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“Orym! Orym!”
The voice sings out over the air, as warm and crinkled as the autumn leaves that ride the winds alongside his skysail, and Orym banks sharp towards the peak, already scanning the familiar faces of the mountain until he spots the figure standing in one garden in particular. He swoops down, letting the strong currents of the rift set his skysail in freefall towards the cliff face he calls home. The sails catch taut in the wind, leading the charge, and he risks releasing one hand to wave at Will, now running down past their herb garden with both arms outstretched and waving with excitement, and a smile brighter than the morning sun as Orym draws close.
He doesn’t land in Will’s arms. Romantic as it sounds, one of the first rules of skysailing is never to land on—or aiming for—another person. They learned that lesson the hard way in their teens, newly dating, when Orym was so eager to land their skysails close to meet with a kiss that the edge of his wing pole slammed into Will’s face—an impact so hard that it broke his boyfriend’s nose and gave him a minor concussion, and Orym was grounded from his skysail for a fortnight.
But even so, he barely has seconds after his feet hit the dry, winter-ready grass before Will reaches him and sweeps him up in his arms, skysail and all.
“Will!” he says, giggling as his husband starts peppering kisses all over his face. “Will, the skysail—”
“The skysail,” Will says between kisses, “got to spend all day with you and I didn’t, the skysail can wait.”
Will makes an excellent point. And even though it’s folded up uncomfortably between them, one fret poking into his leg and the frame pressing against Will’s chest, Orym finds that he doesn’t care as he twines his hands into Will’s loose, soft curls and pulls him in for a proper kiss. Will smiles beneath his lips, and Orym tastes buttery pastry as he hums a hello against his husband.
“So you did get to the market,” he says once they have to break apart for air.
“Of course I did.” Will lifts him up once they’ve both got their breath back, and Orym hauls himself around to sit on Will’s shoulders as Will extricates him from the skysail and starts back towards the house, folding the sails back into the staff. “I said I would.”
“And you got there early enough?”
“Sure did! It was really busy, though.” Will’s pace slows, and his hands twist over the skysail more than necessary. “Like. Really busy.”
The market is never busy at the very crack of dawn when Orym normally goes, and he raises an eyebrow that Will can’t see even as he settles his arms to rest atop his husband’s head.
“Did you get to Ma for—”
“I got all the butter and milk from Mama Laurel, and I brought her fresh coffee—”
“In the—”
“In the special flask that keeps it warm,” Will says, warmly teasing.
“Sorry. I know you know all that. I… I guess I missed seeing her.”
Will reaches up and gives his knee a gentle squeeze, and Orym winds his tail round his wrist, a little tug of assurance before Will turns halfway round to look up at him.
“Now, she said I needed to pass on the biggest, soppiest hug and kiss I could possibly imagine—”
Orym flicks his tail around to land in Will’s mouth.
“Yuck, Orym! That tastes like leather polish!”
“My mama said no such thing.”
“Okay, fine, she said to give you a kiss and a hug, but she didn’t say they couldn’t be big and soppy—”
“Alright, alright,” Orym concedes. “Soon as we get in the house.”
”—and she said she’d drop by tomorrow afternoon to give us some herb butters she’s been trying out. That—that means she’s staying for dinner, right?”
“That means our obligation as her good halfling sons is to host her for dinner,” Orym confirms, dropping a kiss into Will’s hair as relief blossoms in his chest that he hasn’t missed seeing his ma completely. Will’s ears twitch, the slight prick to attention they always get when he’s bemused by something, and Orym bites back a smile at the look he knows must be on his husband’s face at the reminder that by way of marriage and tradition, he is, at six feet and one inches tall, now considered a halfling in halfling society.
“If I’m a halfling,” Will says, still with a resolute note of defiance, “you have to be a quarterling. Or something even smaller.”
“If I recall, that was Dad’s name for me when I was a kid.” Orym rolls his eyes. “Babe, Mama is going to turn you into a halfling by tradition by the time you’re fifty, it’ll be a lot easier if you let her just get on with it.”
Will shakes his head. “If I can get through a full halfling feast without giving up two-thirds of the way through, I’ll be happy.”
Orym chuckles. “That’s the spirit. You didn’t have trouble with the rest of the list?”
“No, it was all fine! I mean, some of your vendors were totally cleared out—but, but but but, I checked everything before I paid, it’s all very good quality! And I got us pastries. Saved a couple for after dinner.”
“You’re a treasure.”
“I try.” Will squeezes Orym’s foot. “How was work?”
