A FULL WEEK PASSED without Ilare’s return to class. The Lights were long and dull. Esor avoided írsa guards by taking long walks between xilcadis gardens and visiting àstin at teatime. If Kit?anve tried to summon him, she never succeeded.
Esor spent one luncheon in àstin’s office, sharing a bottle of flavorful whiskey from a port Esor had never even seen on a map. àstin was animated when he described where he had earned the alcohol. He verbally painted images of lofty towers amid dense forests, leaping onto his desk to mimic the masts of swoops that had taken him to and fro.
“Quintant Mansfield was terrible as it sounds,” he said. “Fields of Men. They live out in these rocky places exposed to the elements, building farms scarce different from the paddocks their animals sleep within. They live off potatoes and milk. I had no clue what I was agreeing to endure when Ambassador Volenkas hired me to teach his son.”
“Was the job as terrible as the port?” Esor asked.
“Worse!” àstin described the ambassador as a cruel buck, dark and brooding and sharp. Volenkas was remote at best, sadistic at worst. “Not unlike Lord Mayor Corvin. I pity your proximity to him.”
“The Lord Mayor is not so terrible.”
àstin sucked a breath through his teeth. “Was the beating so painful you fear to speak of it?” He had drawn the most natural conclusion looking at Esor’s bandaged hands.
Esor felt strangely defensive. “I was not beaten at all. I wounded my hands with alchemy glass. Corvin gave me a scare once, but...he’s not unreasonable.”
“May I never have the opportunity to find out for myself,” said àstin. “And may luck keep you on the Lord Mayor’s favored side. ?elasdur was much duller before my little brother arrived to empty my alcohol reserves.” He leaped off the desk and fondly ruffled Esor’s hair.
Blushing, Esor took the bottle of whiskey for another swig. “Everyone speaks of the Lord Mayor and his kin as though they are slickslithers in the cellar, but my interactions are scarce odder than those with lords in Sibíko. What do you know of the family history for Great House Kovenor?”
“Oh, it’s bloody, wrathful, wretched with betrayal,” àstin said.
“A normal dynasty in the Empire, then.”
“If only ordinary politics were the limits of Kovenor cruelty. The bloodline has been cursed since at least the Great Wave. Ah, did you not realize that the Kovenor family held ?elasdur prior to Malor? Until last millennium, Amalen ruled Ildòrian from ?elasdur. His father was Eri?kidon, wedded to Lady Iestanved, and it’s said their sins destroyed ?elasdur. I dare not speak ill of our lords while they’re in residence. ?elasdur has more ears than àlvar to wear them.” àstin finished the bottle and set it aside on the floor. “I could tell you sometime, but we’ll have to get out of the xilcadis for such a chat.”
“Risk entering the sin?os, then? I thought you would never.”
“Well, sometimes I do,” he said, winking. “When there’s a good enough reason.”
“What qualifies as a good reason?” asked Esor.
àstin dropped his hip onto the corner of the desk. “Love.”
“You are in love with a sin?os lass?”
“No, no, of course not. It would be a good reason. It’s not my reason.” Yet he was falling moody, and he looked at the now-empty whiskey bottle as though it had insulted him.
“You’ve surely loved a great deal throughout your travels. The ladies of the xilcadis seem to think so.”
“It’s an aura I find satisfying to project,” àstin said.
“If a ruse, you feign well. I wouldn’t know how. I’ve never loved,” said Esor. “I have read of it in books. It sounds cataclysmic.”
“For a boring, sweet lad such as yourself, it shall be no such thing. One day, a doe will find your humble cleverness charming; your hearts shall come together as naturally as bee comes to pollen.”
“What would that feel like?”
“I am not sweet. I cannot know.”
“Then what do you feel?” asked Esor.
Slipping off the desk’s edge, the older teacher plopped to the floor, folding into a ball. The top of his head only came to Esor’s elbow. “I feel...” àstin’s eyes were unfocused. He wiped sweat from his upper lip. “Obsessed. Hungry. Afraid of being hurt by her, afraid of being hurt for her, afraid of losing her.”
“Then it is a lass, but not in the sin?os.” Esor used a teasing tone in the hopes it would shift àstin’s mood for the better. He was unsuccessful.
“I am not in love,” said àstin. “Memory of a time I thought otherwise makes me morose.” He spent so long toying with the empty bottle that it seemed he was done speaking, but then his thoughts came bubbling out of him. “Do these lasses even know how much they hurt us, behaving this way? Don’t they know they wield disparity cruelly as any enuvīra, enslaving us to whims we can never fathom? Are there any logical thoughts within a doe’s skull, or only calculated manipulation? Your student is a girl-child. Tell me, Esor. Tell me!”
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Startled, Esor said, “Does are not so different from bucks.” He had befriended many does growing alongside his mother’s choir: the weavers and their daughters as well as his friends’ paramours. “Some are kind, some are cruel; some are intelligent, some are fools.”
“Spoken like a buck with all the empty-headedness of his female counterparts,” àstin retorted.
“I’ve never pretended I am smart,” said Esor. He wished for a new bottle of whiskey. He rose to offer àstin his back as he searched the cabinets with door-slamming ferocity.
“Oh, peace, peace. Don’t be so hurt. You’re unlike a buck because you’re barely more than a fawn. You’ll harden with age. I mean no insult.”
“I take no insult,” Esor said. “I think better of does than you do and know there is no shame in the comparison.” But he kicked a low cabinet shut especially hard. The whip-crack of wood against wood split the air.
“There’s no more whiskey,” said àstin.
“Then wine will do.”
“So the doe would say.”
Esor found wine. He poured a glass for his companion first. “Sometimes I feel stalked like a doe. Others treat me as fragile and small. And if I feel romantic passion, it is not the delicacy of bee to flower, but the torrent of domination as a doe pinned by a buck in rut.”
