Chapter Text
The sun is so, so painfully bright after the cramped dark of the train car. The large standing stones do nothing to shield him, they only keep him from the long flat horizon of swaying twyre beyond. He knows the faces milling around the stones, even if he does not recognize individual people. They watch him, in the middle of the circle. They murmur with a familiar cadence, though he can catch none of the words.
Artemy knows, without knowing how or when he got there, that he is home.
And that he is not alone.
Opposite him is a bull. A broad, massive thing of warm brown, he dips his head to Artemy in what might be greeting or might also be showing off his horns, long and curved and sharp. There is danger here and yet Artemy finds himself thinking: beautiful.
He raises his hands in front of him, planning to reach out to the bull or perhaps surrender, but his fingers curl into fists, his feet shift to ground him. He realises he’s in the Circle of Suok. He is here to fight. His body knows it, even if he doesn’t. The bull, his nyur, knows it too, because a second later he comes charging.
Artemy slips away at the last, tapping his nyur’s flank as he does. The bull huffs and says, “Good. This much, at least, you haven’t forgotten.”
“What makes you think I’ve forgotten anything?”
His nyur turns one large, dark eye on him. Disapproval? Reproach? He can’t tell.
“A lot of time passed,” he says. “You were gone. You were without your guide. Of course you’ve forgotten. The question is, how much? Your heart has spoiled, Artemy, but is it rotten?”
Artemy’s heart clenches in response.
Or maybe in fear since there is, after all, a bull charging at him.
The Circle of Suok demands blood, and blood She shall have. To throw the fight would be an insult, so he does do his best. He skids to the side, out of the way of those horns, and even manages to land a few punches. But each one serves only to make his own sides twinge, and his head rings with the force of the last. They hurt him more than they’d ever hurt something the size of this bull. Even without them, though, it’s only a matter of time before the bull’s horns catch in his flesh.
His nyur pins him against the stone, lifting him entirely off his feet. Artemy can see a wound open in the bull’s chest in return, dripping red turning to gold dust before it can hit the ground. That’s alright. Artemy’s blood isn’t so elusive.
But it smells wrong. Under the thick copper scent is something sickly sweet, and his nyur’s dark eyes are sad, now, as they look up at him.
Spoiled. Rotten. His heart is rotten, after all.
“I’m sorry, Noukher,” Artemy gasps.
Noukher backs away, letting him drop. Artemy crumples to the ground, strings cut into a bloody mess.
“I still know the Lines, even if you don’t,” Noukher says. His voice feels like a rumble in the earth under Artemy’s palms. “And I am you, and so you will remember.”
“What if this rotten heart of mine kills me before I can?”
“What kind of guide would I be, if I let you stay with a rotten heart? No. A river of good washes away a drop of rot. You are here now. Here, there is no you or I, only a we. The we that is the two of us, and the we that is the people.”
He feels wrung out and parched. He feels wronged and wrong-footed. His going away wasn’t by choice, and Noukher had promised that he would be staying with Artemy the whole time, even if Artemy couldn’t see him. Why, then, is he being judged like this? Why did he go wrong, how did he go wrong?
And because he can say none of that, Artemy instead says, wryly, “Going to find me another one?”
Noukher cracks a grin. “There would be volunteers for trade, I’m sure. But why go that far, when I have enough to share?”
Noukher’s horns are not, should not be, an implement for fine surgery, but the line he cuts down Artemy’s chest is as steady and even as any surgeon could hope for. He can barely feel it, though he sees his blood run and his flesh part. And as his nyur, Noukher’s chest opens up as well, and there is his massive beating heart, ribcage already conveniently spread wide. Inviting. Artemy finds a blade in his own hand the next moment, and he reaches in and neatly bisects it.
Even halved, it’s far too large to replace a human heart.
“Quick, now,” Noukher says. “Before it disappears.”
He can see the gold glowing at its edges already. And so Artemy reaches into his own chest cavity and gingerly plucks out the rot-soft heart, then he slowly works half of a bull’s heart between his ribs in its place. He has to crack them wider to make room. It’s uncomfortable, impractical. The beat of that heart, when he connects it to his veins, reverberates in his teeth.
But it does beat.
And Noukher, who has to make do with only half a heart, still manages to get up, casting a powerful shadow over Artemy, who remains splayed on the ground. The rotten heart lies not far from them, blackened under the sun.
