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"I don't think I have the words left," Samot still says from time to time.
Sometimes he specifies—words for the lost, for the wronged, for the not-yet-born, for Hieron—but more often than not the complaint goes half-formed and unanswered, scored into an old journal or whispered into Samothes's shoulder as he wakes. It's not that Samothes has no answer. For better or worse, he knows where he's standing.
Any words the old gods have left are gathered here around them, small testimonies set in stone and wood. Days are for building, nights for resting, and dawns, when they must be, for remembrance. Not because the great ball of fire that was Samothes’s first work within the blade burns somehow more sombre in the morning, and not because it’s any particular comfort to live the slow span of a day in paradise regretting somebody’s absence. Sunrise can bring as much dread as the fall of dark. Funerals are held at dawn, and, in the way of such traditions, the reason why is long forgotten.
Death, in Aubade, is a choice rarely taken. The child who lived by the Halisham docks all those decades ago had never attended a burial. They had never seen a star fall, so they had no reason to fear the sky in the last hours of that restless night, when the shield’s glimmer broke to sear blinding white.
They didn't fear the electric buzz of the pale storm as they tumbled out of their bedroom window into the street, nor did they fear the hum of magic under rain-slick cobbles as they ran to watch the waves turn at the seawall. Their steps only faltered when they reached the waterside, because there they tasted something both strange and familiar on the wind; beneath salt and rain, fresh blossoms burning. They stopped fast, hands tight on the harbour railing, before the apparition in the water. Caught in the first sliver of dawn was the body of a man borne in on the roiling tide, all flowers and light, blood unfurling beneath vine-leaves in the shadow of the harbour.
Even then, they didn't fear the dead god so much as fear for him. They bolted back up a road cast in lightning to wake their parents, who ran to wake a physician, who went in turn to wake Samothes.
The child, long since grown, surely still remembers the figure Samothes cut beside the dock that morning. He stood there for longer in memory than in actuality, the storm above him echoing with a new kind of light. Then he gathered his husband in his arms—because what else could he do—and carried him up through the rain-swept streets, the sky folding itself shut at his back.
If Samot had been left to find his own way to the town then perhaps they wouldn't have been so clumsy in those early days. Maybe they would have found a fit pace to negotiate a future, slipped into tempo with the isle’s slow tides. Or maybe not—after all, there was no time nor space for Aubade to do its work. Samot fell through the sun-woven cradle of this heaven in an arrhythmic shower of sharpest edges, of stars and spring, the pretence of a body stitched into that old darkness by the tired hands of Hieron. One moment he was kneeling in Adularia, and the next, with Hadrian’s last goodbye still resounding in bloodied ears, he opened his eyes to see the sun.
Bright, impossibly so, between the parted curtains of a tower bedroom, stone walls too close, air hanging still. Samothes paced that room all the hot, heady morning, then sat pinned to a worn little chair by the weight of a history he had not felt so keenly in a very long time, watching the flicker of his husband’s eyelids and the bruise of purple blossoms at his jaw.
He tried to excise the plants, at first, peeled away fragments of porcelain armour and parted the leaves to reach into Samot's chest with a creator's hands, poised to take him apart. But Samot's heart was a contradiction that defied even the artist in Samothes. It was impossible to tell where plants met muscle, where blood met breath, where flesh sprouted from that seed of the dark.
When Samot woke, then, he was still as much spring as man. There was no slow coming to awareness, no gentle greeting rehearsed over centuries. Samot sat bolt upright and Samothes caught him before he could fly out of bed or tear his wounds open further, hands firm over writhing vines and freezing skin.
“Hold on,” he pleaded, voice as steady as he could make it. “Please just rest.”
It took a moment for Samot's star-seared eyes to focus on the man before him. Samothes's face was drawn with love and apprehension, sun from the window opposite catching the grey flecks in his beard.
"Oh," was all Samot could say, tension dissolving as his tired body went loose in his husband's grasp. They held each other for a long moment. Samothes swallowed back his questions, prayers and accusations so firmly that it was Samot who moved next. His shoulders tightened as he opened his mouth to speak and Samothes felt a trail of thorns scratch along his chest, but couldn’t find it in himself to care.
“Don’t—” Samothes whispered desperately, “—don’t tell me yet.”
