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It was a very friendly sort of holding cell, as holding cells went. Its walls were painted with murals of aggressively upbeat sea creatures, and its benches, bracketed to either side by potted hibiscus trees, had been lashed together out of soft pale beams of driftwood. Crime, in this world, seemed relegated to the occasional overdue library book or stolen cowrie shell, and as such tended not to require overly harsh countermeasures. The two strangers’ flagrant and unconscionable breach of social norms had been nothing short of shocking, however, and had merited a wave of disappointed head-shaking and concerned tutting from the crowd of bystanders that had witnessed the arrest. Remembering not to wear blue after midday was just common decency.
‘We’ve never been very good at common decency, though, have we?’ Fai mused, flopping back on a bench and wiggling until he could rest his head happily in Kurogane’s lap. ‘Do you think Syaoran-kun and Mokona managed to catch the right ferry? I hope they’re not horribly lost somewhere on the next island over.’
‘Wearing blue after midday,’ Kurogane was muttering. He spared a moment to shove unconvincingly at Fai, who only wiggled his way closer, then went back to his complaints. ‘Wearing blue! What the hell? I’ve heard some pointless laws in my life, but that’s the most pointless.’
‘It attracts the merpiglets,’ Fai said, reasonably, then grinned. ‘Remember that world where we got fined for trying to walk down a street in the wrong direction while eating pancakes? And the fine involved confiscating our natural hair colour with magic?’
‘What the hell is a merpiglet?’ Kurogane demanded. ‘And that was the second most pointless law.’
‘You looked so handsome with white hair,’ Fai said, with a nostalgic sigh. ‘You’re going to be a very attractive grandfather one day. Anyway, I think a merpiglet is a sort of water-sprite? The information desk did say they could be a bit of a nuisance in the afternoon. Apparently they like blue.’
Kurogane sat back: glared at the happy painted octopus perched atop his shoulder, then huffed out a sigh of defeat. ‘Whatever. At least in here you can’t get sunburnt again,’ he said, and knocked at Fai’s chin with one soft knuckle: began, with a great and careful nonchalance, to draw his fingers through Fai’s hair. ‘Your hair’s still full of glitter,’ he murmured after a moment. ‘And flowers. Don’t know why they had to use a damn confetti canon to stop us.’
‘Breaking the law is a cause for celebration,’ Fai recited, holding up a finger. ‘It provides us with the opportunity to learn from our mistakes. That’s what the nice police mermaid with the talking starfish said. Don’t you think it’s fun? There’s never a bad time for glitter, you know.’ He yawned and stretched, which dislodged a small shower of sparkles from his hair: sneezed, reconsidered. ‘Except, possibly, when there’s an awful lot of it in your hair. Well, get to work! You know what they say - a husband is only as good as his hairdressing!’
‘No one says that,’ Kurogane grumbled, but continued to comb his fingers through Fai’s hair, his rough heavy hands very gentle as they brushed the glitter loose and extracted flower after pink paper flower.
Fai closed his eyes. The suck and sigh of the sea echoed soft outside the little police station: the heavy golden air was humid, and smelled sweetly of clean linen and coconut oil. The stillness of the village had been immense, entire stretches of beachfront street deserted and wavering under a haze of heat, with only the occasional clutch of merbabies drowsing in seaweed-strewn rockpools, or small choirs of sea-sprites singing softly from the branches of coral-trees. The world before this had been at war: the world before that had been an ugly place, full of strange hollow statues and shadows that stole children. Kurogane’s fingers brushed the bruise at his temple, relic of a run-in with a small confused werewolf two weeks back. They were both of them very tired, and had in any case no pressing need to talk: and so they waited, quietly and without impatience, for their son to find them.
‘We should do this more often,’ Fai said, after seven or eight minutes had slipped slowly by. ‘Not get arrested by the fashion police, I mean, just - this.’
Kurogane said something very odd.
Fai stirred. ‘Kuro-sama?’ he said, slowly. ‘Are you alright? What did you just say?’
Kurogane only grunted. Then he opened one eye. He asked something that sounded like a grumpy question, but Fai did not understand a word of it.
