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Best to elucidate the requisite caveats, first: whenever Laen overhears a conversation, it's most often because they're listening. Observation as vocation and all that. It's also a force of well-ingrained habit, that somewhat-uncouth but necessary means of preservation, held close like a talisman. One doesn't spend their youth enduring the fraught hell of Udean mercantile family affairs without sustaining a smudge or two, like fingermarks left on polished metal.
Other times—though admittedly more rarely, by substantial degrees—overhearing occurs without intention. Beyond the very concept of intention, in fact. Pure happenstance leading to revelation. In these circumstances, despite the lack of deliberation, all outcomes remain the same. Discovery by way of stumbling is, after all, among the most natural and genuine modes of experiencing the world and its workings, its countless undiscovered secrets.
Proceeding: an example of the latter.
Night in the Southwall Waystation, deepening late. Their temporary homestead has long fallen quiet. While it's not exactly unusual for Laen to be awake at this hour, it is a rarity to be awake at this hour alone. After supper, the rest of the band dispersed to bed down—even Casmyn, now keeping a mindful sleep schedule, and Dahm, currently a few doses into an alchemical course taken to match Sola's waking hours. Laen's only company is the whorl of stars glittering the vast firmament above, the occasional creature-call echoing from beyond the tree line, and this stubborn solution that is simply refusing to precipitate.
Alas. Any academic worth their quill knows that half the toil of alchemy is patience.
Which is no cause for frustration, truly. The wait leaves time to dig into any of the sundry other matters and mysteries the Enclave has dropped into the band's proverbial lap.
Tonight's thread to follow is the ongoing liaison between Sev and Kenric Stanilde. The primary documents Brynn recovered from the Institute laid bare their connection through the Norian Order, but a number of critical unknowns remain. On what are they collaborating, and why? What sort of information has the Eye divulged to Sev—and what has Sev, in turn, revealed to him?
Nagging thorns of questions indeed. Troublesome enough to set Laen pacing about it. Fortunately the camp's central promenade provides plenty of moonlit space for their pondering to wear circles in the stonework.
Time ambles by. How much, Laen couldn’t pinpoint. Less than an hour, maybe, but more than a half? The details are largely unimportant. What matters is that after some number of turnings leading to zero probable conclusions, a quiet noise from the lower terrace interrupts their focus. Sounds of movement—footsteps, approaching—near the loomgate.
Laen stops short and ducks back behind the archway. Sev again, surely, slinking off to Cassidan’s Hold under cover of night? Another point of evidence for the growing pile.
When they peer past the jamb to catch his departure—
It’s not Sev.
It’s Casmyn and Brynn, apparently awake after all, rounding toward the caravan from the direction of Brynn’s tent.
Dressed down to soft clothes, both of them—Brynn barefoot, barefaced. They walk side by side like celestial objects caught in each other’s orbit, tethered at the gaze and drawn into the scant sliver of space between, bumping shoulders, brushing knuckles. The pale starlight limns tender-eyed, private smiles.
There’s a stolen intimacy to the moment, to the way they seem aware only of one another. It evokes a particular sense that Laen should probably alert them to their presence.
They stay quiet instead.
(Never claimed the habit was a good one.)
“You know you didn’t have to walk me back, right?” Casmyn says to Brynn as they reach the carriage’s closed shutter. Her teasing lilt holds quiet, but Laen can attune well enough to discern the words. Mouth upturned, eyes lidded low and glimmering coy, she seems—with apologies for lack of an apter term—unclenched, more so than she’s been in more than a while.
“Ah. See, it’s a new band rule, actually.” Brynn shrugs, smiling through an obvious attempt to remain serious. Between their bodies their fingers catch and tangle loose, the contact no longer incidental. “The point-in-training must needs accompany the quartermaster to the caravan after dark. Oria let me know during our debriefing earlier. Very important stuff. Top priority.”
One eyebrow arches, playful. “Uh-huh. Sure.”
