kay_brooke (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kay_brooke) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
rainbowfic2012-02-17 01:36 pm
kay_brooke) wrote in rainbowfic2012-02-17 01:36 pm
Tea Rose #27, Tyrian Purple #4
Name: kay_brooke
Story: The Myrrosta
Colors: Tea Rose #27 (We do not look in our great cities for our best morality), Tyrian Purple #4 (golden apple)
Style/Supplies Eraser (the Merrus/Jay AU)
Word Count: 2,216
Rating/Warnings: PG-13; No standard warnings apply
Summary: It's not easy trying to find a home.
"Drink," said the man, thumping the tankard down on the table in front of Merrus. The salkiy peered inside at the amber liquid and swallowed.
"No, thank you."
The man--what was his name? Serat or something? The names had flown thick and fast when Edward introduced them to the crowd, and Merrus hadn't been able to memorize all of them--grinned and said, "What's the matter? Your kind don't drink ale?"
The man spoke in the tongue of the coastal cities of Maston, one that Merrus could understand with a little spellwork, that Edward could understand through long familiarity, and that Jay could understand not at all. Merrus looked sidelong at the woman, who was sitting very straight with a very fixed smile on her face. A small vein pulsed in her neck and Merrus placed a placating hand on her back, as much comfort as it was warning not to lose her temper. Jay was formidable, and Merrus would have no trouble taking out the entire crowd if they got dangerous, but he didn't want to hurt anyone and he preferred to keep the scene pleasant.
"I don't, no," said Merrus carefully. He was still feeling out these humans, and wasn't sure if his refusal to drink would be taken as an insult.
Instead, the man laughed loudly and called back to Edward, "You've brought us an interesting one, merchant! Is he a man or a boy? I can't tell. Perhaps he's neither." The man grinned at Merrus again and lifted the tankard. When he finished he put it down, wiped his mouth, and pushed the tankard towards Jay. "My lady?"
"He wants you to drink," Merrus whispered to her.
"I know that," she said. She had gone even stiffer, if that was possible. "Nikolean warriors do not drink. Tell him no."
But the man didn't need Merrus to say anything, because among humans body language was the one thing almost everyone had in common. He sighed in mock disappointment. "Fun ones, you two are."
"Leave them alone," said Edward, making his way toward them from the back of the tavern. "They're not like you or me."
Jay grabbed the merchant's arm as he passed. "Why did you bring us here?" she demanded. Merrus could tell from how white her knuckles were and the grimace on the usually-unfazed Edward's face that she was pinching down hard.
Good, thought Merrus. Maybe now we can leave.
He still couldn't quite make sense of what had become of his life. Eight years stumbling through Maston, most of them spent disguised as a human, and then he had come across Edward, to the disbelief of both of them. Two more years traveling together (Edward didn't talk so much anymore, and Merrus wasn't as full of resentment) before they arrived back at the coast and Edward had said he was going home.
"For how long?" Merrus had asked, fearing that the answer was "forever" and wondering if that was something he should be fearing at all. He had spent most of his life alone, finding his own way, and he had navigated the human cultures in Maston for eight years before he had found Edward.
"I don't know," Edward had said, looking out toward the ocean. "This isn't something I do."
Don't look back. That was how Edward approached things. It was how Merrus had tried and failed to approach them, but as the years got long Merrus got better at it and Edward got worse. Perhaps it had something to do with age: they had both passed their sixtieth birthday, but salkiys lived longer than humans so the years didn't weigh so heavily on Merrus yet.
"Are you coming back?"
"I don't know," Edward had said again, and he sounded so lost and confused that Merrus decided to go with him, to return to the place he hadn't seen in ten years.
He didn't go to Ceenta Vowei, because it seemed wrong when Atro was long dead and there were virtual strangers on the throne. He was sure Gyeth and Kyla were more than adequate rulers, but he remembered how he had turned away from them so many years ago, when his problems had overwhelmed everything else in his mind until he had found himself refusing to help the children of his best friend. Their problems hadn't been his. That was what he had thought. He had been so foolish then.
Not then; foolish still. Because while he didn't go to Ceenta Vowei and he certainly didn't go to Okkand, he did go to Kandel, to the temple where he had last seen Jay. He wanted to know how she was, even though there was a good chance she would kill him.
