"Gray!" Rongen bellowed, pounding at the door to Tsar's room with his cane, "Open the fucking door!"
Rongen's towering fury had not lessened whatsoever on the walk from the grounds; if anything the raccoon seemed even angrier than ever. On the way over he had muttered a nearly constant stream of curses, utterly ignoring every interjection Eni tried to make, and he wasn't waiting for Tsar, either.
Without pausing for so much as a moment to let the wolf respond, Rongen jiggled the doorknob, and when it proved to be locked he was not deterred. The raccoon thrust one paw into his pocket and pulled forth a large ring of keys, his fingers trembling with rage as he flipped through them. Within seconds he had found the right key and plunged it into the lock, missing the keyhole once before getting the key in.
Rongen flung the door open with surprising force, considering his age, and strode into the room. "You!" he bellowed, pointing one finger out, "You cowardly fucker!"
Eni saw the raccoon's face twist in confusion before he blurted, "What the fuck are you doing?"
Eni hurried in the room after him and gasped, her ears suddenly burning as she saw Tsar. The wolf was sitting on top of the bed sheets, his legs crossed and his arms at his sides with his tail curled around him. The Slayer's eyes were closed and his expression utterly neutral, completely devoid of any emotion whatsoever.
He was also completely naked.
His crossed legs prevented Eni from seeing anything she shouldn't have, but his bare chest was utterly exposed and he was facing the door. The enormous scalloped white arrowhead on his chest was perfectly visible for the first time, narrowing from its widest point at his shoulders to narrow and seeming like it'd come to a point somewhere in his groin.
Eni forced herself to look up, but seeing Tsar unclad had apparently only confused Rongen for an instant rather than do anything to defuse his anger, because less than a heartbeat after asking his question the raccoon asked another. "Well?" he demanded, his voice filling every corner of the room.
Tsar's eyes opened narrowly, slivers of blue locked onto Rongen, before opening the rest of the way. "What did you learn about the dagger?" the Slayer asked mildly, as though Rongen had not just burst in on him, and the raccoon made a furious choking sound, apparently too enraged to form words.
"We—" Eni began, but Rongen regained his voice and cut her off.
"The dagger? Don't you dare pretend you think I barged in here to tell you about that fucking dagger," Rongen said, looking Tsar dead in the eye, "You have been a shitty friend from the moment I met you. You're the rudest, most inconsiderate fucking mammal I've ever met, and I was raised in a fucking brothel. The worst clients those working girls ever had still did a better job of faking concern than you, you inscrutable fucker. But I always saw you do what was right. I saw you help others who needed you. I thought that was enough, but now? Now there's someone who needs you more than anyone ever has, someone who needs what only the Slayer can teach her. And you're too much of a fucking coward to do it right."
Tsar's expression changed for the first time, his ears drooping back ever so slightly and his tail curling around his body more tightly. "Oh, you'd better fucking get it," Rongen sneered, practically spitting the words, "Your old pal figured it out. What, you thought I was too stupid? After all this time, you still fucking underestimated me?"
"No," Tsar replied quietly.
His voice was low and terribly grave, and he sat utterly still as he looked back at Rongen.
"Then what was it, Gray? What was it? And I swear to the Mother, you better start talking in actual fucking sentences," Rongen said, and Eni could hear a note of genuine curiosity under the rage.
"I thought you'd see me alone first," he said, glancing briefly at Eni before looking back at the raccoon.
"Tough fucking luck," Rongen replied, crossing his arms across his chest, "Look her right in the eyes and fucking explain it."
Tsar's head didn't budge so much as an inch, but his vividly blue eyes turned to her, running up and down her body with a piercing and unblinking stare. Eni felt as naked as the Slayer actually was, his pupils fathomless and impossibly penetrating slits peering through hers. "I've been teaching you to push your magic aside," he said slowly, "To accept that it's a part of you and reject it."
The wolf seemed to grope for the right words, Rongen still glaring at him. "Tsar—" Eni began to say, but the raccoon turned his glare onto her.
