Summary: Seaver on Kel and co, tavern crawls, and what becomes of the less-than enchanted.

Notes: So this has very little resemblance to anything canon for the very good reason that it's set after the Scanran War, and Seaver isn't really built upon at all (which is a crying shame) in the books anyway. I wrote this when I had zero access to either good books or the internet, when my brain was in a bit of a soupy mush. Consider yourself warned.

Youth

Loss would always be a part of him; the people gone, the places he'd loved that had changed beyond recognition, the sudden moments of perfection which linger in his memory (sparkling in perfect detail, all five of his senses having absorbed everything they could even as the instant of happiness passed out of the present and into a past filled with monsters that should only ever have existed in fairy tales). Sometimes he disappears out of where he is and what he is doing, six again, body rigid with the sudden horror of it. Merric calls it his hundred-yard-stare, when it happens when he's there. Not that he's ever told Merric what's gotten into him, when it's happened when Merric's been there.

Sometimes he feels a million years older than the rest of them. Not that he knows his friends haven't experienced many things in the course of their page and squire and war years – that's kind of what the warrior life does – but still. It's one thing to kill a man in battle. Quite another to see your father… die the way he did (he never can face it head on, that afternoon; in some ways he's grateful he can only remember what happened in disconnected splinters (there is the sun, falling in shafts through the overcast clouds in golden patches upon the sea's calm surface, frighteningly beautiful, tainted by dread; the shout cut short; the blood and the terrible, guttural laughter). His older sister remembers more, he knows, but Celia dances and laughs and lives, and the mark that day left on them remains unacknowledged between them, beyond a sad, esoteric meeting of their eyes (hers are emerald green; look beautiful in the summer when her skin ripens with captive light and her hair falls in salty waves down her back) now and again). It's a kind of heartbreak, he thinks sometimes, distantly clinical. My heart stopped working the same.

'You're doing it – again! Mithros, Seaver! If you were going to go all hundred-yards on us we wouldn't have invited you. Your quietness will scare the girls away enough as is without pulling out those stares…' says Merric and he falls back into his self, trading the coils of the past for the warmth and chatter of The Tickled Lark.

'I guess it's my shout, then,' he says – doesn't apologise – steps abruptly away from the table, head reeling with the distilled Marenite wine.

And it's okay this way.

……………………………………………………………

Before we go any further, he says cautiously. I want to make sure you know I don't love you.
Okay, now kiss me.

……………………………………………………………

The barmaid's hands are long and fine, but coarsened by life in the lower city. He watches her pour, a little entranced by this contrast. His hands prickle to draw them – though he supposes that could also be attributed to the alcohol.

A hand claps down between his shoulder blades and his heart shudders.

'So when did you start drinking today half-caste?'

When he was ten years old, Zahir specifically singled him out for the miniscule tortures he and Joren's little gang inflicted upon the first years, and because he understood exactly why Zahir wanted to hurt him, he took the humiliation on the chin. Stared the Bazhir down, let him know how cowardly and dishonourable a thing it was to do – this is what you are – while between them fell an entire country made of shifting sands and bitter rivalries he knows it is beyond any of the other pages – or, for that matter, most Tortallans – to understand.

Physically, he has only inherited his grandmother's eyes and fondness for lamb (his second and third and fourth and nth cousins used to tease him, endlessly, for being so fair compared to them, when they were children and he and Celia were sent out to Persepolis in the autumns) nor was he initiated into the tribe as an adult. But even so, the Voice spills into his mind some nights or dawns – sporadically, without warning – and there is a part of him that belongs in that blaze of sand and halcyon sky, an awareness in his biology of the thousands of his ancestors who lived out their lives there, to become, upon dying, an indelible part of those winds and earths themselves. In Barzun (because two hundred years isn't long enough a time for the old world to be forgotten, even if Tortall has) his blood hums.

By the time he's twenty, Zahir is a wary kind of friend who shares crooked little smiles with him; silent, rueful recognition of who they are to each other (if they'd been born a century earlier, they would have faced each other across a battlefield). It hadn't taken him long to realise the King's interest in the Bazhir ran down to a deeper, more spiritual level. That when Jonathan died, Zahir's inheritance would be at least as important as Roald's – but then, everyone grows up, and it's just taken a very long time for him to have to consider this in terms of his own world.
'Sand scut, you don't want to know.'

He has, by most definitions of the word, been grown up for most of his life.

……………………………………………………………

Stepping away. I mean it. I like you, but I don't like anyone the way you want me to like you.
I said okay, folding her arms. I know you don't. I said so.
Disbelief dancing through dark eyes.

……………………………………………………………

It's somehow bad for his body, Neal says, switching between grape and grain, but he has never been damaged by it before, is still young and strong enough to withstand that kind of deterioration. When he returns to the table though, Kel refuses her tankard politely, opting instead for lime cordial, and he watches her go up to the bar, shaking his head a little.

