12. Chapter Twelve #2
“A requirement of the job, if a swersoldi is very unlucky.” Viau carefully set the peach on the desk.
“But for most, this is something we do because it is work and we have few other options. For you too, yes, I know, but others happen into this. You are suited to it. Do you know what Daloit calls you? A cat.” He answered before Rafi could ask.
“Efficient hunters, cats. Though they do toy with their prey, and that I don’t believe you would do. ”
“But you’re the ideal,” Rafi protested, ignoring cat nonsense. “You’re what people think swersoldi are, what they should be. Poetry, courtesy, and your hair.”
“My hair?” Viau echoed, blinking.
“The ideal is not a killer, even if you are one,” Rafi explained his earlier point.
“Ah. That would imply that the entire system is constructed on violence, with unwanted children paying the highest price.” Viau sounded playful but his gaze left Rafi again.
“That is not a story people want. They want noble warriors like those from long ago, with exquisite manners and bravery, strong calves and a quick wit. Poetry in their words, elegance in every flick of their wrists. Pretty hair,” he added, probably to tease Rafi.
That description was Viau exactly.
“Did you choose to become the ideal?” Rafi scarcely breathed it.
“I didn’t ask to become famous if that’s what you mean.” Viau reached for a ribbon on the desk and tied his hair at his nape. “I decided young to be as perfect as a human can be in the vocation that I was given.”
Was given. Delicately phrased but not poetry, so Rafi grasped his meaning.
“But your family love you.” And Viau was probably good enough with aer to have been a mage. Maybe not the most powerful mage, but a good one.
“Yes,” Viau agreed. “I was nonetheless extraneous, and I don’t mind it, I suppose. I serve to the best of my ability and have gotten something of a name for myself.”
He could be the ideal swersoldi, but as a mage, he’d be merely one of many. That sort of vanity was beneath someone like Viau. Rafi frowned as he thought of it, then sat up as he understood why Viau trained as much as he did, why he answered every call, probably why he befriended everyone.
If he was good, if he was close to the best, to perfect, then he’d be needed. He’d be kept. Nobody would throw away someone like that.
Rafi wanted suddenly, strongly, to touch Viau, or offer him something more useful than a peach. But he had nothing.
“You enjoy the sparring at least,” he suggested, and got a surprised glance and then a snorted laugh.
“Yes, I do,” Viau admitted, smiling again. “The challenge of it, getting breathless. The soreness the next day if I did too much. It’s fun.”
“But you’d rather be in a garden growing things and measuring them and the like?” That was more puzzling, but when outdoors, Rafi had been wandering fields, not tramping through gardens.
“I try not to think about it too much,” Viau answered lightly. “Do you have anything like that?”
Rafi spent a moment considering if destroying a sparring dummy was considered a real interest. “No,” he confessed at last. “I never saw the point. This is the only life I’ll have.”
“If you like this life, that is fine enough. But if you had a choice, if this weren’t forced upon you, or was one of a handful of mediocre choices, what would you choose? Or at least, what might you enjoy in your spare time? You should have a private pleasure. Everyone should.”
“Oh.” Rafi considered that too. He was tentative. “I realized the other day that I might enjoy healing.”
“After what you just said.” Viau’s grin grew. “Healing? Truly?”
“The weaving of aer and how they view it, it’s… challenging. And, well, everyone listens to healers.”
“A surprising number of people don’t, but I see what you mean.
” Viau seemed thoughtful as he stared at Rafi.
“I can’t see you as a dedicated healer, but I can see you being shockingly good in an immediate crisis.
Oh yes. You know, those same aer-weaving skills are used in gardening, although many gardeners—the ones in demand at noble houses—are often not aware that they are manipulating aer. ”
Rafi was unclear if he was being asked to assist with Viau’s gardening experiments or not. Viau didn’t explain. He sat back, gaze distant as if lost in thought.
“Viau, am I distracting you from your work?” Rafi asked after a while. Viau raised his head, focusing on Rafi again.
“Yes. And what light remains is fading.” Viau smiled as if to apologize for his honesty. “But the bed is yours if you’re tired. No need to worry about manners here.”
Rafi suspected he truly meant that. “You were not with the others for the evening meal,” he pointed out. “Eat that peach, at least.”
He didn’t try to be polite; he’d been told not to.
Judging from his soft laugh, Viau was absolutely delighted by that. And he obeyed, facing his desk again and pulling a small knife from under his notebooks to slice up the peach.
