Making Faces

[Seven Xu]

“I couldn’t—gah!”

The challenge was riposted with a playful thrust of sharp knuckles and laughter, but Victor was stronger, and Seven was sent two steps backward before he caught his footing. Fall into the fall; Seven chewed his lip, tasting of a greedy mouth and lingering bitterness, and tried to replay what he had just watched in his mind. His palms had quieted to a nagging throb, and bastard fingertips itched at superficial scrapes.

Seven dropped to his knees. He lingered, meaning to draw some joke from circumstance, but only managed a sloppy grin before ducking into a somersault. When he came up on his ass, his feet rocked him into a teetering squat, and he thought to shrug before pushing against the roof with stubborn legs until he was standing again.

“I’m not graceful,” he murmured, then a self-deprecating laugh stole a sigh, “I mean, not like you. It’s in my blood, but something broke, I guess.”

Grace followed the halfblood; it clung to his heels like a shadow, never far, but always out of reach, when he tried in vain to channel even the simplest of elegance. While he was prone to tripping over his own feet, his fingers could move as if they themselves were liquid, and as he rolled his neck to peer at Victor with that crooked smile plastered on his porcelain face, his words and his body seemed to contradict themselves.

Then his eyes found the slant of a roof beyond Victor’s piercing grays. “I used to climb the trellis outside my bedroom window. It was wrapped in ivy older than I was, and at night you never lost sight of your fingers and toes, because everything glows, in Lhavit. So it was easy.” He passed Victor, took a running start, and blindly leapt to the new roof, arms bent before his face. Seven made contact with hard shingle, offered his arms to the bite of the fall, and listed sideways to roll until his sloppy—but ultimately less painful—landing slowed to a stop. As he sat up to inspect his arms for scrapes, candid success stretched his smile into a toothy grin.

[Victor Lark]

Victor gave a smile to Seven’s landing. It was flawed in every sense but, while he considered twice giving him the honesty of a critique, he ultimately forgave those misgivings with a vague nod. “Ivy’s easy,” he replied, iron eyes scouring the roofs beneath their feet and the buildings around them. His tongue was loose with the flavor of the past. “My aunt had ivy on the face of her house, and it lead up to her own bedroom.” A laugh. “Mine was only windows and bricks, but they were left untended in the back alley and you could climb those well enough.”

To the left, the adjacent building rose up another level, leaving only a smooth stone wall for climbing; it was a difficult task, unless the window around the corner could be reached. To the right, the one-story shops went on for less than a block before they stopped at a wide street, which seemed to be made of glass, or water, or both.

Victor considered both options as he gathered their book and jackets in his arms. “Here, no where’s an alley that wasn’t once a street. Then again, here you can count on the street itself to give you a boost.” With that, he leapt the same gap and flew toward his fool.

The leather on his feet stomped heavily against the roof. He recovered from the impact without falling, but then he remembered the lesson and did it anyway. Everything he held dropped with a smack as the large of his back thumped against the hollow ground, followed instantly by arms and hands as they absorbed the last of the brief tremor shared between his body and the shingles beneath it.

Staring up at the sky for a moment, he wiped a hot brow and concluded, “As long as you brace for the fall, you’ll always be too tense to land it. You can’t be afraid of it.” Victor stood then, scooping up the pile and regarding the smooth wall over the shorter, easier path. He shed the heavy book on Seven, hardly treating it with the care it required, and slung both coats over one shoulder. Then he ran at the gable and up it, reaching for the ledge at its height. It took two tries to get it, and an audible heave to pull him to the top. As if on principle, he rolled himself through the action before he offered another hand to his latest apprentice.

[Seven Xu]

“Easy for you,” the halfblood murmured. His nostrils flared as he released his lip. As far as Seven knew, his roof-hopping bird was only amused by the prospect of fear. The book’s pages fluttered in protest, met Seven’s unguarded fingertips and he fumbled; it fell, spine first, with a sickening slap against the roof. “Damn it, Victor,” he stooped, ruefully looking the tome over, as if a swift rescue and an unspoken apology could mend the gut-churning dent left by the fall, “Be careful.”

A cloud of blackbirds blotted out the sun, but disintegrated when Seven turned his eyes on the sound of wings beating. Was it shadow, or illusion? Too much time between the pages of an overdue book, Seven concluded. He reined in his distraction, offered Victor a flat-lipped nod, and crossed the rooftop to grab hold of a proffered wrist.