‘Oh, dear,’ he said, and sat up to stare: felt the corner of his mouth lift. ‘I don’t think Mokona caught the right ferry after all.’
Kurogane said what was clearly a very rude word. Weary though he was, Fai snickered wickedly and spoke the same syllables back, then pleased with his new word, tried it several times more. Kurogane’s cheeks went red, and he spluttered some sort of scandalised reproach that Fai could not copy: and Fai laughed and laughed, hooking his thumb around the tip of the finger pointed at him in admonishment and kissing it fondly. Kurogane glared and threw a flower at him.
‘Now, now, there’s no need to take your anger out on the poor thing,’ Fai said, still laughing, and picked it up off the floor, smoothed its paper petals. ‘Mokona’s only a little lost, most likely, and this is only a little flower.’
Kurogane huffed, muttered something that was no doubt murderous: plucked from the flower from Fai’s fingers, gave it a thoughtful twirl. He said something, in that same strange language that Fai had heard only once before, during that long war-torn summer spent in the company of men whose names he still did not know: held up the flower, cocked his head.
‘What? This?’ Fai asked, touching Kurogane’s fingers almost as though in answer, curling their hands together in the quiet cool of the blue room. ‘Flower?’
‘Thisflower.’
Fai shook his head. ‘Flower,’ he tried again, cautious and clear, saying it just as he had it every day of his life: irenyi, a pale unfurling word shot through with threads of red and blue and lifted by three rising tones: and knowing now for the first time in years that it was heard as it had been spoken, wondering suddenly whether it sounded strange.
‘Irenyi,’ Kurogane repeated with unexpected confidence, mimicking Fai to produce precisely the right tones. Fai blinked, smiled in surprise. Kurogane, to his credit, looked only slightly smug. He tucked the flower behind Fai’s ear, carelessly, as though it did not matter: tugged at the scrap of hair that lay curled in his collarbone, asked another question.
‘Hair?’ Fai tried, feeling his heartbeat, reluctant in the heat, start to surge. Thanks to the peculiarities of Mokona’s broad translation matrix, no one left living had ever heard that word: anyone who would have understood Fai without the help of magic had been dead longer than he liked to remember.
But, ‘Ilomitu,’ Kurogane said, stumbling a little over the l, and tangled his fingers close in Fai’s hair, carded through it almost absently. ‘Iromitu? Ilomitu?’
‘Rieshi ube ylomidh yve,’ Fai told him, slowly, still only halfway to surprise: you’re brushing my hair. ‘’mma ciesh.’
Kurogane gave a wry huff and leaned in: got his arm around Fai’s waist, drew him closer with a little tug at his hair. Fai fitted himself in against him, drew a long limerent breath as he felt Kurogane’s lips settle in the hollow of his shoulder. ‘Ma ciesh,’ he tried, mouthing at Fai’s collarbone as he spoke. ‘Mma cieshi? Cyesh?’ and then trailed off into a string of unintelligible complaints, soft as the sound of the waves outside.
Acutely aware that they were still technically in public but rather too content to care, Fai rose up against Kurogane, ran his palms prickling over his hair, drew a dawdling thumbnail over the nape of his neck. ‘Hesshimec,’ he began, and then felt his face flush: said something that made his heart shiver for the sheer sweetness of it.
‘Lorrimeth ibe,’ Kurogane managed to repeat, not quite correct, but close enough that Fai felt his heart shudder, as though a hand had closed about it. ‘I like your hair the best,’ Kurogane said then, a rough and very unexpected note of sincerity catching in his throat, and pressed his lips to Fai’s temple.
‘Oh, darling, do you really?’ Fai cooed, thinking fast.
Kurogane froze. The next second, Fai found himself flat on his back on a bench, dumped there quite unceremoniously, and Kurogane was halfway across the cell. Fai lifted himself up on his elbows, giggling, and batted his eyelashes at Kurogane. Kurogane blushed and looked away.
