Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Three months earlier

Afraid , Caduceus thinks, as soon as he looks up at the girl standing at the garden gate. She is afraid. Her little fingers are gripping at the fencepost. Her arm shakes. He sits very still in the dirt, not wanting to rise up too suddenly and frighten her more, in case it is him that she is frightened of. He doesn’t think it is, though. He is an oddity, but children are very rarely scared of him.

“Hello,” he says, when she just stares at him for a long moment.

“Hello,” she says, after a slightly too-long pause. “Are you Caduceus Clay?”

“Yes,” he says. “Are you looking for a healer?”

“Yes,” she says. Her voice trembles when she says, “My aunt is sick…”

Caduceus lifts his chin and checks the horizon. It’s still early in the afternoon. The ache in his bones says that a storm is coming in, but he can’t see clouds on the horizon yet. Rain tonight, then. “Where are you from?”

“Ellet on Reid,” she says. “It’s a village, north, on the river Reid in the wood.”

“I’ve heard of it,” he says. It might start raining by the time they get there. He rises carefully, mindful of both her fear and his aching knee, but she doesn’t flinch and he hides his own little wince. “What’s your name?”

“Nadia.”

“That’s a lovely name,” Caduceus says, warmly. She smiles back at him, very shakily. “You look about my daughter’s age. Her name is Cormorant.” Like Cormorant, Nadia has dark hair, but otherwise they don’t look very much alike, aside from both being small girls. “Let me wash my hands and get some things, and we’ll see what I can do for your aunt. Can you tell me in what way she’s sick?”

Nadia trails him into the cottage, hesitating in the doorway. He waves her in; he’s not going to make her stand out in the garden. She watches him with big eyes as he goes to the basin and cleans the soil from under his fingernails. That’s another thing she and Cory have in common—the watching.

“In what way?” Nadia asks, uncertain.

“Is she coughing? Does she have a fever?”

“She—yes, a fever,” Nadia says. “And her, um, her nose is running? And she is—cold.”

“Alright,” Caduceus says. “She feels cold, or she is cold?”

“What?”

“Does she say, “I am cold,” or is she cold when you touch her?”

“She says it,” Nadia says, after a pause. Which is really just confirmation of the fever, Caduceus thinks, as he gathers the proper herbs. She hasn’t said coughing, but mucus might mean it anyway. This time of year, it’s likely to be some kind of flu. Usually it isn’t so bad, but there are always a few who get it worse than the others, and then you have to worry. Especially for the elderly or the very young or the already ill.

“Does your aunt have any children?” Caduceus asks. Ages are hard for him to gauge, generally, so he tries to get descriptors instead of numbers. Nadia looks human; what is old, sixty? Seventy? Is it really her aunt or her great-aunt? He guesses the woman might be older, or already ill. It must be a very bad flu, if it is that, if someone has sent their child all the way here ahead of a storm for hope of finding a healer.

“No,” Nadia says, which helps Caduceus not at all. He’s thinking about the idea of sending Cory by herself such a distance—it must be a half day’s walk.

“Why didn’t you go to Saulterwauld?” he asks. If he’s thinking of the right village—which he might not be—Saulterwauld is far closer.

“What?”

“Rheada,” Caduceus says, “In Saulterwauld, is a midwife and a healer. It’s much closer to you, I think.”

“Oh,” she says. “But I was supposed to come here.”

“Alright,” he says, and because she’s looking worried again, he says, “Don’t worry, I can help her.”

“Thank you,” she says. He finishes gathering everything, wraps it up in oilcloth in case the rain does start and puts it in his pack. He picks up his coat and his staff. “You’ll have to show me the way,” he tells her.

They walk. It’s a very long walk, but it’s still early enough that he isn’t worried about much. The storm would be inconvenient, but Nadia has a coat and so does he. He can always conjure light. She’s very quiet. She keeps glancing at him, nervously. She can’t keep a pace—she walks too fast and then too slow, and Caduceus struggles to stay with her.

He is fully limping by the third hour of their journey. The sun is at three-quarters in the sky, and he leans on the staff. He manages to coax Nadia into a semblance of a conversation. She is an only child. She has no father. Her mother is a weaver. They keep a garden.

An only child with no father, sent far away on her own—that can only mean her aunt is very sick indeed. Respecting that, Caduceus never asks her to slow down, and she is of the age where she doesn’t notice the pain of someone trying to hide it.

She gets quiet again at the edge of the wood, and nothing Caduceus says—no question about gardening or comment about Cormorant—can draw her out of it. He has an odd sense of drawing near to death and lets her have the silence. This will be difficult for her, whether Caduceus can save the woman or not. He knows what fear looks like, and knows that no reassurance he can offer would be fully true.

Instead, he says, “I’ll do all I can, and the rest we leave to the Wildmother. It will be alright.”

She stares at him. Her eyes are very big and dark in her face. “How do you—how do you know that,” she says. Her voice is shaking.

“Because it is how things are,” Caduceus says. “The rain will come after us. The river will run to the sea. The world, and you, will endure.” When she just blinks owlishly at him, he says, “The rain will be coming soon. Let’s keep going.”

They continue. It is another half an hour into the wood when it begins to drizzle. He pulls up his hood and is mindful of the soil growing looser, listening for any distant thunder, when he hears voices. They are low. They stop and start. He can’t make out the language, but he’d guess it is idle chatter.

“Are we almost to your village?” he asks.

Nadia nods.

“Almost there,” he says. She seems more ill at ease the closer they get. He could tell her not to be afraid, but he doesn’t know if she’s right to be, what state her aunt will be in and if it will be something he can ameliorate. Sometimes fear is a fine thing. A true thing.

They come around a narrow curve in the path, and there are two men standing there in the roadway. They are in cloaks, but they don’t look weatherproof, which must make the rain unpleasant. The men are both human, bearded and heavyset. One of them is carrying some kind of cudgel.

“Hello,” Caduceus says, pleasantly. He can’t tell what sort of work they were out here to do, which is odd. He keeps looking for an axe, but it’s just the large club the taller man is holding.

“Caduceus Clay,” the shorter man says, and oh. Something about that, Caduceus does not like the sound of.

“Who’s asking?” Caduceus says, after a pause. He isn’t sure why he doesn’t say yes aside from the sudden uneasy feeling. He doesn’t like their tone. Doesn’t like their eyes. Doesn’t like—ah, that’s it. He especially doesn’t like the way Nadia is trembling in his periphery.

“I brought him,” Nadia says. “I brought him. Can I go home now?”

Caduceus’ thoughts, steadily spinning, halt. Nadia is afraid. Nadia is not afraid for her aunt. She is afraid for herself—afraid of these men, who have sent her to get him.

“Yes,” Caduceus says, as soon as he draws the conclusion. “Do you know the way home from here?”

“Yes,” she whispers. “I’m—really sorry.”

“Go home,” he says, and at the same time the man snaps, “Don’t move.”

“Go,” Caduceus says, quietly, shifting his grip on his staff. She is a child. Whatever these men want and whatever they have threatened her with, she needs to make it home.

Nadia hesitates. Something seems to be freezing her in place.

“No witnesses,” the man snaps, and his companion goes for the girl. Caduceus doesn’t weigh his options.  He’s not a strategic thinker and she’s standing there paralyzed and she is young and she did not know.  He casts Command and says, “Run,” and prays to the Wildmother that the adrenaline will keep her moving after it wears off. Prays it will send her in the right direction.

She flees, diagonal, across the path and into the woods beside it, and that’s when the man strikes him, hard, and he gets his staff up and blocks the second blow but not the third and he is somehow on the ground, dizzy, vision grey around the edges. The girl is gone in the trees and it must have been more than six seconds and he has a spell for this, but the staff has fallen from his hand and his fingers are broken where the man stamped down hard to stop him from reaching it and he is bringing the club down against Caduceus’ skull.

The world goes dark and his last, distant thought is to the Wildmother.  He told Fjord once that he never stops speaking to Her, and he hasn’t yet, not in the decade alone or the years traveling with the Nein or these past ones with Fjord on the house on the cliffside, and in the last interval between light and shadow he finds one more prayer for Her.

Please help them forgive me for going home to you so soon.

---

He wakes. It takes too long for Caduceus to remember the men and Nadia and that last hit to be surprised by the waking. His thoughts are a cloud—not merely clouded, like solid stones waiting if only he can grope through the mist; the thoughts themselves are vaporous and insubstantial. Caduceus grasps for them and comes away with only dampness. His mind has utterly unmoored itself from chronology, which is inconvenient, because he’s pretty sure he has somewhere to be.

One thing at a time. A single insect in the buzzing cloud of his skull: where is he? It is dark, and it smells like straw. He is surrounded in straw. There is movement, and the rattle of wagon wheels. He’s in a wagon. He’s under a layer of straw. He tries to sit up and can’t; he is chained, manacles on his wrists and ankles, which are bound together.

He is in a wagon. He is chained up. One thing at a time. What is the first thing? What’s the plan? Fjord asks in his head, and he relaxes. A plan. He needs a plan.

Step one. Not panicking is step one, which Caduceus thinks he’s managing fairly well at. It’s everything after that is troubling, because the appropriate step two continues to elude him. He is not great with plans on most good days, and there is solid evidence this is not a good day. The fact that he is chained in a wagon under a layer of straw is part of that evidence. So is the dull throbbing in his skull that spikes whenever he moves, and the wet blood he can now feel dripping down the back of his neck.

Step two should be to deal with his head wound. He is a healer. He can do that. It takes some time, moving gingerly, but he shifts his hand up and gets it pressed to his own skin and casts Cure Wounds.

Or he tries. What actually happens is that pain shoots through his entire body and his vision whites out. It comes back—he isn’t sure how much time has passed. His wounds are not cured. He just feels achy and wrung-out, and his wrists are numb beneath the manacles.

So. He has learned something: there is something here, some spell or object or person, blocking his magic. As the dull throbbing pain fades and the sting in his wrists remains, Caduceus decides that it might be the manacles. He could double-check, but he’s not eager to repeat the experience, so he’ll assume and let it go. His head is still bleeding. He can’t tell what pain is new and what is old, and taking care of his wounds now feels out of the question. He doesn’t think he can actually reach the wound, chained as he is, and when he tries to twist around and try anyway the wave of nausea hits him and he has to pause in order to breathe.

He is so distracted by the confusing symphony of aches that is his own body that the voices from above him take a moment to register. Yes—from beyond the straw, he can hear talking. Two men. They speak in Common. He recognizes them from the wood.

“And they won’t spot him?” one of them says. Caduceus’s mind conjures the image of the taller man, the less talkative one.

“Gods, Faro,” says the shorter man, exasperated. “There’s barely any border control. They see hay, they’ll call it hay and let us go.”

“Well,” the man called Faro, apparently, begins.

“Don’t think I know how to do my job?”

“Bernard,” Faro says. “You know I do.”

“Then shut up and drive.”

The voices give way to hoofbeats, then, and Caduceus considers their words. This is a successful kidnapping attempt, so Caduceus doesn’t want to criticize, but it’s also not the most professional job he’s ever seen. He knows all the men’s faces and some of their names, or at least what they’re calling each other. The longer he’s awake, the more fragments of the previous hours are coming back. He’d come to in the forest, once. He remembers that they argued for a while about how best to conceal him before they dumped the straw on top. If he hadn’t needed to shield Nadia, he might have even gotten away.

Which makes the manacles—which are very powerful and correspondingly must have been very expensive—kind of odd.

These men don’t seem professional enough to have something like this. Even assuming this was a regular occupation and they used the manacles every time—say, a weekly kidnapping for ransom—it would be a big purchase. And in Caduceus’s experience, people who turned to kidnapping for money didn’t have a lot of gold to invest up front.

So there is something else going on. Caduceus decides that is step two—figure out who these people are, or who they’re working for, and what they or their employer want. It’s about all he can do, chained in the bottom of a cart, but at least it’s something.

His mood doesn’t really have time to lift, because the cart hits a bumpy patch of road and his immediate focus shifts to not throwing up. It would be gross, and also he would probably choke on it and might die.

It is possible to drown on dry land, Caduceus knows. If you get enough fluid in your lungs—blood, water, but also vomit—and can’t get the air in, that’s drowning too. And this is the worst of all possible ways to drown, so Caduceus shifts his priorities.

Step one, don’t panic. Step two, don’t vomit and don’t drown. Step three, figure out who these people are. Figure out where they are taking you, and why.

Step four, find a way out.

Step five, find a way home.

It feels simple, put like that, and something in Caduceus steadies a little—so maybe he wasn’t entirely succeeding at step one after all. But he’s got it now.

He closes his eyes against the pain, and breathes. Don’t panic. Don’t die. Learn what this is. Find a way out. Find a way home. The plan—as far as it can be called that—echoes in his head like a mantra, and while he more loses consciousness than falls asleep, he dreams anyway.

