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When Essek was a child, he had a collection of carnivorous plants.
His mother obtained them for him after a visit to the glasshouse at the Marble Tomes Conservatory. They must have been horrifically expensive, Essek realized later; she must have had to bribe the horticulturists. Such things are not easily propagated anywhere, never mind in the land the gods left desolate, under a blanket of eternal night.
There were many things Essek did not realize until later. Like: there were reasons that the glasshouse he so loved in his youth was the only place in Rosohna spilling with blossoms and greenery, with ferns and palms and pitcher plants and delicate little flytraps. Like: it did not need to be a glasshouse at all; this custom, born of sunnier lands, served less as practicality than conceit. Like: its master arcanist, the enchanter who had raised the conservatory two lifetimes ago, was eleven years dead then. Essek was eleven years old.
The days when Deirta Thelyss would spare no expense for the frivolities that caught her son’s eye would not last very long.
They lasted long enough for that, though: for Essek’s chambers to fill with strange plant life. There were pitchers in pink and green and mottled purple and lacy white, some tall and slender, some short and squat. The flytraps gaped tiny mouths with slender green fangs, some of them barely large enough for a mosquito. The sundews were Essek’s favorite, the most beautiful: leaves and stems all covered in tiny droplet-topped bristles, glittering like they were crusted in gems.
A few of them were flowering, when the servants first moved them into his rooms. Pink, delicate, five-petaled blossoms on the sundews. Enormous alien baubles nodding on stalks over the pitcher plants’ heads.
That was the last time they would flower. The plants withered slowly under Essek’s care. No matter how many spiders he fed them, how much he watered them, how many different sources of arcane light he tried — they all turned brown, eventually, and crumbled to dust.
Plants do not get second lives. Essek didn’t either. He remembers learning that, not long after: there was no better person waiting in the well of his soul. He was just Essek, and his failures were his own.
---
“Shit!” Jester screams, half-bubbles, and Essek turns, and sees Caleb fall.
His hair streams out behind him. In the green light of the cavern, it’s a muted flame.
Jester’s eyes are wild. Her hands are dark with blood — her husband’s blood. Fjord is on one knee beside her, coughing himself back to consciousness, blood billowing horribly from the gashes in his chest.
Essek categorizes. Resources available — Caleb is down. Problems he can solve. Problems he can’t.
He turns on his heel, tears a Gravity Fissure through the last two sea spawn, and they crumple, lifeless, on the spot.
Jester spins around instantly, stretching out a hand, and Essek recognizes the Spare the Dying cantrip. There’s no change to Caleb’s pale face; a single bubble of air escapes his mouth. Jester turns back to Essek, and it’s impossible to tell underwater, but there might be tears on her face.
“I’m out of healing,” she says, an edge of desperation in her voice. “If more of those things find us before Cad and the others do —”
Problems he can solve. Essek says, “I can make somewhere safe.”
Caleb taught him the spell several months ago. He insisted, after Essek came home with yet another new scar; If I can’t come adventuring with you, schatz, at least let me give you something to keep you safe.
You’ve given me several things to keep me safe, Essek had answered, touching the amulet at his neck, the ring on his finger, and Caleb had laughed and answered, Well, you don’t have to attune to this one.
Caleb hasn’t seen it yet. None of them have. Essek was in Tal’Dorei when he received Jester’s summons — the fight to contain Uk’otoa, once and for all, is happening now.
Not now, as it turns out. In eight hours, perhaps, if they can all get a proper rest.
Fjord coughs again.
“Give me — one moment,” Essek says. He fumbles for his wristpocket. The potpourri won’t scatter too much in the water, he hopes; he bought it from a very specific shop in Ank’Harel, and explaining its loss would irritate the owner. There is the wooden figure, carved out of a leftover scrap from Caleb’s mantel in Rexxentrum. The beach glass he found in Nicodranas. The weathervane ornament he took from his own towers in Rosohna when he left.
“Will there be air in there?” Jester asks, worried. “The water-breathing won’t last forever, you know —”
“There will be air,” Essek assures her. He casts the spell.
The glowing doorway appears before them. Caleb has more color, already, in its light.
Essek reaches for him, drawing him close, fumbling to pull Caleb’s limp arm over his shoulder to better support his weight.
Jester is doing the same for Fjord. She looks better equipped for it than Essek feels.
“Please. Come in,” he tells her, gesturing clumsily, and for the first time in years, he welcomes the Mighty Nein into his home.