‘You didn’t think I would hear that,’ Fai crowed, accusatory and delighted all at once. ‘I suppose Mokona must be back within range. What a tragedy! Kuro-sama is secretly romantic when he thinks no one can understand him.’
‘Tragedy nothing!’ Kurogane snapped. ‘I got all - I got all caught up in saying your weirdo words! You were probably putting some kind of spell on me, anyway! It’s not my fault.’
Much later, after Syaoran had caught six different ferries and hopped from island to tiny island, and after Mokona had parachuted in through the window of the holding cell to discuss escape options, and after Syaoran had managed to avert the need for jailbreaks by putting up a handful of rare pink and orange seashells as bail, they found themselves watching the sunset from the shadow of a palm-tree out on the beach front, Syaoran drowsing peacefully with his head on Fai’s shoulder, Mokona singing as she built a sand-castle nearby, Kurogane contentedly sabotaging her efforts with the occasional well-placed poke.
‘Oi,’ Kurogane said, taking a break from his studious attention to demolitions after Mokona thwapped the back of his hand with a wooden trowel and nudging Fai’s shoulder instead. ‘Back there - you could have just written a translation charm, couldn’t you?’
‘Who, little old me? Cast a big fancy spell like that? On a hot day like this?’ Fai yawned: stretched himself out and leant his head against Syaoran, who was starting to snore gently. ‘Far too much work.’
Kurogane grunted. ‘You’re just lazy,’ he said: flushed somewhat, and added, in a softer voice, ‘Anyway, you liked it. Me trying to say your weirdo words. You liked it.’
‘Who, little old me?’ Fai repeated, blinking slow and lazy as an old cat, then waved a hand vaguely at the dim line of breaking surf that gleamed grey in the twilight. ‘Look, look! A merpiglet! There he is! Let’s catch him! He can marry Mokona!’
‘Mokona would like a beautiful merpig husband,’ Mokona agreed. ‘We can live in a sandcastle!’
Kurogane grumbled vaguely about the structural insecurities of sandcastles: sat back against the palm tree, brushed his leg against Fai’s, tried not to let the corners of his mouth twitch up as Syaoran gave a little yawn and rearranged himself comfortably between the two of them. Fai laughed as Mokona wobbled off down the beach, brandishing her spade like a wooden sword: looked over at Kurogane with a wicked and distinctly cattish smile, put one arm around Syaoran’s shoulders and closed his eyes, settled down to nap. Kurogane watched his family for a long while, until the last of the light dissolved into the sea and fireflies began to move in the fronds of the palm overhead. Those soft new words he had learnt by chance he spoke over and over again under his breath, soft as the sound of the ocean: tapped the m out against his knee, counted the syllables in the palm of his hand. He had not known they were so beautiful.
‘Flower, right?’ Kurogane said, unexpectedly, three worlds and one lost lamb later. ‘That was the word for flower, wasn’t it?’ He frowned. ‘Wait.’
‘What was that, Kuro-sama?’ Fai asked, engrossed in tinkering with the little clockwork compass he had found in an antique shop the world before. The needle did not appear to be any kind of lodestone, and swung idly from side to side: he rather thought it was designed to direct interdimensional travel, but could not quite see how.
A cold storm had come up unexpectedly out of the west while Syaoran and Mokona wandered away down the hillsides in search of the farmer’s missing sheep: and so Fai and Kurogane had taken shelter in a little turf-walled cave, closed off from the dripping world by a mass of flowering thorn. Shoulders braced against the broad black boulder at the cave mouth, Kurogane had taken a spray of blossom in hand and was engaged in glaring at it as though it had personally insulted him.
‘I just - remembered some of the things you were saying, back then,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘Not a big deal. Just - thought it was interesting to hear them, is all.’
Fai made no answer, but set the compass aside. He swept his hands across the muddy ground until he struck a sizeable pebble: held it up to the thin grey rainlight that filtered through the thorn and saw that it was a lump of smooth shale, shot through with stripes of quartz. Crystal was among the easiest of all natural materials to enchant, susceptible as it was to the natural vibrations of magic: he found it only a moment’s work to realign the quartz in such a way as to form a rune that flared with light when he traced it with a fingertip.