---

The first few days are a chaotic blur. He wakes and breathes and eavesdrops as much as he can through the pounding of the wheels and his skull. The headache fades, eventually, in these intervals of awareness and darkness, and he begins to have a sense of time again. Overall, he thinks it might be a week by cart, but he’s not certain.

At night, they haul him out of the straw when they camp. He sits, still manacled and shackled, a chain looped around his chest to bind him to the cart wheel. He chats to the grass and the insects when the men fall asleep. He whispers his name and who he is and, as best as he can tell, what is happening to him. He doesn’t think, really, that someone will stumble upon the moth sitting on the back of his hand and talk to her about this and come to find him. But, like throwing bottles into the ocean with scraps of paper, it feels like the thing to do.

They are going north; not the north Caduceus knows, the one eastwards across the continent, but north along the coast. He’s been with Fjord to Port Damali, and although they took the trip by teleport, he remembers it’s somewhere this way. Maybe they are taking him to Port Damali—that would be good luck, he thinks. He doesn’t know anyone there, but it’s where Fjord is from, so that counts for something. And pieces of it are beautiful.

Although there are beautiful pieces to most of the world, so by that logic, Caduceus will be alright no matter where he ends up.

It has been more than a week, Caduceus decides, by the time they arrive at the city. They’ve moved inland, deliberately, avoiding the major roads and camping in the wilderness at night. To the north of Nicodranas, the foliage turns into a temperate jungle, thick with plant life and insects. The dragonflies that Caduceus murmurs to at night are large and colorful. The air is sweet with sap. It is a beautiful place, but he is becoming more uneasy by the day.

He is very far from home. Fjord must be very worried. He wonders what Fjord has told Cormorant, and whether Cormorant believes it.

He tries to question the men about what they are doing only once. They’re sitting a few hundred yards into the treeline, that night. The bigger moon is full and the smaller moon is a waxing crescent; their collective light gleams through the canopy. “We’re not moving very fast,” he observes.

Faro looks up at him. “What’s it to you?”

“Just that it would be pretty easy for someone to catch up,” Caduceus comments.

Bernard glowers. “No one’ll catch up.”

“I’m not alone,” Caduceus says. “I did know people.” He almost mentions Fjord, mentions Cormorant, tries to appeal to their better natures. But he doesn’t know yet if they have better natures, and he doesn’t want his family in harm’s way.

“Who think you’re dead,” Bernard says, with satisfaction. “We knocked the bridge out. Made it look like a storm did it. No one’s coming for you.”

Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s not. It feels true. It doesn’t mean they fell for it. Beau sees a lot of things. So does Caleb. Maybe they figured it out. Maybe they didn’t. He wouldn’t blame them if they didn’t…

So he can’t count on someone coming. Time to move on. “This isn’t an easy journey by cart,” Caduceus says. “We could have teleported.”

“Do I look like I can fucking teleport?” Bernard snaps.

“You got these,” Caduceus says, lifting his wrists to show the manacles. “Teleportation is easier, isn’t it?”

“Not our call,” Faro drawls. “The lady wants, the lady gets.”

The lady—does Caduceus know any ladies who might be angry at him?

“What is this about?” he asks. “Whatever she’s told you—“

“She paid,” Bernard says. “That’s all.”

“What if I paid you more?” Caduceus asks. He doesn’t know how much she paid, of course, but money is---well, there’s not much use for it, and the Mighty Nein collected so much of it over their travels that they’ll never spend it all. He and Fjord have sacks of gold in the cupboards behind the flour and the potatoes.

Faro looks interested but Bernard looks—hmm. That’s interesting. “Not a chance,” he spits. “Don’t mock me, boy.”

“I’m older than you,” Caduceus observes. “Probably three or four times. Why are you afraid of her?”

“What?”

“Whoever hired you. Why are you afraid?”

“I’m not afraid of shit,” Bernard says.

“Okay,” Caduceus says.

“I’m not.”

“If you say so,” Caduceus says. “But if this is just a job, I don’t see why you wouldn’t take more money.”

“You couldn’t afford it,” he says.

“If it risks your life, probably not,” Caduceus says. “Little is worth that.”

“Shut the hell up,” the man says, and backhands him across the face. Caduceus flinches. His lip stings.

“If you take these off,” Caduceus says, one last try, “I can probably protect you from her. I’m not bad in a fight.”

“Oh, are you?” Bernard snaps, and then kicks his legs out from under him. It’s easy, considering the way they’re chained together. He doesn’t stop kicking after that, and Caduceus curls up, puts his back to him and lets him bruise his side and ribs, protecting his face and the soft parts of his belly where a little internal damage can do a lot of harm.

“Stop,” Faro says, eventually, and even though Caduceus is pretty sure Bernard is in charge, he does. Caduceus stays curled up like that anyway, in the soft wet soil, breathing. It smells like mold, and dirt, and life. A dragonfly settles on his knuckles and stays there, and both the men sleep before Caduceus does.

He doesn’t ask them questions, after that.

Their arrival is precipitated by a sharp turn to the west, back out towards the ocean. They come out of the jungle and through the plum groves and he remembers the city of Feolinn vaguely when he sees the signage. They make wine from the plums, he remembers. He remembers being here with the Nein, and drinking, and the way he stood out in the streets of a city mostly-human, slightly elf, even more slightly gnome.

He doesn’t stand out this time. They pack him into a crate instead, folded like a long-limbed doll. His joints ache and his muscles cramp almost immediately. The smell of pine and the darkness eventually allows him to meditate, and he lets the long hot journey through the city pass in a blur.

He comes out of it when the crate is lifted. He smells salt again, hears the creak of timbers, the snap of ropes. The crate is loaded onto a ship, and a man he doesn’t recognize is the one who pries the lid off unceremoniously. They tip him out onto the wooden boards of the below deck, and he just lies there for a few minutes as blood floods back into his extremities. Eventually he sits up. He doesn’t see well in the semi-dark below deck, especially since the kerosene lamp the crew member is using for light is behind him.

“Captain,” someone says. “Right here.”

“So they made it here after all,” a familiar voice says, and Caduceus’s memory shuffles violently through the last several decades and then he remembers in a cold flash, like someone has thrown water into his face.

“Weren’t you dead?” he asks.

Avantika stalks around to his front and gives him an ugly look. “Why don’t you tell me?”

He knows better than to cast Eyes of the Grave, although he’s itching to, but he doesn’t need it to know what she is. He can smell the death on her. She’s what Jamedi was—not fully alive, no longer in the ground the way she should be. An unnatural thing.

Caduceus doesn’t think about Avantika that much, these days. But he doesn’t like her; doesn’t like that she served Uk’otoa, that she would have hurt them without a second thought, that she slept with his husband (the last of which is the pettiest reason, he supposes, but he still feels it). It’s a relief to know exactly where he stands with this, anyway. She’s a bad person. She wants something he won’t want to give her.

Wildmother , he prays. Whatever she wants, let it not be Fjord.

“Well?” she says. “You know what I want. Where is it?”

“What?” Caduceus says, politely blank. Avantika’s face twists into an ugly scowl, and it occurs to him that she thinks he’s being difficult on purpose.

She pulls his head back, her fingers snarled in his hair, forcing him to go up on his knees. Someone whimpers, and Caduceus only realizes the sound came from him when she laughs.  He distracts himself by looking her over. She was beautiful once, but this revenant that was once Avantika is more nightmarish than anything, her skin a sickly green, barnacles encrusted down her shoulder, the faint smell of rotting fish around her.  And of course there is the fishing line that makes neat stitches all the way around her neck.

“Where is it?” she asks, again.

“I don’t know what you want,” says Caduceus, which is true although he could venture some guesses.

“The orb,” she snarls. “We know you had it.  He felt you when you ripped it from Fjord’s useless corpse.  Where did it go?”

“It’s gone,” Caduceus answers.

“Liar,” she says. “Don’t worry, I don’t have to get it out of you.  He will.”  The way she says it, Caduceus has no doubt who she means.  She jerks his head back and he knows better than to make a sound this time but still he flinches.  “You know you aren’t a match for us. His followers killed Fjord when he was surrounded by all of you, and they were not half so valuable to Uk’otoa as me.”

It takes Caduceus a second, but his memory supplies this more easily: the sea in storm, Beau screaming Fjord’s name, the pure cold rage burning through his veins. That feels like a lifetime ago, that horrible nightmarish battle that Fjord did not live to the end of. Caduceus has grown stronger since.  He might be able to take her.  But he is bruised and bound and on a ship, so even if he won a fight, where would he go?  Instead, he decides to test a theory, a theory that has been growing more solid in his head this whole time.

“Did you really care for Fjord? You slept with him, but I know that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

“He’s a traitor,” she says, like she’s affronted Caduceus even brought it up.

“What I guess I mean is, were you sad when you heard he was dead?”

“No,” Avantika snaps, “And my one regret is that he is not still alive so I could do it myself.”

Caduceus hides his relief.  Avantika believes Fjord is dead, so she knows nothing of his life in Bluecove, of Cory.  She might find out eventually—Caduceus will have to deal with her before then—but for now it is a load off to know his husband and daughter are safe at home, out of Avantika’s cruel sight.

“I’m taking you to him,” Avantika promises. “And you’ll take me to that orb.”

“We’ll see,” Caduceus says stubbornly.  She regards him for a moment, and then viciously backhands him.

“You will,” she says, while he reels.  “And you will shut up or I’ll do much worse.”

So he sits there, quiet, chained, and she goes back up onto the deck. The ship sets sail after several more hours, but they leave him there bound in the hold until well past dark, when the same crew member comes with rations. He sets the dried meat aside, eats the beans and the bread and drinks the ale, unpleasant and worse for being thinned with water.

He revisits the plan in his head. He is not panicking. He is not dead. He knows who Avantika is and what she wants and he cannot give it to her. He needs to find a way out, and find a way home.

The ship shifts back and forth gradually, and with a sinking feeling Caduceus realizes that the farther from port they go, the farther he is from help, and from his family, and from a fate better than sinking into the sea. Even if he did break out, what would he do? Where would he go?

The ship rocks.  The waves lap.  Caduceus tries to plan, but he is exhausted and his cheek and scalp are stinging on top of the bruises from before, the marks from his bindings and the pangs of hunger. Instead he falls asleep and in his dreams, finds his way home.

---

It is a long sea journey. Caduceus thinks they feed him twice a day, and he counts twenty-eight meals before things get—odd. The same crewman brings him food every time. He is very young, younger than Caduceus was when he left home, certainly, even allowing for human and firbolg age ranges. The third day Caduceus sees the falchion strapped to his hip, and thinks, oh, no. You are too young for this.

“What do you know of the creature you serve?” Caduceus asks him, the next time.

“What?”

“Uk’otoa,” Caduceus says. “He will ask things of you, and someday they will be more than you wish to give him. Let me help you.”

The boy drops the tray in front of him with a clatter. “I—have to go.”

“What sends you dreams at night,” Caduceus says, “You should not be afraid of it.”

“I’m not afraid,” the boy lies, and runs. Caduceus sighs and picks at the bread. The next person who descends is not the boy; it is Avantika.

Caduceus smiles at her benignly. “Hello.”

“Simon seems convinced you’ve used magic on him,” Avantika greets him. “Read his mind. But I see that those are still secure.” She taps a wrist with a nail. She does it with the confidence—the habit—of someone whose fingers are usually perfectly manicured, but hers are rotting a little. Everything about her screams unnatural, hisses this should not be .

“I don’t read minds,” Caduceus says.

“No,” she says. “But if I hear another report that you’re trying to turn my crew against me, I’ll nail your tongue to the roof of your mouth and Uk’otoa will rip the answers he needs from your thoughts alone.”

Caduceus isn’t sure that Uk’otoa can do that, and he’s not sure that Avantika is either. He’s not sure she’d risk it. But he also doesn’t know if her anger will overcome her good sense, so he is silent the next time the boy comes.

On the mornings when Simon has dark circles beneath his eyes, jumpy and distracted like he hasn’t slept at all—his gaze lingers on Caduceus a long time, and Caduceus knows he remembers.

Still—twenty-eight meals, perhaps two weeks, before things get very odd. Caduceus makes a special effort to count, because he wants to know how long he’s been away. Three weeks. A month. Maybe a month, at worst. Cormorant grows so quickly. She must be so tall. She must need another haircut soon. Soon it will be harvest time, and Hallowtide. He is missing so much.

And yet they seem no closer to their destination, or so Caduceus gathers by the dark looks the crew give each other. They’re down in the hold more often, counting supplies, rationing things out.

“What’s happening?” Caduceus dares to ask, after thirty-one meals. They’ve long since stopped giving him the meat—smart of them.

“Caught in a still,” the boy says, after a moment. “It happens.”

“I see,” Caduceus says.

“We’ll be there soon,” he says.