—
Harbourmaster, I share your concerns. I don’t think the decreased catch will last, but I understand the spread of vegetation can make familiar waters difficult to navigate. Please find my suggestions and the means to employ them in the attached notes. Some targeted reinforcement should keep the hull from warping or sprouting unnaturally—I’ll fit the oldest with iron , and pine will do for the rest. For the visibility issues I can only recommend brighter lures and longer lines. You would know better than I where to source those nowadays, but if the changing conditions call for a seminar then you know where to find us.
—
Today, as on most days, there are no fresh graves and no new arrivals. It’s barely dawn. The sky is a deep grey-violet, the sun veiled for a half-hour longer while the sea pools as smoke against the jetty. The water stretches open to the north and west until it stops short of the island's inner shore, vague in the mist, but a wide jut of volcanic rock— separated from the main body of the island by a narrow channel invisible from this vantage—obscures the view back to the school-towers of the Cartwright House, dips its verdant head towards the caldera. The old beast will take millennia to settle into the water, if it goes at all, and Samothes will bear witness as he has since the isle's half-sunken summit was first heaved from below, since before there was a sea to drift on or bedrock to hold water.
There’s warmth in the breeze already. Samothes's hands are warmer still, heating metal between strong, deft fingers as he fixes a final spar to an upturned fishing dinghy in the half-dark. This harbour is always quiet in the mornings, but it’s the only place to dock on the islet, and the earliest risers will be setting out soon. Samothes truly did mean for the boats to be fixed the night before, but evenings in the sprawl of forest above the university are always distracting, for nobody more than him.
There’s a further complication, though it almost certainly has a common source. Between the rough mooring ropes at his feet lie vines of a different kind, the forest’s veins sprawling across the dock and trailing into the water to lose themselves in the haze. They resurface in places, leaves like silver fish-bellies, hanging in sodden clumps when the tide's low and dancing like lovers in the current when it’s high. Somewhere out there, the spring reshapes the seabed just as it has this outcrop of land, and Samothes can only admire its persistence.
He twists a final bolt into place with a huff of effort, and has just about gathered his tools to leave when he catches the tap of boots on wood, a figure coming down the docks. It’s a familiar face, unsurprisingly, old nets gathered under the salt-weathered arms of the fisher whose boat sits just past the one Samothes has been attending to.
“Morning,” Samothes hails as he lifts the reinforced boat, turning it upright on its far side until he can tip it over the narrow jetty and onto the water a few inches below. The keel breaks the surface with a hollow slap, the dinghy bobs and settles on its mooring. Ripples spread into the near-perfect calm of the lagoon, fading quickly.
“Good morning.” The fisher nods their head in casual deference as their step dips the jetty. “Working early?”
“Early and late.” Samothes says as he stands. “I'm afraid the festivities are waging war on my schedule.”
“Sounds like they’re winning.” The fisher slings their nets over a post, leaning aside so Samothes can step past on his way back to the shore. “I heard the music. Sounded like a lively night.”
“I didn’t see you at the forum, did I?” Samothes asks over his shoulder.
“Oh, no. That’s a young person’s game.” Their eyes twinkle and Samothes laughs, low and easy. Their smile hasn’t changed since they were a child, traipsing around the harbour on their sister’s arm with sand in their hair and more questions for Samothes than he could possibly answer whenever he passed by.
They have no more questions this morning, only a friendly word and a parting wave as Samothes picks his way past the lobster pots and up the well-worn path to the steep incline of the islet where the woods sway, beckoning. The sun is coming up in earnest now, casting roots and tree-trunks in soft gold.
Samothes quickens his step. Nobody is ever in a hurry in Aubade, really, but he likes to feel that he has places to be.
—
Another morning, decades and hours earlier, a light burned low in a tower bedroom. Outside, the town lay shrouded in the distinct quiet that falls after midnight, that stretch of dark when it might as well be late evening, even at the highest tide of summer.
Samot was sitting at a near-empty desk beside the room's sole window, caught between the faint glimmer of the starshield and the fainter glow of that solitary candle. His chair was turned to face the room—where Samothes leant against the broad stones of the far wall, watching him—but Samot was perched sideways so as to face the desk, in intimate and disapproving communion with a half-full glass.
"This is worse than the wine they pressed at the University, and there they had been in famine for a decade."
Samot spoke with a grating gentleness, as though he were too tired to properly play the critic. He tilted the glass inwards, and Samothes watched candlelight circle its rim.