Noukher stomps on it, and it bursts like an overfed tick under his hoof.
*
A light burns in the night sky. Nothing like the neat round illumination of the moon, no, no, this blazes, indistinct at its edges, impossible to hide from or to deny. It hurts to look at for too long. Daniil looks, and looks, and keeps looking. He dares not even squint.
He is supposed to go up.
He is surrounded by a whispering dark, dry and brittle as steppe grass under his fingertips. It wants to swallow him. He needs to get away but it stretches endless, and so the only away left to him is up.
This is a dream, obviously. The metaphor is a painfully heavy-handed one, even so. From the darkness into the light? Really? But the pull is on him nonetheless, the burn terrible and so exquisitely sweet. What does it matter if it’s a dream? Let him clamber upwards, ad lucem, and see what enlightenment awaits at the other end.
This assumes it was ever a choice and not a compulsion, but making the decision himself as well seems to have been important. As though summoned by his thought, stairs materialise to his left, rising into the sky. Each step is steep, translucent, only visible by the gossamer outline of their geometry. Each step, when he trusts his weight to it, burns the soles of his bare feet in cold pinpricks that burrow deeper the longer he lingers. He will simply have to be quick about it.
Daniil ascends.
He still cannot look away from the light. Each moment, each step closer, reveals a new facet he hadn’t been able to see from so far below in the drowning dark. New colours ripple across its surface, subtle, colours he doesn’t have words for. Angles resolve themselves into shapes that bend and change and shift and beckon.
His eyes, mortal, fallible, they burn, they water, tears running salt-warm down his face. He needs to blink. He cannot.
Time as a concept doesn’t exist here. He climbs and he climbs and he climbs, and the tears wear grooves into his cheeks, and he climbs and he climbs.
The first sound in this breathless silence is a crack. Daniil sees the chip more than he feels it, a shard like porcelain popping out from his face. He keeps climbing, but touches his face to find the hole.
The crack spreads further, spiderwebbing all the way up to his temple, all the way down to his jaw.
And with the increasing sound comes an increasing pressure, as though something in this endless shapeless expanse has noticed him, turned the weight of its attention upon him struggling up these flimsy stairs. The aches of the waking world find him now; his knees and feet from walking all that way to the Town, his back from sleeping in the steppe, his shoulders and elbows from the lopsided weight of his bag. It’s not fair.
All it takes is a moment. Daniil stops for one moment to try and breathe through the crush of his lungs, and the stairs have him. The sharp cold has hooked into his bones. He is held there, a foot on one step, a foot on the step above, and cannot move them.
And still, he cannot look away from the light.
Another crack-pop of porcelain, this time up his shins. Insult to injury, that.
Daniil digs into the cracks of his leg on the lower step. Blood seeps from the porcelain, he knows it by its scent, hot slippery between his fingers. Too much of it, it feels like. But he’s free to take another step, once he digs himself out of his other leg, and then another.
This feels right. This makes sense. Foregoing flesh for the divine, divesting himself of everything holding him back. Cleansing, flensing. Yes. He peels away the sides of his face as well, the chips of porcelain tinkling to the stairs beneath. He feels lighter for it, somewhat more equipped to handle whatever force is pushing down upon him.
By touch alone—his gaze fixed still, as ever, on the light—Daniil finds the other cracks, imperfections in his flesh. In his shoulder, his clavicle, his scalp, his chest. Sheds them without a thought. He’s so close now that the darkness below is barely visible in his peripheral vision. Only the light is left, swallowing the sky and promising to swallow him as well, if only he can reach out.
Daniil does. He raises his fingers, red-daubed porcelain falling away from his grip.
And he falls with it.
Clatters, like so much refuse, on the steps. He cannot rise. There are no legs beneath him to push him up, no arms to reach, and he thinks for a moment that he went too far, took too much of himself, presumed too much, shattered entirely in his attempt.
But ahead of him is a jagged figure. Bloody, pockmarked, with uneven broken edges, it climbs from one step to the next with a feverish speed as it reaches for the light above.
*
Of all the oddities Bachelor Dankovsky has been subjected to in this shambles of a town, the animals are perhaps the strangest.
Everything else can be explained. The insistence of even educated, ostensibly respectable men that their wives and daughters are clairvoyant is either indulgent superstition or willful deception. The children who tug at his coat to trade him palmfuls of pills and bullets is the town’s failure to manage its orphan population, who run amok in the warehouses and get into all sorts of supplies. Even the tower, wondrous and impossible as it is, is surely in the end just a marvellously clever feat of physics and engineering beyond Daniil’s knowledge, not being an engineer himself.