“It was work. Pretty quiet. Saw a few griffons. No disturbances to report to the captain.” He watches Will’s grip on the skysail-turned-quarterstaff in his other hand. How tight it is. It’s the same way Orym’s stomach has felt on and off for the last month; the hard reality of the expectations of their job, what they have to do under an oath neither of them would ever think to break. “Someone has to do it.”
Will hums, a low thrum of discontent that heaves all through his body.
“I’m just saying,” he says eventually, “Dad could have woken me up instead. I keep telling him that I’m feeling fine, and Mom cleared me for normal duties again last week, it doesn’t all have to be on you.”
“And have you skysailing while sleep-deprived?” Orym can’t quite keep the laughter out of his voice. “I think your mom would have a few things to say to Dad about that.”
“I only broke one bone last time I fell! It’s not my fault the wind has it out for me!”
“I know, baby,” Orym says, still fighting back his laughter as Will pushes the back door open and steps into their home.
The Yulisen morning market is one of Orym’s favourite parts of the week (after all the parts of the week where he gets to wake up cuddled into Will’s side, and match swords against Will in the training grounds, and go skysailing with Will launching off the cliff right behind him), and most market days see him there before the sun rises: helping his ma set out her stall, bringing her fresh coffee, and always getting the first look in on the best produce. Even on the ever more frequent days where he has duty or there’s an all-day training session, Orym still manages to wrangle in enough time in the earliest whispers of the morning to visit his favourite vendors and pick up the vegetables and eggs he likes best.
But this morning, he was just finishing his stretches in the front garden in the pre-dawn light when Derrig came striding up the mountain path towards their home with a grim set to his face.
There’s been a bad flu going round Zephrah for the last month or so, and it’s swept through the Blades with a vengeance. Will came down with it three weeks ago, and Orym had barely left his side for two long, anxious days, coaxing him into taking Nel’s fever teas and sponging cool cloths over his burning forehead and chest as he waited for the fever to burn itself out and the body aches to subside. Orym’s just grateful that his own sturdy halfling constitution seems to have kept him well all this time; but it does mean that he’s been pulling extra shifts every week since the first Blades started coming down with it, as Derrig does his best to keep as many eyes on the Tempest and the borders as normal.
So, he’s spent the day stationed up at Zephrah’s northern border, which—was fine. Border patrols always mean time up on his skysail, both to reach the outpost and to make a sweep of the mountain ranges every hour or two. He gets paid extra for the unscheduled shifts, and it brings him pride to know he’s helping to keep his home safe.
But Orym’s been going to the market since he was a baby, old enough and settled enough to sleep soundly against his mama’s chest through the earliest hours of the morning. It’s been part of his Yulisen morning for his entire living memory: playing in the grass with the wood carving discards as a toddler; watching the stall as an eight-year-old while his mama did her own produce shopping and honing the art of looking sweet enough to wheedle an extra copper or two of pocket money out of the neighbours (who always fell for his best halfling smiles). Even in his teens, he still made the trip down the mountain with his ma every market day before dawn, helping her set up her stall and grabbing the first breakfast rolls from Will’s favourite baker in his rush to get to sunrise training sessions on the cliffs, and always headed back in the afternoon to help her pack up and haul it all back home; even if he did often get waylaid by Will, intent on a post-training makeout session behind the equipment sheds. Orym could never resist then. He still rarely tries to stop Will in that endeavour even now.
The routine settles him; and, in the months since he got married, sometimes it’s the only time in the week he gets to see his ma. He worries about her more often than he admits to Will, all by herself in the house on their homestead. Halflings were never meant to live alone. And the market has been on hold with the sickness spreading through the village. It just opened back up this week, and with it would have been Orym’s first chance to see his ma in three and a half weeks.
Even Will, he only saw briefly this morning: a whispering wake-up kiss to his cheek in the soft dark of their bedroom, a list left on the bedside table and a dozen tiny apologies on his lips. And that leaves just as much of an ache in his chest—because his early morning sojourns to the market almost always end in him coming back home and joining Will again in their bed as his husband takes advantage of the chance to get a proper sleep in. Orym normally gets home right as Will’s waking up, and it’s the very best part of the week by far.
Once they’re inside and he’s climbed down from Will’s shoulders, it doesn’t take long for Orym to doff his armour, hang up his shield and sword, and pull on a fresh shirt. His weaponry is already clean, thanks to a quick once-over at the training compound after his post-shift debrief. If there were more Blades around—more specifically, if Derrig were around—a once-over lightly would land him with cleaning the weapons again, thoroughly, plus all the captains’ weapons besides, just to make the point. But Derrig wasn’t around this afternoon, and he hasn’t even used his sword or shield today, and he did a thorough job on his armour, because that’s the bit that the captains do notice on surprise inspections.