àstin tried to focus upon Esor’s face, but his gaze could not seem to penetrate the drunken haze between them. “Are you being courted, Esor?”
“I’m not certain,” said Esor.
“Then you know what I mean better than I thought,” said àstin. “The feeling of being helpless. The reluctance to escape.”
“Maybe. Maybe.”
They both drank long and deep, sharing misery about their unnamed sources of confusion. The afternoon dimmed around them. The bottles emptied. They asked no more questions of each other, assuming there would be time for that later.
~
ESOR HAD FOUND NOTHING on the mysterious nature of ?elasdur in the library, but he scoured it again on an idle day without Ilare. The librarian Medista allowed Esor to take several books to his classroom. He read while seated beside the alchemy table. The table’s multiple tiers were perfect for holding a stack of books, his journal, and a charcoal pencil in easy reach. The same sigils that marked the table’s sturdy edge were stamped upon books of Great House Kovenor’s history.
The family line traced back to Tosvodos and most ancestors were listed with exhaustive generational detail. But the library had nothing about the recent family. Any text including Amalen’s birth onward was notably absent.
Esor would have been without sources on the Great House if not for Corvin himself, who continued to make appearances at Night. He was simply always there, as inevitable as the sundown. Esor could have avoided him as easily.
“Watching you reminds me of a century I haven’t lived in time uncountable,” Corvin said on one such Night. “You could be any College student I tutored in alchemy, if this moment were in another time, another place...”
“Can I tell you a secret?” Esor was stripped down again, boots and coat discarded behind the desk. He had gone too long without sleep and couldn’t bring himself to care about his hair’s structural similarity to a pricklebush. “I’m terrible at alchemy. It never works the way it’s meant.”
Corvin expressed surprise.
Esor was happy to demonstrate.
He had already been prepared to attempt a new sleeping draught. Esor arranged crystals upon the alchemy table, placed simple ingredients into the flasks, and began the distillation process. Every drip contacted glass and shot into a tiny green sprout, roots and all, before withering to black dust.
“Bizarre, don’t you think?” Esor asked. “Can’t tell you I’m surprised. I’ve never been good at weaving either, no matter how closely I follow my mother’s guidance. My only Affinity is with incompetence.”
Corvin watched the short life cycle of the sprouts as he circled the table, occasionally sipping at his wine. “Fascinating.”
He reached for the ashy results but Esor stopped him.
“It likes to explode,” Esor said.
“Very fascinating,” said Corvin.
Esor’s wounded hands trembled as he transferred potion between vessels. The glass shivered against the metal frames. “Do you know why this might happen to me? Did you see it studying in Ralen?”
“Of course. A common defect in technique. Continue your studies, Master Esor. You’re clever enough to find your way through.”
“Thank you,” he said, scuffing his foot on the ground. “More encouragement from the Lord Mayor himself.” Growing bolder, Esor said, “At last I have sufficient evidence to posit a theory as to the motivation behind your friendliness.”
“I’m eager to hear it,” said Corvin.
“You want to be friends. Simple as that,” said Esor.
The Lord Mayor was motionless aside from the rippling of his cloak and the sway of his curls in a draft. His expression had frozen but his eyes glimmered.
“Go ahead, laugh if you want.” Esor flung his hands at Corvin. “You and Ilare make such sport of it. But you asked for a theory, and that’s the one I have. You’re lonely. You want a friend.”
?You think I’m lonely?? Corvin wasn’t laughing. Soft shadows shaped the sharp lines of his cheekbones and sloped nose so he looked more like a painting than a living soul. “Let’s entertain the idea that I’m lonely. Why, then, would I seek companionship in one such as yourself?”
“Two reasons.” Esor counted them on his fingers. “First of all, I’m trustworthier than anyone else around you. The excessive investigation into my family situation, ever-watching guards, and my general irrelevance ensure such. Second...I’m terribly likable. How could you resist?” Esor swept his arms wide, presenting the messy whole of him: half-unbuttoned shirtsleeves strapped by one remaining suspender, exhaustion-bruised eyes, and socked feet with a hole in one toe.
The corners of Corvin’s eyes creased as he slipped into the center ring of the table. “How indeed?” Corvin slid his knuckle under Esor’s chin, tipping his face toward him. “You are likable, as you say, and vulnerable and naive. And I am what you say as well: a lonely fool. You’ve made me feel transparent in my every move.” ?I shouldn’t enjoy it so much.?
The space between them closed gently as curtains stirring in a breeze. “I suppose you could say my astute eye is a third reason to keep me around,” said Esor, breathless.
“There is a third reason I will keep you,” said Corvin, “and a fourth, and a few more besides.” ?You truly don’t know. You are Light itself in the body of a Dokàlvar.?
“My liege—”
“Corvin, please.” His thumb drew a line along Esor’s jawline, as if testing to see if it was as sharp as it appeared. “When we’re alone, you may always call me Corvin.” His forefinger slid under Esor’s earlobe to the soft and vulnerable skin that had never been touched by another.
“I don’t know what to say.” The knot in Esor’s throat bounced when he swallowed hard. “I don’t think I entirely understand what you’re asking...if you’re asking anything.” His back bumped into the table’s edge. Glass rattled again.
“Let’s say you’re right. I would like to be friends with you, Esor,” said Corvin. “I’d like you to relax and enjoy my company as I enjoy yours. I wish to unravel the social practices that have been inflicted upon you, limiting the flow of your thoughts and feelings in my presence, so we may develop a true relationship of equals outside the boundaries of caste. Can you give me what I want?” He offered his goblet to Esor.
Hesitatingly, Esor took it, and he drank.