4. Chapter Four
Chapter Four
Kragen
Friday night, the bar fills up the way it always does; by seven it’s loud and warm and every stool is taken.
I’m behind the bar doing four things at once, as I have for eight years, and none of it requires my full attention anymore.
That’s the thing about building something over enough time.
It starts to run itself and you just show up and keep the wheels on.
Walt is at his usual spot at the far end, the one he’s occupied so long I’ve stopped thinking of it as a stool and started thinking of it as Walt’s stool, which is its own kind of landmark.
He nurses his coffee and watches the room, and occasionally says something to a regular that I can’t hear over the noise, and the regular laughs.
I file that away as something I’ll ask him about later and probably never do.
I play my first set at eight. The crowd is good: responsive without being loud about it, the kind of audience that listens.
I do an hour: some originals, some covers rearranged enough to feel like mine, one song from my world that I dust off occasionally when the room feels right for it.
When I play the song from home, the room goes quiet in a slightly different way than it goes quiet for everything else.
I’ve never been able to fully explain that difference.
Something in the intervals, maybe. A frequency the ear recognizes as old without knowing why.
Grulk arrives between sets, his voice carrying ahead of him the way it always does.
HammerFall clan, shorter and stockier than most orcs, eight years in Sunshine Valley and still built like volume is a form of hospitality.
I’ve known him since my first month here.
You know every orc in Sunshine Valley eventually, the community is that small, and Grulk has never been hard to know.
He drops onto a stool, and I pour him a Grim Dark, the one Missouri craft stout that satisfies a HammerFall orc’s specific opinions about what beer should taste like, and he launches into the compound update before the glass is on the bar.
He’s three minutes in when the real topic arrives.
“You need to understand,” he says, setting down his glass with unusual care, “that what Brennak did is not a small thing. This is not a difference of opinion. This is not a cultural variation. This is…” He searches for the word. “A rupture.”
“What did Brennak do?” I ask, half my attention focused on what could be wrong with the left stage monitor.
“Dresha.” He says her name first, because the context matters.
“Three weeks. She spent three weeks making him something. She found out his grandmother used to press flowers, the grandmother he still misses, Kragen, which means she was listening on a level most people don’t listen, and she learned the technique and made him this whole preserved arrangement with flowers from places that meant something to his grandmother specifically. ”
He stops. Drinks. Sets the glass down again. “That is the gift. You understand what I’m saying. That is the gift that could only come from someone who was truly, completely paying attention. Not just to him. To the shape of his grief.”
“I understand that part,” I say.
“And he said thank you.” Grulk lets this sit on the bar between us like evidence. “He said thank you, and he went back to what he was doing.”
“People receive gifts differently—”
“No.” Grulk’s voice drops, which is somehow worse than when he’s loud.
“I need you to hear me. This is not HammerFall tradition. This is not StillWater. This is not any one clan. This goes back further than clans. When someone who is courting you, or someone you are courting, gives you the perfect gift, the one that could only come from someone who was truly listening, you are obligated to answer it. Not with payment. Not with equal cost. With equal meaning. It is the most fundamental thing. Relationships have ended over less. Good relationships. Relationships that should have survived.” He looks at me steadily.
“Saying thank you and walking away is not receiving a gift. It is a declaration that what she gave him meant nothing.”
“Not every orc treats the obligation the same—”
Grulk turns and looks at me. Not angry. Worse than angry: patient in the way a person gets when you’ve misunderstood something sacred.
“I’m going to pretend,” he says finally, very quietly, “that you didn’t just say that.”
He picks up his glass again, finished with correcting me.
He talks for another ten minutes about Brennak and three other things that happened at the orc compound this week.
I listen, but the next set is already taking up space in my head, and by the time I start playing again, I’ve mostly put the conversation away.
The second set runs long. I find something in the third song that I want to follow, and I chase it longer than I planned.
The crowd stays with me, and by the time I finish and the bar empties, I’m still turning something over in the back of my head that I can’t quite locate. Not the monitor. Something else.
I close up. Walt has already gone, said goodnight after the first set, the way he sometimes does when he’s decided the night is mine, which I take as the compliment it is.
I clean the bar, wash the glasses, stack the chairs on the tables, pick up the guitar from the stage, and then just stand here in the quiet.
By the time the room is empty, I know what it is: the phlox photograph. The velara flowers from home.
They surfaced out of nowhere and consumed my thoughts before I put them away.
I don’t think much about home. There’s no percentage in it, and anyway this is home now.
But something about the density of those blooms on the hillside, the pale wash of them, pulls at something I usually leave alone.
Spring on the slopes above my clan’s settlement.
You could smell the velara from halfway up the ridge.
I keep thinking about her too, which I’m aware of and not examining.
She’s not what I expected from the emails.
I’d built something from the directness of her, the precision.
I expected the workshop. I got the workshop.
But she’s slight in a way that the workshop doesn’t suggest, someone who works with her hands all day and carries it in her forearms and her shoulders rather than her height.
Brown hair, jaw-length, the kind of wave that does what it wants.
I lock up and drive home. I sit on my couch and play something slow and without a destination for a long time, following the thing in the back of my head that I can’t quite locate. It isn’t a song yet. It’s more like the feeling a song comes from, the shape of it before it has any notes.
Outside the apartment window, the late-spring Missouri night is warm and still, the dark smelling of green things growing.
I grew up under a different sky. Different stars, different season markers, different everything.
But Missouri at night in May has gotten into me over eight years, the way places get into you when you stop just passing through them.
I play until whatever followed me home gets quieter.
Then I set the guitar on the cushion next to me and sit in the dark for a while, not thinking about anything in particular, which is the closest I get to whatever StillWater orcs are supposed to do when they’re being StillWater orcs.
I would never say that out loud. But at 1:30 on a Friday night in an apartment I barely live in, with a guitar that goes everywhere I go and a workshop twenty-three miles away that I’ve been thinking about since yesterday, it occurs to me that not saying something out loud doesn’t make it less true.
I leave the guitar on the cushion when I go to bed, which I never do. It should bother me more than it does.