‘How clever of me!’ he marvelled. ‘I am so smart sometimes.’
‘Now what have you done?’
‘Have I mentioned recently that I am very clever?’ Fai asked, which earned him an eyeroll. He only grinned, and, springing, to his feet, held the stone out into the halflight that filtered through the quivering thorn at the cavemouth. ‘Present for you! Put your thumb on the rune.’
‘You’re not going to turn me into a dinosaur again, are you?’ Kurogane checked, squinting through the dimness.
‘Kuro-sama! That was one time!’ Fai wailed, pressing a hand to his heart as though deeply wounded. ‘And Syaoran-kun knocked you out before you could eat Mokona, so it wasn’t a problem. Now, be a good puppy and touch the rune.’
‘If I grow extra teeth, I’m eating you first,’ Kurogane warned him, and did as he was told. The rune woke under the warmth of his hand, and the lines of fractured quartz gave off the distinctive purple glow of Fai’s casting. Kurogane’s next question was unintelligible.
‘It temporarily blocks Mokona’s translation matrix,’ Fai said, beaming as the light died. ‘So we can both hear the languages we’re really using. It’s only active when touched. Aren’t I smart?’
‘You and your damn magic,’ Kurogane grumbled, but thumbed the rune as he added, ‘Irinyi. That meant flower, right?’
‘Almost,’ Fai said, beaming. Moving in close enough for their toes to touch, took Kurogane’s hand into one of his and tapped his finger to the rune once more. It flared as he spoke. ‘Irenyi. Like that. Try again.’
Sunlight bled thin through the grey air and thinned away as a cold wind drove the storm in close all around. Doves spoke soft to each other through the dark and startled with thunder came creeping in from the western mountains. Beads of rain clung quivering to the eaves of the cave and slid into the little silt-lined pools that had gathered in every hollow. An hour passed, and another. In the back of the black cave, huddled together under one damp cloak, Fai and Kurogane sat with a stone held between their hands and swapped sound for sound.
‘Alright, so when I’m doing the thing I need one sound in front, and when someone’s doing the thing to me I need a different sound in front?’ Kurogane checked. ‘That’s fine. Mine works the same way, just with the sounds at the end of words instead. Makes sense.’
‘Not so fast! There are different cases, you know, not just subject and object! Twelve, to be exact. They each use different sounds in front to show what they’re doing.’ Fai began to count on his fingers as Kurogane’s face fell. ‘So, in addition to subject and object, you also have topic and locative. The topic you show by putting i in front, and you use it when you’re talking about something. The locative you show with n, and you use it -’
There followed a very long list of cases.
‘Some of these are the same,’ Kurogane remarked. ‘What’s the difference between y in front for when it’s having something done to it and y in front when it’s belonging to someone?’
‘Oh - well, you have to say the first one lower down, and the second one sort of high then low,’ Fai explained, absently. He was very far away, in a cold cloud-walled castle above the treeline, where the wind rattled black against the windowpanes and candles spat smoking in the sunless winter. He could feel under his fingers seven soft vellum rolls neatly scored with table upon spidery brown table of tones and prefixes, irregularities listed in red, archaic infixes illuminated in gold. ‘It’s like music! Different syllables mean different things when they have different notes. So, if I were to say deridh, with the first syllable low, I would be talking about pine trees, but if I change it just a little, to deridh, with a falling tone, I mean hail or hailstones.’
‘Oh, yeah, some of Tomoyo’s old prayers did that,’ Kurogane agreed: his voice drew Fai a little way out of his memories and back into the cave. ‘I think on the mainland back home they have a couple languages like that, too. Always thought it was kind of pointless. You want to make music, just make music. Don’t give your damn language notes, too.’
Still Fai could hear the old sing-song tone table, could feel it lying heavy on his tongue as chocolate. ‘Music is a language,’ he objected: tapped his fingers against his knee, calling up a rhyme he had not recited in years, some childhood cradle-song or candle-chant and humming it aloud. ‘And language is music,’ he added, breaking the tune. ‘They’re the same thing.’
