Making Faces

[Seven Xu]

Winter 24, 511 AV

“They say magic is a sword without a hilt: there’s no safe way to wield it.”

Despite the torrential downpour of bitter grey rain that fell in half-frozen sheets on grey cobblestone from a grey sky, the Bizarre was a bustling refuge of unimaginable grandeur. Not to be outdone by the piousness of the dreary outside, the gold-and-maroon of the market’s vaulted ceilings boasted frescoes and carvings in honor of the city’s patron deity. Every corner not filled shoulder-high with wooden crates of imports seemed to harbor some fascination with, or celebration of illusion. The Bizarre was especially crowded on this day; the slurping suck of drowned leather on the feet of every man fell beneath the din of shouting foreigners and bartering locals, and it smelled of unnameable spices and sweat and stale breath.

Seven shifted in damp discomfort as he groaned, turning a heavy mass of wood and hide and yellowed sheets between his hands. The warning had drifted past his ears; without raising his chin, a scrutinizing glance tipped momentarily towards his lopsided brows, and he retrieved the edge of a dry lip with one ivory point.

“It’s not for me. How much?”

“Sixty.”

The man opposite him looked like a regular fool. Draped in moth-eaten silk and ermine, the thickset merchant boasted a smiling mouthful of ancient ivory wrapped in a face wrinkled and rosy. His green eyes drank in the glow of something too bright for torchlight, too yellowed to come from a day-lit sky; he looked almost cat-like, whiskers and all. He jingled when he moved; a life’s savings of chains hung in bronze and silver around his neck and wrists, and tawdry rings adorned every greasy finger.

“Sixty?” Seven straightened. He set the book down, as if it had suddenly offended him.

“This tome was written well before the Valterrian, sir. And well read, this one. Sixty gold-rims, and she’s yours.”

“Forty.” Scrawny digits dove within deep pockets, danced between the slick metal shuffles of coin on coin, “It’s as old as it is ordinary. I had one in my house, when I was young, and there’s not a library west of Zeltiva without it on its shelves.”

“Fifty.” The merchant’s nostrils flared. “No lower. Every hearth could be warmed by one through the winter, for all I care, but it’s been translated to Common; some poor bastard’s work has to count for something.”

A gathering of coins protested loudly across a wooden table; a gaudy display, for such a crowded market. “Fifty gold-rims, and you give me one of those rings, there,” he motioned towards the cat merchant’s meaty hand.

The man bristled, but then softened into a teasing smirk. “How is that any better than your initial offer? Do you even know how to haggle, boy?” A brief shrug of narrow shoulders inspired a throaty laugh, and a silver ring was wrestled from the grip of a pinky’s plump knuckle. It was tossed; Seven wordlessly fumbled, caught it. “Leave the money. And don’t go screwing yourself or anyone else up with magic, you hear me? It ended the world, once.”

[Victor Lark]

Meet me.

In any other city, those words were uttered as easily as Goodbye. Over an early-morning dinner of stale bread and winter-cooled ale, they warranted a tired laugh and incredulous consent. So it was that two Alvads scheduled to find each other after noon: one pretending to know some pattern in the chaos, and another who considered himself favored and lucky. The latter of them had arrived at the so-called Sanity Center weighted by the clinging rain and the burn of irritation; upon discovering that he was the first, he groaned loudly and ran his pruning fingers through his sopping hair.

Shoes slurping, he took a seat in the lobby and took a few seconds to stare at the wall. The woman at the front, the only other body in the room, fidgeted noisily, and Victor could not decide if she was glad or annoyed that he had not approached her. Shrugging inwardly, he produced the dagger from his side and examined the edges and contours he had already memorized. Boredom reeled in the face of a moment’s deliberation and, with a glance at the secretary (who immediately looked away), he threatened the blade’s point at a nearby wall. A flick of his wrist and it was flying through the air.