They aren’t. The still continues, or something like it. They end up doubling back somewhere to replenish on supplies. They’re on their way again, and things seem lighter, for a while. Then they do not. This time there is a bad storm, so bad that even Caduceus feels it. It blows them off course by several days, maybe a week. Caduceus spends the whole of it ill from the movement of the boat, praying. He has a sudden vision of the ship swamped by water, and tries to imagine swimming in these chains.

But the ship doesn’t sink. It merely—meanders. Hits bad weather, winds in the wrong direction or no winds at all. Spends two and a half weeks fleeing from a persistent dragon turtle—Caduceus nearly laughs at that one, barely managing to bite it back when Simon tells him.

Something is stopping them from getting to Uk’otoa, Caduceus thinks, and he cannot reach his magic but he knows, he knows that his prayers are being answered.

In those interminable tense weeks, Simon begins to talk to him again. At first it is merely short responses to Caduceus’s questions about the weather, about the route. Then he becomes chattier. Uk’otoa, Caduceus gathers, is growing angrier in all of their heads. Is demanding to know why his will is not being done.

“He says—“ Simon shakes his head.

“Consume,” Caduceus says, and smiles when Simon’s eyes go very wide. “I knew a man once who was in the position you are.”

“What—“ Simon’s voice shakes. “What happened to him?”

“I helped him,” Caduceus says, very quietly, in case Avantika is listening. “And I can help you. The Wildmother can help you.”

“The Wildmother?”

“Have you sailed out of Nicodranas?” At the nod, Caduceus says, “The oceans are Her domain—the oceans and the earth both. It is Her lighthouse at the port of Nicodranas, a gift from Her lover the Lawbearer Erathis. It guides ships home safely, and She will guide you, if you want it.”

“I—“ Caduceus can tell that Simon is thinking about it. “I can’t,” he says, finally, agonized. “He’ll know. Uk’otoa. And she’ll know.” The ‘she’ requires no explanation—obviously, Avantika.

“Alright,” Caduceus says. “She will be here, if you ever look to Her.”

He thinks he is making progress, but Simon doesn’t ask about the Wildmother again, not before the storm. 

It hits—Caduceus isn’t sure when it hits, he has little to no conception of time. He is sleeping, and he wakes as the ship rocks, suddenly, thrown from a dream of Fjord’s arms around him, the both of them at the bottom of the sea. It’s peaceful. It’s good. It makes him feel safe. Then he wakes, all of a sudden, and he realizes he isn’t safe at all. The ship is being tossed around like a toy in the waves.

The movement grows worse, crates rattling against each other, vibrating in the ropes that bind them in place. Caduceus himself is flung against the wall violently when a wave tosses the vessel. He breathes. This is the work of the Wildmother. This is the will of the Wildmother. He will be fine.

He believes it until the hull splits and the water starts leaking in. Then he begins to pray, at first in his head and then out loud. The water grows quickly, from a puddle to a sea until it’s up to his chest. Filling just this little compartment, it does not seem to be sinking the ship, but it will drown him and Caduceus does not want to drown.

He takes a deep breath, wondering how to time it so he can have one more before he goes below water. With the chains on him, he has no hope of swimming upwards.

Wildmother, please…  Send a sign. Send a savior. But there is no Fjord here, no paladin to do Her bidding: only a cleric, a cleric bound too tightly to reach Her.

He breathes. It has been—two months? Three? How old is Cory now? How long can he hold his breath? A while, he thinks. Drowning is a terrible way to die. He wants Fjord. He wants to see his daughter again.

Wildmother…

As if in answer, the hatch slams open and Simon comes charging in, sloshing through the water.

“Sorry!” he says. “I didn’t realize where the leak was until Morgan said, and then I had to finish bringing down the sail—“

“Don’t be sorry,” Caduceus says. “You were just in time.”

“I took these,” Simon says. “She won’t notice.” He says it with the air of someone trying to convince themselves of something, but he produces a set of silver keys and unlocks the chains. He doesn’t have the ones to the manacles, which is unfortunate, but it’s enough to let him move, both of them paddling through the water to the stairs and then sloshing their way out of the hold.

“Stay here,” Simon demands, once they’re above deck. They’re in the thick of a storm. The sky is so black Caduceus wouldn’t know if it was daylight, but some instinct tells him it isn’t. The rain is coming in sheets. He’s already soaked, so he hardly notices except where it gets in his eyes. The ship thrashes, and Caduceus does as he’s told mostly because he has to sit down or be flung flat onto the slick, rain-drenched deck. There is a flash of lightning—close, too close—and a roll of thunder, almost simultaneous.

He breathes. He tries to think. He could—he could—

“You!” a figure looms out of the rain. Avantika. She looks profoundly corpse-like, now, red curls soaked dark and sticking to her neck. “I should kill you right now. You’re stopping us from—“ she suddenly resolves something. “You’ll tell me the location of the crystal. Right now. I’ll do it myself.”

“I don’t know it,” Caduceus says, and she draws her gleaming falchion.

“I’ll change your mind,” she says, and raises it.

There is a crash, and a bright light, and then nothing but white.

When his higher cognition comes back, Caduceus is lying flat on the deck. He is soaked through and still getting pelted by droplets, but some of the rainwater down his neck and shoulder is warm. He has the absurd thought that it was heated by the lightning, and then he realizes: of course. It's blood.

He thinks he would be screaming if, one, his nerves were processing this as pain rather than a total rewiring of his entire perception of his body, admittedly into a form that seems to involve a lot more agony, and two, if he could physically open his mouth. His jaw is like a thing he is looking at in a mirror--he understands that it's connected to his body, but it feels like something entirely separate nonetheless. His mouth tastes like metal.

He's taken blows like this before, he thinks—magical lightning attacks. The actual experience reminds him a bit of the time he and Jester shared mango candy, and then months later in Port Damali Fjord had bought him a real sliced mango from a seller of exotic fruits. He can see how the two things are related, but the actual experiences bear little resemblance to each other.

His brain, distracted by re-cataloguing every nerve ending, produces the thought: maybe you're dead. But, no; that hadn't hurt nearly so much.

He’s panicking, which is a regression. Step one. He tries to move again and this time gets a hand to obey him, and automatically makes the sign and casts Calm Emotions on himself.

The calm passes over him like a wave, and he breathes, and smiles faintly. Caduceus slowly sits up and blinks and swallows and reassures himself that all his limbs are still attached. And then he remembers that he shouldn’t have been able to cast anything at all, which is about when the spell fades.

The lightning has thrown Avantika and him apart. He sees her, getting up, shell-shocked. The lightning hit Caduceus, ran right through him like it strikes a tree, straight through the manacles—they have split, as though by design.

This is by design, he thinks, and then Avantika is coming at him again.

“You tell your goddess,” she snarls. “You tell her the storm won’t stop me. The wind won’t stop me. This ocean belongs to Uk’otoa as much as it does to her and I will get you to him.”

Caduceus doesn’t respond. He just lifts a hand and casts a Guiding Bolt at her. She blasts him—Eldritch Blast, the sickly color Fjord’s used to be. He thinks it should hurt but he’s still numb from the lightning, so it barely registers. He casts Control Water and hurls a tremendous wave over the deck, trying to knock her away. She manages to stay upright and slash at him, but she doesn’t go for the throat.

I haven’t told her anything, so she can’t kill me.

The thought is heartening, except then she shouts to the crew for help, and three others appear out of the night, and the fight becomes a meaningless blur. It is hard to shield himself and fight. Hard to face multiple opponents at once, in the dark, in the blinding rain.

The only comfort Caduceus has, as he summons his Spirit Guardians and lets the glowing insects come to life all around him, is that this time, Fjord is safe.

Then they are on him. He casts again, and again, spell after spell after spell. Caduceus had days like this, ten years ago, back with the Nein, days when he burned everything he had in a fight. These days, if he drains himself for anything it’s healing, and most days he goes to sleep with a large number of the spells he could manage still uncast. He spends what feels like magic enough for the last few months in these minutes and he’s still not sure if it will be enough. He hasn’t cast like this in a long time, but he hasn’t fought like this ever.

He has never fought alone.

Avantika. Avantika is giving the orders. Avantika is the one hunting him. He tries to target her, shield himself as best as he can, and he casts Blight on her and watches her rot, and then he summons a Sacred Flame and watches her burn. She’s no longer attacking and he casts it again, letting the fire take the corpse, letting it cleanse. There’s no earth to give her back to, here, and she’s right in one respect—the sea is contested territory.

This woman will not come near his family again. He makes sure she’s burned to ash before she touches the waves.

When he looks up from her corpse, the crew looks stunned. But not for long—they have their falchions, too. They have their orders and the voices in their heads and the barnacles growing up their bodies. Caduceus cannot stop them all.

Simon is there, too. Simon is looking at him, with something like fear and something like awe and something else, faint, that Caduceus can’t quite read through the rain.

“You have to get away,” he shouts over the next crack of thunder. And he draws the falchion and stands between Caduceus and the others.

Caduceus has a little magic left, and he knows then what to do with it.

He reaches out and presses a Death Ward into Simon’s shoulder. And then with his last great effort, he seizes the ocean from beneath them and lets the whirlpool take hold of the ship.

“You’ll be fine,” Caduceus swears, and there’s a terrible cracking of wood, another flash of lightning, and Caduceus throws himself into the sea.

---

His last big spell gets him away from the wreckage. He thinks—hopes—that Simon will be alright. He has a good feeling about it. The current he summons carries him miles before it runs out, and he doesn’t have another spell for it. He just paddles, looking for another ship, or a shoreline, or something. There’s nothing. The storm is behind him, mostly, but the sea is still choppy and rough and it’s a lot to keep his head above water. The numbness has faded entirely and in its place everything aches.

There is nothing to do but swim, and so he swims.

And swims.

And swims.

Fjord taught him to swim. He does it sometimes on purpose now, in the water with Cormorant and Fjord in the summers. He thinks he’ll never quite love it, but he tries to summon those memories, of paddling, of joy. He tries not to think of how it had felt to drown, or how badly his arms and legs want to stop moving.

Always, though, it reasserts himself in his mind. He is out of magic. There is no one here. And he is so, so very tired.

He wants to sleep.

If he does, he will not wake up.

He tells himself this, and keeps going. He thinks it is for a long time, and eventually he starts to realize that he will hit a point where he has no other choice. His body will make the decision for him.

He can’t decide if he is afraid. He is mostly very tired.

There are worse places to die, Caduceus thinks. It turns out that there is a point past terror, past exhaustion, past pain, a point when his limbs have gone from freezing cold to simply numb, when his screaming muscles have turned to rubber, when the burn of the seawater against the litany of tiny cuts across his body has dulled to nothing. He is so far gone that they can’t even rub salt in the wound anymore—that feels like a clever joke, but there is no one to try and make laugh.

It feels like going into a trance, like his mind has battered against the suffering for hours and hours until the door gave way and peace, finally, flooded in.  It is too real to be dreaming, but his body is not quite his anymore, either.  A liminal space there on the water.  The ocean of water is Hers, and so is the ocean of stars above.  He tips on his back and floats whenever the sea is calm enough.  It is his best chance at breath.  He is doing that when the trance hits, although the sea is becoming tougher again, the waves slapping into his face, blocking his breath.  He will drown. He knows this. He has known this for hours and still aches, struggles, breaths.  Why?

The cry of a seabird splits the night air, the silence. Oh, he thinks, and his heart cries out with the next shriek of the bird. Oh, my love, my daughter. Caduceus despises making promises he cannot keep.

He is surrounded by water but his mouth is dry as dust. His throat burns. He only tastes salt. Give me the strength, he begs Her. Please. One more breath. One more minute.

He feels Her, all around him, like he is communing. He can feel Her in the sky or the sea or the wind, all of it. The cold. The salt. The stars. All of it is Her, the beauty and the brutality.

My Clay, She tells him. You have always had the strength.

It is the last truly coherent thought he has. He keeps breathing for hours, after, or maybe just minutes. The bird’s cry echoes but he is not sure he hears it again—perhaps he never heard it. Cormorant used to cry every night, not just like that but enough. That was years ago, or yesterday. She could be crying now.

Caduceus isn’t. He is too dehydrated to cry and there is already enough saltwater.

Seawater.  Sky.  Images. Fjord asleep, somewhere; gardening, somewhere; holding their daughter, alone, reading to the both of them in the kitchen. The picture books.  The myths.  The poetry—Fjord’s voice, in his head. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

Sky. Seawater. The stars have folded in on top of him and the ocean of water and of air are one.  Stars surround him, on the surface of the water, glowing like candles, or a fleet of little lantern boats. He floats, upward, or down.  Maybe there is something good and perfect at the bottom of the ocean. Maybe he will find it.

But I have promises to keep...

He inhales, maybe air, maybe water. Both taste like salt. His eyes shut and do not reopen.

---

Improbably, the water hurts more coming back up than it had going down.