“I mean it. Ask her in the morning, she’ll tell you herself.”
“I just might.”
“That said, I don’t mind the duty.” Brynn’s smile broadens, boldens. When she shifts closer, just by the breadth of a hair, Casmyn admits the change. “Means I get to spend an extra minute or two with you.”
Casmyn sighs out an airy laugh. Pink blooms across her cheekbones, accompanied by a knowing smirk. “Flatterer.”
“Only if it’s working.” A beat. “It’s working, right?”
“Hm. Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Oh, that is definitely a yes.”
This time Casmyn outright rolls her eyes, but she can’t quite disguise the affection writ large across her face. “All right, point-in-training, flatterer. Back to your tent.” In contradiction to her own behest, she lifts their hands palm to palm and laces their fingers more properly. “Before your feet get cold.”
“Yeah. Okay,” Brynn says, making no moves to disengage. In fact, if anything, she edges nearer still, slipping in like the slow narrow of a knot. Insects chirp and drone over held breath as Brynn’s expression softens into something uncharacteristically bashful. A tentative question glints in her gaze before she decides to ask it aloud. “Could I…?”
“Yes,” Casmyn cuts in nearly as soon as Brynn starts asking. Her flush darkens, then, as she schools the eagerness into a calmer shape. “Yes. You could.”
There’s a precise moment in alchemy during which two separate reagents first commix. Change through conjunction—mercury meeting sulfur, quill-ink wetting vellum, the right key turning the tumblers of a lock. Like sneaking suspicions and vague notions moving from abstraction to incontrovertible proof, perhaps inevitable, perhaps obvious, perhaps known, deeper than sense, all along.
Laen sees that very moment transpire here when Brynn leans in and puts her mouth to Casmyn’s.
The kiss is gentle. Chaste, by any definition. But it lacks no passion for its temperance. Casmyn meets it at a wide-open, languid slant. Her palms splay over the ridge of Brynn’s collarbone, an effort to hold steady amid the shifting current. When she tilts her head in welcome Brynn melds in closer, careful but intrepid, one hand cradling Casmyn’s jaw while the other skims down to rest on her hip. Anchored, both of them. Two stars sewn together in the tapestry of night. Through their embrace, palpable anticipation resolves like a long craving finally sated, like hearts reaching, grasping.
The stolen glances and the subtle touches—the way Casmyn has taken to watching the scry, how Brynn emerges from the loomgate with her gaze steered toward the caravan like a needle north—all at once, everything clicks into place.
It’s heartening for any lorekeeper to see such rational coherence in the midst of seemingly endless conjecture. It’s more heartening still for any person to see their companions so wholly happy.
Observing from their quiet distance, Laen smiles for their friends.
When Brynn and Casmyn finally draw apart, it’s only just, foreheads tipped together and hands yet unmoved. A poignant lull. Eyes locked, like a trance. Brynn has a blushing glow about her now, too. The awe on her face comes chased by a naked, besotted delight.
Almost too low-toned for Laen to catch, she murmurs, “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Casmyn hitches, breathless, dreamstruck. “Yes. Yeah.”
“Okay. Yeah. Good.” Brynn’s smile strains bright enough to crease the corners of her eyes. She nods. Her thumb sweeps over the arch of Casmyn’s cheek. Casmyn follows it, swaying. “Goodnight, Cas.”
A significant look passes between them before they finally allow themselves to let go. Casting Casmyn one last crooked grin over her shoulder, Brynn finally turns and starts strolling back to her tent, hardly bridling the lightness bursting in every barefooted step.
For a long moment, Casmyn lingers. Brings her fingertips to her lips as she stares off to where Brynn rounded past the caravan and out of sight. A deep breath lifts her shoulders—its slow, wavering exhale becomes a conduit for some deeper-down allotrope of an ache. Behind her, half-woken, Arva echoes the sigh with a dull snuffle into her pallet of grass. Fireflies dot the darkness in lambent, dancing clusters while wildlife chirrups and bays in the valley below.