---
“I could use some time in the garden,” Essek told Caduceus once. “It’s been a while.”
A while. Specifically: it had been since the Shadowshire asked his aid in improving their crop yields. Essek’s specialty in time, they thought, might have useful applications; perhaps he could increase the rate at which the rice would reach maturity, multiply the number of growing seasons per year.
The experiment had failed spectacularly. The magnification of time, Essek could achieve — but the plants died in revolt.
Perhaps that didn’t count as a garden. In that case, it might have been since childhood, since the glasshouse. Essek didn’t keep much of a garden at his own home in Rosohna, just a tidy enough yard to avoid notice. He was more than happy to tear it up for the Nein.
“You’ll like this garden,” Caduceus answered. “And for your curiosity — almost every plant that grows within this place is unique and only grows here, so if there's anything you feel the urge to poke or prod at, just ask. Probably a little bit of it is more than happy to stay in your possession.”
Essek didn’t take anything from the Blooming Grove. He wandered for a while, with his sunhat and his rose-patterned gloves and the trowel Caduceus gave him, but he wasn’t sure what to use it for. Caduceus was right that there were strange plants here — lilies with long spindly petals that looked like they might take off walking. Tangling vines adorned with bright pink puffs of flower. Ghost-white flowers he mistook at first for mushrooms, pushing like dead man’s fingers up out of the ground.
In the years that came after, though, Essek would visit the Grove from time to time. Not too often; not enough to overstay his welcome. But after a while, he started bringing Caduceus odd fruits and seeds and cuttings from his travels, to see if Caduceus might want to try making them grow.
“They will if they want to,” Caduceus usually answered. “They won’t if they don’t.” But he’d plant what Essek brought, even if usually when Essek found it later it didn’t look quite like what he remembered from Issylra, or Zephrah, or Marquet.
He wondered, sometimes, how Caduceus chose which graves which flowers might belong to. He wondered if they’d still be doing this a century from now. If he’d be bringing Caduceus seeds for Fjord’s grave. For Caleb’s. Beau’s and Yasha’s, Jester’s and Kingsley’s and Veth’s. If it ever made Caduceus angry, to think that they’d all be gone.
---
Seawater spatters on the slate tile.
Essek lands hard on his knees, forgetting for a moment to adjust his gravity cantrip for the sudden change in environment. Caleb’s coat is dripping water onto his floor. Caleb’s face is pale and waxy. “You damn fool,” Essek tells him, wrestling sodden fabric out of the way in search of Caleb’s components pouch, “you better have replaced it this time —”
From somewhere above him, he hears Fjord’s voice, a little dreamy with pain. “Essek. This is beautiful.”
Essek digs past Caleb’s stash of silk cocoons. His vials of dust and guano and sulfur, his copper wire. His stained glass. His catalogue of stones.
There. The hidden pocket Caleb thinks Essek doesn’t know about. The one that always contains a single, unremarkable healing potion.
Caleb’s used that last-reserve potion to save Essek’s life twice now. Once, in Aeor, when Essek thought they were done. Once at his home in Rexxentrum, when Essek teleported in bloody and fainting. The first time, Caleb lied, presumably because he knew how furious Essek would be that he hadn’t used it, a few hours earlier, for himself. The second time, Essek caught him in the act.
“Essek.” Jester’s voice is trembling. “Essek, if it’s all we’ve got left — we should save it.”
Essek sits back on his heels.
He doesn’t want to save it. He wants Caleb to be awake, now, so Essek can yell at him.
He wants Caleb to be awake, now, and see what Essek did with his spell.
“He’ll wake up.” She sounds steadier now. “He’s stable. You’ve made it safe for him. He’ll wake up.”
Then she says, “You made a greenhouse,” and Essek looks up.
It’s like the Marble Tomes glasshouse of his youth, but also unlike it. Palms and figs and mangroves and tree ferns reach up for the ceiling, and a sourceless waterfall spills through them. The walkway spirals upward, clinging impossibly to the dangling roots of a banyan tree, and vanishes into the greenery. Everywhere there are flowers — dusky pink orchids and brilliant bromeliads, violet and yellow and red.
There are also the plants Essek has encountered in his travels. The ones that grow only in the Blooming Grove, or the Rifenmist Jungle, or the Oderan Wilds. There are plants no one in Rosohna has ever seen.
He takes a shaky breath. He replaces the potion in its loop of leather.
He says, “I’ll show you your rooms.”
---
Once, a few years ago, Essek convinced Reani to come adventuring with him.