The wine had been an offering of sorts, bottle heavy and cool in Samothes’s hands as he climbed the spiralling stairs to the room where Samot still lay (or sat, tonight) in recovery. Not the most responsible gift for one still so unwell, maybe, but Samothes knew his husband wouldn't stand to be coddled—not until the long work of repair was underway and they could share a room without it shrinking, darkening into a crypt.
"I'll introduce you to the winemakers," Samothes said, then took a short few steps forward, letting his hand rest on the varnished corner of the desk as he turned his attention to the substance of Samot's comment.
"It must have been strange to see it like that. The University, I mean."
"It was," Samot admitted, still focused on the glass. "I’m glad it was there that—" He tugged at the collar of his shirt, failing to loosen it, in a gesture of discomfort that mirrored his words' halted cadence. "I'm glad I was there, in the end."
While Samothes wore his customary loose trousers beneath a light, open robe, Samot hadn't stopped dressing for city halls, for the bite of winter, all stiff fabric and carefully strung jewellery. Samothes couldn't imagine the style was doing him any favours as he healed, pressing flowers and thorns tight against his skin, but for the moment Samot insisted on it. In Aubade's languorous warmth he looked striking, regal, if far too severe. The window above the desk was open, coaxing the room's air into circulation, but the isle's breezes were mild even at night, bringing little relief.
"I felt closer to you in those towers than I ever did at your sepulchre," Samot was saying, "though I never spoke of it. I don’t think there was anyone left who wouldn’t have thought it strange."
"Maybe," Samothes conceded. "I wish I had been there." Despite the dark look Samot gave him, he persisted. "I know it means nothing, but I still wish it."
"You had a tradition of absence to uphold." Samot had finished his first glass, now, and was pouring a second. "A tradition I started, mind you."
His gaze was too steady as he set the bottle back on the desk, eyes held unerringly to Samothes as though awaiting a response, studying him for signs of the rise of rage that last allusion might have provoked even a century ago. When Samothes gave him nothing, he slumped backwards in his chair, looking impossibly tired.
"Please don't hold back," he said in the low, textured tone of defeat, or something like it. "Don't feign forgiveness. Condemn me, call me a beast or a fool—or anything else you like. I can't bear the thought that you're reserving your judgement."
"I'm not reserving anything," was the only rebuttal Samothes could offer, softly, "and you are a fool."
Samot didn’t respond even to that, only watched Samothes from his chair like a hunter, or a trapped animal, or both. Samothes knew no greater lover of words, of sound, of form and expression itself, than his husband. For Samot to be tongue-tied like this was so rare a thing that the silence made Samothes consider he might be dreaming, and for a fleeting moment his heart dropped through the floor.
"What do you want me to tell you?” he asked for the simple sake of hearing it. “There's nothing I could say of your designs for Hieron that you don't already know.”
Samot set his glass down and spread his hand on the desk, almost, but not quite, beside Samothes’s. Though there was a pendant at his throat and a delicate earring beneath his rough-cropped hair, his hands were unadorned except for a cluster of flower-buds, pushing in an uneven curve from the skin above his knuckles. He savoured his next words, pronouncing them like a fine vintage—finer, certainly, than the amateurish brew he had been drinking.
“I suppose the centuries have done some of our work for us."
"I hope so," Samothes answered, voice as warm as a hearth and as deep as the seamount below. He knew the end of a conversation when he heard it, and he knew, more than anything, that his husband needed time.
For Samot, healing wasn't a matter of tearing the spring from his flesh so much as growing with it, letting the vines shape themselves along the planes of his body. The process would continue to be painful, evidently, but there were ways of managing it, of readjusting his understanding of his own energy and movement. Samothes had his share of ideas, but he couldn't have separated this new aspect of his husband's body from the rest even if Samot had asked, which he never did.
The spring, adjusting in its own right to its place as part of Samot, had designs that Samothes’s ideas couldn’t account for, and perhaps it was these new instincts that drove it, finally, to leave the town.
One cold morning, with few awake to witness it, a great, scarred wolf with flowers strung through its coat walked down from the castle. It padded past the market-stalls and the outer towers, gained speed as it reached the furthest cottages until stone gave way to sand. There were few places to run in Aubade, and the wolf was a predictable creature, so gradually, unevenly, it carried itself to the university.