He can hear Will pottering around further in the house, and he pads barefoot back towards the kitchen, flexing his toes and adjusting to the tiny difference in his stride he always gets when he takes off his work sandals and the green stones laced into them that let him jump three times his height. Glancing inside finds Will unpacking two large woven baskets of produce onto the table, an amount that Orym only buys because he knows he has a much stronger and taller husband to cart most of it home for him later in the day.
Okay, and also because it always makes Gardenia Gelversham look as peeved as she did the one time she realised she’d made scones with sour milk, a thing that no halfling in Zephrah has ever let her live down. It isn’t Orym’s fault that his halfling-by-tradition husband can carry three times as much home from the market in one trip as Gardenia Gelversham can. It also isn’t his fault that it truly displays Will’s arm muscles at their best.
Strangely, though, there seems to be a lot more produce than usual; and it doesn’t take long before Orym spots why.
“You do know that halfling recipes call for onions this size, right?” Orym says, holding back a laugh as he holds up the largest of the onions, the only one that comfortably fills out the cradle of his hand.
“I do know that! Mama Laurel didn’t give me all those cooking lessons for nothing. There just…” Will flushes. “There just weren’t many big ones left when I got there.”
“I did tell you to go early.”
“I thought I got there early enough, I just didn’t realise everyone else would have gone there… earlier. I got the ones that looked the nicest, didn’t I?”
“You did. Guess we’ll just have to get creative with weights and measures this week.”
Will flicks a tea towel at his head. “You’re the one who told me that stuff doesn’t matter as much with soups and stews and things!”
“You’re right.” Orym nudges a fist against Will’s hip, and presses a kiss there for good measure. “I’m sure we will make some very delicious soups and stews with the half-elf-sized onions.”
“I’ll give you half-elf-sized—”
Will’s hands are lightning quick, and he catches Orym under the arms, catching him right in the most sensitive spots and tickling for all he’s worth. Orym shrieks, ducking down to try and escape, but Will pushes off the table and bounds after him, chasing him around the kitchen table with arms outstretched. Orym can scramble over the chairs and under the table more easily, but Will’s longer legs give him the advantage at home, and the chase lasts for mere seconds before he sweeps Orym off his feet and onto the floor, both of them breathless with laughter as Will moves to tickle Orym’s ribs, and Orym wriggles under him so hard that he knocks over a chair and the basket of vegetables still sitting on it, scattering them around him on the floor.
“I yield, I yield!” he says, brushing a tear from his eyes as he dissolves into another fit of helpless giggles and smacks his palm on the floor. “I yield, I give in, half-elf-size onions are superior, I yield—”
And then his palm hits something bulbous and papery, and Orym closes his fingers around it, eyes widening in surprise as he takes it in.
“What’s this?”
“Oh.” Will drops his hands from Orym’s ribs and takes a look. “Uh… that’s from Dahlia. On the house. She said she’d held back some of the wild garlic for you because she’s missed you these last weeks. As thanks for fixing her roof.”
Orym stares up at him. “That was weeks ago.”
Will shrugs. “Market’s been closed. She said you owe her a visit next Yulisen so she can thank you in person.”
A warm flush spreads through Orym’s chest, much like when the captains praise him in training for bringing down opponents nearly twice his size. It isn’t like he’s the best fighter of their company. He’s good at spotting openings and lapses in concentration, that’s all. And it wasn’t like Dahlia’s roof was a difficult fix. He’d just been in the neighbourhood at the time.
“It was nothing,” he says softly. “Anyone could have done it.”
“Not just anyone clambered about on her roof for three hours in the rain, as I recall.”
Orym thumbs over one of the great bulbs, some of the papery skin coming away to reveal fat, perfect cloves beneath. “It’s lovely. We could make a nice soup with this, maybe add in some thyme. What do you think? Unless you had something else planned for dinner tonight?”
Will clears his throat, looking more than a little sheepish.
“If you’re deciding, that sounds perfect.”
“And I think we’ve still got some cooked pumpkin in the icebox. We could pull together a batch of scones if you want.”
Will’s eyes light up. “Mama Laurel’s pumpkin scones?”
“Would I ever make anyone else’s? C’mon. Only the best for my darling wonderful favourite husband who got all this nice produce from the market.”
Will grins wide and leans down to peck him against the lips, once, twice, four or five or six times—until he stops and holds himself in place, looking about their kitchen and the mess they’ve made, and flushes dark all the way to the tips of his pretty pointed ears.