Kurogane hitched his shoulders impatiently under the heavy cloak, shook his head. ‘This is boring,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to have to remember all this crap every time I want to say something. Just talk at me.’ When Fai hesitated, he added, ‘Like in Yama. That was easy. Everyone said all the really useful stuff ten times a day, so when it was different from what I would say I just copied them. Talk at me.’
‘You can’t learn anything like that!’ Fai said, scandalised: he had managed to cobble together exactly three sentences in Yama, together with half the first verse of a very impolite drinking song, and considered the entire enterprise to have been remarkably inefficient. ‘You’re such an impatient puppy. If you memorise everything first, it’ll be stored all nice and neat in your head, so that you can work out any sentence you need to say! It’s like memorising harmony lines.’
Kurogane shook his head. ‘Say this is pointless. That’s all. Just say it.’
Fai obliged. Kurogane repeated it fluidly, tones and all. His ear for speech was very good, as clear and as clean as Fai’s own grasp on grammar. Fai repeated it once, just to make sure, and then sighed when Kurogane responded faultlessly and with growing enthusiasm. ‘At this rate, all you’re going to know how to do is argue and complain.’
‘Complaining’s the reason language was invented, isn’t it?’ Kurogane said, and he was grinning now. ‘Tell me how to say I’ll kick your ass!’
‘So violent,’ Fai sighed, but touched the stone as he spoke: glanced instinctively over his shoulder as he spoke, like a child fearing punishment for inappropriate language: then found himself giggling, helplessly, as Kurogane attempted to copy him. ‘Close! You just said you’d punch my cake, but close! Try again!’
Kurogane did.
A thick yellow mist roiled in close around the docks: whether any water lay below it, no one could have said, but queasy green lights moved down in the distance, and sometimes arching black fins cut the fog before sinking back down into the churning depths. A cold cloying smell bilious as bilgewater curdled on the clammy air. The dingy shipping yards down on the mistline hid a known network of fences and raconteurs, not to mention any number of chrome police automata that carried spinning knots of green clockwork in place of a heart: and there was always the fear, sharper than the crack of any electrified baton, of clutching coldblooded hands and slinking shadows, of scaly shapes that crept up out of the deeps and came questing after blood.
Collapsing into the corner of an abandoned warehouse, Fai shuddered and slid down the wall, blood spurting from his left leg. Syaoran was there in an instant, shucking off his neat pinstripe blazer and shearing the sleeve away with a pocket knife. They had been given a clear route by their informants that would, supposedly, help them wind their way through the worst of the heavily blockaded shipping yards without interference. They had not been prepared to stumble into a stand-off involving the local mafia and several automata. They had not been prepared for a firefight.
Fai laughed and said, ‘Sorry about all this fuss,’ and regretted laughing: braced himself against the wall as fingers probed the wound, gave a short cry, felt sweat break out on his forehead.
‘If you’re so sorry, don’t get yourself shot next time,’ Kurogane snapped, heaving the door closed with a great screech of steel and bracing himself against the bolt until it bent. He leaned against it, breathing hard: wiped blood that was not his from his face.
‘I would hardly say I got myself shot,’ Fai scoffed, with a lazy wave of a hand that shook more than it should have. ‘Grazed, maybe. Scratched.’
Syaoran pressed the wadded-up sleeve in tight against the wound and bore down on the bleeding. ‘It doesn’t seem too deep, but that doesn’t mean you’re alright,’ he warned Fai, teeth gritted, knuckles clenched white between pooling red. ‘I don’t think it hit an artery, but it came close. You’ve lost a lot of blood as it is.’
‘What’s a little blood loss between friends?’ Fai asked but the smile softened as he caught the worry in Syaoran’s face. ‘Just strap me up and I’ll be fine before you know it,’ he told him, even as Syaoran began to knot his tie around Fai’s leg for want of a tourniquet. ‘We need to finish this.’
‘Fai shouldn’t push himself,’ Mokona said miserably, huddling into Fai’s shoulder to kiss his cheek. ‘We can still get through to the drop point without Fai’s help! It’ll be OK!’
