Tris crept down the dank staircase, brushing slimy mildew on the handrail. A gentle mist rose and fell with her breath, a thin dew collecting on her skin, dampening the back of her neck, beading her brow and shoulders like breath-of-earth. Torches sputtered noiselessly at eye level, issuing no smoke as they cast a pale wash of greenish light in the cool stone passageway. She did not remember the path she had followed the day before, down to the clammy stores, but the jade green fibre drew her on with no hesitation, a cobweb-fine filament of unspun wool to the rolag, waning in hand, clotting as it neared the source. Briar was here.
She turned a final corner, stepping off the cracked stair. The wooden door was marked with a smudge of green fire; shimmering like water, cool to the touch. Tris recognized the lintel, cut from plain brown wood, unadorned. She brushed her fingers on the rough-cut boards before rapping quickly twice, a sign she had heard often enough before but had never made herself. He had always offered her the courtesy of knocking, if he came by the door. Not that he always did, she reflected with an inward sigh, but something was better than nothing. Lark's knock was slow and steady, with never more than three beats. Daja had hit the door as if to break it down. A thief to the bone, he had given her a street-rat's 'all-clear' before he opened the door himself and shoved himself in front of whatever she had been working on with as much altruism as the thankless starling she had raised. Tris turned the prickly iron knob and pushed the door open, hearing the sh-shushing of newly-greened reeds shifting on the stone. He sat against the far wall, his long-legged frame tucked into the corner. His brown trousers were worn at the knee with dirt ground so deeply into the hems the colour had changed. His shirt of cream-colored linen hung loosely on shoulders that were broader than she remembered, the tails untucked. Tris looked down at her own informal court gown, russet red embroidered in gold and green silks in Sandry's precise hand; looking down at her feet, she saw her boots of brown leather, scuffed and creased, thinking how lucky she was that Sandry hadn't seen them and ordered them off her feet. Looking at Briar, she noted his own were bare, despite the chill of the cellar, saw how the reeds under him lustred green, though they had been threshed a Moon or more ago.
The court chafed at her like rough wool in summer. Sandry fussed over her dresses, was forever hissing at her to sit up straight, to smile, when all she wanted to do was slip away somewhere where they wouldn't find her. They knew now to look in the libraries, on the walls, in her rooms, thanks to the scandalmonger servants, who frowned down their insufferably long noses at her for her lack of maid, her travel gear, Chime, anything they could nit-pick and pass along. Perhaps they wouldn't think to find her here, below ground, unless Sandry got on her high horse and decreed it.
Briar looked up from a basket of dried silverweed and smiled at her, a smile of welcome, with a companionability she hadn't seen in so long—unhoped-for in this stranger she had known as well as her own skin. In retrospect, Tris realized she had known very little about herself for a very long time, and took back the thought for recognizing hypocrisy in it.
"What brings you down into these dungeonous reaches?" he inquired, then made a face and amended himself, "Though medicine closets should hardly be dungeons."
Tris returned his unobtrusively accepting smile with a wry one of her own. "They forgot to beware me for a moment too long. Sandry will likely subject me to her displeasure, after, but I couldn't stand it any longer."
"That would imply that she caught you at it," Briar observed, brandishing his reed pen like a dagger as he finished a label with a flourishing mark that meant he'd been in the bottle's contents. No quill, Tris noted again, though she could see the blackish splotches on his fingertips. The tiny garden writhing under his skin twined around the stains, either welcoming them or clamouring for attention past the marks that obscured their splendour.
She hid a giggle and nodded an affirmation. "She caught me leaving the door, but didn't say anything, and I heartlessly ignored her frantic gestures. But I was caught between Caidy and three of her friends, and they chatter more than a brace of squirrels on each other's territory." She gave an exasperated snort. She saw Briar looking at her with amusement, and continued with a mitigating note in her voice. "I honestly don't care which noble's coffers are deepest or muscles most defined, or whose eyes or smile is more winning, whether the man in question is spoken for or not. And the bedroom intrigue is more than I can stomach sober." They both knew she didn't—couldn't—drink. "Listening to them prattle will make me crazy before summer's out, if I can't shut them out for a few minutes out of the day." She knew Briar felt as she did, he just hid it better under that urbane charisma he had acquired and perfected sometime while they had been apart. She had heard Caidy mention Briar several times while nattering with her counterparts, and had forced her ears shut and her thoughts far away. She did not want to hear anything Caidy had to say about that, especially not about him. The very notion discomforted her. Briar had changed a great deal in his time abroad, perhaps more than any of them. She hardly felt that she knew him anymore, the barefaced boy she had grown up with. With an icy, numbing sort of plummeting sensation, she realized that she didn't.
He gifted her with a crooked grin. "Just walk somewhere else." He shrugged, waiting for her to list the hundred factors that would disprove his suggestion.