It was Umagorn who suggested it. “She’s been having lady troubles again,” he confided. “Do her some good to get some sun, anyway.”
“You realize the irony,” Essek pointed out.
“You gonna tell me that breastplate’s giving you trouble? My handiwork?”
“Not at all,” Essek answered, chastised. It was the reason Reani had introduced him to Umagorn in the first place; I’ve got a gift for you! she declared. Only it won’t be ready for three to five months. And he’s got to measure you first.
The generosity of it was still inconceivable. The breastplate shone gold like the sun, matching the elven guise Essek wore in Uthodurn; in his own clothes, it was light enough to fit under his mantle. When he wore it, the sun didn’t hurt his eyes — at least not, Reani told him, any more than was normal.
It also protected him from radiant spell attacks. Reani didn’t tell him about that property until they were nearly caught staking out the Tumblecarve estate one day; then she yelled, “Stop, thief!” and hit him with a Sunbeam, full in the chest.
The shock knocked Essek over even when the pain didn’t. That made it easy for Reani to pull him up by the scruff of his neck. “The Ivae’ess thanks you,” she informed the bewildered guards, gravely, and hauled him away.
Afterward, there had been more vehement discussions — I can’t accept this, Essek tried, I’ve never even heard of an item like this, it must have been fabulously difficult to create, and Reani just answered, Well, obviously, since Umi’s the best smith in the world, but how’s anyone gonna know that if he doesn’t make things no one’s ever made before? — with the end result of Essek promising to bring Umagorn whatever fantastic materials he might find in his travels, as he would have done anyway.
So far, his greatest successes in that realm had come from the Heartmoor, deep in Marquet. He hadn’t expected plants to be much use in forging, but Reani and Umagorn disagreed; apparently, certain smokes at certain points in the process could imbue a magical weapon with incredible properties. And the plants of the Heartmoor were incredible in their own right, though all he’d really intended to do with them was bring Reani a flower crown.
That was where he took her, then, when Umagorn asked him. He took her all over Marquet: to Ank’Harel, where even Reani admitted the sun was too strong; to Yios, where they spent three days browsing bookshops for a gift to bring home to Caleb; to the Heartmoor and the Taloned Highlands and the spires of Jrusar.
“Essek,” she told him one day, hands busy on what seemed to be not a crown but a mantle of wildflowers, “this is a very perfect vacation. But we aren’t doing much adventuring, are we?”
They were in the mountains; Reani had spread out a blanket for their picnic lunch, among waving grasses and carpets of yellow lilies, high up on a sunny slope. “We fought a bog spider,” Essek pointed out. “And a troll.”
“I know. I just —” She sighed, dropping her hands. “Umi put you up to this, didn’t he?”
He knew Reani well enough, by then, to know she’d take his silence as an answer.
“It’s not like my heart’s broken,” she burst out, before he could think of a deflection. “Fen’s just — she’s —”
She stopped again. Essek waited a minute, realized he was twisting his fingers together like Reani’s flower stems, and flattened them in his lap. “Did you two — try again?”
“I don’t know what she wants!” The flowers tumbled when Reani threw up her hands, yellow lilies and blue larkspurs and bright fuchsia shooting stars. “One moment it’s like she’s — tucking my hair behind my ear and saying things about — the color of my eyes, and the next it’s all you know the reasons we can’t be together, which, I don’t, by the way, it’s not like you and Caleb don’t make it work with one of you out adventuring and one of you stuck at home, and besides, it’s not like her job isn’t dangerous, too, so —”
There was a sharp ache behind Essek’s sternum. They had turned into eagles to fly here; he found himself wishing, suddenly, for bird bones, that airy strength. A wingbeat’s worth of muscle between his heart and Reani’s words.
“— Essek?”
He blinked. Reani was looking at him, a frown between her eyebrows. “I’m sorry,” he tried. “I must have missed the question.”
“There wasn’t one.” She was moving in front of him, taking his hands. They felt cold despite the warmth of the sun. “Are you okay?”
Essek thought, again, of Fen. She was young — not yet into her second century. Perhaps just old enough to watch the first of her non-elven friends begin to age and die.
“It takes a great deal of bravery,” he found his mouth saying, “to love someone with the knowledge you will lose them.” Then, because it felt odd to accuse himself of what some might call a virtue: “Bravery, or — or a certain willingness to suffer.”
“Fen’s brave.” Reani’s voice was very small.
“She is.” Essek discovered that he could squeeze her hands back. “Maybe not as brave as you.”