The day Keladry of Mindelan saved his life from a monster that should only ever have existed in the horror stories his sister used to tell him when they were small (years later, he knows it haunts her. As if she had tempted fate, summoned them into that day (that terrible, extraordinary day) with the recklessness of her tales: If you sleep with your legs hanging over the edge of the bed, a spidren will chop them off! If you don't eat your broccoli quickly enough, the smell will attract as many spidrens as there are green bits left on your plate. One of their absolutes learnt the hard way: Do not take a monster's name in vain) he began to realise – gradually, over the course of a decade – that she was more than just the sum of her parts. It had been a kind of delicious smoke screen, when he first knew her; an easy way to get people to overlook his own dark, sticky story because it was so utterly eclipsed by the issue of (of all things) her gender. For a while there had been flickers of jealousy mixed up in there, too (with her knowledge of everything (the adjunct) that mattered and her sunny naïveté and her father and her numerous father figures) but these he had relinquished as time went on.

It had taken a long time for him to feel blessed – not that he hadn't ever not thought so, so much as that his father had been his sun, and in the dark that succeeded him, it had been very hard to see – but when it came right down to it, he had a Celia (had had) which she herself would never be able to boast. (This, the way the gods balance the books: thrown into tragedy young, he is given Celias, art, the odd, hypnotic beauty peculiar to those born of more than one peoples; she – god-touched, the protector of the small – would have… a more normal outlook. He's never sure now if he would want to switch – and has, besides, borrowed too many books from Neal that tell him things like everyone is fighting their own battles and that he must live to the point of tears (and, faintly irritated, he thinks I have. It's not as romantic as it sounds, but the words linger in the meanders and eddies of his memory nonetheless) – but it's a small, deformed comfort to him to know they would find the distance behind his eyes, those hundreds of yards, impossible to traverse. The distances of the spirit further than the stars.)

She's not trying to be holier than thou with her moderation, he knows; but so pure – still a virgin at twenty, one of the quiet romantics. He wonders if she is lonely sometimes, dismisses the thought as quickly. She is too self-sufficient – he wants to say, sometimes, you haven't lived as I have. You'd drink too.
This time he meets her eyes – levelly. They're the same height – flickers her a brief smile when she rejoins them. There is neither sense nor point in grudging someone else their luck (walking heartbroken he may be, but he isn't that embittered). Or maybe just their normalcy… he isn't predisposed to the semantics of unfantastic realities.

He has no basis for comparison.

……………………………………………………………

Don't flatter yourself. I didn't come here for love.
Funnily, I was thinking exactly the same thing.

……………………………………………………………

'Say, that barmaid looked interested,' Esmond quips, eyes half-closed by mead, and he shrugs.

'I didn't think so.'

'You weren't looking at her, is why.' This from Merric, his naturally rosy skin poorly cochineal now. 'As usual. Women love to be looked in the eyes. But you were looking at her – at her – '

'The word you want is hands.'

'Exactly.' Stressing the middle syllable. 'Eggs-act-lee.'

He isn't romantic; not in the way that Neal or Cleon is. Nor does he think he could ever love anyone with the quiet, extraordinary ferocity that Roald loves his princess. He's known girls (well, two; on those summer afternoons – two summers apart – that seem to exist without evenings, melting suddenly into darkness without thought of twilight. One who smelled of sage and sweetgrass. One with flax flowers in her hair: he drew her profile – quickly, messily. The honey-coloured ringlets, the delicate blue flowers) but never found anyone he worships (apart from Celia, but she doesn't count like this).

Even so.

Sometimes, in the melancholy whims that are a natural part of youth (because he has been grown up for most of his life, but he is only just (a million and) twenty years old), he looks at his skin – usually his hands. Usually, he's drawing – and wonders if he has inside of him the latent potential for the kind of devotion that sees men try to eat their way through mountain ranges, women wander across nine times nine kingdoms in shoes made of iron (his sister's favourite stories, these: the impossible quests, driven by that remarkable mix of love and faith), heartbreak notwithstanding (though, of course, it does).
Sometimes he looks at his sister and he is astounded by her strength; she dances and laughs and loves, with that infinite ferocity that promises her betrothed she would walk across eighty one lands forever to find him. Wonders, perhaps, if this is the gods' exchange for the horrors ingrained in her memory: her radiance, her ability to love, counterbalance to the dark (enough light in her for the two of them, which is just as well).

'I'm not interested anyway.'

……………………………………………………………

So what now then, she asks. Angry again. Offended in spite of herself.
You can go if you want.
Distance dancing through dark (far too dark) eyes.
I didn't say that.