It reached its target with a loud rattling and fumbled inelegantly to the floor. She flinched; he frowned, rose from his chair. He retrieved it impatiently, then stepped back a few paces and aimed again. The next toss produced the same result, and so did the next. He could not make it fly straight enough to stick to anything, but still he tried. The bang, clamor, and sweep of his impromptu practice was almost like music to an open ear.

Unfortunately, Serenity’s was closed to her petulance. “Will you stop that?”

“Hm?” Victor gave her a sidelong glance, pursed his lips like a stifled smile, and threw the dagger again.

“Excuse me, sir. Do you need something?” Her answer was the thump of a hilt against the wall meant for a blade, and the ring of said blade against the ground. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

Sighing, he bent to pick up the knife and tucked its dangerous end behind his wrist as he turned to face her. He reveled in the exasperation on her face, unaware that the clumsy smile was its usual shape. The squelch of his shoes marred the grace in his approach, but he was grinning nonetheless as he folded his arms over her desk. He saw the bell and rang it; she rolled her eyes and demanded, “How can I help you?”

“I’m sorry for disturbing you, miss,” he lamented, ignoring the door as it opened behind him. His wet shoes kicked idly at the ground, scuffing like shame as his head cocked to one side. “Tell me how I can make it up to you.”

[Seven Xu]

“Be specific, or he’ll resolve his debts as he pleases.”

Seven was behind Victor, when he turned. That familiar face was angled and curtained by a mass of sodden black, but tarnished bangs did little to hide an amused stare beneath a quirked brow. “Rain,” it would have sounded like a complaint, had the halfblood not been proffering a mix of self-amusement and relief on his tongue and in the upturned corners of his mouth, “it’s cold as a Talderan’s taint out there, and it’s raining.”

Serenity had no ears for a song and no patience for a game; ever an opportunist, she slipped away beneath Seven’s well-timed arrival to closed door. “Three, four, five …” The door was opened and the woman was freely swallowed by wooden lips that exhaled the memory of her in the distinctive musk of aged books. Seven hooked a nearby elbow with a set of cloying white fingers, gave a tug, and loosened his bird from his perch.

Neither spoke as leather slogged a wet path to a scattering of chairs. Seven retained his smile, though it had been curtailed by the growing discomfort of rain-soaked trousers clinging to his thighs. In his other arm, wrapped beneath his coat to protect as well as conceal, was a volume of the Treval Codex, translated to Common, with Avakalashi’s name scrawled beneath the title in gilded cuneiform.

“Sit,” Seven finally broke the mutual silence with a command, words spun in silk on a Lhavitian cadence. He gestured towards the nearest chair with a casual tilt of his head, “Please.”

The book hardly waited for Victor to take his seat. It relinquished its veil in two sets of cold-ravaged fingers and anchored Seven to the adjacent chair. “It’s a book,” he observed, before Victor could do the same, “It’s about magic. Being a … mage, or a wizard, or a skin-changer or shadow-maker, or a whatever. It’s to help. I want you,” he paused; one hand released the tome in favor of appeasing an itch behind his ear. He sucked in his bottom lip and traded his smile for the wrinkles of concern. “I want you to be careful.”

[Victor Lark]

Victor peered closely at the look on Seven’s face, unable to decide if it was caring or condescending, or neither, or both. If he spoke to any other man, he might have dismissed his confusion with an excusing smile and found his answers elsewhere. But here and today, he had the opportunity to ask. He stole the book from negligent white fingers and slopped the thing into his own lap; even as he squirmed beneath it, Victor’s inquisitive silver did not move from where it sat beneath generous rubies. “Do you think I can’t be?”

It was an honest question, neither sarcastic nor pleading, that of a curious observer. Still, he laughed a joke as he looked down at the arbitrary page that had been opened for him, scanning its contents. He did not even know what it was called, this talent he had. He did not know where to begin. His fingers felt vaguely numb as they traversed the soft pages, the way they sometimes did when they changed. But whatever his djed desired, he could not turn into a book. He could not solve his curiosity as simply as that and so, like the rest of them, he flipped the page. Columns of words were exchanged for a few diagrams of bodies and muscles and pathways of flux, too many lines for any sense to be made of them. He could have read on, but now was not the time. Blinking away thoughtless anticipation, he closed the tome and balanced its spine against one leg.