"Let him talk," Rongen said, enunciating each word carefully and precisely.
"When I traveled with Rongen," Tsar said at last, "He wanted to learn magic. But his light is dim. He could spend a dozen lifetimes honing his will and…"
The Slayer paused and turned to look at his former traveling companion. "It wouldn't be enough," he finished.
Some of the tension seemed to ease out of the raccoon as Tsar spoke, but his eyes were still hard and cold as he looked back at the Slayer. "So I spoke of magic to pass the time. Because he'd never be able to use it."
The Slayer swallowed, and his gaze turned to Eni. "But you're…" he said, and Eni hoped that it was sympathy that she heard in his voice, "Dangerous."
"Dangerous," Eni repeated numbly, remembering the words that she had read in Rongen's neat writing.
"Oh, for fuck's sake, Gray!" Rongen bellowed, "Stop scaring her and get to the fucking point!"
"And for the Mother's sake cover yourself," Rongen added, and he fumbled with the belt of his robe before tearing it off and throwing it at Tsar, "No one takes a naked mammal seriously and you had damned well better be pretty fucking serious."
The thrown robe fluttered gracelessly across the room like a bird with a broken wing before landing on Tsar's lap. "Sit down, Mimos," Tsar said with a surprisingly gentle tone, gesturing to a chair in the corner of the room.
The raccoon's chest heaved and his breathing had become labored and heavy. Under his robe he had been wearing a silk nightgown, and despite his sizable gut he seemed suddenly frail and insubstantial. "Yes, yes," Rongen grumbled, sinking heavily into the indicated chair, "But—"
"I know," Tsar interrupted, and as he spoke he smoothly slid off the bed and stood up.
At any other time, the part of Eni's mind that was endlessly devoted to cataloging every single detail about the Slayer would have taken over. Instead, each newly revealed feature was simply absorbed as it was. Eni saw for the first time that Tsar's groin was entirely white except for a black tip nestled inside a sheath the same color as the surrounding fur. The upside-down triangle of white on his chest didn't come to a point, instead flaring out into prongs that ran along the inside of his thighs and ended just before his knees. The thin white stripes that began under his armpits almost, but not quite, met up with those prongs, wrapping around his back and ending on the fronts of his legs.
The details seemed as though they should have meant something, but before Eni could even try to force herself to think about them the Slayer had shrugged on Rongen's robe and tied it closed; while it strained slightly at his broader shoulders his much thinner build meant that despite his significant advantage in height the hem still almost reached his ankles.
"Your magic is a part of you," Tsar said slowly, "And denying it for too long is like…"
He paused, apparently unable to find the right words. Rongen snorted. "You're doing great," he said sourly, but most of the anger seemed to have left his voice.
"Are there tidal waves in Nihuron?" Tsar asked abruptly, ignoring Rongen's interruption.
Eni blinked. She was more surprised that the Slayer had apparently remembered where she came from than by the question. "We call them onami, but they're the same thing," she said, "They're mostly in the southern part of the peninsula, but never as far north as Siverets. Well, actually, not never as far north, because there have been onami in Siverets, but not during my life, at least, and there are markers from seven hundred years ago when—"
Eni cut herself off with the painful realization that she had been babbling. "Yes," she said.
Tsar looked at her carefully, his head tilting to the side. "Those markers," he said slowly, "Tell me about them."
"They're obelisks with warnings carved in Nihu," Eni replied, "They mark where the water rose during the onami. According to the carvings, a quarter of the village was swept away because it was built too low."
Tsar grunted. "And did anyone rebuild lower?" he asked.
"No," Eni replied, shaking her head, "We respect the warnings."
"Your magic is like that," Tsar said, "Like the waves. The… onami."
He gave the unfamiliar word an exotic lilt, fumbling over the syllables. "If you don't practice controlling it, if you just reject it… You won't know how far it pushes. You won't know where you need to build your barriers to keep it from washing you away."
"That was almost poetic," Rongen drawled, "I knew you had it in you. Now explain why you weren't teaching her."