This, all of this, is human.
But every single person he has spoken to thus far has had an animal or bird or reptile or something nestled close to them. No cage or leash in sight, their pets nonetheless remain docile at their sides, on their shoulders, in their pockets. If not for the fact both rich and poor seem to boast such bizarre creatures, he might have said there was a thriving exotic pet trade here. As it is, he can find no logical explanation and no one will answer him when he asks.
Mind you, no one in this town can answer a sodding question anyway, but this one especially.
Georgiy and Victor Kain, each with a brilliant and painfully bright red bird on their shoulders, had given him some variation of You’ll understand soon. Olgimsky the Elder had been too busy laughing at the fright his hulking vulture gave Daniil when it swooped down and settled at the back of his chair. Classless bastard. Olgimsky the Younger, a frog peering silently out of his front pocket, said it was something in the soil, or maybe the air.
Even Stanislav Rubin, who seemed otherwise to be a straightforward man and, as the only other medical practitioner here, was the closest Daniil had to an equal, had started waffling on some sentimental tosh about how they were reflections of their selves. Which was all well and good, but still didn’t explain how his dog followed so demurely at his heels without needing even a word to direct it. When Daniil pressed, unable to contain his frustration after a long day of disappointment on disappointment, Rubin just said he wouldn’t get it until he had his own. As though Daniil has the time.
And now, sat at Rubin’s desk, he can hear the echo of hooves clomping along in the stairwell of the building, because of course someone in this backwater would keep cattle as pets too and have them follow them around everywhere. Explains those slats he’d seen all along the stairs at least. One can’t expect a—what? A cow? to climb up and down the steps otherwise.
The more he listens, the more he realises the clomping is uneven too, matching the uneven footfalls of, presumably, the cow’s owner. There is something very disturbing about that.
He tries to put it out of his mind as the sound continues up those wooden slats, rattling, creaking, distracting, when he’s trying to decipher Rubin’s handwriting and glean something of what happened with the last plague. Bad enough that he can’t access Isidor’s accounts, but the Burakh house is currently closed to him pending “investigation,” so Daniil has to make do.
Then the clatter stops, and he lifts his head to the open doorway that is suddenly blocked by—
Ah.
Judging by the snippets of description he’d gotten from various sources about town warning of the killer, this tall man, scuffed and bloody and bright-eyed, a bruise blackening on his cheekbone, would be Artemy Burakh.
When Rubin had said Isidor Burakh’s son was bullheaded, Daniil should have known he’d meant that literally, given everything else he’s seen in this absurd town. Because a little ways behind Burakh is, indeed, a massive brown bull.
This is what he has to work with. An incurable plague on the horizon, no hospital or in fact any sort of medical facility, and of the two other medical professionals in this damned town, one of them brings a bull everywhere.
But it’s fine. He’s fine. He’ll manage this as he does everything else.
Bachelor Daniil Dankovsky draws himself upright in his seat, draws the persona around him, and says, “Well, one thing is very clear. You are a very, very lucky man, Vorakh.”
If it wasn’t luck, if Artemy Burakh was in fact the heartless killer everyone said he was, Daniil imagines his own goading would get him more than just a little snark in return. He had seen the men on the tracks this morning. He knows where the blood that flecks Burakh’s smock comes from, even if some of it is his own. But even as Burakh makes his lack of appreciation at Daniil getting his name wrong, and at Daniil’s questions, and at Daniil’s everything very evident, he keeps his hands, knuckles red and scabbed as they are, beside him.
Daniil is satisfied he had the right measure of this man.
But then Burakh does that thing, that quick once-over glance that takes in, not Daniil’s person, but the area just around him. Over his shoulder. Down by his feet. And that sense of satisfaction is quickly banked by the annoyance Daniil has been feeling all day, because that’s the same look he’s been getting from just about every person he’s met in this blasted town, usually before they give him a pitying smile or clam up and become even more impossible to talk to.
The bull blinks at him serenely from over Burakh’s shoulder.
“If you’re looking for my pet, I don’t have one,” Daniil says. “Tell me, you were studying in the Capital, am I right? How did you get around with that bull? Or did you just pick him up today?”