Her eyes were glittering. She was smiling, though. “You’re a good friend, Essek.”
I am not, protested a familiar voice in his head, the voice that always remembered he had sold beacons and doomed innocents before he ever loved anyone enough to care. I am not a good anything.
“You’re good,” Reani said again, insistent. Reani, who had an angel in her head; Reani, to whom he’d gone willingly and confessed all his sins. “I’d know, right? You’re good, Essek.”
He cleared his throat. His cheeks felt damp. “We are not talking about me,” he reminded her, and went to help her gather up the fallen flowers.
---
Essek’s tower has no solid walls.
It’s a conceit, like the glasshouse in Rosohna — like the plants themselves, magically luxuriant, living without life in this place beyond the laws of the material plane. Essek has never been able to keep a real-life plant from dying, but these vanish and bloom again every time he casts his spell. He can afford a little extravagance.
He has never had guests here, but he has planned for them. The glass-walled towers connect via walkways, spiraling higher; dense vegetation provides each chamber the privacy the panes do not. Viewed from afar — impossibly, within this space beyond space — the whole affair might take on the shape of a tree. An Arbor Exemplar, maybe, or the one the Mighty Nein planted like a beacon on Essek’s skyline. Like that one, this would glow softly from within.
His and Caleb’s chambers are an interconnecting suite — a miniature tower all their own. There is one bed, although it still makes him feel warm each time he thinks of it — presumptuous, despite their years together. He feels somehow even more presumptuous providing the same layout for Fjord and Jester — for Beau and Yasha, when they arrive.
“Who do we ask for food?” Jester asks him, when he is about to leave her and Fjord to their tower. “I mean — are there cats, or —”
Essek blinks.
Caleb’s tower spell comes with one hundred servants, of the caster’s choosing. Essek created a kitchen like Caleb’s, down beneath the bottom floor among the roots, but as for servants —
“I will bring you some dinner in a few moments,” he promises. “I apologize for the inconvenience.”
Jester’s brow furrows. She looks oddly upset by this; “You didn’t want cats?”
“Ah.” Essek glances at the leaf beside his face; there is a tiny poison arrow frog perched there, patterned bright yellow and black and electric blue. “I — they’re not very good at cooking. And I wanted to practice, myself.”
She follows his gaze. It seems to take her a moment, but then a slow, lovely smile steals across her face. “Essek. Did you make frogs?”
“The glasshouse in Rosohna had them.” He can feel his ears flushing; he used to love to look for them, all the different colors and varieties. He could spend hours among the greenery, searching. “I did not — feel the need to make them useful, as it were. When it was just me.”
He made rooms for all his friends, even though it was just him. He ignores that, and hopes Jester will as well.
She does, though her face softens further. She stands on her tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek. “No hurry. Come get me if you need help.”
“I will,” Essek promises, and goes to settle a sleeping Caleb in their rooms.
---
It took a long time — longer than Essek would like to admit — to muster up the courage to go to Bazzoxan.
His life had revolved so many times on a place he’d never been. His father had lived here — an unknowable life, and a harsh one, far from the dance he stepped into on his visits to the capital — and he had died here, too. The Mighty Nein lost Yasha here, and gained the Bright Queen’s trust. Verin had stepped too-young into the Taskhand’s shoes here, and left Essek to wonder if he would become like their father: alien. Impenetrable. Subject to bouts of severe religious feeling — the kind that could make a person walk through the Umbra Gates in search of martyrdom over shame.
Or perhaps that had never been the problem. Perhaps it had been love, all along, and Essek refused to see it. Perhaps Essek, oblivious, had sentenced his father to die out of fear for his son.
Regardless. He was here now.
If the gardens of Rosohna were inhospitable, Bazzoxan was absolutely desolate.
A few thorny shrubs straggled against the walls, showing no signs that they had ever produced a single leaf. Essek crept through them, invisible; beneath the illusion, he was wearing a half-orc’s body. He touched the ring on his finger and mentally thanked Caleb once again for the enchantment that allowed him to assume another’s form unhindered by concentration. It always felt strange, the shifting of skin, the reordering of organs — but it was a great deal safer than a Seeming alone.
The thorns caught at his clothes. He unsnagged himself quietly, watched for an opening — and slipped through the gate.
Inside the city, he dropped his invisibility. His clothes were already those of a Kryn soldier; his guise was unremarkable. He made his way to the fortress, wringing his hands with unfeigned anxiety, and requested an audience with the Taskhand.