Here, Samothes had shown his husband around the towers as soon as he could venture outside again, and Samot had said how much of a pleasure it always was to see his work, and Samothes had denied that the school was in any great part his work at all. Here, Samot had gazed up for long nights at the body of a star, and Samothes had told him of the familiar beauty he had seen in their design, and Samot had smiled at the flattery and told him that Chapter was so much more than he had made them to be.
The beast stalked past the towers and through the tall reeds beneath a stilt-borne classroom until it was swimming the balmy channel to a small outcrop of rock on the inner edge of the island, the last remnants of the summit that had once stood here, detached by a meagre several metres from the mainland but standing isolated nonetheless.
Its pelt was sodden from the crossing as it pulled itself from the water, scrambled up rock and over scree, past brittle shrubs and sleeping lizards that skittered away from its passage. When it reached a patch of even grass near the top of the islet it sank down, and where the wolf had collapsed there now sprawled a golden-haired boy (a god, a man), ancient and small, soaked through and shivering.
He looked at the briars that encircled his hands. There was something stuck in his throat and behind his eyes, he knew—obstructive, like the aftermath of crying, except the sensation hadn’t left him in weeks. All he could think was that the spring demanded something from him.
“What?” growled the wolf. “What do you want?” asked the boy, but the flower-heads had no mouths and no voice to answer him.
Where his tears fell, new roots struck into the earth.
—
Professor, I have finally found it in myself to give your problem the attention it deserves. The channel between the Cartwright House grounds and the islet is narrow, but a bridge is no simple matter. Any construction of wood or metal needs to be high—or flexible—enough to account for the high-tide rush and changes in sea level. I understand crossing by sea has served us well enough, and your rope bridge is viable in the short term for small groups of scholars, but it won’t grant full accessibility or hold up to a storm. I met a brilliant young engineer yesterday who was eager to tell me about a new method for minimising strain in the footing of a wider stone structure. I pointed her in your direction.
Regardless, have you seen the way the roots hang over the cliffs these days? I don’t mean to cause alarm, but I think they’re reaching for your school-houses. Maybe my husband’s forest will solve our problem for us.
—
As Samothes begins his climb upwards from the docks, he hears the dawn tuning its chorus—or thinks he does, until his ears adjust to the distant sound and he registers that it isn’t birdsong at all but the practised tuning of human instruments, somewhere beyond the trees. The first of the day’s performances will be starting soon, then. How typical of the young to be readying the party at sunrise. Samothes suspects this is too early even for Samot to have had a hand in it, though he has been wrong before and surely will be again.
The forum which serves as a focal point for the celebrations isn’t yet his destination. Where the well-trodden road stretches up from the bridge that crosses back to the school-grounds of the Cartwright House, Samothes turns instead onto a smaller path that winds between thick roots for a hundred metres towards a small clearing.
Here, where the deciduous trees grow thinnest, all the life in the once-barren soil seems to have been channelled into the broad trunk of a great pine. Its roots unfurl like cracks in arid earth, though small flowers and grasses sprout between them, except where the knots are worn smooth by passing feet or resting knees.
This was as good a place as any, or so they had decided some decades ago, to turn to the purpose of a sort of shrine. It stands near the islet's peak, high enough to look down on Samothes's own church on days when it’s clear enough above the water to see out for a mile or two. Samothes passes by whenever he can, sometimes with an offering and sometimes without, always grateful to see the path in use.
Today, a brown-speckled songbird is pecking at a small basket of bread rolls that has been left nestled between two of the largest roots. Samothes suppresses a smile both at the traces of some other worshipper’s devotion and at the way the little creature hops around the wicker. He settles in a patch of grass some metres away so as not to disturb its meal, and as the thin wind tugs at his hair he closes his eyes.
There was a group, in old Marielda, called the Cult of Wolf and Dragon. Devotees of Samol, of course, and of Severea—until she grew distant, beginning her tour to the northeast, and the cult turned to Samot. Maybe they converted out of wartime necessity, or followed the symbol of the wolf, or were simply drawn by a familiar magnetism—it hardly mattered how they became heretics, only that they were. They thought they operated beneath Samothes’s notice, but in that city there was no corner his light couldn’t pierce. He saw their futile hopes, heard their misdirected prayers, and for the most part he let them be.
Strangely enough, it’s a prayer of that old cult he finds himself reaching for now.
I stand on your shoulders, Dragon, I feel your breath. Is that how it went? I should come more often. After so long, I should be more used to this.