Rafi removed his boots and his belt, and then, after some debate, his pants too, since no one slept in their trousers no matter what else was on their mind.
He moved to the head of the bed to sit against the pillows and headboard while he watched Viau absently eat peach slices between examining leaves and scribbling onto various papers.
Not interested in poetry, Rafi abandoned his book with the rest of his things and eased back as though he was in a haystack on a sunny day in one of his family’s fields.
Viau got sticky peach juice on his fingers, which he licked off absentmindedly only to notice too late that he’d gotten some on his papers. He licked that away too, or tried to, then shrugged and went back to work.
Rafi was thinking of his question, yet to be asked, but that worry was distant now that he’d been welcomed and teased. He didn’t even startle when Viau broke the silence.
“You don’t have to be a mouse. You’re not going to get thrown out of this room for taking up space.” Viau didn’t even look up from his writing.
Nex were never particularly large, but Rafi truly wasn’t small. He was also sitting comfortably on the favorite’s bed in only a shirt. He was hardly refusing to take up space, even if he wouldn’t have dared to sit like this yesterday.
“I am sitting how it suits me to sit,” Rafi answered quietly. “I’m a bit sore. I fell down today and bruised my knees.”
Viau snorted. “Your bruised knees are your own fault for tackling me. You do love to be close to those you kill, don’t you…
?” He trailed off as he looked over, his hand going still as he looked at Rafi’s bare feet and then his bare legs, pausing at the knees, which were indeed bruised.
His gaze met the hem of Rafi’s shirt, which fell over his thighs, before Viau dragged his attention up to Rafi’s face.
“I didn’t glimpse any other bruises on you this morning,” he said huskily as he turned away again to stare down at his papers.
“I stopped sparring before aedis. I needed to rest.” Which Viau had advised Rafi to do, although Rafi didn’t know if Viau had written to Rafi’s instructors as he’d threatened. “But you told me to only wear your bruises and I have done my best to obey.”
Viau’s fingers tightened around the pencil. “Are you…?” He tapped the pencil against a paper, then looked over at Rafi again. “Is this sparring? You’re tricky, Rafeli Tizzan.”
Rafi didn’t think a single person in the entire world would describe him that way. “I’m not tricky.”
“You’re quiet and you hide.” Viau put down the pencil. “You’re innocent until you’re not.”
“Oh.” Rafi looked down. “I can….”
“If you are about to offer to leave, don’t. I’m not angry or disappointed with you. I’m astonished.”
Rafi raised his head and their eyes met. “You used my full name again.”
Viau pushed out a breath that seemed angry no matter what he’d said, then turned in the chair to face him.
“When Briene wrote to me about a student in need of help, I expected someone with a strong use of aer, because that was why someone else wouldn’t do.”
Disappointed, then. “And I wasn’t.”
Viau, the ideal, dragged his hands through his hair, pulling it from its ribbon, and rumbled unsteadily at the ceiling. The noise was not a word.
Then he got up, the ribbon trailing to the floor behind him as he came over to sit on the edge of the bed that was nearest the windows. He left his feet on the floor and looked at Rafi with an expression Rafi couldn’t interpret.
“You were strong, and you were pretty, and you avoided me, making you a mystery as well. You keep yourself quiet, and you don’t get into squabbles or arguments even when your temper is flaring—don’t pretend you have no temper, pretty liar.
” Viau put a finger in the air when Rafi opened his mouth and only continued when Rafi closed it.
“You don’t play the games miná and nex sometimes play before a heat, which miné enjoy very much and even play themselves if it suits them to.
You don’t play at all, except for when you are sparring, and that took prompting.
But once you’re in motion, you don’t hold back.
” The corner of his lips turned up. “Did you know your aer is reaching for mine?”
Rafi twitched in surprise, but calling his aer back to himself was too little, too late, because he’d already felt the touch of Viau’s to control it.
“Unfurling tendrils,” Viau mused softly. “I think in terms of plants at times, and you are a vine in search of the sun.”
Rafi’s throat was tight. “I thought I was a storm cloud.”
“That too.” Viau didn’t make sense. “Vines or a storm, it’s all the same to those caught in them.”
“You said yes.” Still no worry within Rafi, only those nerves, or what he thought were nerves.
Now he wondered if that was the unfurling Viau spoke of, a shiver of motion in sunlight.
“You’re in demand, and so very busy. You said yes anyway.
Was it to get some time to be alone and grow your plants? ”