Tris merely shook her head. "Wind," she reminded him quietly.
His thin brows shot up, but he made no comment. She knew what he was thinking, that she knew she bandied her power about like a stole on her shoulders, for all she would bottle it up and hide it away out of sight. He knew that she'd gotten much better—or worse—to be so sensitive. Indeed, wind was as much her enemy as her friend anymore, laden with picture and noise, assaulting her from every angle at nearly every time. She blinked hard to push the thought away, but it nudged at her, like a persistent worm in her mind, cajoling and corralling her thought where it wanted, not her. She sniffed, and to her horror, felt the hot needle-prick of tears welling in her eyes. She repressed them violently, but to no avail. They were larger than she was, stronger than she was, built up like a dam over years and years; the last months of accredited mages sneering at her, of red-faced embarrassment for destruction wreaked by accident, of her own kin shying away as though she were devil-got, as she had thought herself to be, of enduring scorn and incredulity. But now the dam burst, and all the hurt flooded out. She could not hold it back; it was like trying to restrain scarves of wind with human fingers.
The tears came quietly at first; a trickle passed her eyelids squeezed shut, wetting the palms pressed to her face. She clamped her lungs down hard on her breath, forbidding her ribs to expand and let loose the sobs she clutched back. She was aware that Briar had stopped his work, that he balanced with tense shoulders only a hand's breadth away, his muscles taut as a cat's poised on the brink of a leap.
"I'm sorry." She drew away slightly, trying in vain to stem the tide. "I—I really didn't mean to do this, I should never have—" she pressed her sleeve to her mouth in an attempt to stifle the sobs that shook her uncontrollably. "It's just so hard…" Tris averted her eyes, ashamed. She sounded so self-righteous, so weak. She didn't know what had made her cry, couldn't stop. Out of the corner of her vision, she saw Briar shrug nonchalantly.
"Everybody's gotta cry sometime," he pointed out, sounding like the dirt-smeared thief boy he had been, though the voice was deeper with an air of authority that Tris heard in her own, a facility derived from hardship. "Nobody can survive with a rock in their chest, 'stead of a heart." He grinned at her, that roughish grin that wormed him out of scrapes half as often as he got into them. She smiled back, then dissolved again as another wave of tears overtook her. Briar laid aside his task and crawled spider-like to her side, laying a blossom-dappled hand on her shoulder. "What's the matter, Coppercurls?" His face was so open, so sincere, that Tris choked, and for a moment saw the bare-footed boy he used to be, the Briar she knew so well. She looked at her lap and tried to explain.
"I don't know, Briar…." she hesitated a long time before answering. "I've…changed. I hardly know me anymore, let alone any of you. I don't know why it hurts me so much, I'm used to it; I expect it from everyone anymore… I am so tired of being undercut by second-rate magicians!" Tris exploded suddenly, lightning crackling at the tips of her foremost braids. She repressed the emotion with difficulty, didn't see Briar's brows raised in appreciation. "They glare passed their hands and stab at me with dislike they don't bother to hide at all. They insinuate that I've somehow cheated to get where I am; I can do things they can't imagine, and think I've cheated. They imply that I've no right to be here. I never asked for this!" she shrilled, almost hysterical, before subduing herself, sobbing quietly.
Briar sighed and patted her shoulder. "None of us did," he reminded her. "We all got saddled with something we couldn't change. I don't think a single one of us liked it at first. But we got on. You'll get on, too. Of course, none of us has got a garish sign tacked up on our faces."
She sniffed and gave a watery, embarrassed laugh. "You know I'd never cheat anything." She shrugged, fingering the brocade of her gown to obliterate the rest of the world. "It was all I could do to keep my magic from rising up and getting the better of me… It didn't like reins, not at all…."
Briar's face was hardened, his brows drawn in doubt. Tris would never take advantage of anything; Niko would not allow it, and if he had even been able to offer her an easy path, she would refuse it. That was Tris for you. "We've all had a little bit of cold-shoulder from those priggish bleaters. No body thinks we ought to be as powerful as they are without trying. What about Yarrun? He felt like that: look how he ended up."
"Oh-h," Tris shuddered, "don't. Don't talk about him that way. It wasn't his fault. It's not my fault! Oh, if only it were, this might be easier."
"Just like a merchant, you always gotta have someone to blame." Briar scoffed, not really offended. "Didn't it ever occur to you that sometimes there just isn't anything you can blame for where you're at?"
She glared at him, then gave a watery laugh and wiped her sleeve across her face. "Yes, it has, more times than you know. You sound just like her, you know. Rosethorn, I mean. Perhaps not quite so prickly, but… That's just what she'd say."
He grinned. "So I've been told. I'd hope I have a few less pricklies. Lark might be able to withstand them in bed, but I'd be hard pressed to find another one like her who'd put up with mine."