Burakh closes his eyes like he’s praying for patience. “He isn’t a pet. He’s—never mind, you wouldn’t get it. Where’s Stakh and Taisya?”
“Taisya being...his dog, I take it?”
Burakh gives no answer, so that’s a yes.
“Be thankful I sent him away on an errand. Your Rubin has utterly murderous intents. Isidor meant a lot to him, you know. Your father was his mentor. Rubin even considers himself Old Burakh’s true son.” And a dramatic pause to let that sink in. “Unlike you. Anyway, he thinks you’re—”
Before he can finish that sentence, however, the bull snorts in what can only be described as a derisive manner. It turns to leave.
“Noukher, wait,” Burakh says. The bull glances over at him. “I know. But let’s listen to what he has to say.”
Wouldn’t you know it, the bull actually waits.
“Remarkably well-trained,” Daniil says.
Burakh sighs. “Look, whoever you are—”
“Ah, yes. I haven’t introduced myself. Daniil Dankovsky, Bachelor of Medicine, at your service.”
“Whoever you are,” Burakh says. Payback for Vorakh, no doubt. Daniil inclines his head in acquiescence. Burakh is owed that much. “You clearly haven’t been here long enough to catch on yet and no one’s bothered explaining, or maybe they have and you don’t believe them, I don’t know. In either case, they’re not pets, and you’d do well not to talk about them like they’re animals.”
Like they’re…?
Daniil looks from Burakh to his bull and back again. “Is that or is it not a bull?”
“He is in the shape of a bull. That doesn’t make him one.”
“I’m...afraid I don’t follow.”
“No, of course you wouldn’t.” And he sighs. Like Daniil is being the unreasonable one. “He’s my—townsfolk call them daemons. Their souls, just on the outside. The Kin would call him my nyur, my guide, my...face. Whatever the name, he’s my self. Me. We're one person.”
Daniil Dankovsky has made the study of the soul and self his life’s work. He is used to very many outlandish beliefs regarding them. This is still beyond him.
Burakh must read his disbelief on his face, because he continues, “Whether you want to believe it or not, the town does. Don’t call them pets. It won’t end well. “
“I...see. So you—all of you, this entire Town—believe your souls are external. And take the shape of...animals.”
Why not.
Shaking his head, Burakh waves a hand. “I don’t have time for this. Forget I said anything. You were saying something about Stakh, where can I find him?”
So Daniil gathers himself and continues with the accusation of patricide, the very generous favour he’s done Burakh by vouching for him and establishing he couldn’t have been the murderer, and how precisely he expects to be repaid. For the good of the town, of course. Meanwhile, that bloody bull keeps flicking his tail. Likely it’s due to fleas or mange or whatever else afflicts cattle, he doesn’t know. But between Burakh’s increasing agitation and this “daemon” nonsense…
It’s absurd, but Daniil cannot shake the sense that this bull is making fun of him.
He makes no comment, however, to that or to Burakh’s parting words of refusal. Burakh will see he needs allies before long, and Daniil is content enough to turn in his seat and resume reading.
After a few moments, he hears Burakh call out, “Noukher! We’re leaving!”
Glancing up, Daniil finds the bull is, indeed, still in the doorway. Watching him.
“Didn’t you hear your master?” Daniil says, and makes a shooing motion.
There is a voice. A soft masculine voice that rumbles, “Things are different here, oynon. You’d do well to remember that.”
And it’s coming from the bull.
This is either a stress-induced hallucination, a twyre-induced hallucination, or a demonstration of Burakh’s truly exemplary ventriloquism and animal training, but the bull’s mouth is moving in time with the words and Daniil can do nothing but stare.
“You’re an outsider, so yours hasn’t manifested itself yet,” the bull, apparently, continues. Unlike his...Unlike Burakh, the bull is perfectly polite, using the formal you. “This is normal. But until it does, you seem soulless to them, and the townsfolk take soullessness very, very seriously.”
Daniil smirks, more out of habit than anything else. Because there’s a bull talking to him. A bull. Talking. “Would hardly be the first time I’ve been called soulless.”
“You? No. Never would have guessed.” The bull snorts. “Good day, Bachelor Dankovsky. Remember what I said.”
“Good...day.”
The bull nods to him, concluding their conversation, then lumbers off after Burakh.
*
The real weight of this warning does not hit Daniil until he watches a woman burn, later, in the Bone Stake Lot. He’s too late to do anything. By the time he’s reached her, the screaming has died out.