He had found her, and she had been angry but had ultimately understood. All of that paled in comparison to the revelation that he had a daughter.
"You didn't tell me," he had told Jay, still shaking with shock. The things the women had said all those years ago, they made sense now. Why hadn't Jay told him?
Jay shook her head and looked down at her hands. She, too, was more silent than she used to be, and more reserved. "I do not know," she finally said. "I did not want to think it was true. I denied it until you left."
He had held her face in his hands then, because he knew this was not what she had wanted. They weren't each other's life loves, he and Jay. So he said, "I'm sorry."
"There is nothing to be sorry about," she said simply, and that reminded him so much of the Jay he remembered that he invited her to go back to Maston with him. And it was very like Jay that she accepted immediately. Quieter and more reserved and the mother of a six-year-old child she may be, but no part of Jay had been made to sit idle in a Nikolean temple.
She left with him, and they took Avashel with them. Merrus had a difficult time pronouncing her name at first, stumbling over the "v" and insisting on making it sound like an "f," but the child herself didn't seem to mind. She just looked at him with wide eyes, and he took it upon himself to immediately begin teaching her how to control and use her Gifts. Jay had been smart and, realizing what having a half-salkiy child meant, had found a salkiy to teach her the basics when she started exhibiting her abilities. But Ava also had ekalap blood, and that only Merrus could teach her about.
Edward showed up on the dock before they left, almost arriving too late to catch the last ship of the year back to Maston. Jay and Merrus and Ava accepted him right into their little family, and during the trip they started talking about where they would go once they arrived. Merrus and Edward had wandered aimlessly, the latter selling his wares wherever they went, but Merrus felt he couldn't do that anymore, not now that he had Ava.
"I want to go north," Merrus told Edward. "To the forests we visited there. It reminded me of home."
Edward remembered, and so they had gone north, traveling as lightly and as quickly as possible before the winter season set in, only stopping at night at the inns on the side of the road. Most of these places Edward had been before, and people still remembered him, the foreigner from across the ocean who insisted on being everyone's friend.
Jay was stranger still, and Merrus strangest of all, but the Mastonians of the north were surprisingly tolerant and any friend of Edward's was adopted into their large circle of acquaintances.
Jay was still holding Edward's arm in a tight grip. "I think I need to go now. I need to check on Ava."
The girl was upstairs sleeping, one of the daughters of the innkeeper watching over her. But Edward nodded and said, "We should talk in our rooms anyway. Quieter up there, you know."
The three of them, being themselves, couldn't slip away without notice and numerous clamors that they stay for just one more round of drinks, but Jay gave them all her most terrifying look and Merrus tried to blend into the shadows and Edward cheerfully told everyone that it was late and they were tired, but not to worry because they would be down again the next morning. Finally the group managed to extricate itself and make its way upstairs. They had rented two rooms, one for Merrus and his family--he still got a little thrill when he thought about it, even if it wasn't the family he had envisioned in his dreams--and one for Edward. They met in Edward's room to avoid disturbing Ava.
"What did you find out?" asked Jay, switching to Kandelian. It was her and Edward's first language and the one they were the most comfortable in, and Merrus had his own ways of managing.
"There's a little house," said Edward. He had brought up his last tankard and took a drink from it, tipping it far back to get the last drop before setting it down on the bedside table. "It's in the forest, fairly far from the village but not so far as to be a nuisance if you ever need to go to town. Belongs to one of the men I was talking to down there, inherited it from some aunt or another, but he wants nothing to do with a house so far from the village. It's not been kept up, but because of that he'll sell it to you cheap."
Merrus looked at Jay, even though he already knew what she was thinking. She shook her head, her mouth set in a straight, hard line.
Edward sighed. "He's selling it for real cheap, Jay. You're not going to find a better deal than that."
"We will go farther north," said Jay.
"It's all wilderness farther north," said Edward. "I been there before. Some scattered villages, but if you're looking for civilization, that's not where you're going to find it."
