The Past
Ava insisted on coating him with a bronzing ointment, saying his pallor would attract too much attention—as if their whole fucked up family wasn't made up of pale gingers. He favored her, which she hated, never having wanted to be a mother. Now, he wondered how much of the differences between Galeas and him were engineered by Douma.
"Mists," he muttered, standing naked in front of the mirror, "you think that looks real?" She was using the last of the stuff on his ankle, kneeling beside him.
"Nah, but it looks like you care enough to fake it. There. There isn't enough to do your foot." She stood, tossing the empty container into a large wicker rubbish bin. Everything in the room looked carefully hand-made by what the affluent called artisans. Expensive, Oren knew, but it was a style that had always irritated him. Perhaps because he wanted to be wealthy and hadn't managed it yet on his own steam. The coverlet on the huge bed was the color of sand. There was a lot of pale wood and handwoven fabric.
"What about you," he asked, "you gonna dye yourself brown? Don't exactly look like a kept woman used to sunbathing in the seraglio."
She wore loose black silk, and black silk that bound her feat to wicker wedges and twined up her shapely calves in double helices. "I'm an exotic," she explained, as if to a child. "I got a big straw hat for this, too. You, you just wanna look like a cheap-ass thug who's up for what he can get, so the fake tan is all right."
For some reason, her words always found blood. They were just so sharp he didn't always feel the sting until later.
Oren regarded his pallid foot morosely, then looked at himself in the mirror. He looked like a more tanned version of himself, he supposed, and that self was dangerously thin even after binging all this time with Ava and Galeas, at least when his extended threshold sickness didn't make him inappetetic or nauseated. He looked feral. He looked like someone he wouldn't want to find in a dark alley. It was strange to look in the mirror, recognize oneself while also feeling like the person in the mirror was not at all what he should be seeing.
"Mists. You mind if I get dressed now?" He went to the bed and pulled on his trousers. They had been fitted, and now felt loose. He felt like he was disappearing, the physical only following some other, more subtle disappearing act. "You sleep all right? You notice any lights?"
"You were dreaming," she said.
When she said that, he didn't know if she meant actually dreaming or just a function of his new magical senses coupled with his ability to make illusions.
They had breakfast on the roof of the hotel, a kind of meadow trapped in a bubble of glass that was reinforced with what he assumed were magical wards. He saw things, but he didn't always know what he was seeing. The place was studded with umbrellas and what seemed to Oren an unnatural number of trees. He told her about his attempt to eavesdrop on the demon in Gel'Grandal. The whole question of someone listening in on them had become academic. If Galeas were spying on them, he would be doing it through Douma.
"And it was like real?" she asked, her mouth full of cheesy pastry.
He said it was. "Real as this," he added, looking around. "Maybe more."
The trees were small, gnarled, impossibly old, the result of some sort of magic, surely. Oren would have been hard pressed to distinguish a cypress from a maple, but a street boy's sense of style told him that these were too cute, too entirely and definitively treelike. Between the trees, on gentle and too cleverly irregular slopes of sweet green grass, the umbrellas shaded the guests form the unfaltering radiance of the faux sun. A burst of a language he didn't know from a nearby table caught his attention: the golden children he had seen gliding above the river mist the evening before. Now he saw that their tans were uneven, a stencil effect produced by carefully nurtured tans wearing carefully curated clothing, the multiple shades overlapping in rectilinear patterns, outlining and highlighting musculature; the girl's small breasts, one boy's wrist resting on the white enamel of the table. They looked to Oren like automata built for racing. Beyond them, at another table, three Vastian wives awaited their bourgeois husbands, their eyes looking artificially bruised by kohl.
"What's that smell?" he asked Ava, wrinkling his nose. As soon as he asked it, he wondered if it were a real smell or something he was imagining. This place would have been surreal had he been clean and sober. Galeas' mystic and whoever had cut Runes into his skin had made sure he would have felt everything surreal even back in Cathena.
"The grass. Smells that way after they cut it."
Galeas and Len'Falas arrived as they were finishing their coffee, Galeas in tailored clothes reminiscent of a military uniform, Len'Falas in loose gray that perversely suggested incarceration.
"Ava, love," Len'Falas said, almost before he was settled on his chair, "you'll have to dole me out more of the medicine. I'm out."
"Ambal," she said, "and what if I won't?" She smiled without showing her teeth.
"You will," Len'Falas said, his eyes cutting to Galeas and back.
"Give it to him," Galeas said.
"Pig for it, aren't you?" She took a flat packet of thick paper tied with twine and sealed with wax from an inside pocket and flipped it across the table. Len'Falas caught it in midair. "He could kill himself," she said to Galeas.
"I have an audition this afternoon," Len'Falas said. "I'll need to be at my best." He cupped the packet in his upturned hand and smiled. Small, glittering insects swarmed out of it, vanished. He dropped it into the pocket of his blouse. Oren wondered if he would ever be so facile with creating false things.
"You've got an audition yourself, Oren, this afternoon," Galeas said. "On that tug. Get yourself tricked out with what you need, and get out to the boat. You've got three hours."
"How come we get shipped over in a shitcan and you two hire a luxury taxi?" Oren asked, deliberately avoiding the man's eyes. In some ways, he was still an adolescent.
"Founders suggested we use it. Good cover, when we move. I do have a larger boat, standing by, but the tug is a nice touch."
"How about me?" Ava asked. "I got chores today?"
"I want you to hike to the far end of Freeport, work out where the false gravity fails. Tomorrow, maybe, you hike in the other direction." Villa Luminaria, Oren thought.
"How soon?" Oren asked, meeting the pale stare.
"Soon," Galeas said. "Get going, Oren."
The Past
Sometimes, even in late spring, Aurin would have preferred a fire against Karnor's clime. But it really wasn't necessary. Torin was asleep, exhausted and blissed out beside him. For whatever reason, the post-coital haze had allowed old ghosts into his mind rather than keeping it blissfully blank until he could pass out beside his boy, clinging to him for warm—only for warmth.
Sitting up, he admired how swinging a hammer, working metal, and all the other physical activities Torin did sculpted his body. It belonged to Aurin, but tonight, that fact didn't bring a smug little shit-eating smirk to his face. The magical light from the lantern was whiter than firelight. He found himself staring at his pale foot next to his darker hand. Torin was sort of golden, even where he was pale. Aurin could be peaches and cream if he was healthy and happy; more often, he was just pale wherever he didn't catch sunlight. And then there were the freckles.
He was an ugly, ungainly thing. It was crazy what an extra portion of bravado allowed him to get away with.
Torin belonged to him, body and mind. He also belonged to Kala, but that was more of a soul thing. If Aurin knew how to claim that, he might have done. But with old ghosts, he wondered still which demon inhabited Rivin. The Lysanrin was a big more cagey, more distant these days, and Aurin didn't have a solution. He had to figure it out lest he lose his investment.
"What is your name?" he murmured to the devil whose host wasn't even near.
Torin mumbled something into the pillow.
With a sigh, Aurin slipped back under the covers, nudging at Torin. The bigger man moved, obedient even in sleep. On his back, his slack jaw parted lips. Aurin considered tea-bagging him, but instead, he slid one arm in the space between Torin's neck and the bed, his other pulling his human furnace close.
"Just go the fuck to sleep," he muttered to himself.
Eventually, he did.