……………………………………………………………

'So why did you come out tonight then?' Her eyes – that colour of the Olorun, after rain – make him suddenly, wistfully, wish he used more colour. He doesn't remember the first time he picked up a piece of charcoal and began drawing loopy creatures all over the nursery walls with his chubby toddler's fist, but according to Celia, she was punished as well, for letting him loose.

'I knew, though, didn't I? That you had a gift.'

Her eyes sparkle with laughter as she says it – the clumsy, balloon-fingered people he began with are a far cry from the studies of his sister her fiancée has commissioned (their wedding, like so many during the Scanran war, held off until peace has properly fallen upon the north again, and in the meantime Leon of Haryse has the unenviable honour of commanding a desolate, mountaintop fort) – but he knows her too well to take that emerald glitter to mean she isn't serious. Ever the jester, Celia (once his sun, now someone else's) veils her most serious thoughts with mirth, and if he has his grandmother's eyes, Celia has her extraordinary, almost supernatural, sense of intuition. (That day of the soft clouds and pools of sunlight on the water, he remembers her hand over his mouth, her whispered 'Close your eyes': right before it happened. That he has regretted doing so will probably stay with him forever, or else he will come to realise that it's better this way. He can't tell. She never spoke to him about it, the nights he crawled into her bed – she probably couldn't – but it was enough to breathe in the smell of her skin, their bodies clinging fast to one another like limpets to the rocks.)

'Hold still,' he orders, so she sighs dramatically, rolling her eyes, before settling once more with her chin balanced on her knuckles, looking, past him, out to sea. Quickly – she can't hold still for long – he fills in her likeness in bold strokes. There is her oval face, the symmetry disturbed by the hand on which it rests, the slight arch of her eyebrow, eyes the same celadon as the ocean today (because as far as he's concerned, colour can be captured with black and white. Kel says Yamani philosophers think that way too), the smooth, dark hair, tied back simply in a bun at the nape of her neck, only a few tendrils escaping over her brow, the solemn, full-lipped mouth. Their father's mouth.

'And we're done.'

She snatches the sketches from his hand – their day's work: Celia under the fig tree in the sheltered eastern garden; Celia in the library window, reading a book of botany; Celia blowing a kiss; Celia's hands, the long tapering fingers, the engagement ring a Haryse heirloom, emerald set between dots of coral; Celia looking out to sea with that mixture of laughter and seriousness Leon fell in love with one fine midsummer night – shakes her head.

'You've made me look too beautiful,' she admonishes.

'If you ask anyone, they'll tell you that's exactly what you look like,' he retorts. 'I draw, Celly; I like portraits because they're not about beauty so much as… so much as…' he hesitates, the word more dramatic than he usually likes: 'Truth.'

'Spread that around enough, my love, and you'll have girls falling over themselves to kiss you,' she says, ducking the pencil he throws at her before running, laughing, back indoors.

Faintly; tenderly; he recalls that he used to tell people he was going to marry her one day. The war has ended though, peace finally beginning (softly, inexorably) to fall: their days as son and daughter of Tasride are irrevocably setting. (It is a disinheritance, he used to think, knowing what would happen to her, when this happened to her (this: a much easier word to use for the walking heartbroken) but now he is twenty, and he thinks It's okay this way. I can do this for her. How terrible to be Tortallan and Bazhir, to walk with triple the ghosts. How terrible not to be able to run away to page training.) And when he pulls apart the way he feels about all of it, all he can think is: Oinomi, I need another drink.

'I'm celebrating.'

'What?'

'Does it matter?'

He can tell from the look in her eyes he has crossed some kind of a boundary, but the idea that he could have known her for ten years and never gotten mad with her is irritatingly precious and he has no intention of ever being that.

'Why do you have to ask stuff like that anyway? You never come out to find a friend but is this supposed to be different for me because you're the girl? You act like you want us to treat you the same and then you claim sex sets you apart and that's not supposed to make you a hypocrite? Make up your mind.' They're all staring at him now, he registers. In his peripheries he can see the dark red O of Merric's open mouth.

In their adolescence when Keladry's virtue triggered many an afternoon dust up, he refused to fight on the basis that 'It's stupid.' She would always be his friend, always be the person who cut him from an ironic twist of fate by the point of a spear, but fighting for something like that had seemed idiotic to him. Economically she's a boy, not a girl, he wanted to say, but none of them – not even Faleron. Not even Neal – all half in love with her as they were, could separate honour from infatuation. And in youth, it isn't that they don't speak their mind around her, so much as that it doesn't occur to their minds to think this way about her at all. Not that that's bad – this collective insulation of theirs is often a comfort to him, but sometimes, like now, he knows they find his words somehow cruel, somehow unfair.

'Look, just forget I said anything.'