Needless to say, that wasn’t part of the prayer. How did it end?
Guide us through the woods, Wolf, and grant us the words to remember.
Empty words, he had once thought, a fragment of faith misplaced, and yet here they are on his lips when the hope they exalt is barely a memory. Half of it, anyway. The other half is with him against all odds, and maybe that’s why the sentiment still resonates, or maybe his mind is working too hard to justify an old man’s indulgences. Samothes shifts on the uneven earth, sits back on his heels, and feels the spreading chill of dew beneath his knees.
I took a break yesterday to hear a musician play, Dad, and as I watched their hands I thought of yours.
It’s mundane as prayers go, but the centuries tend to sap any store of momentous statements. Moments remain, simple images stuck in the mind.
I saw you reading to a golden-haired boy in the forum last week, my love, and it took me too long to recognise he was a student.
It’s much easier to admit than it once would have been. Samothes has been grieving for his father for centuries, a horror no gentler in its familiarity, but for a long time neither he nor Samot knew how to mourn their son, largely because neither of them felt they deserved to. Long ago, Samothes talked himself into feeling Maelgwyn’s absence by carrying grief as a duty. Not so anymore, not after Samot came to Aubade bearing the brand of the spring as though it meant something, as though it ought to destroy him.
This forest doesn't remember where it came from. It won't do the work of penance for you.
Now sorrow comes with the ease of memory, and that’s better, Samothes thinks; not good, not right, but better.
When Samothes opens his eyes the first thing to come into focus is the scarred face of an old wolf, head resting on its paws as it lies before the shrine, deceptively docile. Its body is giant, flower-pelted, almost glowing in the feeble morning sun, though the light on its vine-ridged back is dappled beneath the leaves. Its eyes are closed and it could well be sleeping, but Samothes knows better.
He whispers a greeting, then reaches to pet the soft fur between the wolf’s ragged ears. Its tail thumps once against the forest floor and it opens a violet eye; it doesn’t deign to reply.
“I know,” Samothes says anyway, with a half-laugh. “That’s not why I pray.”
—
"Do you know what I told Hadrian and his friends about our island, years ago?"
That was the first thing Samothes asked the day he found Samot again, and he didn’t wait for an answer. "I told them—in these words exactly, I think—that in Aubade there was no way to throw a tantrum and leave society behind."
"You should know not to tempt me with the impossible," was Samot's teasing reply, and Samothes allowed himself, however briefly, to feel that all was right.
There was genuine warmth in Samot’s voice that day, but not a drop of humour. Many tides had passed and his hair was longer than it had been. If not for the flowers in his skin he would have looked almost as he used to, reclining on a wide sandstone wall, his back against the column of a fresh-built forum already wound about with vines. The forest breathed around them on every side, and Samothes felt all at once that they needed more time to heal, that he had sought out Samot both far too early and far too late, that he couldn't stand to be apart from him a moment longer. The millennia had made Samothes patient by necessity, but surely even a god of forbearance could not have borne this.
Samot made a place for Samothes in his new routine, leading him between nascent classrooms and bowers of branches. Though he held himself with practised grace, his step was heavier than it had once been, as were his words. Samothes found himself wishing that Samot would just come out with whatever had trapped his tongue, and, as was the way of things in Aubade, time fulfilled his wish.
“Husband,” Samot asked late one evening, voice shot through with dread. “Do you know where—and from what—these plants were forged?”
Samothes said that he didn't, and from there began a journey that led him to the base of Hieron and to nowhere at all, because Hieron had no base, no surface, and no body. It led him to long nights in the forest, and long days walking with his husband when neither of them could sit still to talk, to find the words that would bind the land beneath their feet into something more than a mirage. Once, after further tides had passed, it led them to a long morning out on the rocks by the water, at the base of the miniature forest-isle where Samot had made his home.
It was still dark, just barely, and raindrops burst like stars on the black water, but neither of them had made the move to shelter indoors. The appeal of time inside was enclosure and warmth, sure, but more than anything it was the particular illusion of detachment that walls were built to inflict. For now, both of them needed to feel present, though presence as they knew it was gone, and could only be rebuilt painstakingly from memory. So long as Samot stayed close, the sun-warmth that surrounded Samothes would take care of the rain.