He failed twice. Two steps in, his leathered feet had lost their grip against the wall of flat brick, and his heart leapt to the back of his throat when he nearly slipped into the narrow alley. The fool managed to laugh instead of gasp, while humiliation stained his white skin and he skirted an iron gaze. On his second attempt, Seven made for the window ledge. One hand planted against brick, the other clinging white-knuckled to the ledge above his head, his outstretched leg came up short—by an arm’s length. “Gods,” he spat.

The hand was still there, hovering at the end of an arm attached to a man whose grin had faded into comfortable nothingness. Seven thought he saw a flash of amusement (or impatience) in the quirk of thin, dark brows, and he emptied his chest of an indignant sigh. Clammy, dirty palms clapped together, and he managed to reach further as he ascended the wall: an elbow, a shoulder, and finally, he wrapped a neck in the crook of his arm and rolled onto their new vantage.

“If I were a real Widow,” Seven threw his legs over the ledge, feet swaying over the conquered alley, “I could cling to walls with my hands. Maybe then, I’d have a chance to keep up with you.” He ended the thought with a blithe grin—that was just as quickly upended when he spotted the familiar, dented face of Victor’s Treval Codex, forgotten on the roof below. “Petch.”

[Victor Lark]

Victor hardly boasted any great strength, but his hand was steady as it pulled at Seven’s meager weight. Careful parity countered the clumsy scrapings of his shoes on weathered brick and mortar and resilient wooden awnings, and they were left in a pile of limbs and soggy coats. The roof was steep here, and Victor dared to let himself roll to the edge of the alley before he crawled toward the adjacent ledge. Searching steel soon struck the object that had already caught a bloody red eye; he offered Seven the forgiving laugh he probably wanted, then gripped the brink and swung off.

The speed of the sudden fall was enough to throw him back to that lower level, where he retrieved their forgotten prize and jumped up all over again, wedging the heavy tome between his fingers and the ledge. When he tried to use the leverage of it, the mishandled book slid harshly down the roof’s hard slant. Reflex pulled Victor’s hand out to catch it, leaving the other to flush white as it was burdened with the weight of his body and his gift; the momentum of its added weight, at least, was enough to hoist an elbow onto the roof, and in the next moment he was scrambling to his feet. With a brisk glance at the fool who had purchased it, he pulled the Treval Codex against his side and stepped deftly to the tall apex of the building.

A welcome breeze reached him at that height, nearly forty feet up. It cooled the sweat on his brow and made the linen of his shirt slap against the heavy breaths in his chest; it made the hot, white-blue sky seem to grow, and reminded him of how big the world was. His chin turned to the long lane of buildings on the other side of his perch from their climb, a gradual slope of mismatched roofs that were never same height as their neighbors. It was perfect. “You don’t need anything but yourself, to do what you want to do,” he called down, more argumentative than assuring. “All it takes is hands to climb, and legs to run.”

His arms were itching as well as his legs, for a stronger breeze, a greater exertion. Victor had to adjust his precarious footing to turn to Seven, and the necessary vigilance in the act made his knees ache. “Maybe all it takes is practice,” he grinned. A thought pulled his expression back down, and he gamboled to the end of the ridge. There he peered over the five-foot drop to the next building and said, “Bet you can’t catch me.”

*12 and 1.5 m, respectively, if you’re a not a patriot.

[Seven Xu]

Seven watched fifty gold-rims scrape and mince between careless fingers and remorseless shingles. Desperation struck against unrepentant grey, but faded with his growing apathy before he could pour a similar look into that vessel. A face turned to a swarthy, sweat-drenched mess; summoning what grace his Widow-blood allowed, Seven ascended to the summit. They shared mutual victory for a heartbeat, then his bird uttered a dare, and vanished.

“You’d be right,” Seven called after his Ravokian with a halfhearted laugh, whose retreating back showed little remorse for the halfblood’s dismal experience. Arms outstretched, he doddered to the cusp and dropped himself.

Sky morphed to shingles and to sky again before Seven flattened on the sun-baked rooftop. He forced a stand, ignoring the nag of bruises that dotted his waiflike frame, and scoured a trail up another mountainous gable in his pursuit. You’d love Lhavit, he thought above a half-bitten lip; the city’s dome-roofs, slopes, and parapets were all blessed skyglass. Radiant jade seemed to draw in the day’s light to shimmer long after the sun had set. “You could do this in the dead of night,” he added aloud, trailing far enough for his comment to be swept away with a gust of wind.

