stoneybridge.”
His brows rose in what she tried not to think of as unflattering surprise. “Are you? How—settled.” He picked up one of her blue sashes and began to fiddle with it. “Why was?”
She pulled the sash from his hands before he could start to unravel the threads absentmindedly, as he had once had a tendency to do. “Because I recently took an indefinite leave of absence,” she said shortly, rolling the sash as her sister had taught her to prevent creasing. “To rescue you.”
“Aha!” His expression took on an enlightened air. “May I presume, then, that I have you to thank for my current, ah, unencumbrance?”
“No,” she said bluntly, unfairly furious at his ignorance. “You seem to have managed it all on your own.”
He seemed to notice her discomfiture for the first time. "Have I offended you?"
Yes was the wrong answer, and no was nearly as bad. Instead she said, placing her words as carefully as the steps of the shēhen, "We did not part on the best of terms."
"Oh." He blinked at her. "I offer you my humblest apologies, for whatever my prior self did. I will endeavor not to do it again."
"That," she said, frowning, "would be difficult." After a moment she added, "And it's a bit presumptuous to assume that it's you who needs to apologize."
An almost comical surprise passed across his face. His expressions danced so easily, compared to that horrible stillness he had held in the Palace of Stars, had held even here in the refuge before he left so unexpectedly. “I… see,” he said thoughtfully.
She studiously folded another shift, her own harsh parting words to him echoing in her ears: Is there anything left of you but the Emperor? They had grated upon her all the way back to Stoneybridge; she could not take them back, she could not atone by daring rescue, and now even an apology was beyond her reach.
(And did she now have her answer? Or was that answer, too, gone, along with any possibility of restitution?)
“Is this poetry?” He was still rummaging through her things, disordering her neat piles. “The Correspondence of Love and the Soul, what a very intriguing title.” She looked up in alarm, too late to stop him as he flipped the book open to the middle and ran his eyes down the page. Even as she watched his expression grew fixed, almost queasy, and he closed the book and returned it to its place with an ashen smile. She took it and tucked it quickly away in her bag, and after only a moment his demeanor eased back to its usual cheer. But she, at least, could not forget so easily.
By the time Fitzroy had finished his belated breakfast, and the rest of them scrounged for lunch, it was past noon and a steady gray drizzle had started up outside the refuge, unrelenting and damp. It was agreed all around that there was no sense starting out so late in the day, with no promise of a roof by nightfall, and so they resettled themselves for the afternoon, rummaging in their various bags for additional comforts, activities, and provisions. Jullanar managed, on the third try, to produce the endless amphora of olives from Fitzroy’s old Bag, which led to his discovery of the new one.
“How very ingenious,” he cooed, holding it up to his ear in rapt fascination as if listening to it. “I would never have thought to…” He trailed off into arcane mutterings, far beyond Pali’s understanding of magical theory, and she turned her attention firmly to pitting olives one by one until Jullanar, hiding her mouth behind her hand, said, “I think that may be enough for the moment.”
“Hmm,” said Pali. She handed Jullanar the bowl of olives—the bowl was an absurdly fine thing, made of glass in a dozen different colors, which had been Jullanar’s second try from the old Bag—and began to line up the pits on the table, as Fitzroy moved on from admiring his own handiwork to pulling items from the new Bag one by one.
“Let’s see what my other self decided to pack, shall we? My, this is certainly a splendid mantle! I commend him on his taste, or perhaps his tailors.” He swung the midnight-blue cloak carelessly over one shoulder and flirted its hem so that the spangled embroidery caught the light, as shimmering and deep as the Sea of Stars. Pali bent closer over her olive pits, arranging them into the center of a tight spiral.
"Dear me, surely I do not need quite so many cushions?" Nevertheless, he laid out several and sprawled across them at Jullanar's feet, entirely at his ease.
Next he pulled out a thick bundle of letters, tied with a neat blue ribbon. "It appears I have been enlisted as an ersatz postal service." He undid the ribbon with an unnecessarily florid gesture and laid it across Pali's knee. "They're all addressed the same," he said, riffling through the stack. "Basil White, The Bee at the Border Inn, St-Noire."
Jullanar flicked a surprised glance in Pali’s direction. Pali shrugged in return. "How do you know Basil?" Jullanar asked.
"Oh, do you know him? How serendipitous. I haven't the faintest idea, of course." He studied the address again. "I don't believe this is my handwriting, even after, what was it, a thousand years? Far too neat. It looks practically typeset."
Pali leaned in to study the envelope. "That's your Lord Chancellor's handwriting, I believe. I had a chance to see it when I… visited you."
“My Lord Chancellor?” Fitzroy said, his mouth quirked in a half-mocking smile. “Goodness, can you imagine me as someone who has a Lord Chancellor? Some great overstuffed pomposity of an aristocrat, I suppose?”
Pali might have said something unwise in response, but Masseo spoke first. “I’ve heard he was a commoner before you ennobled him,” he said thoughtfully. “Quite the people’s champion.”
“He seemed well-liked by everyone I spoke to,” Pali said begrudgingly. “And—” She hesitated, rolling an olive pit under her thumb, but information was necessary; one could not make full and reasoned decisions without it. “He called himself your friend.” There. She did not know for certain, of course, that Fitzroy—that Artorin Damara—had considered him so.
Fitzroy regarded her with a curious eye. “Did you meet him?”