“We should probably clean up in here?”
Once they’ve cleared all the garlic off the floor, Orym sets Will dicing potatoes and slicing onions while he fetches ingredients for the scones. His tall kitchen stool for reaching the high cupboards has a wobbly leg, and he hasn’t had a chance to sit down and fix it up yet with all the extra shifts, but he’s managed more with less. The pantry shelves are sturdy and don’t even budge under his weight—courtesy of Ma, who came through with the carpenter to personally check the fixtures were strong enough to support two full-grown halflings at a time—and it’s no hard task to make footholds of the shelves to grab what he needs.
Staple items like flours and sugar and the leavening powder all live on the shelves he can reach without the tall stool, with root vegetables in the lowest, darkest reaches of the pantry, but the special items are a little more out of the way. There’s a savoury malted sauce that one of their neighbours makes—not pleasant to eat on its own, but it works particularly well to add depth to stews—and one of the two dozen small bottles of chilli-infused oil that the Tempest was gifted at the end of a recent stay in Marquet. Orym hadn’t thought his ma’s pumpkin scones could ever be improved upon, but the chilli oil gives a welcome edge to the sweet bread, and Will is beyond enthusiastic about the stuff. He’s already trying to figure out how to cultivate the plants for when their much-used bottle of the oil runs out.
The bottles are small enough to fit in Orym’s pockets as he clambers his way down, and after that, the ingredients come together quickly: dry goods from the pantry, the cooked-down pumpkin and aged cheese from the icebox, an egg from the basket. The table is still crowded with vegetables and now also with Will and his chopping, so Orym takes his scone-making and a kitchen chair to the bench once he’s lit up the wood stack in the oven, and settles easily into the process of measuring and sifting and grating, tossing the cheese through the dry ingredients before he whisks an egg and a good glug of chilli oil into the softened pumpkin.
Will’s favourite part about pumpkin scones is getting to roll them out, and there’s no point in mixing up the dough fully while the oven’s still cold; the leaveners will start working if the dough sits around, and scones just aren’t nearly as satisfying without a good amount of lift. So Orym leaves his dry and wet ingredients and scoops up a head of garlic, working loose all the cloves and squashing off the papery skins before slicing it as finely as he can. It’s a lengthy task, but one occasion where small, nimble hands have a great advantage over larger ones. Growing up cooking alongside his mother, Orym knew finesse with a kitchen knife long before he picked it up with a shortsword, and it doesn’t take him long to finish his work and pile up the slices ready to go on the board.
While he’s waiting for Will to finish with the onions, he heads back to the oven, now warming up nicely. Orym pulls out a big soup pot from the cupboard, and hefts it up onto the stove to start heating; and then, from under the sink, he pulls out an even bigger soup pot. This particular pot is easily two-thirds of his height and so large that he can sit in it. It was a wedding present from a family on his ma’s side, a very traditional halfling housewarming gift to enable a newlywed couple to feed a large family well and happily entertain the masses.
However, in the six months they’ve been married, they haven’t actually used it yet. It’s far too big to bring out for just the two of them, or even the nights Orym’s ma comes round for dinner; plus, Nel and Derrig tend to host the full-family gatherings, and bringing a pot this size just isn’t feasible. It’s not that the food wouldn’t be welcome; but they tried filling it up with water once, just to see how it would travel, and even Will struggled to carry it across their yard without letting it spill.
But the pot is well-made and very sturdy and, upended, is the perfect height to allow Orym to reach the stove.
“Will?” he calls behind him as he hops on up, flicking some water into the pot on the burner to see if it sizzles. “Are you done with those onions yet?”
His question hangs in the air, and Orym looks back from the stove to see Will examining the pile of onions in front of him, a thoughtful look on his face.
“Babe?”
“You know,” Will says slowly, “I just noticed…”
He holds up one of the slices from the largest onion, a perfect hemisphere.
“Big moon.”
And with his other hand, he picks up a slice from another onion, cut the same way, but a great deal smaller.
“Little moon.”
Orym turns around and thunks his head against the soup pot.
“That’s terrible,” he says, hoping Will can’t see the grin that’s threatening to split his face in half.
“I’m not wrong,” Will says, delight beaming through his voice as a board clatters down on the bench and two strong arms wrap around him from behind. “It’s us, babe!”
“No, no, absolutely not,” says Orym, with as much affected disdain as he can manage when squeezed up against his husband, which is not very much at all. “I am not an onion—”
“You’re an onion!” Will cheers, bouncing them both up and down.
“My mama calls me pumpkin—”
“Little onion, little onion!”