They glided above another rift. Seven shouldered his fall, let his face take the brunt of the impact, and flinched to a stand before he could orient himself. A hand shot to his cheek, and he cursed, but did not call out. Angry white oozed specks of crimson and burned and teased the narrowed eye above with the blur of tears. Seven grit his teeth and pushed on.

Only when two rooftops separated them did the halfblood admit defeat. “I give up,” he shouted, threw his arms above his head, and gulped in the stale air his hungry lungs craved. “You win!”

It occurred to Seven then, as his arms fell into a tired heap atop a wet mop of faded black and his jaw sagged, that he wasn’t quite sure what it was he had wagered.

[Victor Lark]

His flight felt short-lived, but they always were. Victor stopped, and his pores screamed for the breeze of running; his bones ached for the weightlessness he had lost. His heart throbbed through his fingertips, but despite everything he turned and faced his fool. That white face cast a shadow of exhaustion, but the flushed scars from his falls glared a new red. Drumming his fingers against the spine of the book they held, Victor ambled back to meet him. The building before him was taller than the ones around it by a few feet, but his eager legs jumped the short height and brought his feet to curl around its opposite edge.

There he sat, or rather fell, tucked his feet against the vertical stone beneath him and waited for Seven to join him. “Night’s fun,” he mentioned with a shrug, eyes drawn to the wounds on an approaching face. “But you donnot need any more skill to run. Just trust. Trust yourself as much as you say you trust me, and you won’t fall.” The words he spoke seemed sensible enough, mimicking the contemptuous practicality that sometimes salted Seven’s outward mien. He would have called it instinct, if he had not forgotten the term, and if he did not think it a talent of a base animal. The truth in the words was for Seven to decide.

Dipping his gaze to his lap, Victor turned the Treval Codex there and opened the hard front cover, examining the pages with more attention than before. He flipped over an introduction and summary, an essay on meditation, a precautionary story about some dangerous magic he did not recognize. He glanced over the paragraphs for a few moments, fingers twitching for some entertaining revelation, but when Seven finally neared, he shot a leg up to stop him. The dried leather on his toes alighted on the halfblood’s scant belly, clinging to him as he pushed him away.

A cool shadow moved over their little world, a cloud sprouting anew from the once clear sky. “Tell me what I’ve won,” he smirked.

[Seven Xu]

“What, the pleasure of my company isn’t enough? I owe you more?” Seven laughed, grappling with the boot on his gut. Their world grew cool at once, and gooseprickles rushed up pale skin caught unawares. Clouds had littered a pale blue sky, swept in from gusts off the Suvan Sea, smelling of brine and the north, crisp and wintry. Seven turned his chin skyward, to the grey-white hulk that blotted out a high afternoon sun, and scratched an itch on the leathered ball of a cradled foot. “I’ll get better at this,” it was a laughing promise on heavy breath and a foolish, grinning, febrile mien. He sidestepped the foot as he dropped it.

A scraped knee lifted and caught the edge of the precipice. The other leg followed suit, and Seven dragged his tired body up and over to fall in a heap at Victor’s side. He could be so much smaller than the Ravokian, when he tried. His hips and shoulders were narrower, his arms and legs were ganglier. His posture was poorer, too. He drew one such leg to his chest, wrapped both scant arms around it, and laid his cheek against the bend of his knee.

For an instant, he closed his eyes, let Alvadas spin around him, let birds sing above their heads, let calloused fingers roam in practiced interest across countless words, far older than either of them. A halfblood heart was still fluttering too fast against its cage when uneven lids opened again, and he relinquished his knee in favor of another’s shoulder.

Seven’s eyes were immediately drawn to his second gift. The ring’s alabaster stone had lost its luster after the sun dipped beyond their vantage. Red fire had calmed to sleepy maroon, and foggy white had darkened to pale ash. It still looked nicer on hardened olive than it had between the swollen knuckles of a niggling merchant.

Hot light broke above a cloud’s silver halo, once again bathing the rooftop in early summer. Seven’s mouth opened, his tongue twisted in hesitation. He cleared his throat of apprehension, and giggled an unspoken jape, “Here—give it to me,” he stretched an arm across the tome, fingering the far end of its weathered pages, “I’ll show you what you need to know.”