It had been another night of stories, of words that would not bear repeating even if they could be recalled. A vague hue of pale dawn, and the first thing Samothes could remember feeling was Samot taking his hand. Lightly, tentatively, he placed it over his own chest, where he could only hope that the last of the Breath of Hieron still filled the wounds the stars had since vacated, below the leaves and petals that moved above his heart.
"You know I’d give anything for it to be otherwise, but if he's anywhere at all he's with me." A thin stem twined around Samot's fingers, and he looked down. "I suppose they both are."
"You don't have to make me believe that."
"It's a comfort, isn't it?" The question sounded acutely, painfully genuine. "The only pretence of one I can offer, anyway." Samot shifted once, then twice, uneasy, as though adjusting himself in his own skin. Samothes resisted the urge to hold him tighter.
How sickening it must be to feel yourself a living memorial to wrongs so intimate and so public. What use was there in saying that in all Samothes's millennia of creation nothing had astounded him the way Samot did? That his form—spring or no spring—was infinitely wondrous in its impossibility? Samothes had said it a thousand times, and Samot knew his own beauty perfectly well, as intimately as he knew and despised the nothing it sprang from.
Samothes traced a careful, reverent hand down Samot's chest and over his ribs, felt the paper-dry edge of leaves and puckered lines of scarring, the quickening pulse of his heart.
"Sometimes a wound is just a wound," he said, and Samot raised his face, unaware or unashamed of the bruise-dark shadows below his eyes and the loose strands of hair that fell between them. Samothes kept his gaze level. "Let it be. We'll build memorials on our own terms, if you think they can bring any peace, but—"
Samothes didn't continue, in part because his line of argument demanded a confidence he didn't have and in part because Samot was meeting his eyes, shaking his head slowly.
"It wasn't guilt that brought me here." Samot’s voice was deep and strained as he grasped Samothes's hand again, squeezing it to his chest as though if he held it tightly enough it would pierce through flesh to grasp some bloody truth within. Samothes could, would take him apart again if he asked—but he had already seen Samot's plant-riddled body lying open, and there was no insight to be found where those stems entwined with his arteries. Samot knew it too.
"That blade in my chest was a mercy, not a sentence. How vain a killer would I be if I thought this a fit atonement?"
Before the energy of his words had dissipated, Samot twisted backwards and pulled Samothes into a near-desperate kiss. As unexpected and unearned as it was in the midst of the deathly mood that had taken both of them, Samothes reciprocated with force while the moment lasted. Samot tasted of salt, nectar and wine, though he hadn't been drinking, and sharp teeth tugged at Samothes's lower lip as he pulled away.
"I'm old and selfish," Samot confessed once they had separated, his head coming to rest in the crook of Samothes's shoulder. "All I wanted in the end was to be yours again."
The Samothes of old would have killed for an admission like that, and in some sense he probably had, many times over. If he were younger, less careful, he would cover the bitter thrill Samot’s words sent through him with a heated confession in turn, or another kiss, or a well-earned jab— finally seeing what’s in front of you, my love? —and Samot would elbow him in the side with the arm that wasn't crushing their hands together among spring-vines, just hard enough to hurt, and then they would laugh or curse each other or fall into bed and forgo the need for words altogether—but they were both too tired for that.
Samothes didn’t care to test such old, brittle bonds, nor did he trust that he remembered their shape well enough to retrace them. Better to build anew. For so long he had known his husband in fickle, fragmentary things; a letter, a mask, a book out of place, a shadow across a battlefield, a lilting song played streets away, a distant howl, a frozen night, a troublesome scholar, a silver-tongued thief—the list was laughably long, because he had seen Samot everywhere, and all the while he had loved him. It was a blessing beyond measure, now, that he would have the time to know him again. One concession, this, one undeserved mercy in the onslaught of history that had swallowed everything else.
"I hope you want more than that," Samothes said softly, and Samot looked up with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes—not yet, at least.
"Who would I be if I didn't?"
"Hm." With his free hand, Samothes brushed the bothersome stray strand of hair out of Samot’s face and tucked it behind his ear, hand lingering on his neck and coming to rest again over his shoulder. "Aubade has a lot to give, if you'll give it time."
"Kind of you to trust I won’t take too much.” Samot leaned into his husband’s touch, perhaps to offset the barbed compliment. “Tell me—how did you build this place?"
A question with many answers, all ultimately similar. Aubade was built over the span of many tides, with the careful labour of just as many hands. It could be understood as a work of necessity, or the product of a base creative impulse—but Samothes suspected Samot was looking for a different kind of insight.