"You were right about me," Tsar said simply, looking at Rongen, "I was afraid."
Eni could barely believe what she had just heard. The Slayer admitting to anything as mundane as cowardice should have been beyond the realm of plausibility. But Tsar's head had dipped slightly, his ears and tail both drooping, and there seemed to be genuine shame written across his face. "I'd say I'm glad to hear you admit it, but I'm not," Rongen replied, and he pushed himself out of the chair and walked over to where Tsar was standing.
"You've spent too much time alone," Rongen added gruffly, clapping his paws around Tsar's arms in an exceptionally awkward embrace, "And Miss Siverets there hasn't already run away screaming, so I think she's probably in for the long haul. Isn't that right?"
"I'll follow you anywhere," Eni replied immediately as Rongen glanced over at her to ask the question.
"See?" Rongen said, and he let Tsar's arms go, "Now I'll make you a promise. I'll tell you about that fucking dagger if you show her the Mildeus Technique. Properly, or I'll crack open that thick fucking rock you have for a skull."
Tsar looked at Rongen blandly, his face utterly devoid of emotion. Eni couldn't tell what the wolf thought of the raccoon's threat, but Rongen stared him down until he looked right at her. There was a brief moment when their eyes locked again that Eni felt as though he was seeing her in a more intimate way than anyone ever had. He nodded slowly, and an unexpected warmth flowed through her.
The Slayer hadn't come out and said that he liked traveling with her or that he enjoyed her company. He hadn't actually paid her the slightest actual compliment. But somehow, Rongen's words made it feel exactly as though he had.
Rongen stumped off toward the door, but he seemed to notice Tsar's eyes on his back. "Now?" he asked with a weary sigh, "Fine, fine, but then I'm calling it a night. I'm too fucking old to stay up this late."
Rongen turned back around, motioning for Eni and Tsar to sit. The Slayer took a seat back on the bed again, and Eni claimed one of the other chairs in the guest room. "The dagger's nothing special," Rongen began, "Decent quality, but not great. Mass-produced right here in Tormurghast, actually. No maker's mark, but I'd recognize the work of the Brotherhood of Bladesmiths anywhere. Probably not worth following up on that; they sell thousands of the fucking things every year, inside the Circle and out. The poison's a bit different. Whoever made that shit was a master alchemist. And I mean a master."
"How so?" Eni prompted.
"If that blade so much as scratched you, you'd be dead," Rongen replied grimly, "Making something like that without killing yourself is harder than most would-be poisoners think. Serves them right, the fuckers."
He scowled, seeming to recall a particularly vile encounter, and then continued. "But the ingredients aren't too exotic. Nothing too difficult to find in the Circle. Or the Fanglands or the Federation, for that matter."
"So we're just looking for a really good alchemist?" Eni asked, feeling slightly disappointed that Rongen hadn't been able to tell them anything more actionable.
Her expression must have been perfectly clear, because the raccoon immediately snapped at her. "Well I was able to rule out what it wasn't," Rongen added, seeming to bristle, "This was pure alchemical skill that brewed your poison. It wasn't the tears of an extinct sea monster or some stupid flower that only grows in the middle of the Demosthene Desert or some shit like that. Just common, easy-to-get reagents."
"How good an alchemist?" Tsar asked quietly.
Rongen shrugged. "I could have done it," he said, "I didn't, but I could've. Someone at least as good as me."
The Slayer made a wordless noise, and then inclined his head in Rongen's direction. "You're welcome," Rongen replied, and his gruff voice was almost cheery.
He pushed himself back to his feet, grunting with the effort. "And now I need some sleep," he said, shuffling for the room's exit, "The two of you have fun."
"Oh, and Miss Siverets?" he called as he stood in the doorway, turning to look back over his shoulder.
Eni looked at him questioningly. "If he doesn't keep his word, let me know," Rongen said, and without waiting for a response shuffled out, closing the door after himself.