Jay just looked at him with her steely gaze, and Merrus looked at his hands. It was a long-standing argument that they hadn't even begun to resolve. Merrus and his family needed a place to settle down. Constant travel was no way to raise a child. But Maston was full of strange ways and people, and both Merrus and Jay had found the cities too dangerous for their obviously foreign daughter. But the farther away from the cities they got the rougher the elements. Jay didn't like it.
Edward rubbed his forehead. "All right," he said. "Maybe we're going about this wrong. Maybe we should try south. Better climate there, anyway."
Merrus had been in Maston for ten years, but for most of those years he had been alone and mostly avoiding human settlements. Edward had been there twice as long and made his trade by traveling to different lands and talking to the people. Merrus knew he should listen to the older man, but he couldn't shake the visions he still had of Byret in Okkand, one of the most miserable little places he had ever lived. "Is it like Byret?" he asked Edward, because of course Edward had been there, too. Edward had been everywhere.
The merchant shook his head. "No, if we go down toward the coast. Warm, yes. Wetter, though. Ferocious rains during the wet season but as perfect as a dream the rest of the year. More like southern Partika, if you ask me."
Merrus shrugged. He had never been to Partika and had no idea what it was like.
"I think you would like it," said Edward. "I think your little girl would like it, too. And," he turned to Jay, "I heard tell of some Kandelian scholars down there, just got off the boat a couple years ago, who are looking into the origins of the Nikoleans. Your ancestors might have come from around those parts."
That got Jay's attention. She sat up straighter and cocked her head. "You tell the truth?"
Edward held up his hands. "I tell what I've heard. I don't know anything firsthand about any scholars, but word gets around."
Jay turned to Merrus. "I want to see it."
Merrus sighed. "So going north was a waste of time?" he said, feeling that familiar tinge of failure well up in him. It had been his idea to go north. As usual, he hadn't thought it through. Stupid. Why would he even want to live someplace that reminded him of where he grew up, where he had been miserable?
"No," said Jay. "Not a waste of time. We have shown our daughter a lot of this land. It is knowledge worth having."
Merrus felt like she was humoring him, because she knew him too well and knew what to do when he got like this, but instead of feeling ashamed he only felt affection and gratitude. He took that as a good sign and turned to Edward. "Yes," he said. "We'll go south and see what's there."
kay_brookeStory: The Myrrosta
Colors: Tea Rose #27 (We do not look in our great cities for our best morality), Tyrian Purple #4 (golden apple)
Style/Supplies Eraser (the Merrus/Jay AU)
Word Count: 2,216
Rating/Warnings: PG-13; No standard warnings apply
Summary: It's not easy trying to find a home.
"Drink," said the man, thumping the tankard down on the table in front of Merrus. The salkiy peered inside at the amber liquid and swallowed.
"No, thank you."
The man--what was his name? Serat or something? The names had flown thick and fast when Edward introduced them to the crowd, and Merrus hadn't been able to memorize all of them--grinned and said, "What's the matter? Your kind don't drink ale?"
The man spoke in the tongue of the coastal cities of Maston, one that Merrus could understand with a little spellwork, that Edward could understand through long familiarity, and that Jay could understand not at all. Merrus looked sidelong at the woman, who was sitting very straight with a very fixed smile on her face. A small vein pulsed in her neck and Merrus placed a placating hand on her back, as much comfort as it was warning not to lose her temper. Jay was formidable, and Merrus would have no trouble taking out the entire crowd if they got dangerous, but he didn't want to hurt anyone and he preferred to keep the scene pleasant.
"I don't, no," said Merrus carefully. He was still feeling out these humans, and wasn't sure if his refusal to drink would be taken as an insult.
Instead, the man laughed loudly and called back to Edward, "You've brought us an interesting one, merchant! Is he a man or a boy? I can't tell. Perhaps he's neither." The man grinned at Merrus again and lifted the tankard. When he finished he put it down, wiped his mouth, and pushed the tankard towards Jay. "My lady?"
"He wants you to drink," Merrus whispered to her.
"I know that," she said. She had gone even stiffer, if that was possible. "Nikolean warriors do not drink. Tell him no."
But the man didn't need Merrus to say anything, because among humans body language was the one thing almost everyone had in common. He sighed in mock disappointment. "Fun ones, you two are."