“If you call me an onion again then I will mix the scones myself.”
“You wouldn’t dare!”
“Watch me,” Orym says, laughing as he reaches over to the two bowls of scone ingredients, wiggling his fingers. Will’s laughing too as he bats at Orym’s hands, tussling to keep him away—
And then something in the tussling jostles Orym, or maybe the pot, because it slips out from under him, skating along the flagstones too fast for him to keep his balance. His stomach drops as he falls.
And a large body lands under him with a crack against the stone, catching him and holding him close as the big pot skitters to a halt, and Orym is left breathing heavily in Will’s arms on the floor.
“Orym? Oh gods, Orym—”
“I’m okay,” he says, curling his fingers around Will’s where his husband is pressing around the base of his skull and the top of his spine, the same way Orym’s seen Nel do dozens of times before—but frantic, too hard, fear glazing his eyes. His heart is racing so hard and so fast his whole body feels like it’s ricocheting with the beat, but Will got under him so fast Orym doesn’t think he even hit the floor at all. But Will doesn’t stop his ministrations, and his panicky hands are starting to shake.
“Will,” Orym tries, but Will’s checking his temples now and doesn’t seem to have heard him. “Will. Willow.”
Will draws back in surprise at the sound of his full name, as Orym hoped he might, and he places his hand on Will’s chest, right atop his heart beating just as fast and frantic as Orym’s own.
“Look at me,” Orym says softly, drawing in one slow breath and releasing before he speaks again. “You caught me. I’m alright.”
Will leaves his head alone, but draws him into his chest, holding him tight, and Orym squeezes back for all he’s worth.
“You aren’t hurt?” Will whispers into his hair, and Orym shakes his head.
“Nothing hurts. I’m fine—really, I’m fine. Are you okay?”
Orym pulls back to see Will looking rueful, shifting on the floor.
“Banged my butt. And my elbow. Here, can you check—is it bleeding?”
It isn’t, but the skin is already reddened and smarting, Will flinching as Orym presses carefully around the bone.
“I don’t think it’s broken or anything,” Will says as Orym draws back, extending his arm and rotating it this way and that. “Just… you know how sometimes you ding this bit of your elbow and it feels like your soul just left your body?”
Orym winces in sympathy.
“But,” Will continues, “I think it’ll be alright in time for me to roll out scones and maybe hopefully also with a kiss better?”
“Maybe with some arnica paste on it.”
“No! No, no way, that stuff is foul, you are not opening that anywhere near our home!”
“It works.”
“It smells so bad.”
“I’ll kiss it better after.”
“You’d better.”
Orym lifts Will’s arm and places a kiss to his elbow, petal-soft.
“There. All better.” He gives it a little pat as he adds, “I’d have been fine, you know that. It wasn’t that far.”
Will shrugs, and there’s something shadowed about his face that makes Orym’s gut twist and clench, fearful and sad all at once. “Don’t like seeing you fall.”
All of Orym’s worst injuries have been from falling. A tumble from a tree when he and Will were six and playing adventurers just out of sight of Nel and Derrig’s back garden, and several other trees in the years since. Getting knocked down a cliff face at nineteen, a freak training accident. Plummeting from an airborne invading roc barely a year later. In Orym’s defence, Will came out worse in the latter case, given he was unconscious with half his guts spilling out on the ground from the other roc.
But everything else, Will has seen. And if he’s anything like Orym the times Will has been hurt, he won’t have forgotten a second of any of it.
“You know me.” Orym brushes his fingers along Will’s furrowed brow, a trick that always works to ease the worries away. “I always bounce back.”
Will blinks hard, a glossy sheen to his dark eyes, and leans into Orym’s hand as he trails it down to rest on his cheek. “Still going to catch you if I can, little moon.”
At that, Orym winds his arms back around Will and hugs him tight. One of Will’s hands lands again on the back of his head; no longer frantically checking for injury or blood, but just resting, strong sword-calloused fingers soft as he strokes through Orym’s hair.
“C’mon,” Orym says after a few moments comfortable on the floor. “I should get the onions on—oh, the pot’s going to be so hot by now…”
“No,” says Will into his hair. “You are not using the enormous soup pot of death for this—”
Orym snorts. “Will, it’s fine.”
“Next time Mom’s over, I’m getting her to put indents in the floor so this doesn’t happen again.”
“Indents?”
“In the stone,” Will says resolutely, but with his usual good humour colouring his words. “One for the soup pot of death, one for the danger stool, one for the kitchen chairs—”
“Of slam attack?”
“Exactly! The furniture is fighting you, we have to fight back!”