Despite how Rongen looked, it sounded like a genuine threat, and for a moment Eni imagined what he must have been like in his youth. But then she was alone with Tsar, who was still sitting quietly on his bed. "So…" Eni began, feeling more than a little awkward, "What were you doing?"
She badly wanted him to show her the Mildeus Technique, but the air felt heavy and strange between them and seemed to need some kind of lightening. "Meditation," the wolf replied simply.
Eni wondered if it was the same thing that he had been doing the previous night, when she hadn't been able to hear his heart, but before she could ask any sort of follow up question Tsar spoke. "Mildeus," he said, his voice still low, "What did Rongen tell you?"
"He said it was a sort of practice for controlling magic," Eni said, "Something with keeping a flame steady?"
Tsar inclined his head ever so slightly. "My first teacher called it…" he began, and then he lapsed into his strangely accented Jarku for the next few words.
"The fire's pulse," he said, and then switched back to his blandly neutral Circi as he continued.
"Means the same," Tsar said, shrugging his shoulders beneath his ill-fitting robe, "Here."
He got off the bed so quietly that Eni could barely hear a sound, padding over to one of the cabinets and pulling out a lantern. He lit it with a match procured from a small box that had been neatly stowed next to the lantern, rather than simply with a touch as Ceslaus had lit his pipe back in Ctesiphon. Her encounter with the other wolf Aberrant felt as though it had taken place ages ago, and she wasn't able to keep herself from asking a question. "Why did you stop using magic?" she said.
"I know where my onami markers are," he said as he walked over to where she sat.
Eni had only a moment to turn that answer around in her head before Tsar spoke again. "Mildeus is a way of teaching control and limits of your light. Hold out your palms."
Eni did so immediately, despite remembering Rongen's comment about Tsar lighting his paws on fire; if the cost of learning was a few burns she'd gladly pay the price. Tsar looked down at her cupped paws and frowned. He set the lantern on the floor and then reached out and gently grabbed Eni's fingers. "Like this," he said, altering how she had her paws together with small corrections.
His own fingers were warm and strong, and with Tsar standing so close his musk was stronger than Eni had ever smelled, raw and masculine in a way unlike any other mammal she had ever met. "That's it," he said at last, and Eni looked down to memorize how she was holding herself.
She wasn't sure if there was some special significance to the way he had interlaced her fingers together, but she focused herself on paying attention to everything he was showing her. "You're going to pull off some of this fire," he said, holding up the lantern, "With your magic, not with your paws."
"And then you're going to hold it. Let it beat with your heart and your lungs. Focus on every breath, every pulse, and make the fire respond. Bigger when you inhale, smaller when you exhale."
Eni nodded to show him she understood even as she looked down at the lantern with no small amount of trepidation. The idea of practicing magic, of practicing actual magic rather than simply forcing it aside, was so exciting that she could already feel the power within her straining for release. "How big should the fire be?" Eni asked.
Tsar seemed to consider it for a moment. "From this to this," he said at last, first using one finger to draw a circle in the air about four inches in diameter before indicating one about half that size.
"Ready?" he asked, lifting the lantern and opening the glass housing to reveal the fire within.
Eni wasn't sure that she was, but she swallowed her doubts and nodded. She inhaled as deeply as she could and focused herself on the flame dancing within the open lantern. The flame shivered in the air currents that her breath made, and Eni stared at it as she tried to empty her mind. An impenetrable blackness started forming at the edges of her vision as everything focused down to the flickering fire.
Eni strained her hearing, reaching out for every sound that she could and trying to sort through them. Tsar's heart was slow and even as always, and she could feel her own throughout her entire body from the tips of her ears to the ends of her toes. She could hear the soft rustle of fur against cloth as Tsar's arm moved ever so slightly to keep the lantern steady, and the far-off gurgle of water through pipes in some distant part of Rongen's tower. The wind blew gently against the window, shaking the glass ever so slightly, and the fire whispered delicately.
She strained her hearing further and further until there was nothing but the fire, and the sound of it began to seem almost like words. Eni let every breath flow through her, her thoughts seeming to slow as time dragged out, and then the fire spoke.