He can see it, now, in the crowd. In the teeth bared and the wings spread and the heads tossed in joy and victory and some bloodthirsty mimicry of justice. Daniil watches until the fire burns itself down, leaving nothing more than boiled blood and charred flesh. He watches the animals tuck beside their humans as doubt ripples through the crowd, robbed of their clay woman and righteous revenge.
“Maybe she wasn’t the shabnak after all,” one says to another.
“Doesn’t matter, does it?” says the other. He spits to the side. “Still got no soul.”
And though the crowd has calmed, their animals remain wild-eyed and watching, ready to pounce on something, anything, else.
Whatever they are, pets or faces or guides or souls...Daniil learns to watch them in return.
*
Safe within the walls of his home, Artemy breathes freely for the first time since he arrived. And immediately feels bad for it. His father was murdered here and Artemy doesn’t know the first thing about who might have done it or why. What right does he have to comfort? The voice in his head sounds a lot like Stakh, which makes it marginally easier to ignore, but it’s not wrong.
This hasn’t been home for five years. Not by Artemy’s choice, but…
Noukher noses past him, and Artemy gets out of the doorway to let him through.
“It looks different,” Artemy says.
“It does. But that’s to be expected. We look different too.”
They do. Noukher, silhouetted in the half-dark of the station, had seemed like something out of Artemy’s dream first. A delusion brought on by pain or maybe the image of Bos Turokh following him into the waking world. He’s bigger than he had been before Artemy left, broader. His horns are longer. He walks like he isn’t sure of his legs, and maybe he isn’t yet, newly reformed as he is. But that hadn’t stopped him from rushing in to try and protect Artemy from his attackers—and seeing that he shared Artemy’s limp had brought forth a wave of rightness that said yes, he’s home, he’s whole. Even changed, this is right.
Noukher seems to have none of his misgivings and leads the way through the various rooms, pointing out things for Artemy to open and show him. He’s much more comfortable too, now that he’s in a house made for someone of his size. He doesn’t have to tilt his head to get his horns through the doorways, the furniture is all sturdy and spaced apart enough to let him pass through without worrying about jostling anything, and the staircase has a ramp so he can go to the second floor, instead of having to wait downstairs like he did at Lara’s.
“We should find where Aba put your things,” Artemy says, following him upstairs.
“Ezhe said she would keep them with hers while we were away,” Noukher replies.
We. Being a we again makes his throat tighten and he nods, gesturing for Noukher to lead the way because he doesn’t trust his voice to speak. Noukher glances back at him and leans his weight against Artemy. Just a little. The good kind of crush, not the bad, and that’s overwhelming too in its own way; it had taken Noukher a while to find the balance of just right when he first settled, and seeing how unsteady he is on his feet with his new size, his new returned form, Artemy had thought they might have a similar period of adjustment. Apparently not. In this, at least, Noukher is sure of himself and the pressure he exerts.
Then, just as wordless, Noukher pulls away and does finally clomp ahead to his mother’s corner of father’s room. Moihon-Ezhe is—had been...had been a horse, tall and regal, and the shelves where she kept her things were likewise tall, at just about the height where she could have pulled them with her teeth.
Noukher noses through one shelf and then the next gently while Artemy peers through father’s drawers and cabinets. Needles, matches, discarded buttons, these are the things he takes. Useful things. Soulless things. His fingers glide over father’s pocket watch (stopped), his handkerchiefs (folded neatly), his cologne (barely used, only for important dinners and special occasions), considering then dismissing the idea of stuffing these in his pockets too. The small things he can use for trading, but these…
That voice in his head again, sneering something about plundering the old man. It doesn’t sound like Stakh, not really, but that’s who Artemy quietly curses as he closes the drawer.
Anyway, father’s things aren’t going anywhere. He can sift through them, donate what needs donating, do all of that after the funeral.
Behind him, Noukher hums that he’s found what he was looking for, and Artemy returns to take the knotted bag from Noukher’s mouth and open it. Out unfurls Noukher’s knitted woolen blanket; his hoof pick; his pockets, the rolled up leather-and-fabric lumpy from whatever trinkets had been left within them; his very favourite books.
“Good thing I convinced you I should leave these, huh,” Artemy says, brushing his palm over the cover of one of said books. “You wanted me to read them and keep you company while I was away, but if I had, they’d still be with the rest of my stuff back there.”