“We don’t have to fight the soup pot,” Orym says, clambering to his feet and offering out both hands to Will, who takes them with a roll of his eyes.
“Can I at least put a cloth underneath? I don’t want you slipping again.”
Damp cloth laid and soup pot repositioned—Will eyeing it up suspiciously all the while—Orym turns down the heat and starts cooking down the onions, tumbling in the wild garlic after, before Will comes over from the table to tip in the diced potatoes with fingers coated in still-sticky scone dough. He sprinkles in some salt and wafts the fragrant steam up to his nose, trying to pick out what smells different. What he missed in the fright of falling from the soup pot.
“Where are you going?” Will asks from the table as Orym makes a show of climbing down slowly from the pot, sitting down before hopping the short distance to the ground.
“Just into the garden, forgot about the thyme. Won’t be a minute.”
“Wait a second—”
Will crosses the kitchen in three large strides and reaches up to the upper peg beside the door to pull down his own scarf, a wide and soft thing in deep greens and blues, knitted in the traditional patterns that symbolise the leaves and buds of new growth, and the wind swirling through their home. He kneels down and drapes it over Orym’s neck before winding it round several times to secure it in place.
“It’s chilly out there,” he says, tucking the loose end under the weight of the scarf and brushing Orym’s hair back with his hand, with a look in his eyes so fond Orym thinks he might burst. If they weren’t in the middle of cooking dinner, he would probably have dragged Will halfway towards their bedroom by now. Possibly only as far as the kitchen table. But there is soup on the stove and a leavener already working in the scones and he doesn’t really want to scrub down the table before his ma comes round for dinner tomorrow night, so he settles for drawing his husband in for a soft kiss instead, breathing in the gentle scent of his skin before he forces himself to let go, tucking a loose strand of hair behind Will’s ear.
“Don’t let the onions burn.”
“You’re only going to be two minutes!”
“I saw what happened with the potato water that Hazel Festival—”
“Stop distracting me, then. Shoo!”
Will’s laughter echoes after him as he closes the door.
The wind is fresh against his cheek, and Orym wraps Will’s scarf another time around his neck before he ventures into their garden. Despite the breeze, the sun glows warm on his hair, and he turns back towards the house for a moment to take it in fully, that deep cosy light of sunset. It’s a lovely time of year, this point in autumn, where he can enjoy the cool weather without feeling weighed down by the need to sleep. Hibernation tiredness always sets in by the first snowfall, and from there it can be mere days before he and his mother settle down to sleep away the coldest weeks of winter.
Well. He supposes this year his mother will be staying with her sister and Orym’s cousins, and over here, it’ll just be him, with Will keeping him warm. Their first hibernation in this little house.
How Orym loves this little house of theirs.
Some of the grander and more official houses and buildings in Zephrah are built on wooden platforms, reinforced and held in place by magic. Orym and Will’s place is nothing like that. Like most of the houses here, it’s built directly on the mountain, half-elven style with a wide domed roof. The house is old, but the furnishings are new; extra shelving and stools in all the rooms, halfling-sized armchairs that haven’t been used much and half-elf-sized loveseats that certainly have, a large and comfortable bed with a headboard hand-carved by his ma as a wedding gift, one that had made Orym cry when she surprised them with it the day they were moving in. There are blankets Derrig has woven on his loom, throws knitted by both their mothers, a stand and a trunk for their weapons and armour and all the accoutrements they need for both; and every piece of kitchen equipment one could ever need, thanks to the halfling marital gifting traditions that survived the Calamity intact.
It’s cosy and it’s comfortable, and it’s their home.
Even the size of it doesn’t feel so strange to Orym now. When they had first been engaged, Will had suggested looking through a few of the halfling-sized houses available in the village, the ones vacated by those halfling families who settled in Zephrah for a time but always had roots elsewhere. Orym had dutifully gone along to look them over, and found them all in the same pleasant and pristine condition every halfling knows to leave their place in for the next custodians, but he knew even before they stepped through the door that none of those places would work. In his ma’s house, Will is barely an inch shy of knocking his head on the ceiling at the best of times; and in the bedrooms and the washroom, built under the sloping eaves of the roof, his poor husband has to stoop badly to keep from giving himself an accidental concussion.
“I don’t want to wreck your back before you’re thirty,” Orym had said after the second viewing, hand in hand as they walked the long route back to Nel and Derrig’s, up at the cliff face.
“And I don’t want you wrecking your knees! Don’t think I don’t see you jumping up and down when Mom wants something from the cupboard at home.”