Caduceus coughs for what feels like hours before his body gives up and decides that it might as well be thorough, and so then he pukes his guts out on the deck. It’s all water, water and salt and bile, he hasn’t eaten recently enough for it to be anything else. It hurts. Coughing and vomiting are never comfortable affairs, and Caduceus’ entire body is beaten, muscles strung tight, each wracking cough like a new blow.

The woman, who must have dragged him out of the sea because he can’t remember doing it himself, just stares at him. He can’t blame her. She’s human, perhaps in her early thirties, with the weather-beaten skin of a career fisherwoman. He thanks her in between fits. She pats him once on the shoulder and then backs up as far as she can go, which is fair. Caduceus doesn’t want to be near his vomit either.

The boat is small. Caduceus is wedged up against a big bucket of crabs, still alive, scrabbling and crawling over each other and pulling each other back down.

“Stupid,” he tells them, leaning over to look. His throat feels like it’s been scrubbed out with sandpaper. His voice sounds wounded. “If you’d just cooperate you’d do just fine.”

“I beg your pardon,” the woman says.

“Not you,” Caduceus says as gently as he can. Then his lungs make it known they are not quite empty and he dissolved into another brutal coughing fit.

“What were those things?” she asks him, when his breathing has settled into a steady rasp and he has drawn his knees up to his chest to avoid his own puke.

“What?” he says. Absurdly, he thinks she must have seen the corpses of Uk’otoa’s minions, but he’d been swimming for hours. Surely he’d gotten further away. Although time had been pretty meaningless, by the end.

“The lights,” she said. “On the sea.  Like candles. I followed them, didn’t I?  S’how I found you.”  She has the same accent as Fjord. It’s pretty common—most of Port Damali has it and half the Menagerie Coast besides—but he’s still profoundly endeared to her because of it.

The thought of Fjord, and the lights, makes Caduceus laugh. It isn’t out of humor but sheer joy; it makes his whole body ache, his lungs, his throat. He’d thought he’d hallucinated it.  He’d thought it had just been the stars. “Divine intervention,” he says, and slumps back against the crabs.

“I’m heading back to the coast,” she says, eyeing him warily.  “Fishing villages, one called Bluecove, one called Fleur de Mar, and then to Nicodranas.  You can find passage elsewhere from there...”

“That’s just fine, thank you. That’ll get me home,” he tells her. The fear is already fading like a half-remembered dream. The pain is an afterthought.  He is going home.  The Wildmother has sent this ship to him and he is going home.

“Right,” she says.  She looks at him like she is seeing a ghost. Caduceus can’t find the words to reassure her. He isn’t really sure that he isn’t a wraith. So he opts to just sit there against the crab bucket and wait.

They reach Bluecove perhaps four hours before dawn. “Faster than usual,” she comments, suspicious. The dock is empty and still.  In an hour it will start to see its first sailors, in two it will fill up with early-morning fishermen, in three it will be fully alive.  But now it is just this woman, and Caduceus, and the lapping sea.

“Blessing from the Wildmother,” he tells her drowsily. It takes him two tries to stand. He feels something on his shoulder and reaches up to find a hard shell under his fingers. One of the crabs has made it out of the bucket. He smiles at it as the woman ties up on the dock.

Caduceus can’t keep his balance properly; the world spins when he tries to rise. And he’s never been the most graceful—when he gets in and out of boats on a good day, Fjord often takes his hand to steady him. He really, really does not want to take another dip in the water—his clothes have only just dried, ragged and stiff with salt.  So he just crawls out of the boat, pausing on his hands and knees on the splintery dock, before he painfully, painstakingly stands.

“Where are you going?” the woman asks, when he walks slowly past her.

“Home,” he answers, and continues up the dock onto the shore.  “Thank you.”

She doesn’t answer, just stares at him when he glances back and then keeps going.

The sand is cool but it still cuts into the raw soles of his feet. The crab fidgets on his shoulder, and he sets it down halfway up the beach. Crabs are good to eat, or so he’s gathered from Fjord and Cory’s enthusiasm for them, but this one has overcome its worse nature and it seems like a morning for second chances.  Once liberated, it scuttles off into the dunes.

Then he looks up.  There is still the radiant spill of stars against the deep blue of the sky. On the cliff he can see their house, the outline faint against the predawn sky.  There is a lantern gleaming orange and bright in the window.  It looks like a lighthouse, faintly visible off the coast to a ship on a barren sea.

Caduceus has been adrift for a long time.  He stares up at it, inhales the salt air, and whispers a thank you to The Wildmother for Her light and for the one he sees shining above, for guiding him, for saving him.

Then, on bare feet already torn bloody, heart lighter than it’s felt in ages, Caduceus limps the rest of the way home.

---

Fjord wakes to a familiar weight pressing down on his chest.  He keeps his eyes shut and breathes; in a few moments he will have to rouse himself somehow, beneath the heavy press of the grief, but for now he can cling to his dream.

And as dreams go, it was a good one.  A new one.  He tries to commit it to memory, so he can replay it: He wakes up in his too-big, too-empty bed to a knock at the door, even though it is still dark.  He gets up and answers, as though on autopilot, feeling strangely, perfectly awake.  And Caduceus is standing in the doorway.

Art by @lurrlonde.

He is pale, hair bleached mostly-white, raw skin stretched too close over bone. Fjord glances at his feet automatically to see if they touch the ground. They do; they are caked in sand, and when Fjord glances back there are dark reddish-brown footprints up the path.  And he smells like the ocean, like salt and brine. Fjord instantly remembers every story he’s ever heard about the ghost of a drowned sailor turning back up on the shore and none of them end well when someone lets them in.

He reaches out and touches Cad anyway. He’s no ghost; Caduceus’ hand is solid—skeletal, yes, but your garden-variety emaciation level of skeletal, not a walking corpse. “I’m home,” Caduceus rasps.

“What happened?” Fjord breathes.  “How...”

“The will of the Wildmother,” he says, “Brought me home. The rest...” he looks so terribly weary that Fjord feels guilty for asking. “There is no danger now.”

It’s a non-answer, but it’s the most Caduceus of non-answers and Fjord is filled with joy at it, that his subconscious can still construct such a good likeness.

“Gods,” Fjord says, and hugs him. Caduceus hugs back; his weight sags a little against Fjord, and Fjord is a little dismayed at how little effort it takes to hold him upright. He glances down at Caduceus’ bloodied feet.

“Come on,” he says. “Arms around my neck.”

Orcs and firbolgs are built to carry things; Caduceus is not very strong at all but can still lift Fjord, and Caduceus is unwieldy to hold at his height but not beyond Fjord’s strength. He carries him into the bathroom, sets him down only to spell in the water, to bank up the fire and heat it. While they wait he draws Caduceus up against his chest, lets him rest his chin on Fjord’s shoulder. Normally Caduceus is chattier in these dreams, but he seems content to be quiet now.

“Do you want water?” Fjord asks. “Tea?”

“Tea,” Caduceus says. “I think I’ve had—enough water.”

Fjord makes sure Caduceus is comfortable before he gets up and starts the kettle boiling. He starts boiling oats and milk for porridge, too—feeling the narrow sharp ridge of Cad’s spine has made feeding him feel imperative.

When the bath is full and the water hot, he gently helps Caduceus strip off his clothes—probably beyond saving, Fjord thinks—and into the bath. The fine grey fur turns soft as he lathers it with soap; little ribbons of blood fade into the water as Fjord cleans his wrists—ringed by a raw red line, like something bound them—and gets the sand off his blistered feet. There is a strange wound on him, a branching burn that stretches from his left shoulder across his back to his right hip, like someone has soldered the pattern of a fern into his skin. But when Fjord brushes the washcloth across it, he doesn’t flinch.

His hair takes the longest. It’s soaked with salt and dried, matted in places, and fragile from sun and lack of care. But Fjord is gentle. He works the soap through it strand by strand, allows each to settle back into a soft curl in his hand. Through it all, he can’t stop touching Caduceus, thumb stroking down his cheekbone, his eyebrow, the angled slope of his ear. Caduceus leans into it, one cheek pressed to Fjord’s palm.

Fjord keeps waiting for the dream to end, for Caduceus or the Wildmother or his subconscious to tell him what this is. Caduceus to melt into an angry ghoul, or Uk’otoa to lurch up out of the bathwater.

It doesn’t. No ghouls or leviathans appear. He rinses Caduceus’ hair out, combs it smooth, and helps him out of the water into a towel. “Let me get you clothes,” he murmurs.

He comes back with a nightshirt and rose hip tea with honey spooned in for Caduceus’ raw throat. Caduceus manages to dress himself but can’t hold the teacup steady. Fjord carries it to the bedside, and then carries Caduceus to bed, unwilling to let the raw sores on his feet touch the ground. Some part of it feels overly dramatic but in this dream Fjord is allowed, he thinks. He sits beside Caduceus, helping him lift the cup, tilting it to his lips. Caduceus swallows, and smiles at him, but a tear drips down his cheek.

Fjord catches it with his thumb. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Caduceus assures him.

“What are you thinking?”

“It doesn’t taste like salt,” Caduceus says.

“No,” Fjord says.  “It shouldn’t.”

“It’s been—I can’t remember when I last stopped tasting it,” Caduceus says.

“You need to eat,” Fjord says. “Can you?”

Caduceus nods, so Fjord brings the bowl.

“We don’t have blueberries,” Fjord tells him. “Just jam. Here.” He has stirred blueberry preserve into the porridge, because there are no fresh ones in midwinter.

Caduceus eats slowly, but empties the bowl. It is maybe the strangest dream Fjord has had, if only because it feels so real. He wonders if this is the Wildmother, wish fulfillment, giving him the chance to take care of Caduceus and say goodbye. He bandages Caduceus’ wounds while he eats, lets his hands linger on every angle, every damaged part of him.

When the tea is gone too, Fjord pulls Caduceus into his arms and lies back. The exhaustion missing at the start of the dream has arrived. Caduceus goes willingly and relaxes against Fjord’s chest, his own exhaustion written across every line of his face.

“I love you,” Caduceus says.

“I remember,” Fjord promises. “I love you too. Go to sleep.”

And they do, and then Fjord is here. Waking, slowly. The sunlight is already streaming in.  It might be beautiful, but is it any wonder he wants to hold to the dream a little longer?

But the familiarity of the weight is not the invisible pressure on his chest that has made itself known in his half-empty house. It is older than that weight, deeper than it; it is a real, physical thing settled on his breastbone. He reaches out and touches soft hair. He opens his eyes and his fingertips are settled in Caduceus’ loose curls, his husband‘s head pillowed on his chest.  One ear pokes raggedly through the tangle of hair; the other Caduceus has pressed down, perhaps unconsciously, over Fjord’s heart.

No ghosts. No dreams. Just Caduceus, here, breathing, warm in his arms. 

If it can be believed that every person gets an allotment of miracles, Fjord has more than run through his fair share. Surviving that shipwreck all those years ago. Escaping Uk’otoa’s grasp and finding the Wildmother. Cormorant. But the best of his miracles is here. Fjord married him.  And he isn’t sure if it’s a new one entirely or merely the same one, like a living fluttering thing, that has carried Caduceus home to him.

Fjord gets a burst of clarity, the breaking of a wave. He understands Caduceus’s relationship with the Wildmother, he has always thought—understands the casualty with which he speaks to Her, not just in prayer but in the kitchen, in the garden, braiding Cormorant’s hair, all of it a form of worship. Fjord understands. He respects it. It’s just always been easier for him to do it carefully, incense lit, on his knees. He has to work up to it.

But this—this is what Caduceus feels, this sudden ecstatic joy. He couldn’t bear to move and disturb Caduceus, but he doesn’t need to; no prayer or ritual could feel more like he was directly speaking to the Wildmother than right this moment, when he feels Her hand in the world like this, when he is holding the proof of it in his arms. He presses his face into Caduceus’s neck, slips the hand not yet tangled in his hair down to find his fingers and hold them, a little too tightly, and thinks thank you, thank you, thank you more certain in Her love than he has ever been.

Caduceus snores. Fjord tries to keep still and let him rest, but he can’t help himself—he keeps moving his fingers, checking another part of him to make sure it’s real. Here is the edge of the bandages around his wrists. Here are the old scars from those wolves, in scattered teeth patterns along his arm and ribs where no fur grows anymore. Here is the burn from the explosion that killed him. Here is the knife-wound that didn’t, still a thick ridge of scar tissue along his back. Here is a lock of his hair that has somehow stayed pink, one of only a few buried in the strands. Here is the curve of his rib close under his skin, the jutting bone of his hip, the lamb-softness of the hollow beneath his ear. Remembering, verifying. All these little details, no longer lost to him.

Caduceus doesn’t stir; perhaps something in Fjord’s touch tells him he is safe, or perhaps he has simply been pushed so far past his limits that gentleness, no matter its familiarity, is incapable of rousing him. They have spent hundreds of mornings like this, thousands of mornings. Fjord can’t imagine taking them for granted again.

It used to be that the moments felt stolen before Cormorant cried to be fed, or changed, and then as she got older before she came for breakfast. Now it feels stolen from the hands of the Raven Queen herself, that Fjord has gotten this back out of the grasp of death.

Mine, he thinks, possessively. Not yours. Not yet. Still mine.

“Dad,” says Cormorant from the doorway, bossily. Speak of the devil, he thinks distractedly. “Are you going to get up? I want—“

She takes a step into the room. Freezes. Fjord shifts to look at her. Her eyes have gone wide, pupils dilated all the way. Her mouth has opened just a little, like she’s forgotten she was partway to words.

“He got home last night,” Fjord says. He has no good explanation, but he thinks the faint awe that he can’t keep out of the words, the lost wonder of his expression, forestalls any protest Cormorant might have about getting details. “Be gentle, okay?”

She’s already running. “Dad!” Caduceus wakes, or maybe was awake already, smiling softly at Fjord as he shifts to open his arms and let Cory seize the spot between them. Heedless of the bandages, she presses herself into Caduceus’s hold; Fjord throws an arm over both of them.

“Dad,” she sobs, and she is sobbing, her shoulders shaking. Fat hot tears soak the bandaged burn where she’s pressing her face. Fjord can’t bring himself to scold because Caduceus doesn’t. He looks wonderstruck too. One hand slides up and cups her face, with hesitant reverence. His other hand stays in Fjord’s.

“I missed you, seabird,” he tells her.

“I thought you were dead ,” she says.

“Not yet,” Caduceus says simply. “Not for a while, I think.”

“You can never die,” she tells him hotly. “It’s not allowed.”

“Not for a good long while,” he reassures. “I don’t think it’ll be my time for a long while.”

“Good,” Fjord says, trying for levity, to close out the subject. He fails abjectly; his voice breaks on the word.

“I’m sorry,” Caduceus says. “I’m sorry it took so long to make it back to you.”

“You didn’t want to go,” Cormorant absolves him instantly, dripping snot. “You didn’t, right?”

“No,” he says. “And I’ve tried every day since to make it back here.”

“We put out a boat for you,” she says. “Did you see it?”

Fjord almost steps in to answer it, to say no, he was alive, remember? There was no ghost for their candle ship to guide through to the next world, no spirit imprisoned on the wrong side of the gate. But that’s not quite right, is it? Because Caduceus was in chains—Fjord knows the marks of shackles when he sees them, and Caduceus’ are old and deep. It will be a miracle if they don’t scar. And he might not have been looking for the way through to the astral plane, but he certainly was looking for his way back from somewhere.

Besides, Caduceus looks very thoughtful. His thumb brushes across Cory’s cheek, neatly drying her tears. She tips her head to the side to get her face fully into his palm like a little cat. “Yes,” Caduceus says. “I think I did.”

“Did it help?” she wants to know. “I put a flower on it, also.”

“One of the only things that did,” Caduceus says, quite seriously. “You two and the Wildmother brought me back.”

Fjord tightens his hold on them both a little. “And you,” he says. “That you—I don’t know what happened, you’ll have to tell me. But you lived. You came back to us. That is…not a small thing.”

“It’s a big thing,” Cory adds helpfully.

“Did you want breakfast?” Caduceus asks her, and Fjord remembers how she came into the room with a demand. He supposes Caduceus must have been awake after all, if he’d heard it, or maybe it’s just his uncanny intuition for the needs of other people. Or the half-decade of their lives that has begun most days with Cory insisting on food.

To his surprise, Cory shakes her head and wriggles down deeper in between them. On an impulse, Fjord pulls the sheet up, cocooning them in. She sighs happily. “I want to stay here a little longer. Can we?”

“As long as you want,” Fjord promises, meeting Caduceus’s eyes over her head. Caduceus smiles at him, and Fjord feels a little rush of joy all over again and is smiling back without thinking about it, without meaning to.

“We have time,” Caduceus agrees. Fjord nods in agreement and is seized by the realization; they have time. Time not just for this, to lie in bed and wait for breakfast and hold each other, but time for another season of planting, for Caduceus to teach Fjord to cook for real, for Cormorant to get taller and get her next set of teeth and the winter and spring and summer and fall to come through again, over and over. Time for Cormorant to grow up with both of her fathers, and Fjord to never wake alone again in the mornings, and to do laundry and sweep and braid hair and bake bread and watch the sunrise and the sunset and the ocean of stars. To go out in the middle of the night in the full moon and show Cormorant the plankton that glow, and drink tea on the porch, and Fjord’s life feels—longer. Fuller. The next four or five decades are spilling over with life and possibilities, the tea kettle boiling over.

Vandren had told a story once about a hat he’d lost overboard, how it had come sweeping back in with the tide three months later on an island two hundred miles away—still wearable, he’d said. Fjord had thought it was a load of bullshit, and he still did really, except that was what this was—the tide, rushing back in like a guest who had accidentally picked something up, a stranger chasing you down, excuse me, isn’t this yours? A feel-good story, the kind of thing that Caduceus means when he says nothing this good ever happens.

Except it does, every once in a while, and Fjord thanks the Wildmother again—will never be done thanking Her—that it should have happened to him.

“We have time,” Fjord says. That is a prayer too, and he cannot keep the wonder out of his voice. “We have time.”

---

Fjord wakes up slowly, like surfacing out of a warm pool, to the sound of voices. The weak winter sun has risen high enough to spill through the window. There are warm bodies pressed against him, Cormorant’s back against his chest, his arm sprawled over Caduceus’s back. Caduceus and Cormorant are both awake and talking quietly.

“Is it alright, then?” Cormorant is asking. “If I was mad at Her?”

“If it wasn’t,” Caduceus says after a moment, “Would you stop being mad?”

“Yes,” Cormorant says instantly. Then she pauses and admits, “…but I wouldn’t really. I’d just be mad secretly.”

“And She’d know anyway,” Caduceus says mildly. “So I think if you’re really mad, that’s all that matters, isn’t it?”

“Have you ever been mad at Her?”

“Yes,” Caduceus says.

“When you were gone?” she says. “Were you mad at Her then?”

“No,” Caduceus says. “I was grateful that you were safe, and I understand that there are limits to Her powers. She did help me come back to you, and I did not blame Her that it wasn’t sooner. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be angry, you know.”

“I know,” she says, but Fjord gets the sense that Cory is saying she knows it now because Caduceus told her, rather than because she was confident in it before. The soft pattern of their voices, Cory’s questions and Caduceus’s calm surety—Fjord had grasped for this, tried to fill this void, felt helpless and falling short as he tried to mimic some scrap of Caduceus’s wisdom. It is such a relief to hear this again—to hear Caduceus again, gently explaining the tangled mess that is the world. “When were you angry at Her?”

“Well,” Caduceus says. “I’ve told you before, how I met Fjord when I left the Blooming Grove to try and find a way to fix the rot.”

“Mmhmm,” Cormorant nods. “And you traveled together and you saved Grandma and Grandpa and Aunt Corrin and Aunt Clarabelle and Aunt Calliope and Uncle Colton when they were turned to stone! And made those magic crystals.” She sounds pleased with herself for remembering.

“That’s right,” Caduceus agrees. “But before I left, everyone else had left before me, to try and fix the blight.”

“Yes,” she said.

“And after they left, I stayed behind in the Blooming Grove, for a while,” Caduceus says. Fjord shifts and moves his hand across Caduceus’s back in a soothing gesture, to let Caduceus know he’s listening. Unintentionally, but rewardingly, it prompts Caduceus to revise his minimization. “For a very long time, actually.”

“How long?” Cormorant asks.

“A little more than ten years,” Caduceus says.

“That’s a really long time,” Cormorant says. Fjord cracks his eyes open to watch her. Her ears have flattened back in shock, and he imagines her eyes are very wide.

“Yes,” Caduceus says. “So while I understood, I was also angry sometimes, and sad sometimes, and lonely sometimes. And it’s okay to feel those things, even towards Her. She understands, too.”

“That’s so long,” Cormorant says. “You were gone forever and it wasn’t that long. It was fall and most of winter. That’s like—ten falls and ten winters and also ten springs and ten summers.” She sits up. Fjord shifts back to give her room and sits up as well. Caduceus slowly leverages himself up onto his elbow to be eye level with her. His gaze flickers back to Fjord for a moment and he smiles.

“That’s about right,” Caduceus agrees.

“And it was everyone ,” she says. “Both Grandma and Grandpa? But they were your mom and dad!”

“Well, I was a lot older than you are,” Caduceus says. “And I volunteered to stay. But it was a long time. And I was mad at them, sometimes. I was mad that they’d left me, even though I agreed with their reasons for going and still believed I had been right to stay. I was angry at the Wildmother for sending them. And I was angry at them for being away so long, even though I was also afraid from them, and they couldn’t have helped it.”

“…I was mad at you, too,” she admits in a rush. “I was mad that you left. Even though it wasn’t your fault and you didn’t want to go.”

“That’s okay,” Caduceus says.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“It’s only natural,” Caduceus says.

“I still feel bad,” Cory says quietly.

“I forgive you,” Caduceus says, and that seems to be what she needs, because she launches herself at him. The force of it tips Caduceus over and he ends up on his back on the mattress, Cory on top of him, curling into his arms.

“Careful,” Fjord says, but Caduceus gives him a winded but sincere smile and he subsides. Caduceus clearly isn’t so fragile that he doesn’t want to hold Cory (although Fjord does privately wonder if no amount of frailty would make him let go of her now).

“I’m kind of hungry,” Cory says, after another few minutes of lying there.

Fjord isn’t surprised. The sun is high enough for lunch by now, probably. They had made plans for the day for the market that dissolved entirely; Fjord wonders if they were missed.

As if in answer to the errant thought, someone knocks on the door.

“I’ll get that,” Fjord says. He rakes a hand loosely through his hair; he has pants on, which is really all he can hope for right now. He heads for the door.

It’s Cara. She’s standing there with a basket, looking a little taken aback by his disheveled appearance. She hides it well, though. “You weren’t at the market today,” she says. “So I wanted to come by with some things and check in.”

Fjord likes to think he’s been holding it together pretty well, but he knows that his neighbors worry about him. They check in on him often, inviting him and Cormorant to things, sending messages, dropping off vegetables or some salt because they “got a little extra” or always, always more fish. Fjord tries to head them off—Caduceus isn’t even there to provide medical help in exchange anymore—but never really manages to stop them.

“Yes,” Fjord says. “We had a—night. Um.” He almost prevaricates and then can’t be bothered. “Caduceus came home last night.”

Her expression shifts. Fjord thinks it might be shock, and then he realizes that she is evaluating his mental state. “Why don’t you come in,” he says, because seeing is believing and he knows exactly how much credence he’d give it if a local widower told him he’d started seeing ghosts.

Cara steps in with the basket. “I’ll put this on the table,” she offers.

“Thanks,” Fjord says. He doesn’t know how to broach the subject except that Cormorant skids in. “Hi Miss Cara!” she chirps. “Dad’s home!”

“Fjord told me that,” she says, glancing at him with a little more warmness. Cory’s exuberance is a little harder to write off as a hallucination, he supposes.

“Can we make pancakes?” she asks. “Except Dad can make them because his are better. Dad!” she hollers the last word into the next room.

Part of Fjord almost acquiesces because he wants that normalcy so badly, Caduceus back in his kitchen where he belongs. The more reasonable part recalls Caduceus’s wounds and exhaustion and the torn soles of his feet. “Let him rest a little longer,” Fjord says. “How about you help me make pancakes, and we can bring them to him?”

“Okay,” Cory agrees. She skips over to the cupboard to retrieve a bowl.

“What do you need?” Caduceus says. Cara looks up with wide eyes. Caduceus’s hair looks even whiter in the sun. He’s leaning against the doorframe for balance and wrapped in a quilt, which hides the bulk of the injuries.

“I was going to ask you to make pancakes but Dad said we could do it,” Cormorant reports.

“I don’t mind,” Caduceus says, glancing at the cast iron pan.

“Sit,” Fjord orders. “You can supervise.”

Caduceus sits. He smiles at Cara. “Hello. It’s good to see you.”

Her eyes are very big and she’s smiling when she says, “It’s good to see you too. Welcome home,” she adds.

“Thank you,” he says.

“Do you want to stay for…” Fjord glances at the sun. “I suppose this is lunch.” Pancakes for lunch. It’s about on par with what Fjord has been managing for food lately.

“No,” she says. “Thank you. Do you mind if I—tell people? Do you need anything?”

“Please,” Fjord says. “Tell anyone. I don’t—know everything, but we’ll need a little time, I think.” He glances at Caduceus.

“I think that’s right,” Caduceus agrees.

“Of course,” she says. “Just let me know.”

“What do we owe you? For the groceries,” Fjord asks.

“Nothing,” she says. “They’re a gift.” Seeming on impulse, she steps forward and embraces Caduceus; he hugs her back immediately. 

“Can I ask,” Cara begins. “How…”

“It’s a long story,” Caduceus says. “The simple way to put it is that I was pulled away by something, and the Wildmother guided me back.”

She nods. “Then I am grateful to Her for that.

“So am I,” Caduceus says, softly. His eyes find Fjord’s. “So am I.”

---

After breakfast is done and the dishes are washed, Cormorant skitters back to her room to change. Fjord sits down at the table with Caduceus and takes advantage of the moment of privacy.

“Hi,” Caduceus says, smiling at him.

“Hi,” Fjord says. “I—have so many questions.”

“I can try to answer them,” Caduceus offers.

“You were taken,” Fjord says. “I guessed that much. We—Scryed for you, we looked. Caleb and Jester both. Why didn’t it work?”

“They had these—chains, that stopped me from casting,” Caduceus says. “Or blocked you from finding me…blocked magic, I suppose. All of it.”

“The bridge had fallen, due to the rain.”

“I think they did that on purpose,” Caduceus says. “But it was raining, very hard. The girl!” he says, suddenly. “Nadia. Do you know if—“

“I saw her,” Fjord says. “She’s alright. She didn’t say anything.” He starts to scowl. If she’d told Fjord, if he’d known to look—

“They threatened her,” Caduceus says, seeing Fjord’s look. It’s so like Caduceus, to absolve people of the harm they’ve done him, the aid they failed to provide. “She was very afraid.”

“Who were they?”

“Hired mercenaries, at first,” he says, and then hesitates. “Working for…” Caduceus pauses, and then looks almost apologetic. “Avantika.”

His heart stops. “No,” Fjord says, automatically. “No. She’s dead.”

“She’s dead,” Caduceus agrees. “And now she’s gone. I killed her.” He says it like he says ‘I made breakfast’ and the certainty of it stops the scream of panic rising in Fjord’s mind. “But she was a revenant. Undead. She was looking for the crystal.”

“From you? Are we in danger here?”

“She thought you were dead,” Caduceus says. “When you—she thought, she knew you had died on the ship.”

“And didn’t—know you brought me back. You brought me back, and she didn’t know.”

Caduceus nods. “And she didn’t know about Cormorant, of course. I think—she probably heard my name, from someone.”

That’s—better than Fjord had thought, when Caduceus had first said it. Better than them being hunted, specifically, across these decades. “Where were you going?”

“To Uk’otoa,” Caduceus says, simply. “She thought he could—get the information from me, somehow.”

Fjord shudders involuntarily. The image of that—Uk’otoa, and Caduceus, in the same place, Caduceus in chains—it doesn’t bear thinking about. “And she’s dead.”

“Yes.”

“But Uk’otoa—he’s still out there. He still wants…”

“We knew that,” Caduceus says.

“I know.” But in the long years since, it’s felt less real. Fjord still worries, of course—they’re going to have to have a hell of a conversation if Cormorant ever feels called to go out to sea. “We need to—have a plan.”

“Okay,” Caduceus agrees. “We should ask the others.”

“Yes,” Fjord says. Then, he remembers. “Oh, shit. They all think you’re dead, too.”

“Huh,” Caduceus says. “We should call them.”

“Can you do that now?” Fjord says. He sees that flash of uncertainty on Caduceus’s face—the face he makes when Fjord has asked for something impossible or at least very difficult and he’s going to try it anyway. “No,” he says. “Could you do it if you rested more?”

“Yes,” Caduceus says.

 “You should rest,” Fjord says, firmly. “Stay here. I’ll take care of things.”

Cormorant comes charging back in then, and Fjord enlists her to bring in blankets while he builds up the fire, moving coals from the stove to the fireplace to get it going. Once it’s roaring pleasantly, Cormorant makes a nest in front of it, fussing with the exact folds of the wool until she declares it done. Caduceus starts off sitting in it with a cup of tea, at her insistence, but he soon has it set aside on the hearthstones and then he is curled up asleep.

Cormorant sits by his head and pets at his ears, like you would a cat. “Let him rest,” Fjord warns.

“I am,” she says, but Fjord is pretty sure she goes back to it as soon as he turns his back.

He finishes cleaning up. He puts on real clothes. He goes through Caduceus’s old things, bandages, potions, herbs that have kept for three months, and lays them out of the counter. He’ll ask Caduceus to take a look at his own injuries, once he’s up to it. Or Jester. Jester will be there soon.

The idea of the Nein in their house again—for this, for disbelief and joy and getting something instead of losing it—makes Fjord smile the whole time he works.

There is another knock, eventually. He’s still smiling when he opens the door to find Olivia. “Hi,” she says. “I wanted to see how you were. Actually, come out here, would you mind?”

It’s cold out. Fjord is at least dressed now. He follows her out onto the porch, uncertain. “Is something wrong? Caduceus is home,” he says.

“Cara told me. I wanted to talk to you a moment, first,” Olivia says.

“What is it?” Fjord asks.  He isn’t sure why he’s anxious, except that Caduceus is out of his sight, and Olivia has a very serious look.

“I know—I’ve always thought Caduceus was a good man,” she says, quietly but firmly. “And I know how hard you grieved. But when someone leaves, just because they come back—you don’t have to take them.”

“Oh,” Fjord says, after the moment it takes him to catch her meaning. It is somewhat endearing that she wants to protect him, if only because almost no one has worried about Fjord in this way. But Caduceus is the last person he needs to be protected from like this—Caduceus, who never leaves anything, except dragged away from it still clinging with bloody fingernails.

But he supposes he can see her worry.  Most people do not have the sorts of history that make “being kidnapped and having your own death faked” the first recognizable story. “He didn’t want to—“ he starts to explain, and then breaks off. There are easier ways than words. “Come in.  He might be sleeping,” Fjord says, quietly.

She follows him into the cottage and they both pause just inside the threshold, as she sees Caduceus.  He is indeed still asleep in the little nest of blanket and pillow they’d piled up by the fire.  He looks a little less ghostlike than the night before, but still obviously ill. The way he’s curled up, Fjord knows Olivia can see the bandages at his wrists and on his feet. Cory has tucked herself in the hollow of his curled form and gone to sleep herself.

“Oh,” she says, and he hears her voice melt in sympathy, looks back to see the naked concern on her face. “Oh, I see.”

“He, uh,” Fjord is surprised by how hard it is to say. “It took a lot, to make it home.”

Olivia draws herself up. “We’re all here, for all three of you. Tell us what you need.”

“Us” is, of course, Bluecove. The village had closed ranks around Fjord when Caduceus had died—had, Fjord knows now, been taken—and they will do it now, he knows. From Olivia, word will spread easily.

“Thanks,” Fjord says. “I don’t...I don’t know, really. Just. I think he’ll be alright. Just...time.”

“Someone will bring something by,” she says, as though he hasn’t spoken. “Don’t worry about cooking.”

Caduceus likes the cooking, Fjord knows, but he’s also barely in a state to stand right now.  “Thank you,” he says. “Really.  It means...”

She draws him into a warm hug. “You’re very lucky.”

“Believe me,” Fjord says, “I know.”

---

Caduceus wakes not long after Olivia goes. “I can do it now,” he says, blinking sleep from his eyes. “Who first?”

“Jester,” Fjord says. “Call Jester.”

Caduceus nods, and casts Sending. “Hi, Jester.” Fjord holds up his fingers, counting the words for him. “It’s me. Caduceus. I’m home. And alive. Home and alive. It’s a long story. I’ll tell you about it later.” Caduceus looks at Fjord.

“Three left,” Fjord says.

“I missed you,” Caduceus finishes.

It’s not the message Fjord would have written—mainly because it conveys a minimal amount of information—but it does tell her the most important thing.

“How was that?” Caduceus says.

“Good,” Fjord starts to say, and then Caduceus’s ears flick back and Fjord knows Jester is replying.

“Well?” Fjord asks.

“She’s, uh,” Caduceus laughs a little. “Excited.”

“Yeah,” Fjord says. “How do you feel?”

“Good,” Caduceus says, without any thought. “Should I not?”

“No,” Fjord says. “You realize, they’ll all want to see you.”

“I want to see them,” Caduceus says. “Will they come here?”

“They did before,” Fjord says. “When you—didn’t come home.” How strange, to not say when you died, when he has been thinking of his life in terms of before and after for so long. Before my husband died, we would… and After Caduceus died, I… a neat intersection of his entire being, and now Caduceus is home. Caduceus is here. Another segmentation.

Fjord once wondered if he was going to spend the rest of his life changing, growing, reinventing himself—a snake shedding his skin, a hundred, thousand times. Then there was Caduceus, who reached down through all of the masks to the heart of him. He had been so relieved to find something that felt true to himself for so many years, and then that person too had changed, and grown, trying to fill empty spaces after the man he loved was gone.

It’s a strange brilliant joy, to be able to change just one more time.

“That was good of them,” Caduceus says.

“They love you,” Fjord says.

“And you,” Caduceus points out.

“That, I know,” Fjord assures him. He has never doubted that.

“Oh,” Caduceus considers. “Do you think Jester will tell everyone else? We probably should have talked about who to call...”

Fjord is about to say they can Send to someone else if Caduceus isn’t too tired for it, but there is a crack in their kitchen of magic and air displacement and Caleb is standing there breathless, in his shirtsleeves with ink stains on his hands as though he’s come directly from working in his study. Which he probably has, Fjord thinks.

“Mein Gott,” he says, staring at them at the table, Caduceus wrapped in the quilt, Fjord with an arm around him. He drops to his knees.

“Hey, now,” Caduceus stands gingerly. There is a distant pang in Fjord’s chest as he watches him take up his staff just to limp across the kitchen, but then he drops down right next to Caleb. “I’ve missed you.” He holds out his arms.

Caleb is not the most touchy-feely man, but he accepts the hug instantly.  He is shaking.  Fjord stands too, coming over.

“What Jester said—I owe an apology, I did not believe her—“

“Thought I was dreaming,” Fjord tells him.  He sits down too, leaning against Caduceus.  He pats Caleb’s shoulder. “When I saw him, I thought, this can’t be real.”

“How?” Caleb asks. “We tried to locate you, to Scry—“

“Oh,” Caduceus says. “The, uhh. Manacles were enchanted. She was kind of proud of that.”

“Who is she?” Caleb asks.  He draws back but not too far.

“Avantika,” Caduceus says.

“She is dead,” Caleb says, in just the way Fjord had, when Caduceus told him.

“Undead,” Fjord says. “Something—she’s gone now, Caduceus said.”

“Gone how?” Caleb demands.

“Burned to ash. I felt her go,” Caduceus adds. “Before she could touch the water.”

“Thank Melora,” Fjord says, not sure if he means it as a warding off of evil or an oath.

“How long have you known this?” Caleb demands. “When did you get back?”

“We talked a little this morning,” Fjord says. “He got home last night.”

“You did not ask before?” Caleb is critical, which if Fjord is being generous is just an attempt to cope with the lack of control he has here.

“I did,” Fjord says, with a glance at Caduceus. “But I didn’t get much of an answer and I thought I was dreaming, so I figured my subconscious just left a couple plot holes.”

“I didn’t know you thought that,” Caduceus says. “When did you think that?”

“Last night,” Fjord admits. “I—knew you were real when I woke up this morning.”

“Oh,” Caduceus says, and then he smiles at Fjord. “You were so kind. You took such good care of me. You didn’t think that was real?”

“I don’t...” Fjord shakes his head. “I just. I wanted to do it. While I had the chance. However I had it.”

He ducks his head. Caduceus is looking at him with such love he can’t stand it.

“Tell me,” Caleb says. “All of it. This can’t happen again.”

“Are the others coming?” Caduceus asks. “If it’s all the same to you...I’d rather tell it only once.”

“Shit,” Caleb says, and then reaches for his components. “A moment.”

“Caleb,” Caduceus says, and Caleb stops. “I’m very glad to see you again.”

Caleb looks at him, and sighs. His shoulders slump, and the tension goes out of him. “It is…” he shakes his head. “Very good to see you safe.”

“Thank you for being here for Fjord,” Caduceus says. “And Cormorant.”

“Hmm?” Cormorant was still asleep by the fire, but is sitting up now, blinking at the sound. It’s going to be hard to get her to sleep tonight, Fjord thinks wryly, but he can’t bring himself to force her to do anything. “Uncle Caleb!”

“Hello, schatz,” Caleb accepts her hug. “I am going to get everyone else.”

“Everyone’s coming?” she beams.

“Yes,” Caleb says. “I think everyone is coming. Ah, we should plan.” He takes the Sending stone from his coat pocket and calls Veth. They can only hear one side of the conversation, but it sounds like Veth knows the others are coming and they’re coordinating as best as they can.

Caleb goes out to the garden and carves a teleportation circle into the earth to get to Nicodranas. It is apparently something of a mix of spells that get them all there—Caleb’s initial teleport, teleportation circle back to Nicodranas for Veth, teleportation circle with her to Zadash, where Beau is, except Jester is with her, and back with the three of them. Then he’s gone again for Yasha, leaving Jester, Veth, and Beau in their living room.

“Fucking hell,” Beau says.

“You cussed!” Cormorant exclaims, delighted.

Jester merely flings herself at Caduceus. “You’re okay!” she starts out sounding full of delight, and then she starts to cry. “Oh my gosh you’re okay, I missed you so much.”

“I missed you too,” Caduceus hugs her back tightly. “I missed you all.”

“Caleb said something about Avantika, what the hell, man,” Beau says.

“What’s that?” Cory asks.

“It’s—yes. It’s a long story,” Caduceus says. “Can we—I’ll tell you all. I’ll tell you all everything.”

There is a pop as Caleb reappears with Yasha. She is wild-eyed until her gaze lands on Caduceus. Then she walks the few steps towards him and places a hand on both shoulders.

“Hey,” Caduceus smiles.

“You’re here,” Yasha says.

“I’m here,” Caduceus agrees.

“I’m going to give you a hug,” she declares, and then she does. Caduceus is the only person Yasha ever looks short next to, and she seems to enjoy the ability to tuck her head under his chin and hold on.

“It seems we have, ah, much to discuss,” Caleb says. Some of his calm seems to have returned.

“Yeah,” Caduceus says. “Does anyone want tea? It’s kind of a long story.”

“I’ll make it,” Fjord says, because he’s heard a little of it, at least. “Cory, come help me.”

“I want to hear it!” she says.

“Cory,” Fjord says.

“No!” she says. “I want to know!”

“Cormorant,” Caduceus says. “Please?” He doesn’t say it like a warning. There’s no exasperation to it. It’s just a question, or more accurately a request.

She locks eyes. “Why not?”

“Because we’ll tell you everything at some point, but I think there a lot of things you don’t know about yet, and when we talk about it we’ll start from the beginning.” Caduceus glances over her to meet Fjord’s eyes. Fjord stifles a little sigh, because Caduceus is right—there are things that Cormorant needs to know at some point, and some point might be now, and if she is going to hear about Uk’otoa and Avantika and the story of how Fjord found the Wildmother in a way that is accurate to detail instead of reduced to a bedtime story, it should happen all at once.

“Okay,” she says. “But you promise you’ll tell me later?”

“I promise,” Caduceus says. She turns to Fjord then.

“I promise,” Fjord repeats, and they go and get the kettle.

Cormorant goes to her room with surprisingly little fuss when the tea is done. Caduceus hasn’t gotten very far—they’ve fallen into litigating what exactly happened to the bridge, and whether Nadia was a scared child or, as Beau says, ‘a sneaky little shit’.

“She was afraid,” Caduceus says.

“Let’s not condemn a ten-year-old,” Fjord says, although he’s privately very angry about that, too. He sets down the tray of teacups. “Where are we?”

“There were two men,” Caduceus begins, and then he talks for a long time. He gets interrupted a lot, and at first Fjord tries to stop them, and then he realizes that Caduceus appreciates the breaks, that the pauses let him breathe and drink his own tea. He tells them about the journey up the coast by cart, about meeting Avantika on the ship, about how she was looking for the Cloven Crystal. About how she believed Fjord was dead.

“Good,” Caleb says. “That makes this very easy. Come here, I have something for you.”

Caduceus sits forward obediently, and Caleb produces something from his pocket and places an amulet on a chain around Caduceus’s neck.

Fjord recognizes it. It is the amulet that Caleb wore every day for years, up until the day that Trent Ikithon’s blood was going cold on the ground. Then he’d taken it off, and Fjord hadn’t realized that he’d kept it until this moment, when he is leaning forward and bestowing it on Caduceus.

“Well,” Caduceus says, looking down at it. “We’ve done this before.”

“And you will keep it on, this time,” Caleb says. “Yes?”

“Yes,” Caduceus says. “I’ll be honest with you, I don’t remember when I stopped wearing the Periapt. But I see Cory’s got it now.”

Fjord hadn’t realized he’d noticed, but of course Caduceus notices everything.

“Then what?” Beau says, and Caduceus keeps going. To the boat, to the endless cycle of storms and stills and unfavorable winds, a thousand factors keeping the ship from getting to its destination. The sea itself in opposition.

“The Wildmother,” Fjord says. “Wasn’t it?”

“I think so,” Caduceus says.

“Or really, really good luck,” Beau says.

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Caduceus says, “Even though they happen.”

“You said you killed her,” Caleb says. “You did not make it to Uk’otoa?”

“No,” Caduceus says. “There was a storm. Last night, there was a storm.”

Even skimming over the details, Fjord can read the things Caduceus is not saying. Can read the moments where he was afraid. The moments when he called out to the Wildmother and wasn’t sure She’d answer, the moments when it seemed like the sea would swallow him after all and what Fjord had once believed about his fate would be true. He reaches out and takes his hand and doesn’t let go, just holds on like a tether through the whole story, through the storm and the lightning and the fight and the endless sea.

“And then I was here,” Caduceus points, through the window, “And I saw the lantern in the window, and I walked home.”

Fjord looks, automatically. There the lantern sits, the little stub of the candle he’d lit the previous night still in it. In the time it has taken Caduceus to work through his story, it has begun to grow dark, and yet Fjord feels no urge to light it.

He is missing nothing. There is no one he loves, lost out on the waves, waiting to be guided home.

“Welcome back,” Yasha says, very quietly, in the silence. “We have missed you so very much.”

“Are you done?” Cormorant asks. She is standing in the doorway; Fjord isn’t sure if she’s been eavesdropping this whole time or merely came when she heard the voices stop. Caduceus doesn’t look startled to see her, so Fjord expects he’ll know, either way.

“Yes,” Caduceus says. “Do you want dinner?”

“I’ll help!” Jester proclaims, throwing herself to her feet.

“That’s alright,” Caduceus says, sounding a little alarmed.

“We’ll all help,” Veth says, grinning a little wickedly. Caduceus grimaces, but eventually resigns himself to it. They use the groceries Cara brought, make a root-based winter salad and roast fish or mushrooms with lemon and rosemary on top of rice. They all follow directions very well, even though Caduceus, voice raw from talking for so long and almost certainly still from the seawater, gives instructions in a low voice.

The house fills with the smell of cooking food. They make another pot of tea. Jester insists on making cupcakes, and she and Fjord do it, although she keeps darting back to where Caduceus sits, talking to Caleb and Yasha, and making him explain things, check her measurements, tell her what it’s meant to look like.

Every time, the thought let’s ask Caduceus drifts across his mind, and he feels the odd sensation of tripping and catching yourself. The way you expect to fall and then you’re fine, you’re completely fine, but your mind is still reeling.

All these months, and he hasn’t managed to stop looking for the gaps at all. All these months, and he’s merely started to adjust to the pain. And now it’s gone, and he’s whole, and he doesn’t know what to do with it. Doesn’t know what to do with the joy of it, the way his eyes keep drifting across the kitchen to Caduceus and Cormorant, to the rest of the Nein, his family all in one place the way he thought they might never be again.

The cupcakes come out of the oven and Jester frosts them prettily, and they taste delicious. Fjord doesn’t know what they did wrong, last time.

“Do you mind,” Yasha says, looking up from the crumbs on her plate, “Do you mind if we all stay, for a few days?”

Fjord and Caduceus make eye contact and Fjord knows they’re thinking the same thing.

“No,” Fjord says. “We’d like that a lot.”

---

It’s good to have everyone there, Caduceus decides. Nice to have an extra set of hands in the kitchen—although the five sets of hands, he could do without. Nice to have Veth’s jokes and Yasha’s steady presence and Jester’s exuberant joy and Caleb’s careful planning, promising that they will come up with a plan, they will do something about Uk’otoa. The amulet around his neck is a relief he hadn’t even realized he was looking for. Beau drags Fjord out on runs along the beach the next few mornings, and Yasha follows with Cormorant on her shoulders. Caleb and Veth spend a lot of time whispering together, planning sometimes, sometimes just the overflowing chatter of best friends who have been apart for too long, Caduceus thinks. Jester insists on helping in the kitchen, and so they bake bread together and while it bakes, Jester mentions very casually that she has some healing spells this morning, if he wants them, and she sinks Cure Wounds into his still-healing burns and scrapes and aching joints until he hardly feels the sting.

“Can I come stay?” she says, the second morning, when they’re repeating the ritual, her hands on his wrists. “This summer. I’m not teaching a class this summer.” He knows she’s thinking about when she has to be back home to her art students, how little time they really have.

“Of course,” Caduceus says. “We’ll be glad to have you.”

“Good,” she says, and casts another Cure Wounds.

Fjord doesn’t like to leave, Caduceus knows, so he keeps pushing him out the door whenever one of the Nein ask. They can’t be afraid of this. It won’t happen again, so they can’t be afraid of this. But he’s a hypocrite—Fjord’s obvious relief whenever he walks back in the door and Caduceus is still there, or when Caduceus comes back with Cory and Yasha from the market, is reflected in Caduceus’s own heart.

Caduceus sleeps a lot, catching up on all the peaceful rest he’s missed out on. His wounds heal. The lightning that split through him is going to scar, but the wound is in a way beautiful, like someone has let a fern made of fire and light grow a path through his skin. With a bit of coaxing of the lichen, he thinks the color in his hair will come back. Cormorant holds on very tightly when they hug, and he and Fjord drift towards each other whenever they’re in the same room, the needle on a compass eternally spinning to the north.

Small wounds, for what it is. They’ll heal. They’ll scar. Everything is drifting back together, the way it was meant to be.

There are a few things to take care of, though, niggling at the back of Caduceus’s mind. A few afternoons later, one of them feels like it can’t be put off anymore, and so he goes outside when no one is looking, out the back door.

Caduceus sits in the back garden, considering the right words, for a long time before he does it. After a while, his mind slips from the words to the garden. A lot of the vegetables have been harvested by now, in his absence. What remains is going to seed. Only a few winter fruits are still there. The berries remain—blackcurrant and raspberry, heavy on the bushes. He plucks a blackcurrant and bites into it. The tart flavor bursts across his tongue. They have sugar; he should make jam. Cormorant had mostly watched him do it last year, but he thinks she’s old enough now to help.

Old enough now, he thinks, for a lot of things. He was gone for a few cycles of the moon, and Cormorant seems to have grown up so quickly. He isn’t sure what to do with time—never was. Family condition.

Which brings him back to what he’s really doing. That’s how he always knows when a duty becomes unavoidable: his mind brings him back to it. And he woke this morning thinking about his family, and knew he’d put it off too long.

Before he can back out, he raises a hand and makes the right gesture. “Wildmother, carry my words.” The magic comes as it should, no backlash or ache, just a warm rush through him as the power activates. He takes a deep breath.

“Hi, Mom. It’s me. Uh. Caduceus. I’m alive. There’s…some stuff happened. It’s okay now. I’m home.” He can’t think of what else to say. Doesn’t Jester always run out of words with these things? “I love you. We’ll visit you again soon.” With that, he feels the spell break.

There’s a few moments of silence. He picks another blackcurrant and rolls it in his fingers. The words come through before he can bite into it. “Caduceus! Oh, honey, it’s so good to hear your voice. You have to tell us everything. Give our love to Fjord and Cory. Thank Melora—“

Her words cut off then, but Caduceus can imagine the rest of the invocation. He puts the berry in his mouth, chews. Still tart. Really better as a jam. He thinks about calling Clarabelle, too. Maybe tomorrow. Whatever he wants to say to her, he doesn’t think that twenty-five words will do.

“Whatcha doing out here?” Beau says from behind him. “Fjord’s jumpy whenever you’re out of his sight.”

“I know,” Caduceus says. “I’m coming back in. Have you ever made jam?”

“Yeah,” Beau says. “New hobby. I make shittons of jam. All jam, all the time.”

“Oh, great,” Caduceus says placidly, although he knows she’s being sarcastic. “You can help, then.”

“I was—“ she checks his face, breaks off. “And you’re just fucking with me right back. Got it.”

He smiles. Beau reaches out and picks a raspberry. “These are good,” she says, popping it in. “The little black ones are kind of nasty, though.”

“They’re the ones for jam.”

“That’s why you came out here? Jam planning?” Beau pauses, and Caduceus can’t tell what it is that’s twisting her expression until it morphs into a wicked grin and she says, “If we make jam it could be a jam session .”

“Ooh, that’s good,” Caduceus says. “I was Sending to my mom.”

“Oh, shit,” Beau says, suddenly serious. “You good?”

“Yes,” Caduceus says. “I had been—putting it off. I don’t know why. We both feel better for it, I think.”

“Yeah,” Beau says. “Your parents love you, they’ve gotta be thrilled. They were super fucked up about it, I think. Jester used Sending last time, like to tell them? And she came back in crying.”

“I’m sorry,” Caduceus says.

“What?”

“I’m sorry that you grieved,” Caduceus says, because he can read too easily the truth beneath what Beau is saying, which is I was super fucked up about it.

“Shut the fuck up,” Beau says. “Sorry we thought you were dead. We should have been the rescue party.”

“It all worked out in the end,” Caduceus says. He does mean it. He certainly wondered, on the worst nights on that ship, if the Mighty Nein might be coming. But Avantika had covered her tracks well. He certainly doesn’t hold it against them. He never managed to call out to them, either.

“Still,” she says.

“Can we…” he thinks about it. “Can we just agree that it was bad for everyone and no one should feel bad about it?”

“Yeah,” Beau says, relieved. “Fucking sucked. I missed you, dude.”

“I missed you too,” Caduceus says. “You should come stay in the summer.”

“Mmm,” Beau says. “Isn’t Jester coming in the summer?”

“Yes,” Caduceus says. “Seems like a good time for you two to work things out, doesn’t it?”

“We’re not—like that,” Beau says.

“You’ve never asked her,” Caduceus points out.

“I don’t know,” Beau says. “I don’t know how she’d…I don’t even know how you know about this.”

“I have good hearing,” Caduceus says. “And what I know is…life is short. Spend it with the people you love, as much as you can. Come for the summer. Whatever you want to happen with Jester. We’ve missed you.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Alright.” In a single smooth movement, she stands. Holds out a hand and helps him to his feet. Caduceus envies her grace; she’s older in human terms than he is for a firbolg, but her joints don’t seem to protest the way his do. “Come on. Let’s go back in before Fjord has an aneurysm.”

“Can’t have that,” Caduceus agrees, and they go back in to the others.

---

Veth goes first, back to her family and her shop. Caleb returns a day after, back to Rosohna, where Fjord guesses he will throw himself wholeheartedly into the work he is planning to keep them safe. He comes back though, to get Jester and then Beau. Yasha leaves herself, taking a ship, when the Stormlord calls her. Fjord wonders if her god had anything to do with that storm, with the lightning that saved and scarred Caduceus.

They’ll probably never know which parts of it were luck and which were the divine. Some things, Fjord is okay not knowing.

Still, it’s strange and a little empty once they go, and it hits Fjord like a blow in the quiet.

Fjord is lying in bed when it happens. Caduceus has yet to join him; he tires so easily that he has been napping on and off throughout the day, but it leaves him restless at night. Still, he’s nearby, slowly moving towards sleep—unlooping his hair from the pins and braid, carefully working a soft brush through the curls too fragile for anything else. Fjord watches him, watches his fingers on the wood handle, the downward curl of one corner of his mouth that betrays his dissatisfaction, the swivel of his ear towards the sound when Fjord sits up and the sheets rustle.  He sets down the brush and drifts into the next room and Fjord can picture him perfectly, the path he will take into a kitchen, the way he will set the kettle on the stove and measure out the water and the tea leaves, the way he will bring it back to bed, carrying a cup for Fjord as well.

Wherever Caduceus is in the house, Fjord has a sense of it, like some invisible tether. Or maybe it’s just the familiarity, that he knows these floorboards and Caduceus’ footsteps and heartbeat like nowhere else, like nothing else and no one else.

That is when Fjord thinks, oh. I almost lost this. I had lost this. The breath rushes out of him like he’s been knocked prone by a wave, like he’s been slapped and he sobs, suddenly unable to do anything else.

He lost this. Those cold months, missing, wishing, feeling grateful for haunted dreams because at least it was a fragment—memory does not compare to having Caduceus, to seeing him, to knowing him. Having this again has reified the loss—to feel again what he has and know its magnitude. Caduceus’s absence had felt like a tangible thing, a shadow in every room. His presence is so much more than that. In his grieving, Fjord remembered in fragments, mourned piece by piece—this is the way Caduceus smiled, this is the way his breath sounded against the pillow when he was not quite asleep—but in totality it is insurmountable. How had Fjord been going about the task of missing him? How could he have ever been finished at it?

And this, too—the tears are streaming down Fjord’s face and before he has taken a third hitching breath, Caduceus is there, gathering Fjord in his arms. “What is it, what’s wrong?” He’s subtly checking Fjord for injuries.

Fjord just shakes his head. “Nothing, I—nothing.”

“You can tell me,” Caduceus says, very gently.

“It’s because—nothing’s wrong. You’re here—I missed—“

“I’m here,” Caduceus confirms, low and steady. He draws Fjord close. Fjord sobs into his chest, clutches at his thin shoulder. He can feel Caduceus’ heartbeat and he chokes out another sob. Caduceus smells like moss and like the subtle smoke of the hearthfire and still a little bit like the sea. He could have never done this again, held this again, heard the low rumble of Caduceus’ voice through his chest.

“What can I do?” Caduceus asks. He strokes Fjord’s hair, gentle. His fingers linger on the edges of Fjord‘s ear, just firmly enough not to tickle, but soft enough to feel like kindness.

“Stay,” Fjord sobs out. He wants to stop crying—because he has already cried so much for this reason back when it was a reality, and why should he do it now when it is nothing but a bad dream? But he has woken from the nightmare and still sobs from it.

There has always been some shame in that, for Fjord. To wake trembling from nothing more than the shades of his own mind, the haunting of a distant beast. But in Caduceus’ hold he has been able to let go of it, to shake, to sob, to let go of the emotions as the dream fades and accept it as something natural and allowed.

So he cries, and grieves for the last time, mourns those months of being alone and Cormorant’s misery and Caduceus’ pain and everything he could have lost forever, and Caduceus holds him through it until his tears give way to sleep.

When he wakes in the morning Caduceus is still snoring beside him, and the candle in the window has gone out—was never lit, he realizes, because he never lit it, because there was no one lost to call home. And Fjord feels lighter, as though he has somehow unconsciously released a burden he did not realize he was carrying.

---

Cormorant prods them both out onto the porch in the evening, insisting that she’ll make the tea. Caduceus and Fjord sit down and let her go to work behind them, rattling the cabinets open and shut. The sunset is in full glory, blazing orange to red to purple against the horizon.  Good weather tomorrow, Fjord thinks absently.

“This is nice,” Caduceus says.

“We used to do it a lot,” Fjord says. “When you were gone. Sit out here, I mean.”

Caduceus stares out over the ocean. “It’s very peaceful,” he says.

“Do you think Cory’s alright with the kettle?” Fjord asks.

“She’ll be fine,” Caduceus says.

“Were you making tea, at her age?” Fjord asks.

Caduceus frowns. “At seven? I’m not sure I was talking.”

Fjord pauses. “Firbolg.”

“Firbolg,” Caduceus agrees, cheerfully.

There is a clatter from inside. “It’s fine!” Cormorant shouts preemptively.

“Let us know if you need help,” Fjord calls back, because he can’t help it.

“I’ve got it!” she shouts back.

The sun is shifting. The red has shifted to a more muted pink, melting into violet.  That distant edge of the sea against the sky keeps drawing Fjord’s eye.

“Knowing now, that you were out there all that time...” Fjord says, staring down at the shifting pattern of light on the waves. “I don’t know. I dreamed about it when you were gone but I really thought they were...dreams. Wishes. I knew you were gone.”

“I can’t imagine,” Caduceus says. “I keep trying to imagine it.”

“Don’t,” Fjord says.  “You don’t—“ he stops.  He was going to say you don’t have to .

“I will,” Caduceus says calmly. “Someday. But not for many, many years, I hope. We have time.”

That has become a small mantra for them. We have time. But not forever; there is no such thing. And Caduceus will live what Fjord has lived, and will repeat it, with each of the Nein, with fewer and fewer of their friends around him to hold him up. And someday—after the rest of them are dead—he will lose Cormorant.

Fjord does not want to dwell on the memory of grief. But he also knows it is a luxury that he can choose not to, a boon granted by good luck and fate and the Wildmother and Caduceus’s steady stubborn love that carried him home. Someday Caduceus will have no choice.

“We have time,” Caduceus repeats softly. “But if anyone would know, I think...can you live with it?”

Will I be able to live with it? Will I have a life, after you and Cory are gone? That is what Caduceus is asking, and it is a strange blessing mixed in with all the hurt, a pearl tossed up on the shoreline by a wave tangled in the rotted netting and dead fish, that Fjord is in a position to answer him.

Fjord would still be here, if Caduceus had really drowned those months ago. He would be sitting on this porch watching the sun go down. Cormorant would be sitting beside him, or inside still trying to make tea. And some part of Fjord would be aching, the ragged edges of the wound left in his heart when Caduceus was torn out of it. Cormorant would have grown up in this town with one father who loved her here with her and one father who loved her in the ground, would have grandparents and aunts and uncles, adopted and not. Fjord would have kept seeing his friends, baking with Jester and walking along the shore with Yasha and sparring with Beau and growing old, here. He would keep growing, the garden growing, Cory growing. And even then he could see the beauty of all those things, bits of life tangled together, the way the forest continues with a piece of it gone.

But Caduceus returned. Caduceus came back to him, borne back on the tide, stumbling home towards the light. So this, too, Fjord can imagine: Caduceus will be here, will watch Cory grow up and Fjord grow old, watch the last of his dark hair turn grey, watch the wrinkles deepen in Fjord’s face. And after that he will bury Fjord, and will bury Beau and Caleb and Jester and Yasha and Veth, and years after that he will bury Cormorant. He will grow old, over centuries. He will care for so many people, here or elsewhere, and love them and bury them, too. He might travel again, or settle down somewhere else, carrying his light with him, or live here in this house in the memory of them. Wherever he goes, Fjord knows there will always be places for him, in Bluecove or the Grove or in Rosohna.

There will be wounds. The price of loving something is the pain of losing it, and Fjord knows Caduceus holds on tight, loves fiercely enough to cross oceans and weather storms. He will carry his scars and go on, and he will hurt, and grieve, and he will be loved, and out of the broken places a new life will take root, and grow.

And if Fjord was strong enough to lose him, to mourn, to face the most unfathomable loss, the one irreplaceable thing he allowed himself in a life built always to be temporary, then this is the reward—that for everything Caduceus gave him, all the answers and certainty and love, Fjord has this own certainty to give back to him.

Caduceus has always known he is strong enough to hold on, and Fjord knows too that he will be strong enough to let go, in the end.

Can you live with it? “Yes,” Fjord says. “It...is going to hurt like hell. It was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. But it was alright. It was...going to be alright. And so will you.”

“Thank you,” Caduceus says, quietly, and Fjord takes his hand, and they sit there and watch the sun slip beneath the sea.

“I did it!” Cormorant announces from the doorway, triumphant.  She offers the first cup to Caduceus, who takes it and thanks her, then darts back in the house to make the same offering to Fjord before running back for her own.

They sit in a mutual comfortable silence for a while.  The tea is warm and sweet and tastes of spice and cinnamon, probably something Fjord bought in Port Damali.  As the world gives into the period of dusk, the sun gone but the light remaining, the stars beginning to appear one by one like candles going on as the sky darkens, Cormorant says, “Can we do this forever?”

“Nothing lasts forever,” Caduceus says. “But we can do this for a long time.”

“I don’t like that,” Cormorant says. “I think the house will be sad without us.”

“Well, we didn’t build the house,” Fjord tells her. “It was already here.”

“It was?” she blinks. “But it’s ours.”

“It is now,” Caduceus says. “But maybe it will be here for someone else someday. Maybe your children. Maybe someone we don’t know.”

She looks thoughtful. “It won’t miss us?”

Fjord glances at Caduceus. “It might,” Caduceus says. “But it will have new people. That’s how the world works.”  He glances at Fjord. “Nothing lasts forever. It sprouts, and it grows, and it dies, and something else grows out of it.”

“And someone else will have the house?”

“Someday,” Fjord says. “Not for a long time.”

“Not for a long time,” Caduceus agrees. “But someday the whole world will be someone else’s.”

“I didn’t think of that,” Cory says.

“But it’s yours now,” Caduceus says. “And you’ll become part of it, in the end.”

“So it will be mine forever,” she says.  “A little bit.”

“Yes,” Fjord agrees. “And you’ll belong to it. And to Her.”

Cormorant nods. “I think...I think I’m okay with that. But maybe...not yet. I’m not ready yet.”

“You don’t have to be,” Fjord reassures her.

“Will I be ready then?” she wonders.

“I don’t know,” Caduceus says. “You have a lifetime to find out, though.”

She nods. “Is that a long time?”

“Depends on who you ask,” Fjord says, after a pause.

“I’m asking you,” she says, promptly.

“I don’t know,” Fjord says, after a longer pause. They are quiet for a while.  In the still-darkening sky, the stars blaze brightly above them.  Cormorant tilts her head up to look, and Fjord follows her gaze up to the two distant moons that will shine over this house long after he is gone, and feels very small.

“Yes,” Caduceus says, after so long that Fjord has almost forgotten the question was asked. “I think it’s the longest time in the world.”