It was forty-five minutes later — more quickly than Essek expected — that he was ushered into Verin’s office.
His brother looked tired. There were papers all over his desk, and ink stains on his hands. He looked up and set down his quill, and his eyes were kind. “Yes — Tristan, was it?”
Essek had borrowed one of Fjord’s less-used pseudonyms, along with elements of his appearance. “Yes. One moment, please.”
He reached into his pocket, pressed down on the bead of arcane abeyance waiting there, and a soundless wave washed out to fill the room.
In the instant he moved, Verin’s chair scraped back, loud with alarm. The next, he was on his feet, hand tense on the hilt of his sword. “What’s the meaning of this?”
He didn’t draw it, though. He didn’t move for the glaive leaning against the wall.
Essek raised both his hands in peace. “I apologize. No one can hear us now from outside this room — or spy on us by magical means. If you’ll just allow me —”
The moment he reached to rotate the ring on his finger, Verin moved.
Please don’t stab me, Essek thought. Caleb will be so furious with me if you stab me —
Verin swept him into a hug.
It felt very strange, being squeezed in another’s arms as the magical transformation took place. Essek gasped, his body shrinking, but Verin’s hold only tightened; he buried his face in Essek’s neck.
Essek hit his back feebly. “Stop it. Let me go.”
“No.” Verin’s voice was muffled.
“I could have been an assassin.”
“I knew it was you the moment you stuck your hand in your stupid pocket.”
“Assassins have pockets —”
“No one wants to assassinate me.”
“You’re the son of an Umavi. And brother of a traitor to the Queen.”
Verin drew back, holding Essek by both his shoulders, a frown wrinkling his forehead.
Essek felt a queasy affection bring a smile to his face; Verin had always worn the same expression when he was puzzling through something difficult. “I should let you know that I’ve made extensive, and rather dire, promises not to let you arrest me.”
More specifically, Caleb’s words had been, I’ve walked a beacon into the Lucid Bastion to free a prisoner once, and I’ll do it again, do you hear me, Essek Thelyss?
“I’m not going to arrest you.”
“You should arrest me.”
Verin ignored him. “Are you all right? Where are you — no, don’t answer that. What do you need?”
What did he need?
It suddenly felt very hard to swallow. Essek managed, once, and then again.
There had been a time — a long time — when in all the world, he only loved one person.
“I wanted to give you these.” He had borrowed a bag of holding; the gauntlets were more than could fit inside his wristpocket. “There are — a dozen pairs, I think. But we can make more. They’re made to fit with your regular armor, they should be interchangeable —”
Verin was staring down at the bundle of armor in his hands. “That looks like chitin.”
“It’s metal, but we figured out how to make it look like it isn’t. It’s got a death ward on it. It should — it only works once, all right? If you use it once, you — you need to let me know, so I can get you more.”
“Let you know,” Verin echoed.
“Yes — oh.” Essek reached into the bag again and held out a sending stone. “If you speak into this, I’ll hear it. Only twenty-five words, though, so —”
Verin took it, but his eyes were still on the armor. He was frowning. “Essek, you know I’m consecuted.”
Again, that birdbone feeling. “Yes. But most of your soldiers aren’t.”
“I have more than twelve soldiers.”
“We can make more.”
“It would be selfish of me to use these, when I could give them to someone who —”
Essek’s temper flared. “It would be selfish of you to die and leave them to face whatever monster killed you without your help.”
Verin went very still.
What do you need? Essek’s throat felt tight again. Their fight when Essek refused consecution had been quieter and more awful than the ones with his father and mother, but at least Verin hadn’t gotten himself killed over it.
Verin hadn’t told him about his own ceremony until after it was over, either.
“I won’t be around,” Essek tried to say, but his voice came out very small. “This time. If you come back. I won’t be around to help with the, the memories, and so —”
“All right.” Verin was taking the gauntlets out of his hands. “All right.”
Essek breathed a long, shaking sigh of relief.
“I told you not to tell me where you’re staying, though.”
He glanced up in surprise.
Verin’s mouth was turned up in a sideways half-smile. “That’s Uthodurn work. I’m not an idiot, Essek.”
Essek found his own mouth smiling, helplessly, without his command. “Yes, you are.”
It wasn’t a long visit. The Taskhand couldn’t vanish without notice for hours at a time. Essek crept back out of the city, through the thornbushes, but later, at Reani’s, he discovered that it wasn’t their prickles that had stuck in his robes; it was small, hard, finely barbed seeds.