Her face darkened, and she withdrew slightly. Her voice was very small as she whispered, "I miss you, Briar."
He looked surprised, though he knew what she had meant. "I'm right here, Coppercurls. Right here, with you." His voice was an equally soft murmur, tender, as he put an arm around her shoulders, drawing her to him. She surrendered to the embrace, to the calm, green stoical tenderness of his touch, and leaned her head on his shoulder, silent tears still bleeding down her cheeks.
Briar couldn't help but notice how pretty she was, sitting across from him in the dim closet with her braids awry, her face shining with tears that streamed from red, puffy eyes.
"I've worked so hard, so hard—" she sobbed quietly, staring at her lap as she tried not to whine. "And for what? To have it get the better of me, to not be able to blink for being assaulted by a myriad of dizzying images that are gone before I can see them properly? To not be able to remember what it's like to have a head that doesn't ache?"
Wordlessly, he passed her the cotton handkerchief stuffed up his sleeve; they both knew the one of pale jade-green silk flowering from his breast pocket was only for show. It was somehow comforting to see Tris cry like this, as though nothing had changed, although everything had. It was immeasurably reassuring to see her invisible iron-work barriers fallen down. He knew they would be rebuilt all the stronger before the sun touched her again, but for a little while she didn't have to pretend that she wasn't hurting. The tears wetting his shoulder, the gentle sobbing that wracked hers in the circle of his arm, personified her in his memory more than anything else. Tris had grown. Grown into something a little bit more. She frightened common folk without meaning to, and the new Tris even frightened him a little, the unstaggerable street-rat who had seen the fumbles and the failed attempts before she grew so powerful her skin could barely hold her. Seeing her blot her swollen face on his handkerchief made him remember that she was still human; somewhere in there was the girl who had taught him how to read, had lain with him on the fragrant thatch of the cottage that had become the first home either of them had known and watched as clouds were born. It was some kind of a gift of trust, so hard-earned with Tris, that she sat hidden here with him, clutched him like a salvation. He knew that he was blesséd among mortals that she allowed him to see her tears.
Briar smiled gently and daubed a teartrack with his thumb as leaves budded under his skin. She pulled away slightly as if in apology, brushing the wet patch on his shoulder with her fingertips.
"It isn't just me, though. I would be all right with it if it were just me." The words were lost as her face darkened. It seemed easier for her to talk if she didn't look at him, so Briar examined his flowery hands, watching as blue and black pansies bloomed on his knuckles. "Everyone looks at you askance, they resent you for knowing things they think you shouldn't. I'm gaudy enough as it is. I don't need any extra oddities. I'm tired of people looking at me like I've sprouted a second head. That's why I want to go to Lightsbridge; so I can have a normal life, without everyone and their mother begrudging me powers I've bled through the nose to gain. I just want something ordinary." Tris finished somewhat brokenly. There was a pleading note to her voice, as though she were trying to justify herself to him.
He wished she would stop apologizing to him. There was nothing between them worth saying sorry for. She, of all people should realize that if he did not accept her, lightnings, voices, and all her other quirks into the bargain, no one would. Besides, seeing her, here, broken and shaking—Tris the unshakable, the unbreakable—here in the closet dredged up memories he would rather forget. It felt all too much like Urda's House for comfort. Briar primly inspected the label on a bottle of dried cherry for cough and sent a bloom of silver energy into the wrinkled things. He saw Tris flinch and blink not a handspan away. She'd been jumpier than a cat on a bed of needles since she got back, but he'd been loath to mention it since he'd been no better. "You know, Coppercurls," he told her in an offhand manner, "bein' ordinary ain't all that much fun."
"Oh, you." Tris laughed weakly and laid her head against his shoulder. "You wouldn't understand."
Briar laughed, but the sound was rather harsh and ugly. "Try me. You'd be surprised."
Tris smiled. He could feel the muscles of her face stirring against his chest. "I suppose we aren't so different, after all…. Yes, we've changed. We've all changed. But… we've changed together, even while we were apart. I'm sorry I'd forgotten that."
I've missed you, Coppercurls, more than you know, Briar told her through their magic, at first unsure if she would hear him or not.
But she answered silently, I missed me, too. I missed us, all of us, but I taught myself not to notice.
She was the only one who accepted him for who he had become without pretence. Of all the girls, Tris was the only one who hadn't openly criticized his parade of bed-mates since they went north. Sure, she'd gone before him and warned them upstairs, but she had never openly shown him her disapproval, or contempt, if she felt it, but she'd never looked him in the eye and said she hated the prancing man he'd become. She had stared at all the cuddly armfuls and never reprimanded him, perhaps remembering two children they had both once known, who had trusted each other without asking why. Briar could never tell her that when he looked down at all the pretty maids, he wished it was her face he saw. He could never tell her that she was the only girl he wanted to share his bedroll, ever.