‘We can’t leave him here on his own, though,’ Syaoran said, tightening the tourniquet. ‘We’ll just - it doesn’t matter. We’ll just hide out here until the time comes to jump to a new world. We don’t have to make the exchange.’
‘Of course you do,’ Fai said, patting the boy cheerfully on the shoulder and giving Mokona a comforting tug to the ears. ‘You three go on for now. We can’t afford to lose our chance at that map. I’ll be alright on my -’
Kurogane held up a hand.
Mokona flinched, and Syaoran moved immediately to cover Fai, who bit down on his lip to keep from crying out as the wound was jostled. From outside there came a noise like the clicking of scissors. A film of green light coated the warehouse windows, swept from side to side, scanning the interior swift and efficient. The scissors whirred and snickered, reconfiguring. Kurogane bore down against the door. A cold draught crept in through the cracks, and with it a few greenish tendrils of mist. For a long moment, the travellers did not move.
Then the light faded, and the sounds whirred and faded as the automaton passed by. Kurogane relaxed, and Syaoran breathed out: Mokona sniffed, cuddled closer to Fai.
‘He’s right,’ Kurogane said, quietly, into the unpleasant silence. Leaving the door he loped over to stand at the edge of the little spill of blood: knocked his knee very gently against Fai’s shoulder. ‘Oi. You. You’re not dying here.’
‘Of course I’m not, you big silly,’ Fai said, and managed to grin up at him. ‘I still have so many rude words to teach you.’
Information changed hands under Kurogane’s watchful eye; Syaoran single-handedly fought his way out when the negotiations went sour and automata broke down the doors; Fai barricaded himself behind a heap of crates and kept one fist balled against the blood, battled to keep himself from blacking out. They survived. Later, on the second floor of a wood-walled pub where bioluminescent lanterns cast a cold light and the mists pressed themselves clammy against the windowpanes, Fai and Kurogane lay together in one narrow bed, backs flinching from the barnacled walls, and tried to forget the fear that pressed in around them. They had passed through kind worlds and cruel, worlds full of blood and betrayal, worlds that had never known war, and were well-used by now to stopping one day in a kindly old couple’s guest room, cowering the next in a dug-out. They clung closer when the worlds were colder, seeking solace in each other’s silence, talking as much through touch as with words.
‘I didn’t sign up for you dying on me.’
Fai shivered under the thin greasy blanket. ‘Did you sign up for me fainting melodramatically into your arms?’ he asked.
‘Didn’t sign up for you at all,’ Kurogane said against his temple, breath warm. ‘You’re a damn nuisance. I don’t know why I put up with you.’
‘You’ll be pleased to know that the feeling’s mutual.’
Although the artificial skin kept the worst of the chill from Kurogane’s fingers, they could still be unpleasant against shivering skin. Fai could not bring himself to care. He pressed himself in against Kurogane’s chest and closed his eyes, tracked the progress of the stiff steel thumb as it moved carefully down his spine, pressed against the hollows of his back, came to settle at last against his hip. The bed complained under their combined weight. They lay together in a long speaking silence, building small defences of warmth against the creeping cold of the world outside, fitting their fingers together like words in a sentence, translating each small touch. There was no syntax to this: Kurogane was not the sort to spell out secrets with a fingertip, at least in any conscious alphabet: but to Fai it spoke great sense all the same.
‘So how do I say don’t get shot in the damn leg, you ass?’ Kurogane asked, after a long space of silence.
Fai laughed so loud that someone on the other side of the wall retaliated with a thump of their fist. Still snickering, he curled himself in close around Kurogane’s cold arm, drew a single rune into the artificial skin: spoke into the little loop of light so that the words broke bright on his breath: loremmi yve medhoc ube.
‘That’s how you say it?’ Kurogane asked as the rune faded. ‘You sure?’
‘Of course that’s how you say it,’ Fai said, lips still pressed to that false skin. ‘I suppose you haven’t even learned enough to translate that. How disappointing. You’re a very bad student.’