At some point, somehow, even the wastes of Bazzoxan had produced flowers.
He brought some of the seeds to Caduceus and the Blooming Grove. He kept some for himself, though. He figured, if these seeds could survive Bazzoxan, maybe even he could make them grow.
---
Caleb sleeps. His chest rises and falls.
Essek watches it through his trance.
Breathing is one of the things you can keep time to, while trancing — your own, or another’s. This is often how Essek spends his nights in Rexxentrum, counting Caleb’s breaths. Sometimes, on his dark days, he thinks: counting down Caleb’s breaths.
But he tries not to do that. He tries to let the rhythm be a current that soothes him. He lets his mind drift in it, to friendlier shores. To the pages of new research he has ready to share with Caleb when all of this is over. To the little garden behind Caleb’s house, where Yasha planted some cuttings Essek had abandoned in the kitchen one day — he’d had to flee quickly, or risk a run-in with the Augen Trust —
Since then, Essek’s been a little more willing to try planting seeds of his own. The thornbushes from Bazzoxan are doing well.
Three hours into their rest, Caleb gasps awake.
Essek is ready: a hand on his cheek. A kiss to his forehead. “Shh. You’re safe. Sleep.”
“We’re in your tower,” Caleb says, voice scraping, as if he can tell that from an instant’s glance, just this side of death’s door.
“Sleep,” Essek tells him again, and Caleb lies back. Obeys.
They drift together, in the glasshouse under the sea.
---
Carnivory evolves in plants in response to deprivation.
That is not quite true. Carnivory evolves in plants because it allows them to live where others cannot. In the sparsest of boglands, they spread their murderous leaves under the sun, and capture nutrients from their prey where the soil offers them none. Few, if any, trees grow there; they cast scant shade. Like a Kryn on the day of the Luxon, the pitchers and flytraps and sundews are exposed. Suffused. They care little for soil; they worship the light.
Some people, Essek has noticed, also live in intolerable places on purpose. They pride themselves on their toughness. Their selfishness. They wield it like a weapon and laugh at those who falter. Essek has been one of these people.
He has also read scientific tomes — the writings of the illustrious professor who was not him — that tell him plants have no morals, no intent. They simply grow where they grow, and survive.
Essek met that professor, eventually. It was inevitable that their paths should cross, though the professor — long since retired from arcane study — kept mostly to his garden in those days. Essek had taken to avoiding it. Essek had nearly exhausted the frontiers of learning available to him within the strictures of the Dynasty; his plans to steal the beacons were well underway.
They were at a gala; an anniversary celebration. The professor was in the body of an elderly bugbear. The one he’d wound up in instead of Essek’s own.
“You know, I tried to raise some of your carnivorous plants once,” Essek told the old master of the Marble Tomes. He made his voice sound bored; a lick of mockery. A vine growing among cattle will bedeck itself in thorns. “They struck me as altogether too delicate. I suppose they need a glasshouse to survive.”
The professor wore enormous round glasses. He smiled at Essek over them, as if he hadn’t felt the barb. “Perhaps. Many things may seem delicate, when they’re far from home. I would encourage you to visit them in their natural habitat if you ever have the chance, Shadowhand Thelyss. I believe you’ll discover they thrive.”
---
Caleb wakes while Essek is downstairs, assembling breakfast.
He makes soup, because he knows how to make soup. Slicing the vegetables is comforting, rhythmic; Jester comes in when he’s halfway through, but he doesn’t notice her for a solid two minutes.
His mind is elsewhere. On the rest of the Nein — they arrived in the middle of the night, spilling through the doorway with an extravagant splash of seawater from Kingsley’s coat. He thinks about Beau, leaning on Yasha, sporting an ugly swollen cut just above her left eye, but grinning — offering Essek a thumbs up. He thinks about Caduceus, ducking through the entry and glancing around with a placid, This is nice; about Veth, complaining about having to learn the Water Breathing spell.
He’s thinking about the merrow priests they said they ran into on the way. That’s three more of Uk’otoa’s allies down. Essek categorizes: problems they’ve dealt with. Problems they haven’t.
“Essek,” says Jester, “are you making breakfast soup?”
Essek jumps.
He spills hot broth on his shoe. Apparently, even with years of Sendings behind him, he still hasn’t learned to expect Jester’s sudden voice in his ear in his moments of quiet.
“Jester.” He puts the ladle back in the pot and turns, with a little laugh; “It is soup, and I suppose it’s for breakfast. I don’t really know how to cook many things. I hope that’s all right.”