It would be easy to slip unnoticed into the night’s smallest seams. Laen could take their leave in careful silence, their new knowing unbeknownst.
But this is neither a political game nor an empirical bygone to be chronicled from an impersonal distance. This is real, and this is immediate. These are the people who have become truer family in mere months than actual family has ever been.
And that—that means more than all the rest.
So instead, Laen clears their throat as deliberately, as conspicuously, as possible.
Casmyn whirls around with a fright. It takes a few wide-eyed blinks for her startled expression to unknot after Laen steps out from behind the archway. “Ira’s breath, Laen. I thought you were some creature.”
“Not a particularly fearsome one, at least,” Laen points out in greeting—with the intention of jest rather than pedantry—taking Casmyn’s address as an invitation to approach. As they do, the sledgewyrm in the room demands a bit of delicate prodding. “Well. It looks as though your night’s been…nice?”
Cognizance levels on a moment’s delay, like thunder on the heels of a lightning strike.
Casmyn’s eyes bug wide again.
“You saw—” It comes out in a bitten-off rush, taking on that hoarse, overwrought tone she slips into when one of her counts is off. An anxious hand wrings around the opposite forearm as her face turns the reddest it’s been yet. The rest proceeds as a statement, not a question. “How much of that did you see.”
“All of it, I’m afraid,” Laen admits with a polite amount of chagrin. “Inadvertent, but. Just the same.”
Just the same indeed. Casmyn pinches the bridge of her nose, groaning with dismay. “Gods…”
“It’s a good match, Casmyn,” Laen assures her, puzzled by the embarrassment. “You complement each other well.”
That earns them another sigh, this one of reluctant capitulation. Casmyn’s mouth twists with some emotion Laen can’t quite decode. She presses her first knuckle to her lips as she composes herself—softens, lowers her hackles—like allowing a door to creak slowly open.
“It means a lot that you think so,” she says, finally, her eyes meeting Laen’s for half a moment before darting askance again. “Sorry. It’s just—it’s not that I don’t—ugh. I’m being stupid. I guess I was really hoping that I—that we would have more time before anyone else knew.”
Not hard to empathize with, put like that. But heart-heavy affairs like this don’t tend to stay under wraps for long. They’re difficult to hide and impossible to deny, and that alone pulls them into the light. Tonight, Laen’s light just happened to be the one shining.
Gently, they say, “To be honest, in retrospect, there were a few less-than-subtle intimations. How long? If it’s all right to ask.”
“That’s the thing. It’s so new.” Like weft shuttled through a breadth of warp, Casmyn’s gaze drifts off to where Brynn just stood. Distant, again. Wistful and aching. “That was actually the first time we’ve…”
It tapers down into quiet, but extrapolation is one of Laen’s strongest suits.
“Ah.” Not much more to be said. They wince out an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry. I hope I haven’t managed to ruin the moment.”
Still staring off, Casmyn shakes her head. “I don’t think anything could.” When she turns back to Laen, her face is tense-strung, stricken, the same shape it takes when her mind starts howling louder than reason. “How do you get used to that?”
“What do you mean?”
“I like her a lot, Laen. A lot. She’s…gods, she’s incredible. She makes me really, really happy. And that terrifies me.” A desolate, mirthless laugh. “I don’t think that’s how it’s supposed to go.”
Laen tries to interject, but Casmyn doesn’t let them. Or maybe she plainly doesn’t notice their attempt to begin with. Either way, words come pouring loose with the desperate precipitance of restraint breaking, pent inside to fester until it’s either lay them bare or burst.
“I keep catching myself waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like if the world notices me being this happy, being with her, it’ll—I don’t know. Balance things out. Take back what it’s due. Because why would I get to have this?” Casmyn shakes her head again, her eyes downcast. The furrow in her brow cuts a sharper shadow. “More than anything I want to deserve her. And to be what she deserves, if those aren’t the same. Sometimes all I can think about is what I have to lose if I’m not. If she—changes her mind.”