"Look where we are,” he said. “I think you know."
Samot did as he was bidden. He turned outwards first, to where a subdued dawn spun its webs of light over the sea, then looked back over Samothes’s shoulder to the shadow of the forest. There was a thin trail of smoke spooling into the sky somewhere above, a sign of morning life at some student’s laboratory a few hundred metres inland, but no voices carried to the shore except those of the gulls.
"This?" Samot inclined his head towards the trees. The sorry state of his hair was even more apparent in the growing glow of morning, his ears pink in the cold. He looked off-balance, too young and too old at the same time, as he turned back to Samothes. "I didn’t build the islet. It was the Spring, and the students. I really had very little hand in any—"
Samot faltered as he caught Samothes’s half-smile.
“What? Oh, you’re saying that’s the point.” He rubbed his eyes red with the back of his free hand, crushing petals in the process, too exhausted to properly carry the weight of the conversation.
"I don’t trust us to rebuild,” he said finally, lowering his head to rest below Samothes’s shoulder. “I don’t trust us at all."
“You could at least have the decency to say that to my face,” Samothes admonished with all the lightness he could muster.
“It’s cold ,” Samot grumbled into his chest.
“And whose fault is that? You’re like a block of ice.”
Samot leaned up to press a cold kiss to the skin above Samothes’s collarbone, pulling his free hand down towards the blossoms at his waist, beneath his open shirt.
“Warm me up, then,” he murmured, and Samothes shivered.
“Out here, when you’ve just confessed you don’t trust me, and you barely have a grip on yourself?” Samothes extricated the contested hand and brought it instead to Samot’s face, running a thumb lightly over his cheek. “That would be a new low, even for us.”
“That’s not what I—”
Samot’s protest caught in his throat as he froze at the touch, all the lax mischief evaporating from his body in an instant. Samothes wondered whether he hadn’t realised until now that he was crying.
"It's not a matter of trust." Gentle, simple words, crafted to ease the tension. "As you well know, half of any job is listening, letting yourself be guided." Samothes rested his head above Samot’s, golden strands and green stems tickling his cheek, and he stumbled over the next words even as they left his mouth. "Maybe if I had heeded you I would've learned that sooner."
"Maybe," Samot said, his voice low.
“It's only natural not to trust yourself as the sole architect of the future, my love.”
Samot's nails dug into Samothes's skin, around the wrist of the hand that hadn't moved in what felt like an age, trapped so firmly in the greenery at his chest that it was starting to lose sensation.
"The future?" Samothes couldn’t see Samot’s smile so much as hear it in his tone, grim and tremulous. "No need to worry about that. I'm not sure I trust myself as the sole architect of a… a sketchbook, or a cup of mead."
The desolation in his voice was understandable, justified even, but that didn’t lessen the pang it sent through Samothes.
“Well, even that would be a start,” he said uselessly.
"It would be more than I deserve,” Samot countered in barely a whisper. His shoulders were held taut, starting to shake in earnest, and Samothes watched with a sort of choked, bitter relief as he finally allowed himself to unravel entirely.
For the long span of the sunrise, Samot wept as though the world were coming apart and Samothes held him tightly, face buried in the soft, wild mass of Samot’s hair—until he lifted his head again, because what did it matter if he showed his tears? There was nobody here but his husband, the spring, and the sea.
Samot had held Samothes like this, untold centuries ago, in those brief years when the knowledge that Samol was dying had brought simple sorrow, before all that followed. It was both natural and strange, now, to be the one with arms steady enough to hold him in return. Even after so long Samothes was adrift, a ship so becalmed you'd be forgiven for thinking it at anchor. Perhaps Samot had always felt the same, though he was never at rest—with him, there had never been anything but to wonder whether he had gauged the risk as he charted yet another path into the storm.
Samothes felt something, then, an ache he hadn’t registered, and looked down to see that the thorns of one particularly adventurous vine had dug their way into his half-numb hand where it clasped Samot’s. The pain was warm and sharp and intimate, circling around his finger, pricking its way diagonally across his palm and settling around his wrist. A new understanding, an ancient blood-bond, or neither? Samothes couldn’t say, and gave it no further thought. It was natural, he reasoned, for a plant to seek the sun.