The smile that looked up at Seven was too gracious, too kind, though not necessarily insincere. Victor lifted a hand to browse the black forest at the back of his friend’s scalp, trapping whatever fingers might have remained there. “I don’t know what you’re worried about,” he teased, caressing the soft white pocket beneath Seven’s cheekbone. “But I’m sure I’ll find some use for it.”

Then he leaned close to his fool, drew their lips close. “Thank you,” he conceded through a low mumble, and stole for a burning kiss.

[Seven Xu]

Thick air, saccharine breath laced with promise in a familiar burn, wafted between parting lips in a long sigh. He could not find the resolve to lean back in his chair, even when his neck began to complain of his slouch. Willowy fingers tangled between rain-soaked hair and olive intruders, and a restless knee knocked between imperfect thighs that fought to balance fifty-gold rims of paper and ink. “You’re welcome,” was pushed out in a murmur not unlike the Ravokian’s a breath before, before he claimed that lower lip for one more heartbeat.

Lingering dampness hung wet from his brow, and when he finally straightened to let the Center’s cool air steal in and break apart their world of wet musk and simpering affections, he reclaimed his hand in favor of wiping back tickling black bangs.

“I think you choose not to be careful,” belated accusation churned beneath a lopsided grin. “It’s the very reason I need to worry.” There was a moment’s pause of consideration, two hands descended on wet legs and briefly squeezed a jape, before he pushed to stand, turn, and beckon his bird after him. “It also makes everything more exciting.”

The Trickster had seen fit to not only stop the rain, but plunge His city of illusions into the depths of summer on an afternoon any almanac would claim as fledgling winter. They were greeted by a salt-air burst of warmth as they stepped out of the Sanity Center and onto Alvadas’ cobblestone streets. Puddles had dried; clouds were scarce, wisps of their former grey selves in the pale blue sky. Seven’s rain-leavened coat found the crook of his elbow, while his free hand shielded his brow from a high noon sun.

“How do they celebrate birthdays in Ravok?” He turned his head, stole a glance at Victor, and wondered if he knew how to paint bewilderment across his features without a reference, “Tell me about your best.” Some promise lingered in that request; his fingers dropped to tangle among a collection at the human’s side, and his unprotected face twisted into a smiling squint.

[Victor Lark]

He opted for a mix of amusement and mild disdain at the question, but his expression manifested as something too subtle to be sloppy. As if considering his answer, or a potential route home, Victor turned his mistake away from Seven and down the road. He took his time to peel damp-soft leather from his back and push his sleeves to his elbows, then tossed his new book and old jacket to one arm. He made a point to arrange the driest fabric beneath the bulky pages, keen and careful. Then he replied, “Parties.”

Obviously.

“One for the food,” he explained, “And one for the gifts, one for my mother’s friends and one for after that.” That would have been the end of it—he even began to walk, punctuating the list with the ugly gurgle of his heavy shoes—but a glance at Seven told Victor he should think of some other detail. A short pause pulled his eyes to the sky and the rooftops. “I wasn’t invited to those until I was fifteen. It would have been fourteen, but I didn’t go to that one. They...” He skipped a beat. On his fourteenth birthday, he had gotten into a race with a vagrant child who said he could not find his way home. He returned late in the afternoon on the following day; if his mother noticed that he was missing, she did not seem to care.

The memory made his feet itch. In the next instant, his eyes dropped from the heavens to the rooftops. He continued absently, “They’d dress up the whole house, make me wear a suit. It’s always a whole affair. We’d take any excuse to celebrate, and we had a lot of birthdays.” The word we felt to his mind like a needle in a blanket. That he had said so much about himself made the Ravokian cringe, briefly turned a feathery grin into a straight-lipped frown. Luckily, he noticed the road was beginning to slant heavily to the right, leaving starboard side houses at the proper vantage for leaping.