Her eyes widen. “Oh my gosh, of course it’s all right, Essek! Breakfast soup sounds perfect.”
He studies her. Something in her seems more fragile, more breakable than usual — even perched there on his counter with her feet swinging. “And what about you? Are you all right?”
He sees the impulse toward bravado cross her face. She laughs and touches her hair, taking in a breath as if to declare she’s never been better; then she looks to the side and smiles a little and says, “I’m scared for Fjord. I mean, I know why he wants to do this, and don’t get me wrong I would love to stop having creepy drowned corpses crawl into our cabin to try and murder him at night, but — I keep having these nightmares where he dies and I don’t have a diamond, or I do but it doesn’t work —”
She stops abruptly. There’s a hard lump of stone in Essek’s throat. Jester’s eyes are shining. “What can I do to help?”
She lies back on the counter, and Essek does not comment on sanitary kitchen practices. “Distract me,” she says, spreading her arms. “Tell me about where you’ve been traveling. Oooh — tell me something Caleb doesn’t know yet.”
So he does, talking as he works. He tells her about his recent researches, and his new theory on the nature of the beacons; he tells her about the stops he’s made in Marquet. He tells her about a pompous museum-owner in Heartmoor Hamlet, and all the fantastic artifacts he claims to possess; Jester laughs at that. Several frogs have materialized from the vegetation as he’s been speaking. Two of them are perched in Jester’s hair.
He tells her about the adventuring party he encountered in a tavern, there in the Heartmoor. He doesn’t think they noticed him, but he watched them for some twenty minutes, from a far corner at the bar; he felt unaccountably drawn to them. Perhaps it’s simply because one of them had an Uthodurnian accent.
“Are you going to replace us, Essek?” Jester demands, sitting up; the frog leap for safety. “Did they all look at you and say, ohh, that’s a big mama duck, he’s gonna take us under his wing —”
Essek laughs at that. But he keeps thinking about it, as he slices bread and ladles the soup into bowls; as he and Jester divide the task of carrying them to everyone’s rooms. About — it wasn’t that party, not in particular. It was only that they reminded him a little of the Nein when he first met them, full of bravado and off-putting antics and obvious affection for each other; it was only —
And it isn’t just them. He keeps thinking about Reani, too, and the old professor, and Umagorn and Verin and his soldiers and how — the world is full of people. That’s all. It’s just very full.
When he lets himself finally into his own chambers, breakfast tray in hand, he finds Caleb standing by the far wall. He’s inspecting something — an orchid, maybe, or the structure of the glass walls. He hasn’t dressed yet, and there are freckles on his pale back. His hair brushes his shoulders.
Essek’s throat feels tight. He loves this idiot of a man; he loves him so much he can barely breathe.
The tray clatters slightly when he sets it down.
“This is fascinating,” Caleb says. “You’ve made the plants part of the architecture, haven’t you? It’s the glass, almost, that’s decorative. I never thought of trying something like that.”
Essek says, “I’m going to love other people after you.”
Caleb glances over his shoulder, and his eyes are clear and blue. He must see the scowl on Essek’s face, but he’s smiling when he walks over. He takes Essek’s hands in his. “I know, schatz. I’m glad.”
“I’m not. It’s stupid.” Emotion burns suddenly, hot and angry, at Essek’s eyes and his throat; the Nein are his family. His home. The garden he’s slowly learning to tend. He built his tower like this, for all of them; he doesn’t want to have to change it. Not ever.
But that’s stupid, too. He’ll change it if he journeys with Reani again — she’ll need rooms. He’ll bring it to Bazzoxan and build a version for Verin. Verin will like that: a closet in his room full of bromeliads. Verin was always delighted at the frogs swimming in their little leaf-pools.
Caleb changes his tower all the time. He has changed it for Essek.
“You are very good at loving people.”
“I don’t want to.” It comes out petulant.
“Well. We seldom have a choice in that matter.”
Essek has chosen not to. He has chosen not to for a hundred years.
He’d thought, back then, it was such a brazen decision — to live just once. To scorn attachments. To burn a single candle as bright as he possibly can. Fate — the Luxon, maybe — has a sense of humor. Essek has lifetimes ahead of him, even if they’re not his own.
Caleb touches his cheekbone, just below the corner of his eye. “Did you make breakfast soup?”
“It’s good,” Essek says defensively. He steps away, and crosses his arms. He looks past Caleb’s elbow at a climbing trumpetflower — its blooms are only just starting to open — and adds, “You’re not allowed to hurry.”