"Leave them alone," said Edward, making his way toward them from the back of the tavern. "They're not like you or me."
Jay grabbed the merchant's arm as he passed. "Why did you bring us here?" she demanded. Merrus could tell from how white her knuckles were and the grimace on the usually-unfazed Edward's face that she was pinching down hard.
Good, thought Merrus. Maybe now we can leave.
He still couldn't quite make sense of what had become of his life. Eight years stumbling through Maston, most of them spent disguised as a human, and then he had come across Edward, to the disbelief of both of them. Two more years traveling together (Edward didn't talk so much anymore, and Merrus wasn't as full of resentment) before they arrived back at the coast and Edward had said he was going home.
"For how long?" Merrus had asked, fearing that the answer was "forever" and wondering if that was something he should be fearing at all. He had spent most of his life alone, finding his own way, and he had navigated the human cultures in Maston for eight years before he had found Edward.
"I don't know," Edward had said, looking out toward the ocean. "This isn't something I do."
Don't look back. That was how Edward approached things. It was how Merrus had tried and failed to approach them, but as the years got long Merrus got better at it and Edward got worse. Perhaps it had something to do with age: they had both passed their sixtieth birthday, but salkiys lived longer than humans so the years didn't weigh so heavily on Merrus yet.
"Are you coming back?"
"I don't know," Edward had said again, and he sounded so lost and confused that Merrus decided to go with him, to return to the place he hadn't seen in ten years.
He didn't go to Ceenta Vowei, because it seemed wrong when Atro was long dead and there were virtual strangers on the throne. He was sure Gyeth and Kyla were more than adequate rulers, but he remembered how he had turned away from them so many years ago, when his problems had overwhelmed everything else in his mind until he had found himself refusing to help the children of his best friend. Their problems hadn't been his. That was what he had thought. He had been so foolish then.
Not then; foolish still. Because while he didn't go to Ceenta Vowei and he certainly didn't go to Okkand, he did go to Kandel, to the temple where he had last seen Jay. He wanted to know how she was, even though there was a good chance she would kill him.
He had found her, and she had been angry but had ultimately understood. All of that paled in comparison to the revelation that he had a daughter.
"You didn't tell me," he had told Jay, still shaking with shock. The things the women had said all those years ago, they made sense now. Why hadn't Jay told him?
Jay shook her head and looked down at her hands. She, too, was more silent than she used to be, and more reserved. "I do not know," she finally said. "I did not want to think it was true. I denied it until you left."
He had held her face in his hands then, because he knew this was not what she had wanted. They weren't each other's life loves, he and Jay. So he said, "I'm sorry."
"There is nothing to be sorry about," she said simply, and that reminded him so much of the Jay he remembered that he invited her to go back to Maston with him. And it was very like Jay that she accepted immediately. Quieter and more reserved and the mother of a six-year-old child she may be, but no part of Jay had been made to sit idle in a Nikolean temple.
She left with him, and they took Avashel with them. Merrus had a difficult time pronouncing her name at first, stumbling over the "v" and insisting on making it sound like an "f," but the child herself didn't seem to mind. She just looked at him with wide eyes, and he took it upon himself to immediately begin teaching her how to control and use her Gifts. Jay had been smart and, realizing what having a half-salkiy child meant, had found a salkiy to teach her the basics when she started exhibiting her abilities. But Ava also had ekalap blood, and that only Merrus could teach her about.
Edward showed up on the dock before they left, almost arriving too late to catch the last ship of the year back to Maston. Jay and Merrus and Ava accepted him right into their little family, and during the trip they started talking about where they would go once they arrived. Merrus and Edward had wandered aimlessly, the latter selling his wares wherever they went, but Merrus felt he couldn't do that anymore, not now that he had Ava.
"I want to go north," Merrus told Edward. "To the forests we visited there. It reminded me of home."
Edward remembered, and so they had gone north, traveling as lightly and as quickly as possible before the winter season set in, only stopping at night at the inns on the side of the road. Most of these places Edward had been before, and people still remembered him, the foreigner from across the ocean who insisted on being everyone's friend.
Jay was stranger still, and Merrus strangest of all, but the Mastonians of the north were surprisingly tolerant and any friend of Edward's was adopted into their large circle of acquaintances.