He nodded his idea silently at Seven and shoved his burden at his companion’s chest. There he lunged at the lowest house, stepped twice up its side, and clutched the ledge of its roof; a few scrabbling kicks and he was rolling up the shingled glacis. He spun on his side and crouched, outstretched hands beckoning the unforgotten contents of those obliging white arms. As he helped Seven to his level, Victor added, “Forget Ravok. Give me a Lhavitian birthday. We’ll find some quiet place and pray Ionu makes the stars rise early.”

[Seven Xu]

Leather boots slurp-sucked their way up mortar and stone as the halfblood obliged the request of two reaching arms. They joined a pair of coats and a thick book in a damp, sprawling pile on sun-warmed terra cotta, kicked off by waterlogged feet. “Forget Ravok, forget Lhavit,” he remarked with a flippant eye roll, sloughing off one muck-soaked sock, then another. His pruned and pale toes curled against the clay shingles, and he drooped to squat.

Forget Ravok; he couldn’t. Damn him, Seven shot Victor a sideward glare, softened by the quirk of one darkened eyebrow and a lopsided smile. What it must have been, to have everything by birthright, and throw it away. There were days when the Widow’s bastard could barely wrap his head around it. A weighty pause filled the clement air between them; Seven couldn’t will anything clever enough to the tip of his tongue to hold the conversation, and he let it slip away.

The sky had begun to yellow from its deep azure, bleeding beyond the foothills to the west and mingling with the sea in the north. The temperature seemed to be on a steady rise; dwindling puddles were either sinking into the earth, or being licked up by the greedy wind. Winter had blossomed into summer.

Seven’s fingers dipped into his breast pocket, fumbling for a loop of cool silver before managing to fish it out. The ring swarmed with carved embellishments, tangled around a milky, albicant stone.

“So you pray,” he inspected the bauble; it glimmered in the sunlight, opalescent, with flecks of red as bright as poppies. Seven turned a similar-colored gaze on Victor, breathing a teasing laugh. “Ionu must favor you, to stop winter for a day. Maybe, if I begged Mother Night to turn the sky black, Ionu would dot it with whatever you desired.”

Piousness did not wear well on Seven’s sleeve; he shrugged, chased off discomfited pink with another laugh, and offered the ring with an upturned palm, as if it were as tedious as a plum. “Here.”

[Victor Lark]

His eyes had since found respite on the rippling horizon, watching the heat rise from colored roofs. He only wanted to sit for a second, and yet he found himself lingering, held down by their mutual chagrin in a mention the divine. It was not uncommon to remark on Ionu’s benign curses within the veins of Alvadas, and yet in that moment it meant something more. They were just words, but Victor’s haphazard religion was the closest he had ever come to a passion; it promised to be more than that with every fleeting prayer, every deceived stranger and attempt at magic. Seven knew like no one knew, and the weakness in his knowing was as embarrassing as it was exhilarating. He reciprocated with a less than veiled reference to his own patron, and there was a peculiar intimacy in that brief conversation that made Victor look away, to miss the flare of color which he so loved to witness.

“Here.”

Victor blinked. Sudden curiosity pulled him out of that fleeting unease, tossed his gaze at an upturned palm. Seven’s white skin seemed to glow in the sun’s light as his bird scrutinized the ring from afar. Then he plucked it from its pedestal and pulled it over his finger and inspected it there. Its style was as playful as an Alvad, but it was not incredibly different than that which he had worn a lifetime ago. His skin had gotten darker, he realized, and his knuckles harder.

“Thank you,” he said again, because it was the right thing to say. He took Seven’s hand and the warm metal added a pinch to the strength of his grip. What had started as a gesture of gratitude turned swiftly into an insistent tug as Victor rose to his feet and gathered the coats beside him in a sloppy bundle. He scaled the roof to its peak and tossed the wad of wool atop the next adjacent building. Only when his arms were free did he look down to Seven. “Parties are just an excuse to seem better than your friends,” he recited; it was some version of something his uncle used to say. “We donnot need them. Want to see what I really did, in Ravok?”