“Only very briefly,” Pali said, which was not a lie. “He seemed… competent.”
“Well, he would have to be, wouldn’t he?” Fitzroy laughed. “I certainly don’t know how to run a government.”
Pali stared at him, a career’s worth of scholarship rising to her lips. Artorin Damara, freshly brought to the throne, had been this man before her, a genius of words and a master of adventure. His head had been a library of literature and romance and song; of revolution, yes, but not practical politics. He had been thrown into the morass of Eritanyr’s court untutored and friendless, and by the end of his first decade had been on track to be named in the histories as Artorin the Great. He had done that. Fitzroy Angursell had done that, all on his own.
(He should not have been on his own.)
“You learned,” she said finally, and something in her tone must have been final indeed, for he shrugged and returned to rummaging through his Bag.
“I think we have gotten away from the salient point,” Jullanar said, plucking up the stack of letters where Fitzroy had abandoned them. “Why is Fitzroy’s Lord Chancellor writing to Basil?” She shuffled through them. “And often, by the looks of it. What could—” She stopped, eyes sharpening on some distant point as an idea occurred to her. She turned to Pali and Masseo. “What’s his name?”
“Cliopher Madon,” Pali said, baffled.
“Madon,” Jullanar repeated. “Not Mdang?”
“I suppose it could be,” Pali admitted, feeling a trifle defensive. “I never heard it from the man himself—we were never formally introduced. But everyone I spoke to pronounced it Madon.”
Jullanar tapped the corner of a letter thoughtfully against her chin. “Basil’s cousin Kip’s full name is Cliopher. Clio is his namesake.”
“That’s—it must be a common name, surely,” Pali protested. “I thought Basil’s cousin died in the Fall.”
“Basil presumes he died in the Fall. There’s a difference.”
Fitzroy was watching their conversation with avid interest, his head bobbing back and forth between them.
“Ought we to deliver his letters, then?” Masseo said. “Where is this St-Noire?”
“Nearly all the way back the way we’ve come, I’m afraid,” said Jullanar, grimacing in distaste. “I would prefer not to stray so close to Ragnor Bella so soon.”
“Yes, I imagine there are some people it would be rather awkward to run into.” Masseo smiled, still a surprising sight.
“Like slamming the door magnificently after an argument and then creeping back in to fetch your coat,” Jullanar agreed mournfully.
“Oh, I shall need to hear this story at the earliest possible opportunity,” said Fitzroy, his eyes dancing with glee.
“But you were— ah,” said Jullanar, her expression passing from confusion to consternation. “No, I suppose you weren't.”
“If I left now, I could probably ride to St-Noire and return here not too long after nightfall,” Pali said slowly, judging distances.
Jullanar’s frown deepened. “I’m not terribly thrilled about the idea of any of us going off on our own just now.” Her gaze flickered to Fitzroy, who returned an insouciant shrug.
“I’m fine, aren’t I?” He smiled lazily up at them, sprawled across his cushions in perfect ease. Except for his shaven head and a few lines around his eyes, he might have been looking through a gash in time from any moment during their old adventures.
Pali looked down at her olive pit spiral. A few pits were slightly out of alignment, and no matter how carefully she adjusted them, she only managed to knock their neighbors out of place.
He was fine, wasn’t he? All that grief, the stillness, the flinching from their touch, all dusted away as easily as sand. She had despised the man she spoke to on that terrace in the Palace of Stars; she had later come to regret her words, but she could still feel that bitter sting of disappointment, so deep and painful that cruelty was the only shield she had been able to raise in response. That man was gone, and in his place was the friend she had lost, and she—
Why was she still so furious?
In her pocket was a feather, white with a black tip, the Siruyal’s third wish. Two wishes she had made and been granted, and she had been lucky: the Siruyal had not been cruel in its interpretation of her words. She knew from harsh experience that not all wishes were treated so kindly.
But here he was, having wished and, it seemed, won.
She might have wished for her old friend back. What, she wondered, had he wished for?
Serendipitously, of course, a pair of highwaymen rode by early that morning, just as Fitzroy went to fetch water from the spring down the hill. And of course, he not only charmed them out of robbing or killing him, but also persuaded them to deliver Basil's letters to St-Noire, as it seemed they were riding in that direction anyway.
“Only you, Fitzroy,” Masseo laughed when Fitzroy reported these events, even as Pali prowled to the door of the refuge to glare after the horsemen rapidly shrinking into the distance. She fingered the hilt of her sword, calculating their speed against the landscape. Her mare could certainly catch them, if she was quick about saddling up and cut across the sward, but it was true that they had not actually hurt Fitzroy, nor even truly threatened to.
“They seemed perfectly decent fellows, profession notwithstanding,” Fitzroy said cheerfully, as she returned to the table with a scowl. She did not sit, however, but stayed tensed and ready, itching to be gone. Fitzroy went on, “The big masked one in green had the most familiar accent, though I wasn’t quite able to place it; I wish I had had another few moments to ask him where he was from…”
“Oh,” said Jullanar, hiding a smile behind her hand. “That’s all right, then, I have no doubt the letters will reach their destination.”
And when they left the refuge at last, they found a fourth path at the crossroads that hadn’t been there the day before.
“Well,” said Fitzroy, turning to flash them all that brilliant grin that had lodged into her heart like a fishhook, all those years ago. “Shall we?”
And after all: when had any of them ever been able to resist a call to adventure?