Jay was still holding Edward's arm in a tight grip. "I think I need to go now. I need to check on Ava."
The girl was upstairs sleeping, one of the daughters of the innkeeper watching over her. But Edward nodded and said, "We should talk in our rooms anyway. Quieter up there, you know."
The three of them, being themselves, couldn't slip away without notice and numerous clamors that they stay for just one more round of drinks, but Jay gave them all her most terrifying look and Merrus tried to blend into the shadows and Edward cheerfully told everyone that it was late and they were tired, but not to worry because they would be down again the next morning. Finally the group managed to extricate itself and make its way upstairs. They had rented two rooms, one for Merrus and his family--he still got a little thrill when he thought about it, even if it wasn't the family he had envisioned in his dreams--and one for Edward. They met in Edward's room to avoid disturbing Ava.
"What did you find out?" asked Jay, switching to Kandelian. It was her and Edward's first language and the one they were the most comfortable in, and Merrus had his own ways of managing.
"There's a little house," said Edward. He had brought up his last tankard and took a drink from it, tipping it far back to get the last drop before setting it down on the bedside table. "It's in the forest, fairly far from the village but not so far as to be a nuisance if you ever need to go to town. Belongs to one of the men I was talking to down there, inherited it from some aunt or another, but he wants nothing to do with a house so far from the village. It's not been kept up, but because of that he'll sell it to you cheap."
Merrus looked at Jay, even though he already knew what she was thinking. She shook her head, her mouth set in a straight, hard line.
Edward sighed. "He's selling it for real cheap, Jay. You're not going to find a better deal than that."
"We will go farther north," said Jay.
"It's all wilderness farther north," said Edward. "I been there before. Some scattered villages, but if you're looking for civilization, that's not where you're going to find it."
Jay just looked at him with her steely gaze, and Merrus looked at his hands. It was a long-standing argument that they hadn't even begun to resolve. Merrus and his family needed a place to settle down. Constant travel was no way to raise a child. But Maston was full of strange ways and people, and both Merrus and Jay had found the cities too dangerous for their obviously foreign daughter. But the farther away from the cities they got the rougher the elements. Jay didn't like it.
Edward rubbed his forehead. "All right," he said. "Maybe we're going about this wrong. Maybe we should try south. Better climate there, anyway."
Merrus had been in Maston for ten years, but for most of those years he had been alone and mostly avoiding human settlements. Edward had been there twice as long and made his trade by traveling to different lands and talking to the people. Merrus knew he should listen to the older man, but he couldn't shake the visions he still had of Byret in Okkand, one of the most miserable little places he had ever lived. "Is it like Byret?" he asked Edward, because of course Edward had been there, too. Edward had been everywhere.
The merchant shook his head. "No, if we go down toward the coast. Warm, yes. Wetter, though. Ferocious rains during the wet season but as perfect as a dream the rest of the year. More like southern Partika, if you ask me."
Merrus shrugged. He had never been to Partika and had no idea what it was like.
"I think you would like it," said Edward. "I think your little girl would like it, too. And," he turned to Jay, "I heard tell of some Kandelian scholars down there, just got off the boat a couple years ago, who are looking into the origins of the Nikoleans. Your ancestors might have come from around those parts."
That got Jay's attention. She sat up straighter and cocked her head. "You tell the truth?"
Edward held up his hands. "I tell what I've heard. I don't know anything firsthand about any scholars, but word gets around."
Jay turned to Merrus. "I want to see it."
Merrus sighed. "So going north was a waste of time?" he said, feeling that familiar tinge of failure well up in him. It had been his idea to go north. As usual, he hadn't thought it through. Stupid. Why would he even want to live someplace that reminded him of where he grew up, where he had been miserable?
"No," said Jay. "Not a waste of time. We have shown our daughter a lot of this land. It is knowledge worth having."
Merrus felt like she was humoring him, because she knew him too well and knew what to do when he got like this, but instead of feeling ashamed he only felt affection and gratitude. He took that as a good sign and turned to Edward. "Yes," he said. "We'll go south and see what's there."
no subject
no subject
no subject
Lovely job.
no subject
Thank you for reading!
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject