Chapter Sixteen Taking Squash from a Farmer #3
Kell joined them and saw. “Can I touch?”
“I’m holding the whole thing away. You’re fine. Be quick. Don’t mess it up.”
Kell had gloves on and held a flat little bar to pry up prongs.
He had the fake gem out and in the white bag in a blink.
He lifted the real gem from the gray bag it lay on, turned it around, and it fit, neatly and perfectly, in the housing.
He laid the silver thorns that held the gem in place gently, making it look undisturbed.
Saeldian laid the web down over the gem. “There.”
The whole web of spells hummed along for a breath and then went quiet.
“Hells.”
“What?”
“The spells aren’t active.”
“What? Why?”
“I don’t know what I did. Wait. Maybe…hold on, I have an idea.”
They grabbed a bit of fleece and polished the newly replaced gem with it.
“Apparent,” they said in Draconic, and cast the spell into the web.
It woke up, accepting their power to activate all the little spells that had been tied together.
It flared, then the center of their palm tingled, like the magic touched back. “And it’s working again.”
But Saeldian stayed crouched beside the casket, studying the spell-web. Did it feel different somehow? Saeldian sniffed. Rosemary. The sea. The delicate smell of orchids. But…
“We should go.”
“I’m double-checking.”
“Are the spells intact?”
Saeldian sniffed again. Just underneath all of that, it smelled like overripe apples.
“Sheld.”
That hadn’t been there before. Why now?
There was no time. Saeldian let the spell-web go, and it hummed along, doing all the little illusions and enchantments it was supposed to do. But—
“Saeldian.”
Kell had sounded alarmed.
“Yes. They’re fine.”
“Then let’s go. It’s time for the blow-off.”
Still gloved, Kell picked up the pouch that held the fake gem. He pushed it into a side pocket of his pack and fastened that buckle closed. “It’s like we never did a single thing wrong. What’s our exit game?”
But before Saeldian could answer, Kell was headed down the path back to the barge, and they had to scurry to catch up. “Dylstra saw the bolster. I don’t think she’d buy that we kissed and made up.”
“I don’t think so either. Storming out, I think. How’s your flounce these days?”
“Oh, you know me,” Saeldian said congenially. “I like to keep my skills up.”
“Aces. Dramatic exit, coming right up.”
Ahead of them, Lorzok and Jubilee studied Jubilee’s folding lanceboard. Timtim sat up on his hind legs, alerting Lorzok, who lifted a hand in greeting.
Saeldian raised theirs too. They smiled wide and passed their hand over their face, uncovering an angry grimace. Jubilee nodded once before tugging at Lorzok’s sleeve and whispering.
Saeldian stalked onto the barge and waited for Kell to start the argument that would ring across the lake.
Kell passed a hand over his smiling face and became the picture of frustration in a heartbeat. The barge disembarked, taking them to the shore, where there were hardly any crumbs of a breakfast left by now, surely. It didn’t matter, though. They weren’t stopping for morsels to take with them.
Kell brooded. He paced. And once they were close enough that their voices would carry, he burst out with, “This place would work if you’d just try.”
Oh, so they were the quarreling couple? That made sense.
“It’s too late, Kell. It’s always been too late.” Saeldian sighed so deeply, it echoed off the water. They hitched their pack on their shoulder for the dramatic march, everyone chasing after, the curtain drawn on the touch. “I shouldn’t have come here.”
“Then why did you?”
“I had to!” Saeldian shouted. “Because I wanted—”
Saeldian whirled away. They clamped their lips shut and looked down at the leaves carpeting the ground. Because they wanted? That was supposed to be, Because you wanted.
“Because you wanted what?”
To play along so you’d leave me alone. “Because I wanted to make it up to you.”
That’s not what Saeldian meant to say. It was an argument! You hold on to your position and then you do everything it takes to win it, no matter what. You don’t give ground. You don’t confess.
And Saeldian would never have said that to Kell. There was no way to make it up to him, and they knew it.
