Chapter 17
Vaike is feeling better the next day.
Evran knows this because when he wakes, Vaike is already sitting on the edge of the bed, testing the range of motion in his injured shoulder with focused stubbornness, having decided that his body will do what he tells it to do, regardless of what the medic said.
The bandage is still in place, the bruise still vivid beneath its edges, but the half-lidded squint of yesterday's headache has eased into something more manageable, and when Vaike turns at the sound of Evran stirring his expression is alert and present and very much his own.
"No," Evran says.
Vaike raises an eyebrow.
"Whatever you're about to do, no. Get back in bed."
"I've been in bed for fourteen hours."
"You were trampled by a horse."
"Evran."
"Vaike."
They hold each other's gaze. Vaike's expression is the carefully neutral mask of having already made his decision and merely going through the formality of allowing his husband to disagree with it before doing what he was going to do anyway.
Evran's expression is the narrow-eyed refusal of knowing exactly what that mask means and objecting on principle even though the outcome is predetermined.
Vaike stands up. He rolls his shoulder, slowly, with only the faintest tightening around his eyes, and reaches for his tunic.
Evran sighs.
"The medic said a week."
"The medic is not a Warlord."
"The medic knows better than the Warlord."
Vaike pulls the tunic over his head, managing the injured shoulder with a controlled grimness that tells Evran the pain is worse than he is admitting.
When his face emerges from the collar, he looks at Evran and his expression softens, not much, but enough.
The hard edges ease. The mask recedes. For a moment he is not the Warlord or the warrior but just Vaike, looking at the person he loves with an expression that says I know you're worried and I'm sorry and I'm going anyway.
He crosses to the bed and leans down and kisses Evran, sound and sure, his uninjured hand cupping the back of Evran's head, and Evran melts into it despite himself, despite his frustration and his worry and the fact that this man is going to go swing a sword or negotiate a treaty or do something else that involves moving his shoulder and he is going to make the bruise worse and Evran is going to have to watch.
"I've had worse than being trampled by a horse," Vaike says, pulling back.
"That doesn't make it better."
"No. But it means I will survive a headache and a bruised shoulder." He presses one more kiss to Evran's forehead and straightens up. "I need to secure the trade negotiations before the summit closes. If I'm not at the table, the Ashenmoor will try to renegotiate the grain terms."
"You and your grain tariffs."
Vaike's mouth twitches. He buckles his belt, checks the ceremonial clasp, and gives Evran one last look that is warm and steady and says I will come back to you even though all it actually says is "tonight" before he opens the door and goes.
Evran sits in the empty bed and stares at the closed door and exhales.
He barely makes it into the hallway before Tria finds him.
She appears at the far end of the corridor with her braids swinging and her face bright with the urgency of a sixteen-year-old with plans and no patience for a world that does not share her enthusiasm for them.
"Evran! Good, you're up. Arin's not feeling well, his stomach, he thinks it was the cheese at dinner, and the festival is in the market today and I cannot miss it because the silk merchant from the southern valleys is only here once a year and if I don't get there early the good colors will be gone. "
Evran opens his mouth.
"Please," Tria says, and the urgency modulates into something more earnest, and her dark eyes are wide and hopeful, and Evran thinks, distantly, that this girl is going to be an absolutely formidable negotiator when she grows up.
"Let me get my cloak," he says.
The market at Heldrin's End is a different creature during a festival.
The stalls Evran walked past on his first visit have doubled in number, spilling beyond the market square and into the surrounding streets, the vendors' canopies forming a patchwork of color overhead, red and gold and deep green, the fabrics snapping in the valley breeze.
The air is thick with smells: roasting nuts, spiced cider, fresh bread, the sharp tang of leather and dye and metal polish.
Music comes from somewhere, a fiddle and a drum, their rhythms bright and insistent, and people move through the narrow aisles between stalls in a steady stream of color and noise.
Evran tries to keep up with Tria, which is not easy.
Tria navigates the market with an instinct that is part intuition and part force of will, flowing around obstacles without slowing, finding the gaps and the shortcuts, her attention darting from stall to stall with an energy that borders on the supernatural.