“Will, baby, it’s fine at Ma’s house once in a while, but you haven’t been able to stand up straight in my room since you were fourteen. And we wouldn’t fit a bed in there that would fit you. I know you’re thinking about me, and I appreciate that. I really do, Will,” Orym had said, stopping and tugging Will closer until his then-fiancé knelt beside him, a little worried furrow in his brow. “But this is our house we’re looking for, not just mine, and it’s a lot easier for me to climb on a stool or a chair to reach things than it will be to fix your back from bending down all the time.”
“I just thought…” Will had taken both of Orym’s hands in his own, and thumbed softly over his knuckles several times before he carried on. “It’s just—everywhere else in Zephrah is sized right for me, but not for you. I don’t want our house to be like that.”
“And it won’t be,” Orym had said, unfurling their hands so he could lace his fingers with Will’s, one warm, sword-calloused palm against another. A perfect fit, like always. “I wouldn’t say no to having low cupboards and plenty of drawers I can reach and a bath I don’t have to go swimming in. But we can fit smaller things in a bigger house. We won’t fit you in a smaller one. Will, sweetheart, if I wanted a house for small folk I’d have said yes when Rhodey Gelversham tried to ask me out at that Highsummer picnic.”
“Rhododendron Gelversham,” Will said, fire in his eyes, “is the most arrogant, self-obsessed, whiny little—if you’d said yes I never would have forgiven you.”
“Because we were dating at the time?”
“Well—that too, but you remember those things he and brother said when Berenie—and about the Tempest! And he tried to make me eat one of his mother’s terrible scones, you couldn’t possibly think about going out with someone as awful as that.”
“I know that, my love. That’s why I turned him down and seasoned his lemon cake with salt and vinegar afterwards.”
And Orym wrapped his hand tighter around Will’s, and tugged him in close. “And that’s why we’re going to find a house where we can both fit. Our home.”
Now, with the sunset spilling soft orange around him, Orym kneels in the herb garden Will has been tenderly cultivating since the spring: one part a carefree patchwork of parsley and thyme and bay and the cutting from Ma’s enormous rosemary bush that has settled into its new home quite nicely; and, carefully separated and contained, rows of comfrey and arnica and peppermint and yarrow, a layout Will had spent hours plotting out in the garden area of the houses of healing. Even Orym can druidcraft well enough to spin together flower crowns and bloom moss to staunch small cuts in training, but neither he nor Will can craft herbs with the potency their naturally-growing counterparts possess that makes them so effective in knitting skin and bones together and easing stomach aches. Will takes great care with the physic garden, checking the plants daily and feeding a little of his own druidic magic into their soil to help them bloom. The culinary herbs bloom wild and free, growing quite happily on their own.
Orym picks his thyme, and blooms a little sprig of sweetpea to lay beside the plant as thanks. It isn’t like he’s particularly spiritual, but his mother has always been firm in her belief in the proper expressions of gratitude.
If you were plucking herbs from Nel’s garden, you’d say thank you to her. The Wildmother gifted us all the plants around us; it’s only polite to thank her when you’re taking some of that away with you.
Orym isn’t really sure if the gods are watching—and if they are, it won’t be over his little life, quiet and unimportant on a mountain in the middle of nowhere. But halfling hospitality is an instinct at his age, and he leaves flowers the way he might do for any of his neighbours. A little show of beauty. A little gratitude for the magic that is wild as the wind around him, that comes from the Wildmother like all the beautiful things in their home.
Like the most beautiful thing in their home, Orym reflects, watching from the doorway as Will re-forms the remaining scone dough and presses it out again, brightly marigold and pliant beneath his strong brown hands.
He picks up a biscuit cutter, and Orym can’t help but smile as Will stamps out flowers from the scone dough and lays them out on the baking tray. His halfling relatives would be scandalised (there is little more sacred in a halfling’s kitchen than the perfect shape of a scone), but Orym is still utterly charmed at how his husband will find a way to make a flower crown out of anything.
“Hey, handsome,” Orym says, nudging the door shut behind him and laughing as a few stray marigolds pop out through Will’s hair. “Are those ready for the oven?”
“Almost!” The marigolds were enough to give it away, but Will is still deeply, prettily flushed when he turns from the table. “I can’t remember, do we glaze these ones with milk or egg?”
“Just milk is fine,” Orym says, hopping back up on his pot and picking up his dual-handled half-moon sickle to chop the thyme. He’s just sweeping it into the pot alongside the garlic when Will comes over bearing the first tray of milk-glazed scones, and Orym really can’t hold back his smile at the array of shapes: the softly rounded blossoms, a hand-cut outline of a bird, and a couple of bunnies, one pressed out in reverse so that their little noses are facing each other. When Will bends down to slip the tray into the oven, it puts them of a height, and he ekes out what tiny threads of magic he has to tuck a sprig of marigold and thyme and miniature, perfect pumpkin flowers behind his ear.
