15 A stiff drink with a… friend? #2
“Let me guess,” Fi said gloomily. “You tried it and loved it?”
Not like she could grow claws if she just thought hard enough—
“Fuck no,” Kashvi said. “Books are boring as the pit of the Void.”
Fi frowned. “But you’re the governor. You read reports all day?”
“For work. Who wants to go through that torture for fun?”
Oh. Well. Take that one off the potential birthday list.
“I tried,” Kashvi said. “I couldn’t do it, and I felt like shit.
Something I couldn’t give to her. But then I realized?
I can ask what she’s reading. I can listen to her talk about her books, and I can buy her more books, and I can send her to book clubs to talk about books with other people who like books.
And when she gets home, she has this huge smile, and I just want to… ”
Kashvi sighed, wistful. The softest she ever got, talking about Iliha.
“The point is,” Kashvi said, “once the butterflies settle? You have to wade through the mud again. You have to find ways to live together. Sometimes, that means bending a little to fit your partner better. Sometimes it means supporting the shit out of them while they do their own thing. You have to figure out which version will get you through this.”
By all appearances, it seemed like sound advice. Six years, Kashvi and Iliha had been together. By far the healthiest couple Fi had ever met.
Kashvi shrugged. “The murderous parents? I’ve got nothing. You’re on your own with that.” She downed the rest of her drink. “I should get back to the capitol.”
She stood. After an appraisal of Fi’s silence, her frown at the window, Kashvi set a lighter hand to her shoulder.
“Don’t keep it all in, Fi. I know we haven’t always been… close. But I’m here.”
“Thanks, Kashvi.” She held up her glass.
Kashvi departed. Fi finished her drink slowly, watching the snow fall.
She left Aisinay to enjoy her evening in the river. The Void horse would find her way back to the capitol stables once she’d finished snatching trout from the current.
Alone, Fi walked Thomaskweld’s main avenue, listening to the din of afternoon shifting to evening, hands deep in the pockets of her black and red coat. Cold wind off the river tussled rainbow hair across her eyes. A clash with her ensemble. She ought to consider a new hue.
She mulled Kashvi’s advice. It was good advice. Level-headed advice. To solve her current dilemma, all Fi had to do was figure out how to support Antal. Easy.
Except it wasn’t fucking easy, was it?
Fi couldn’t send him off to some daeyari book club. This was his entire world. His entire species. And he seemed to want to keep her away from every part of it.
She could bare her teeth, but she couldn’t grow fangs.
She could hang a marriage pendant around his neck like Kashvi and Iliha, a glass capsule of silver mixed with red. But they wouldn’t be “bonded in the Void” the way daeyari did.
Fi arrived at the capitol complex. Fists clenched, she looked to the cliffs above the city.
Near the highest point, a smudge of black marked the opening to Antal’s home.
Simple, for a daeyari to teleport there.
Fi would have to navigate through two Curtains, climb down the icy ledge without slipping and breaking her neck.
Either that, or wait in the capitol building for Antal to collect her like a child at daycare.
Or she could Voidwalk up there.
The thought hit her like a bucket of ice water, some cold slurry of paralyzing fear and Plane-shattering anger.
Despite being able to see Curtains since she was eight, Fi had only accomplished real Voidwalking twice.
The first time, a mistake, when she’d been fleeing Verne and had recklessly cut a Curtain with no Shard on the other side.
The second time, she’d done it to reach Antal before Verne could tear him apart.
While both these feats had been unquestionably badass, the fact that she could only pull it off in life-or-death circumstances really put a dampener on her bragging rights.
Fi hadn’t worked up the courage to practice again, daunted by that teeny tiny fear of getting trapped in liminal space and dying a slow cold agonizing death.
She snorted, rage-hot air billowing steam.
Was she really a Voidwalker, if she couldn’t do it whenever she wanted? Why shouldn’t she use one of the coolest skills in the Planeverse for something as petty as walking home?
It wasn’t a well-ordered thought, the way Fi yanked a hand from her pocket. All fluster and bravado, as she gathered energy to her fingers. She couldn’t give Antal claws or a tail, couldn’t even give him the right kind of coffee, apparently.
She could slash her hand through the air, parting the fabric of reality.
A ripple. A tear. The shimmer of a new Curtain. Exhilaration surged through her, simultaneous with the thought of, oh no, this is actually a stupid, reckless ideas, isn’t it?—
Fi stepped through the Curtain, off the Winter Plane.
For ten years as a Void smuggler, she’d mapped Shard locations, fragments of reality to safely cross the abyss. It was a disorienting, nauseating feeling, to find no Shard on the other side of the Curtain. No ground beneath her boots.
Just floating in endless black.
The Void was as silent as she remembered.
Then there was the lack of air. That oddly tight feeling in her lungs as they seemed to, for the moment, not need any air.
Fi floated in stasis, limbs weightless, cold aching her joints.
For most mortals, this would be a death sentence, lost to the abyss with no scrap of reality in sight, no visible path to claw back out.
Oh, good, there came the paralyzing fear again. A helpless feeling as she drifted…
Fi forced herself to calm.
She embraced the drift, not trying to move. Smothered in the quiet.
For most of Fi’s life, she’d considered herself a coward. All her bravado, just a defensive facade. But that wasn’t true. She’d held her ground against immortals. She’d reclaimed her home from Verne. She’d won Antal’s heart, had taught herself to Voidwalk.
That last one, with some help. Once, Fi had met a wraith of a daeyari here in the Void, eyes like glowing carnelian and a calming voice inside her head. She’d never seen him again. Whether it truly had been Veshri, the wandering immortal, she might never know.
It didn’t matter.
Fi shut her eyes. Getting here was the easy part.
All her focus went to a mental image. Voidwalking wasn’t as limited as daeyari teleportation. She could reemerge on any Plane—if Fi had been there before, and if she could visualize her destination in perfect, painstaking detail.
She pictured Antal’s sitting room upon the cliffs.
Cold seeped into her, as she imagined the color of the stone, the way it felt on her bare feet, warmed by hidden conduits.
Her chest ached, as she visualized the exact arrangement of pillows.
The gleam of each silk tassel. How they caressed her skin when Antal held her down and—
Fi plunged into freefall, wind roaring past her ears.
Then out the other side. She careened back onto the Winter Plane, catching herself against the wall of Antal’s sitting room. Frigid. Breathless.
Alive.
Holy fuck, she’d actually done it. No life-or-death motivation required. Fi shook with relief and triumph. A feat no other human on the Season-Locked Planes could perform.
“See that?” she shouted from the den of a daeyari, looking out upon the valley of Thomaskweld. “Voidwalking! Easy!”
Fi might not have claws. She might not know what to call herself, this not-Arbiter, this partner to a daeyari she was still struggling to understand. But she wasn’t weak. She could fight, and she could Voidwalk. She could be what Antal needed.
Now, if she could just get her hands to stop shaking.
Fi’s adrenaline thinned a little, alone in the dark sitting room, no witness to her feat. She had no idea when Antal would be back. Dumb daeyari and his dumb trip to the Twilit Plane.
Despite Fi’s attempt at annoyance, her shoulders slumped. A sigh.
She hoped her dumb, soft daeyari was doing ok on his own.