Your palms?
The question was weak and tentative, far less eager than the voice fire usually spoke with while urging her to use it. "Yes," Eni whispered, barely daring to speak; her focus had narrowed so much that it felt suddenly perilous, as though a single wrong move would send her crashing back to reality.
And reality had, somehow, utterly abandoned her but Eni hadn't noticed. The world was a vibrant series of colors that were really sounds, her eyes open but unseeing. Everything was noise, and while the flames were loudest they were not the only sounds she heard. A faint chatter of voices crept at the edges of her consciousness, the wind sullenly protesting the unfairness of being left out even as the stones that formed the walls of the tower sleepily stirred.
There's only my voice, Eni told herself, but she could feel her grip slackening. The fire was slowly passing from the lantern to her palms; even though she couldn't see it in a way that was recognizable as vision she could feel it. But her grasp of the flames felt horribly tenuous, the flames straining to do something much more interesting.
My palms. My palms. My palms.
Eni thought the command as sternly as she could, over and over, groping desperately with her thoughts even as the fire protested. For an instant, Eni could perceive that she had a beautiful fireball hovering less than an inch above her outstretched palms, vividly colorful and elegant and so bright that it seemed as though it would put the sun to shame. The glowing orb pulsed once, then twice, delightfully in time to Eni's heart, and she was overwhelmed with a sudden fierce triumph beyond anything she had ever felt.
It was the moment the Archivist had first praised her in class, listening to the other students murmur in surprise at the insight from a nobody. It was the evening of her graduation, feeling the formal robes of a scholar against her fur. It was the day her first suitor had awkwardly asked her out, fumbling over his words and stammering as he tried to make it perfect. It was reading The Sultry Dreams of the Saine for the first time, her delight at finding a story of the Slayer and a lapin changing to something much more primal as she devoured the book.
It was her first kiss.
There was a sudden flash of warmth that seemed to consume Eni from the inside out, burning from the base of her belly and spreading through her entire body, making every nerve tingle and sing with the heat. For a single glorious moment it felt as though she was made of fire, burning without being consumed and alight with her own radiance.
And then it was gone and the Slayer's face was swimming into view.
Eni blinked groggily; her eyes were full of tears, but she didn't feel sad. Her eyes hurt, as though she had looked at something much too bright, and dazzling spots danced in front of her as she blinked again and again. "How—" Eni began, and her voice sounded oddly thick and far away to her ears.
She coughed, shaking her head to clear the cobwebs that seemed to stream through her mind, and then looked down at her paws. They were still outstretched before her, but there was no fireball or even a trace of one. "How'd I do?" Eni asked, looking back up at the Slayer.
His face was as inscrutable as ever. "You lasted about three seconds," he said, and Eni couldn't tell from his tone if that was good or bad.
"Three seconds?" she repeated incredulously, "That was three seconds?"
"It felt longer," Tsar replied, "I know."
Eni looked back down at her paws, which felt oddly leaden and stiff despite the fact that her attempt had barely lasted any time at all. "That was better than my first attempt," he said, "You let yourself get distracted."
"I— I guess I did," Eni replied, "But I could feel things. It was…"
"I know," Tsar repeated, but more quietly than before, "I remember."
"You mean what it was like when you did it?" Eni asked, suddenly overcome by the idea of Tsar having peered into her thoughts during her attempt.
He nodded. "You'll try again," he said, "But not here."
Tsar bent down and picked up the lantern, moving back a few feet from the chair and gesturing at the floor. "Here," he said.
Eni felt nearly as creaky and worn-out as Rongen looked as she got out of the chair; she felt somehow overstuffed and achy as though from a bad cold. The room swam around her when she first stood, but the feeling quickly went away as she shuffled to the spot that Tsar had indicated and sat down, crossing her legs as the Slayer had while sitting on the bed.
The Slayer sat down across from her, so close that the tips of his toes almost brushed hers. "Ready?" he asked, lifting the lantern and looking her in the eye.
Eni took a deep breath and nodded. "Ready," she said.