“It was to keep you company, Artemy, not me.”
Artemy’s smile fades slowly. He still manages, “Well, I was never much for poetry. I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate them properly anyway. Do you want me to get your pockets on you?”
At Noukher’s nod, Artemy unravels the roll and drapes it over Noukher’s back.
The problem becomes apparent even before he tries to tie it; Noukher’s grown, and the length of material comes up far too short. Probably he could just lengthen the ties later, but there’s something very funny about how the pockets look, that high on Noukher’s flanks. Artemy rolls his lips back to keep his amusement at bay.
“I, ah...don’t think this fits anymore, my friend.”
Noukher sighs. “Not surprised. Ezhe’s pockets are on the next shelf. We can take them apart and add another panel to mine.”
Something like panic spikes in Artemy’s gut at the thought.
“I. Are you sure about that?”
“Sure about your sewing ability? Cloth isn’t skin, but I’d be very surprised if you couldn’t at least stitch two things together.”
“No, I mean, it’s not—it’s…Moihon-Ezhe’s.”
“...Yes, and she’s dead, Artemy.”
Artemy flinches from the reminder and then huffs at himself, his own ridiculousness. He’s lived a life defined by one lost mother, what’s another one? But he realises he’s been avoiding thinking about it. Father is gone. And so is his nyur. One follows from the other.
“There’s no one but us to claim their things,” Noukher says. “Who should we ask permission of? Or do we leave the entire house unchanged in memoriam?”
“No, I don’t mean that. Just…”
“You’re thinking about Stakh and Taisya, aren’t you? What they’ll say when they see.”
Noukher’s ear flick shows what he thinks about both of them, and he steps back to the shelves to pull out Moihon-Ezhe’s pockets anyway. With the roll between his teeth, he looks Artemy squarely in the eyes and speaks around it.
“She’s my mother,” he says. “Not Taisya’s. Mine. I will not be shamed out of my inheritance.”
He drops the roll in Artemy’s hands. Artemy fumbles the catch, but manages not to drop it.
*
Daniil is unsettled but unsurprised by Andrey Stamatin’s daemon. From what he recalls of Stamatin, and even his current demeanour, a lynx suits him. It sits at Andrey’s feet, large paws crossed over each other, and though it does not look at Daniil while they talk, its large tufted ears swivel this way and that. Despite its feigned disinterest, it is indeed paying attention. And judging by its thumping tail, it does not like what he has to say.
“I’m not leaving without my brother,” Andrey tells him. He reaches down to scratch the top of his daemon’s head. It swats at him, seemingly more for the principle of the thing, because it pushes its head into Andrey’s hand a second later. “Bad enough you’d be asking me to leave Nastya here behind, but I’ve lived my whole life without her already. I can manage. Convince my brother first.”
Peter’s daemon meanwhile is a graceful crane that keeps its head tucked under its wing for the duration of their conversation. Is it asleep? Can daemons sleep when their owners are awake, or is it merely suffering from whatever twyrine haze Peter seems perpetually under? Daniil is tempted to touch it and see if its eyes are as bloodshot as its owner’s, see if he can’t prompt it to speak. None of the daemons since Burakh’s have spoken to him and he isn’t sure whether this is because he’s an outsider or because they won’t or can’t. Do they speak only to other daemons?
And when did the Stamatins manifest theirs? How? Where did they come from? What sets their shape?
There is too much he wants to ask but not from the Stamatins. Peter is too...Peter to answer these questions, and Daniil does not trust Andrey to give him actual answers.
It’s Eva he turns to that night, over a celebratory drink of that blasted burning twyrine, taking advantage of her gratitude over securing her escape from this hellhole to ask after her daemon. If she’s been here as long as the Stamatins have, surely she has one of her own?
Smiling, she looks up and to the right, lifting her finger. A butterfly alights on it, white marbled black, although the longer he watches the gentle fold-spread-fold of the butterfly’s wings the less sure he is about the colour. It’s no species he can identify, but maybe the steppe has its own, or maybe daemons don’t subscribe to such mundane things as regular species.
“He’s shy,” Eva says. “Especially when we didn’t know how you would take it. It’s so strange here, after all. But now that you know...it’s alright, Adam. Say hello.”