How lucky he is, Orym thinks as his husband traces the outline of the flowers and laughs bright and loud, filling the whole space of their little kitchen, that of everyone in this great big world, he gets to build this home with Will.
It isn’t long before the kitchen is heady with the deep, rich smells of butter-softened garlic and sweet cooked onion, illuminated by the delicious bready aroma of fresh-baked scones. Orym hops back up on the large pot to check the soup, dipping a spoon in to take a taste. It’s very good—it’s Ma’s recipe, so it’s always very good—but he still wants Will to take a taste before he takes it off the heat. A tiny capful of vinegar might not go amiss, just to bring everything else to life, but he won’t put it in if Will’s quite happy with it as is.
He stirs it again, just to check nothing’s sticking, and hears the scrape of the butter knife against the butter board. But the telltale ripping sound of a scone being split in half doesn’t follow, and he turns, concerned.
Over the far side of the table, Will has the strangest, most delighted smile on his face, and a stack of untouched scones next to him. And he’s buttering his hand.
“Will!”
Orym almost overturns his standing soup pot as he jumps down and sprints to the table, grabbing Will’s hand before his husband has a chance to finish his protests of surprise. He turns Will’s hand over in his own, checking his fingers and palm, and breathes a sigh of relief when he finds no blood, no cut from a distraction-handled knife. Just a lot of butter.
“What in Melora’s name are you doing?”
Will shoots him a sheepish smile.
“Buttering scones?”
“Uh-huh,” Orym says, looking pointedly at the one split, buttered scone out of fifteen. “Buttering lots of scones, apparently.”
Will shrugs and runs his free hand through his hair. It also has butter on it. “I got distracted.”
“Distracted by what?”
“I was just putting that one down when you hopped up on your soup pot. And you were stirring the soup.” His face softens. “You climb on soup pots to make soup for me. And you make this little face, when you’re trying to decide if you need to add anything else, and your tail flicks about when you’re tasting it…”
He sighs, and reaches down to thumb over the curve of Orym’s ear, his smile glowing as deep and bright as it did the day they were married. “How could anyone not be totally overcome when they look at you?”
Orym’s ears grow hot, a blush he can feel spreading to his cheeks, and his whole chest feels filled up with sunlight. He looks up at his husband, hair curling out from a too-loose ponytail and flour still dusting his rolled-up sleeves, his wide mouth always stretched into that smile that makes his knees weak, the little scar through his eyebrow from a training mishap; his eyes, which catch the lamplight and dance and shine like molten copper as he looks at Orym like he lit the stars in the sky and hung the moons. This funny, silly, wonderful man who chose to make a home with him. Who chose him.
He doesn’t know what to say, how to convey the love that fills him head to toe every day for the man he gets to spend his life beside. But Orym has always been better with showing Will what he means. And Will knows that too.
“Come on,” Orym says, twining his fingers with Will’s butter-smeared ones. “You need to taste the soup before it’s done.”
The thing is: this is a soup made with garlic and love. You only make it when someone you love with your whole heart will be eating with you. Someone you love and trust enough to take the most important step in the recipe.
But, to his surprise, Will doesn’t make for the stove. He just squeezes their fingers tighter together, and bends to one knee.
“Well,” Will says, sunlit smile spreading over his face while he cradles Orym’s jaw with a gentle caress over his cheekbone, “I don’t think we need to go all the way over there.”
Will pulls him in close, and Orym smiles into his lips as Will kisses him deeply, warmly, like he’s drinking in everything Orym has to give him and more. When his husband finally pulls away, he’s panting and his cheeks are flushed, and he has a great big smile on his face.
“Tastes pretty good to me. Although I know you want to add something. You always do.”
“Of course I do,” Orym breathes, stepping in closer and threading his hands through Will’s hair. “But I think maybe you should try it again, just to be sure.”
For a second their teeth clack together, because they’re both smiling too hard. But Will just purses his lips once and shakes it off, before he cups the back of Orym’s head and pulls him in again, soft and sweet and with the faintest hint of pumpkin and sharp cheese on his tongue. His hand is still covered in butter. It must be all through Orym’s hair by now.
Well, he finds he doesn’t really mind. Pumpkin scones always did taste best with butter, Orym thinks as he nuzzles his nose against his husband’s, and takes in those deep brown eyes that are his alone to admire, and dives in again, and again, and again.