He stepped down the other side of the shingled bend and, without a word, leapt to the opposite building and out of sight. There was the soft pound of wet leather against stone, the silent scrape of a cotton-bound shoulder as he rolled, and Victor was on his feet again. He turned around, waiting to find Seven’s face rise above the summit between them. Impatient, he scanned his new vantage for the next path to take. As he stepped backward to it, he called back, “Put your shoes on!”

[Seven Xu]

Seven wiped a clammy hand through his hair, hoarfrost lingering against a scalp darkened a dozen short lifetimes ago. His mouth opened, lips poised in a clever retort—he happened to like feeling more important than his friends—but the sentiment died on an unseen command, and Seven wrapped his pruned feet in sodden leather. They were cold and uncomfortable and squelched mud and water between his toes when he walked; this was all quickly forgotten as he stepped towards a chasm that filled the balmy air between two rooftops.

“You do this here,” he mumbled, toes curling against his boot soles. Reluctance twisted his mien into a fleeting scowl, but weak resolve loosed a beetled brow and let him take a blind step backward. It was a narrow gap. Even if he fell, it isn’t as if he’d kill himself in the process; a slight maiming wasn’t too absurd a thought. Hot air exhaled through flared nostrils. He gave the roof his best running start, did his damnedest to recover from a brief hesitation, and leapt the gap.

Hot sky greeted him for a heartbeat, but the earth’s call was loud and unforgiving.

“Oof!” The halfblood’s knees buckled beneath him and he skidded to a stop with the help of outstretched palms. He didn’t allow himself to linger long, face to face with his new perch; Seven stood, brushed soiled knees with bloodied hands, and stretched his best smile over a pained wince before closing on his bird for a brief victory kiss. “Teach me how to fall,” because in that moment there was no better word for it, and no better way to punctuate a diminutive request than with the burn of venom, born on a rush and lingering on two sets of lips, “So that I don’t break myself if ever the streets flood and the rooftops become walkways.”

[Victor Lark]

The poison danced with his blood on the inside of a curling mouth. Victor lapped it up from the inside of his lip, felt it stab his tongue and fade again. He wished he could give it back to Seven, the thrill of the burn that was so foreign and so familiar at once, or some other intimate piece of himself. He could take venom and pain, gifts and kisses, emotions and patience and commitment, but he had nothing to give, even if he knew how. He took Seven’s hands and felt the tender, flaking flesh of his palms, saw the flush of pink and the tiny beads of blood. He licked away the last of the venom and lifted the heel of each palm to his lips. He kissed them, one and then the other. It was enough.

“You won’t break,” Victor reassured him through a breathy chuckle. He laced his fingers delicately through Seven’s, debating what it meant to teach him to fall. In a life before this one, where the streets were water and the roofs were the walkways of spoiled children, he had taught a man how to fall in exchange for a lesson in wound-stitching; a trade for a trade, he had called it, when the boy’s only trade was getting in trouble. “Just don’t hesitate,” he offered. “Fall into the fall, and keep on moving.”

He knew it was not much of an answer, but still he paused to joke as if it were. His face twisted into a mockery of contemplation. “But not on your hands,” he explained, as his own slithered up Seven’s arm, “Or your elbows, or your shoulders,” he continued, and his fingertips wandered down the man’s thin frame as his smile grew, “Or your ass.”

Then he stepped back, arms parted from his sides as if it were a performance. “Fall on your leg, not your knee. Your arm, not your hand. Not the edges, but the lines. Like this.” His demonstration was too quick to catch much. As soon as he was down on one knee, he was falling backwards to his back and rolling over his head; as soon as he stood, he was falling into a forward roll. The momentum of it pulled him to his feet again, and he was standing in the same spot he had occupied seconds earlier. It was the easiest thing in the world.

“Try it!” He suggested, and pushed Seven abruptly at the shoulders.