He shifted his palm around and under Samot’s, easing his grip until he could interlock their fingers, and he didn’t pull his hand away.
—
The first time I crafted rings for us they were promise rings, and it was the easiest thing in the world. I had the metal to hand, so I sketched out their shape on a romantic whim, and with all the passion of youth I had them forged in an instant. The second time, for our wedding bands, I fretted over the design for so many nights that I think I tested your temper, and for that I'm sorry, but it was a sweet sleeplessness.
This time will be more difficult still. I considered adding an inscription or a small floral engraving, but I suspect we'll tire of such symbols in time. Simple rings, then, in the yellow-gold of your hair and of my suns. I know you're fond of ornament, but I hope you'll agree.
—
“Let’s be on our way,” Samothes says, giving the wolf an affectionate scratch beneath the chin. “You’re scaring away the birds.”
As he stands, Samothes stretches out the soreness that has set into his muscles after the morning's work, and realises that his knees are stiff too. He would do well to remember, the next time he visits the shrine, that he’s hardly of an age to be kneeling for so long.
The wolf gives a deep huff, shaking dew from its coat, and bounds beside Samothes as he wends his way back to the path and uphill again into the forest. Its gait is practised—not as spry as it once was, but measured to keep pace. Samot doesn't speak just yet, as is often his choice when he takes this form. Samothes tells him of his morning at the docks, and with an animal's grin the wolf brushes past him to take the path ahead, flower-stems catching on his robe.
That distant music grows closer and more distinct throughout the walk, strings slipping into tune as players’ hands are warmed by sunrise. The air tastes of youth, and it burns at the back of Samothes’s throat, but all the same he savours it. Not every day is like this.
Finally, after a climb that steals half his breath, Samothes reaches the summit of the islet. Here, on what was once a volcanic plateau, stands the forum that was the first human construction in this strange extension of the university grounds, set deep in the sprawl of the forest of spring.
His companion pads ahead as Samothes pauses to watch the crowd gathering between the pillars. A moment later, there stands Samot, the grey-white of the wolf entwined with yellow in the radiant tumble of his hair. The morning sun isn't strong, there in the fractured sky above the canopy, but the slight flush across Samot's cheeks suggests the climb has warmed him well enough, though his clothes, much like Samothes's own, aren't suited to the post-dawn chill. A simple dress, half-open at the chest and gathered at the waist; the apparel of a younger man, perhaps, but as ever Samot carries it well.
The boy-king matured , is what comes to Samothes's mind, looking at his husband. Such epithets have no place here in Aubade, but the fact remains that this long, luxurious stretch of time has been barely a flicker in the span of their immortal lives. One of the first lessons Samol taught Samothes, when he was a barely-formed impulse of a forge-god, was that nothing he crafted could ever truly last. Now, he offers a small prayer to nothing that this—this outcrop, this isle, this community, this Samot; Samot the scholar, the reveller, the lover—will defy the logic of that first and final darkness, and will not pass until Samothes himself is gone.
For the moment, life between the town and the university is inconvenient, joyous, and oddly nostalgic. The two of them play at negotiating each others' domains as they did millennia ago, only this time with none of the authority, none of the terror.
Nobody has given them another house to live in together, and they haven't yet built one. Sometimes one of them or the other dreams of a new home, and the walls close in as they once did, and vines sprout from the dark wood and the panels bleed.
Samothes has been drawing plans for a cottage for a few years, adjusting the slant of the roof and the direction of the windows as though there's a single elusive design that will keep memory out and let the world in, or the other way around. He hasn't chosen yet. Sandstone would be sturdier, but wood is so flexible, so abundant. He hasn't decided that either.
Samot has seen him drawing, has picked up the habit of tidying the plans that remain on the mess of Samothes's desk after he falls asleep. He likes to watch the walls rise and fall, the stairs sink, the bedroom grow, and the furniture sketch itself into place from month to month.
It's a pleasure to see Samothes's mind at work without the shadow of consequence or the urgency of an end. Samot catalogues the drawings' spread through notebooks, and adds little notes of his own, and wonders whether his husband notices (he does, of course).
Samothes could ask, as could Samot, but neither of them feels the need to. The tide is high, the horizon hazy, and beyond it the bristling wave of history no longer bears down on every detail. Their life here is a miracle so costly that it can hardly be called a blessing, but a forest is a forest; a house will be a house, and many other things besides.
One thing they have, after all, is time.