Caleb’s eyes are on his face. He can feel Caleb’s eyes on his face.
Then Caleb moves toward him again. His touch on Essek’s arm is light, a question, and Essek leans into it in assent. Lets Caleb gather him close. Lets Caleb hold him, around his crossed arms, and lean his cheek into Essek’s hair.
After a minute, Essek unfolds his arms and twines them around Caleb’s waist, too.
“I’m sorry,” Caleb murmurs.
“You should be.”
“I’ll be more careful. I’ll try to.”
Essek pulls back, and pretends his sniff is a haughty one; pretends his eyes aren’t damp with emotion. “Fjord needs you. Eat your soup.”
---
Many plants require the perfect habitat to survive. Others create it for themselves.
Essek has visited mangrove islands in the Lucidian Ocean that contain no true land. They’re made of trees on stilts, root clinging to root like interlocked hands. Each one drops its dart-seeds into shallow water, and when they grow, they build — catching the sediment that rolls in the waves. Stabilizing. The island expands.
The bogs where Essek’s carnivorous plants flourish are building themselves, too. Moss makes a thick mat underfoot, but below that is water — ancient peat-soaked water, pooling in hollows the gods punched in the landscape a thousand years ago. Slowly, so slowly, the moss reaches to fill them. On top of it grows whatever can.
It’s a richer flora than Essek might have thought, when he first read of these places’ harshness. There is cottongrass, raising white puffs of seed that brush Essek’s ankles when he floats. There are orchids with bright pink flowers, and bog laurels and rosemaries and leatherleaf shrubs. There are places where the sundews and the flytraps grow so densely that Essek would not know where to drop from his float if he wanted to. Where the mat underfoot is more pitcher than moss.
Some plants exude chemicals that will kill those who try to grow beside them. Others drop generous leaf litter — mixing soft, rich nutrients into the soil at their feet. There are great old trees, in some forests, that foster whole generations — that reach out, through threads between roots, and share the bounty they’ve earned. A lifetime of sunshine, and sweetness, offered up by a tendril in the dark.
Many things are gardeners in this world.
Essek, himself, is a poor one. He tries not to kill those seedlings that wind up in his care; still, he looks with envy at Yasha’s success, or Caduceus’s. The little plot behind Caleb’s house in Rexxentrum straggles with brown leaves. Occasionally it produces a tomato, or an otherworldly blue flower. More often, it generates weeds.
It isn’t often Essek can bring himself to uproot them. He suspects, witting or unwitting, that he brought more than half of them here.
The other half might be his friends’ doing. The Mighty Nein visit more often these days, since Fjord and Jester bought a house in Nicodranas and Luc got old enough to babysit their kids. Reani’s been walking through trees for a while now, but she finally lost patience with the struggling oak by Caleb’s front steps and induced it to double in size — enough to harbor a door. Even Verin has been to visit, a handful of times, with careful planning and utter secrecy. After his first trip, he imitated Jester and showed up with a little pot of soil, a few withered leaves plastered to the dirt. “It took me a while to find anything growing,” he explained, sheepish; “I don’t know what it is. It has roots, though. I’m pretty sure.” Caleb laughed uproariously when, after months of diligent watering and care, Verin’s pot sprouted a common dandelion.
Caleb laughs often, these days. He laughs when he’s happy. There are silver threads in his hair now, and he laughs at how Essek likes to touch them; he would say that they’ve merely proliferated, that he’s had them all along. But they haven’t fallen in streaks across Caleb’s face all along. They haven’t done their alchemy all along, catching the sun and turning the copper around them to gold. It’s only by night, really, that they look silver at all.
That’s all right. Essek wakes up in the night.
Sometimes, he’ll simply lie there until morning. He’ll study Caleb’s face, the new lines in it, the way he turns into Essek’s touch without waking when Essek rests a thumb on his cheek. Or he’ll sit up in bed reading, by his dark vision or a faint dancing light. Or he’ll sleep — nestle closer to Caleb’s hip and turn himself over to it. He’s getting better at that.
Other nights, he’ll rise in the dark. He’ll move silently through the room, dressing; he’ll gather his battered gloves and his trowel and his watering can. He’ll slip his sending stone in his pocket, like always, but he’ll leave his breastplate on its stand by the door.
He’ll creep back to the bedroom. He’ll watch Caleb’s chest rise and fall, for a moment; watch the light through the curtains fall across his face. Then he’ll softly close the door.
And he’ll go out by moonlight to garden.