“You wanted to make it up to me?” Kell sounded even angrier now. Good. He had to carry this for a bit. “Like you cared how it felt for me?”
This was going sideways. Attack. “Don’t you remember what it used to be like? Don’t you feel like we lost something?”
What in the—
They meant to say, Of course it’s about how it felt for you. You, you, you. I’m sick of it. But you had to speak like getting words in claimed ground on the battlefield. There was no room to think, only to use what your opponent said and jab with it. Why—
Saeldian told Jubilee last night when they arrived. There was an enchantment. It made it easier to tell the truth.
But they were wrong. It didn’t make it easier to tell the truth.
“Yeah,” Kell muttered. “But we didn’t lose the same thing, did we?”
Confusion on Kell’s face. Saeldian went cold. That wasn’t what he meant to say either.
Saeldian tried to remember lying here. Even the smallest comforting lie. Even a demurring response. Nothing. Not when they answered Ilondrel’s question, and every time they had tried to find the right lie, they couldn’t speak at all.
Fuck. Fuck! “What do you mean?”
“I lost the most important person in the world to me.” He tensed. Not what he meant to say.
Gods.
It was impossible to lie here. Saeldian saw it on Kell’s face as he figured it out. But then he shook his head and relaxed. How could he relax at a time like this? What were they supposed to do?
They couldn’t lie here. So they couldn’t fake an argument. But they could still pull off the game, if they were careful. Kell could storm out of the domain; the plan would still work. Saeldian just had to give him the right line.
“You’re saying I was the most important person in the world to you?”
They tried to flavor it with skepticism. It came out like shock.
Now he could say half a dozen things. This isn’t going to work. I don’t know why I try. It doesn’t matter, anyway. And then he could turn around and run from this place, and they would never, ever come back.
But he didn’t say any of that.
“Yes. You were the heart of my world.” He shook his head, then accepted it and went on. “But I wasn’t that for you. It’s him.”
That wasn’t true!
But it made sense that Kell saw it that way. Kell could never be the most important person in the world to them. But it wasn’t that Osalor was either. Saeldian owed him everything, but that wasn’t what Kell meant.
Saeldian glued their tongue to the roof of their mouth. No one was the most important person in the world to them. No one ever had been. No one ever could be.
And saying that here, where they could not lie, would break Kell’s heart.
But Kell relaxed, the way someone finally lets go of every tension that carried a secret, and struck again. “It will always be him. And no domain of the Feywild can fix that.”
Saeldian’s skin went cold. They backed up a step. “You hate me for that. Because I couldn’t put you first.”
Now he would say it. He hated them because he’d made them the center of his world and Saeldian wouldn’t do the same. He had been doing only what he needed to do to get along, and they had cried in his arms, clung to him like they’d fall, and kissed him again.
Well, now it was time to stop pretending. They braced themself to hear him say, Yes. I hate—
“I love you,” Kell said.
Everything and everyone in the grove went quiet.
He what?
No. No. He couldn’t. But no one could lie here. He couldn’t lie to them.
And Saeldian couldn’t lie to themself. There was nothing they could say. Nothing. There was only this door in their mind, closed and locked.
They couldn’t even shake their head.
But it was too late for Kell, and he relaxed into the inevitability. “Nothing’s changed, no matter how bad it hurt or how hard I tried to forget or how much I tried to hate you. I love you. You’re the last person in all the worlds I should love, and I can’t stop.”
That was true. Kell loved them. All this time, trying so hard not to, and—Fuck this place. Fuck everything that had brought them here to this moment. There was nothing Saeldian could say.
Nothing.
“I never forgot you,” Kell said. “I would do something funny and think, ‘Saeldian would laugh so hard.’ And I could hear it. I would see someone moving in a crowd, and then it wouldn’t be you.
I told myself that it was because I wanted my chance to get the last laugh, but I wanted to understand why you left. ”
“I had to go.”
Every word burned their throat.
Kell was so gentle and so understanding, and that made it so much worse. “Because of him.”