……………………………………………………………

And there is nothing more to say.

……………………………………………………………

She turns over onto her side, proactively ignoring him, legs curled up to her chest, shoulders hunched against the touch he wasn't going to offer anyway, sliding his legs over to the edge of the bed, walking over to his desk, grabbing sketchpad and charcoal pencil. There, her impossibly long back, sheets bunching over her hip in shadowy drapes that are satisfyingly deep in the post-dawn grey light. The expanse of bare mattress stretching towards him. The darkness of the floor and the bed's edge, where the light fails.

'What are you doing.' Not really a question, not really worth an answer, but heartbroken or not, he supposes he owes her something for temporarily alleviating the otherwise drudgery of the night. 'Drawing you.'

She turns. Eyes hard.

'Why.'

'So I remember properly.'

'So you need to draw me.'

He once told his sister drawing was true, because it is. Or at least it is for him. Has saved him more times than he can count (the first night in the page's wing when he'd felt so overwhelmingly alone, he had pulled out the charcoal and graphite his sister had packed for him – carefully – as a going-away present, and over the bare whitewashed walls drawn Tasride: the castle seen from the coastal road; the cove filled with dinghies; the waves bursting over the rocky outcrop where the seals sometimes rested, beneath a nor'easterly skyscape of feathery cirrus clouds – and then, soothed by the cry of gulls and smell of ocean, he had fallen asleep. In the morning, the servants reported it to Salma, and she came around to see for herself what the natty boy had done. That evening though, it was all still there, real – untouched – upon his walls) and he needs a little more salvation than usual right now.

He nods.

'Gods curse it Seaver. We've known each other for ten years,' she says, angrily – he has drawn more anger from her in the past few hours than he's seen in a decade – pushing blankets off, finger combing her plain, short hair.

When she is gone he returns to the bed – still warm – finishing the image off with a little crosshatching, a little deepening of certain shadows, glossing of certain lines. He erases nothing though; dark, sticky stories are filled with tangles of thought and memory where paradox and proposition melt and burn, and they are no different, under the eyes of the watching gods (another of the grander lies the romantics cling to so desperately (not realising how unbearable it would all be otherwise): love is about as unfantastic as anything can get. Unless you're born a Celia, he supposes, in which case the price you pay is brutally high. And even she is going, besides; with her dances and her laughter and her life and her love. With her green eyes and her desert premonitions and their father's full-lipped mouth. Out of a past that has haunted him ever since he grew up (a million years ago) she is disappearing to a future where there is no sunlight upon calm saltwater because there is no saltwater to speak of at Haryse. And it's okay this way, because this is what she wants or needs or something somewhere in between, and the clumsy ideals he wrought upon whitewashed walls have long ago disappeared, and it has to be. Godsdamn it it has to be).

Ever since he grew up (in a dazzle of light and water, guttural inhuman laughter, the other, darker things he remembers only in hundred-yard flashes) his memory has been his greatest defence mechanism, and also one of his greatest flaws (Something in me shattered that day, he accepts. It's okay though.) If he doesn't draw, embraces that state of distant (clinical) contemplation, his memory sneaks up on him and destroys his reality, recreates instances and fleeting moments and transforms them into something that they weren't.

He had been right to stop it (it: a word to send him spinning back into his childhood, euphemistic connotations to shameful adult rituals without a hint of irony), to lay his cards upon the table (this is what I am:) not to let his heartbreak bleed into her (because he isn't that embittered). In the morning, Keladry of Mindelan will wake up, ashamed, a little angry, but with her heart (less importantly, her virtue) still intact. Her sense of enchantment untouched; unbroken. For mercy has a human heart he thinks (another Nealism; or at least, it's in one of the books of Neal's he's borrowed) and then catches his expression in the looking glass.

His hair is spiky, standing on end, eyes still many hundreds of yards away from here (a fleeting: Merric's probably right goes through his head). Crescent shadows underneath from the sleepless night to match the shadow of unshaved stubble on his cheeks and chin. His stomach rumbles, and, suddenly, he realises he hasn't eaten in two days. Curiously though, the hunger in him is all for a blaze of sand and diaphanous light. The desert is in the heart of your brother.

In the morning (proper), he will saddle a horse, leave word with his steward (a man more than twice his age, their guardian, until he was eighteen and became Lord of Tasride himself) and take the road south. But first breakfast. First a shave. First a quick self-portrait – counterbalance to Kel-on-his-bed. Enchantment, 450 HE (because it's not as romantic as it sounds) – a glass of water. Salvation is in the small instances, after all; no point eating through mountain ranges unless you have something worth that destruction. He walks over to the window. The grey post-dawn light is cracking open in shafts of gold over the city that make his heart shudder.

It is beautiful, though.

And he is relieved.