She is everywhere at once, sampling wares, collecting gossip, haggling with vendors in a rapid-fire exchange that leaves them simultaneously charmed and slightly dazed.
"This one," she says, pulling Evran to a stall draped in embroidered fabric. "Feel this. Feel the weight of it."
Evran feels it. It is beautiful, a deep cobalt blue with the embroidery worked in silver thread that catches the light.
"That would look wonderful in your hair," the vendor says, eyeing Evran's braid with professional interest.
"It's not for me," Evran says automatically, though he is not sure who it would be for, and Tria is already pulling him to the next stall.
They bounce from canopy to canopy. Tria finds her silk merchant and spends twenty minutes sorting through bolts of fabric in colors that Evran did not know existed in nature, ultimately purchasing a length of deep rose silk that she tucks under her arm with the satisfaction of a successful campaign.
A spice vendor lets them sample something that sets Evran's mouth on fire and makes Tria laugh so hard she has to sit down.
A woodcarver displays a set of tiny animal figures, each one no bigger than a thumb, carved with such delicate precision that Evran can see individual feathers on the birds.
He stops at a stall near the end of the row. The vendor is an older woman with clever hands and a display of metalwork, brooches, clasps, buckles, and in a cloth-lined tray near the back, needles.
Embroidery needles.
Evran picks one up and turns it in the light.
It is slender and finely made, the steel polished to a mirror sheen, and along the shaft there are tiny engravings, vines and leaves, so small they are barely visible to the naked eye.
The eye of the needle is threaded with ease, the hole clean and perfectly round, and the point is sharp enough to prick his finger before he realizes he has tested it.
"These are exquisite," he says.
The vendor brightens. "Mountain steel. My husband forges them. Each one is unique."
There is a set of six in a leather roll, each needle a different size, each one engraved with the same intricate botanical pattern.
They are beautiful, they are functional, and they are exactly the thing Aether would examine with her expression of professional approval and then use every day for the rest of her life while pretending they were merely adequate.
"I'll take the set," Evran says, and feels a curl of satisfaction when the vendor wraps them in soft cloth and places them in his hands.
For Aether. For the woman who made him a cloak and pinned it at his throat and touched his braid with her fingertips and said passable.
He finds Tria three stalls down, engaged in a spirited discussion with a bookseller about the merits of romantic poetry versus political histories, and extracts her with a gentle hand on her elbow.
They browse the remaining stalls together, and Evran is just beginning to think they should head back when he sees it.
A pressed flower journal.
It is in a quiet stall near the edge of the market, displayed alongside other handmade paper goods, bound notebooks, letter sets, watercolor palettes.
The journal is small enough to fit in two hands, bound in soft leather the color of honey, and when Evran opens it the pages are thick and cream-colored and interspersed with sheets of translucent tissue, the kind designed to protect pressed specimens without crushing them.
The first page has a flower already pressed into it, a pale purple mountain bloom, its petals papery and translucent, perfectly preserved. Beneath it, in small, careful handwriting, is the name of the species and the altitude at which it was found.
Evran's throat tightens. He thinks about Eira, about her straw hat bobbing above the garden terrace wall, and the dirt on her hands, and the way she called weeds persistent instead of stubborn, and the fierceness with which she hugged him before he left.
He thinks about the wildflowers in the mountain passes, the pale purple and white blooms that pushed up through the rocky soil, too delicate for the altitude and yet there they were.
He thinks about Eira turning the pages of this journal, her bright eyes going wide, her careful fingers tracing the pressed petals.
"I'll take this," he says, and his voice is thick, and the vendor either does not notice or has the grace not to mention it.
They head back to the Keep. Tria chatters the whole way, her arms full of purchases, her mood as bright and buoyant as the festival itself.
Evran walks beside her with Aether's needles in one pocket and Eira's journal tucked against his chest, and for a few minutes the weight of everything else recedes enough that he can simply be present, in the sun, in the valley, in the company of a girl who talks too much and means every word.