[Victor Lark]

While his feet hung still, Victor’s eyes ran over words instead. He had found a story about alternate dimensions and the portals that opened one world to another, about the unfathomable monsters that came forth from the threshold and caused so much destruction on an ancient, distant world. It was at once a tale of glorious discovery and of cautionary practice; it seemed too mythical to be anything but fiction, and yet it was called summoning, and the following passage began to describe some guidelines for its strategy and function.

If he attempted to bother himself with the details, it was not for long. He felt the unique warmth of a slender thigh press against his, the weight of a tired head settle into the well-worn cushion of his shoulder. And then his book escaped him, forsaking the cold cotton on his lap for the bony knees of another. Victor twisted his new ring around his finger in conscious circles. “And what is that?” He teased. “How to be careful? Maybe if you just trusted your magic, it would not be so dangerous.”

But even as he said it, he knew how false it was. As natural as it felt, Victor was not daft enough to think that whatever it was he had discovered was good for him. Neither was running on rooftops, or willfully injecting himself with venom, or drinking beer for breakfast. But Seven cared about this thing, this skin-changing, so Victor exchanged the pillow of a head for the shoulder beneath it and yielded to whatever lesson he had to share.

Where he fell he shoved the fragile frame beneath him, inhaled the bitter brine of rainy air and exhaled a heavy laugh.

[Seven Xu]

Seven had been called many things in his short life; strong was not one of them. The halfblood often sported a collection of small bruises, littering white skin like spots around his forearms, his hips, his thighs: countless testaments to his bird’s most sincere passions left unchecked.

“Oof!”

A bold thrust spread him in a flurry of pages, a panicked white face, and a yelp. The Treval Codex skittered out of reach to settle well away from the building’s shingled precipice. Seven’s forearms had caught him from being thrown prostrate; his knees bent to his chest to threaten an imminent pounce with leather-bound heels. He went as far as to press the ball of his right foot beneath Victor’s collarbone, in the hollow between his chest and his shoulder. His heart pounded in his chest. The threat of falling was so close, and yet so far.

“I trust myself,” his retort was ingenuous, almost too delayed to matter. Pale brows indistinguishable from his skin in the gleam of a high afternoon sun wrinkled beneath a dusky curtain of bangs. His toes curled through the thin sole of his boot. “And my magic isn’t dangerous—because I’m careful with it!”

He gnawed his bottom lip to mask a crooked grin. Weeks ago he blinded himself, shattered a lantern and stomped through its remains; Victor had spent the following nights helping him recover slivers of glass from wrecked flesh. Careful, indeed.

“I—” The fib was cumbersome in his throat. Seven’s nostrils flared. The wrinkles burdening his brow smoothed. His foot bore down against Victor’s shoulder, and pushed. “Well, I don’t use it often,” a mocking laugh was finally countered on stale wet air, “Not like you! You change your skin without even realizing it. Bloody startling, waking up to your own face, you know.”

[Victor Lark]

A moment of tension attempted to pull Victor’s abdomen up against the foot that would knock him back, resistance by reflex. But once he realized the joke in the assault, he gave way to it and was knocked supine against the hard stone of the roof. His arms wrapped around the offending appendage, pulling it with him; before Seven could finish his hasty retaliation, Victor had shoved away the sleeve of his pant leg and was pulling at the laces of his boot.

Muttering through the inevitable struggle, Victor replied, “I told you I’d work on it, and I will.” He hadn’t, but that wasn’t the point. The contempt in the statement garnished his subsequent smile, more facetious than impatient. However peculiar or inconvenient his changes, he had never thought them dangerous. The thought woke involuntary threads of unseen djed on his face and neck.

He managed to wiggle the boot from a cold wet sock and threw it beside their book, removing all hope of decency with it. The argument had passed any productive end by then, having morphed into another game beneath Victor’s careless hands. He hooked his fool’s damp heel atop the shoulder it had offended and sat up suddenly, trapping him close and testing the bounds of his flexibility.

Victor was not afraid for his fool, and not only because he lacked usual forethought. Though he was not particularly observant, he had known the body beside his for two seasons, its limits and its tendencies. Whatever the case, Seven tended to curl; whether out of some innate reflex, borne by the fragility of his mother’s race, or simply a recluse’s impulse, his chest had always been fond of his knees. So Victor curled over him, driving him to his back. His words were as much an accusation as a flirtation. “And what do you know of danger?”