She won’t. Brynn has her heart stitched to her sleeve. It’s in everything she says, in everything she does, indelibly. Admirable, her undaunted authenticity. More than admirable. Inspiring. To stand in the company of her natural earnestness is to feel the same burgeoning within.
And sewn through that heart worn proud on Brynn’s sleeve, a gilded strand as striking as dawn, is Casmyn.
The proof of it abounds. Under other circumstances Laen would rush off to compile it in an annotated list and then present it back with gusto. Among the points enumerated would be Brynn’s constant pivot toward Casmyn’s voice, regardless of its subject or proximity. How while anyone in the band would have rallied to help ease Casmyn’s suffering, Brynn took it like an oath, going to lengths with an immediacy and depth of purpose that suggested an impetus beyond friendly concern. And, of course, the way Brynn looked after kissing her just moments ago—marvelled, buoyant, singularly enthralled, like an undeniable lover. Like she would slay a hundred surgeborn just to experience it again.
But sometimes—and ironically—offering proof is not the answer. In the wrong situation it’s rendered merely as platitude. A bombardment of evidence won’t defang Casmyn’s apprehension. Unlearning takes more labor than learning, and some convictions are stronger when rooted from within rather than without.
Against every crumb of their scholarly bent, Laen offers Casmyn something different.
“I don’t believe it has anything to do with deserving, actually,” they say. “Nor is it about the world. It’s about you and Brynn alone. What you have—regardless of why, if a why even exists. What you have, and what you’ll make of it.”
Finally Casmyn lifts her gaze to Laen’s. If vulnerable, stiff-shouldered, she listens, worrying her lower lip between her teeth.
“My advice, if you’re seeking it,” they go on, “is simply to trust Brynn. Trust her to be honest about what she wants. And, Casmyn?”
“Yeah?”
Heart on sleeve, steady and hopeful, waiting to be bade home.
“I’m willing to wager that she’s told you she wants you.”
The corner of Casmyn’s mouth twitches upward, a reaction too genuine to be drowned by doubt. “Ha. Yeah. Once or twice.”
“Then believe her.”
Casmyn considers the words as they sink in. A long swallow works along her throat. After a moment, she nods with the slow solemnity of acceptance.
“Yeah. I can try,” she says. Then: “You know, you’re pretty good at this.”
“Ah, well. Read broadly and you’re bound to pick up a little about a lot. Though, one may be surprised to find how the fundamental aspects of some sociopolitical treatises can be similarly applied to purely interpersonal proceedings. For example, in one Tazan volume I studied, a key detail of the—”
Only when Casmyn clears her throat, smirking, does Laen catch their tangent and curtail it with a contrite chuckle.
“I’m happy for you, Casmyn,” they affirm at length. “For both of you.”
“Thanks, Laen.” Her smile finally reaches her eyes, touches them with brightness, misgiving dissipated like vapor. “A favor, though?”
“Of course. Anything.”
“Don’t tell anyone else?” she requests. “I’d really like it to come from us. When we’re ready.”
Lacking the heart to point out how the others are likely already harboring their own suspicions, Laen nods. “You have my word. I won’t tell a soul.”
“Good. Because you know what’ll happen if you do.”
“Cold potatoes.” A threat neither light nor empty. Laen grimaces. “A week.”
“Try two.”
Very serious, then. “Duly noted. That’s not a risk I’ll take.”
With a look of satisfaction, Casmyn lifts the shutter of the caravan to prepare her bedroll. “It’s late. Goodnight, Laen.”
“Rest well,” Laen bids her, smiling.
Then they turn and head back toward the archive to check on that precipitate, giving Arva her requisite pat as they pass.
No, Laen won’t breathe a word of what they know to the rest of the band.
However. In the meantime, they decide: they will definitely, definitely be telling Brynn about Casmyn’s socks. How could any lorekeeper—or friend—resist such an opportunity?