And there is, indeed, a gentle hello in response. The talking bull had been disturbing enough, but hearing a deep human voice coming from a butterfly makes the hairs on the back of Daniil’s neck stand on end. He manages to smile back nonetheless.
“Yes, hello, Adam,” he says, just to be polite. Or is that rude, actually, since none of the other daemons have ever acknowledged him? What is the etiquette with these things?
Then, because flattery has never been a bad idea in his experience, he looks to Eva and adds, “He’s a lovely specimen.”
And Eva does blush prettily, so he’ll mark that as a success.
“Have you…?” she starts to say, and makes that same overall sweeping look that’s made his stomach clench since he realised what it meant.
Daniil keeps his voice light, his words flippant, as he says, “Oh, no. My soul remains firmly invisible for now. Probably afraid I’ll try to study it.”
Her giggle helps him ignore the tug he feels internally at the thought. He doesn’t know what the tug means yet.
“Do they normally appear so quickly?” he says.
“No. At least...I don’t think so? It was ever so long before I saw Adam, at least. I don’t know about the rest.” She makes a small, wounded sound, looking at him with very large eyes. “And now you won’t ever get to meet yours. Oh, Daniil, I’m so sorry.”
That tug again, a hook dragging blunt through his intestines. Probably it’s only guilt. Daniil doesn’t have the heart to tell her he has no intention of leaving on that train, and here he is, accepting her pity anyway.
“You agree with Andrey, then? He seems to be of the opinion they can’t exist beyond this town.”
“Oh, I hope they can. I hope we can bring them with us. But if we could, I imagine we would have heard of wonderful talking animals—”
“And butterflies,” Adam adds.
“And butterflies and all manner of things before now. In the world outside, I mean.”
“You never know,” Daniil says. “Perhaps it’s merely a very well-kept secret, much like this town is.”
“Maybe,” Eva says, but her smile is limited to her mouth.
It’s only when Daniil suggests he might ask for her assistance in a thanatological matter that her smile spreads, a little more genuine, although whether that’s due to her fascination with his work or the fact Daniil conjures his Bachelor of Medicine persona to speak about it is up for debate. With the sort of smile he’s used to secure funding for his Thanatica, and all the charm he can muster, he asks her about Adam. Does he sleep, does he eat, how does he speak, does he have her memories, can he see through her eyes or she through his, can he feel her pain, can she feel his. Her answers are circuitous and frustrating but, he thinks, probably the most honest he’s going to get in this town, as both of them are very eager to help. He makes note of it all.
And then, when he’s done writing, he sets his pen down and gestures with his hand towards Adam. Not touching, but close, his hand open in case the butterfly would like to settle on his finger as he had with Eva. Inviting as he can be.
He’s barely even formulated his request when Eva cups her hands over her daemon, her fingers forming a loose cage close against her chest. Adam makes no movement to push against her. Both of them are frozen. Her eyes are wide, face aflame, and the overall impression he’s getting is somewhere between mortification and...delight? He isn’t entirely sure how to read it.
Daniil clears his throat, mirroring her gesture by withdrawing his hand to his chest. His own fingers are closed tight.
“Forgive me, I was getting carried away with the scientific potential. I assure you, I meant no harm.”
“No, it’s—I know, Daniil, of course you wouldn’t harm him.” Her eyes are on Adam as she speaks, voice soft. Like she’s trying to convince the both of them. “And you’ve only been here a little while, so you don’t know yet. Especially without one of your own. No one has told you what it means, have they? To touch another person’s daemon.”
No, but he’s starting to get an inkling. Enough to at least turn down her offer when she does crack her hands open to allow Adam out again.
Daniil is itching to see what they’re made of and how and why, and normally he would hold science and the cold impartiality of medical examination up as his shield against this sort of thing. Worries about impropriety have no room in scientific discovery. He doubts Eva could maintain that level of detachment, however, much as she is clearly trying to, and he has no intention of crossing this particular boundary with her.
“Perhaps another time,” he says, and her palpable relief tells him he made the right choice. Nevermind his disappointment. “You need to prepare for your departure, after all. Did you need help packing?”
Of course, there is no departure in the end. Not for Eva, not for Andrey, not for anyone at all, thanks to the emergency powers Daniil himself bestowed on Saburov. They do not discuss this the next morning, nor does Eva renew her offer to let him examine Adam. The only thing she says to acknowledge the situation is, “At least you’ll get to meet yours now, Daniil. I wonder what it will be.”