‘Not my fault you’re obsessed with declensions,’ Kurogane muttered darkly. ‘What did you really say?’
Fai shook his head, pushed their fingers together, closed his eyes. ‘Nothing important.’
The hours before sunrise found them alone on a broken stone on a hill above the last of the campfires. Armed and waiting attentively for the signal from their allies in the blockaded town below, they had huddled together against the worst of the dawn chill, Kurogane’s arms hard around. Sleepy birds sang from out the dark of the oak trees all about, and the smell of smoke rose up from the battlefield. They were easy in each other’s silent company, and had no need of constant conversation, but they had been awake nearly thirty-six hours at this point, and so Fai, in the interests of keeping them both from sleep, spoke in a low ceaseless murmur against Kurogane’s encircling arms. He had recited his favourite recipes for steamed winter cider, and wondered whether or not spiders slept, and recounted details of an old siege in a fortress in the north-eastern tundra of Celes, and even recalled a few soft-edged memories snowmelt in Valeria: and at last, in the cold of dawn, had drifted back into language lessons.
‘When you’re talking to one person, you use obe,’ he said, holding still to the stone in his pocket with scabbed and muddy fingers. ‘When you’re talking to more than one person, you say obeth.’
‘That’s a whole different word,’ Kurogane mumbled, chin resting heavy on Fai’s shoulder, arms close around his waist.
‘That’s just how it worked,’ Fai said, shrugging. The campfires below, already fading under the lightening sky, blurred briefly in his vision; he blinked to keep himself awake, forced himself to focus on grammar. ‘If you’re talking to just two people, the old-fashioned way was to say oberu.’
Kurogane yawned in his ear. ‘Seriously?’ he muttered, shifting in discomfort. ‘What’s the point of that?’
‘There were dual verb-endings, too, for if just two people were doing something,’ Fai answered. He remembered a particular page of poetry in an old leather-backed book and smiled a little. ‘That was one of the polite ways to talk about sex, actually. And there were dual adjectives, you know: special ways to talk about things that came in pairs, like cherries or wings or hands. You couldn’t use those adjectives to talk about people, though. That sort of speech was very fancy and old-fashioned: only for prayers, really.’ His voice wavered: he looked out again through the dark at the campfires, at the red of early light beginning to flicker on the horizon. He said, ‘Or exorcisms.’
A wind woke and blew cold across the hillside: the birds creaked and complained louder than ever from the forest. There was a revolutionary cadre hidden somewhere in those trees, and a casket full of cursed amber that must be safely transported to a spy hidden deep behind enemy lines, somewhere at the heart of those campfires. They were a long way from Valeria, but Fai remembered. No one had spoken those words in longer than could be counted. No one was left alive to hiss the word twin as though it were profane, to mutterprayers of protection under their breath, to curse two children in the language of objects, linked but not living, eerie inhuman copies of each other: but Fai was tired, and cold, and hungry, and so he remembered. He closed his eyes and breathed out.
‘You heard a lot of exorcisms,’ Kurogane said, after a long moment filled only with birdsong. ‘The two of you.’
‘We did.’
The wind bowed the grass down before them in a great dark ripple, tossed the heads of dandelions until they shone likes stars in the rising light. ‘Things that come in pairs,’ Kurogane mused. He slid his artificial fingers into Fai’s, locked them tight together. ‘So - hands?’
Fai’s lips parted in a very small laugh. ‘Tymily rynieshec,’ he said, and lifted the back of Kurogane’s hand to his mouth. ‘Two hands entwined.’
‘And sex?’
Fai laughed again, a little lighter, a little louder. ‘Mylu rymmac,’ he said, and almost managed to grin. ‘It’s not very romantic when it’s translated. Being two together, is all it really means: very polite, so that the fussy old gentlemen at court wouldn’t blush!’ He waited a moment, his heart suddenly beating very hard in his chest, before adding, ‘You’d hear it in love poetry, and old old songs. Sometimes it just meant being in love.’
The wind shivered. Kurogane’s hand shook a little against Fai’s lips. He cleared his throat, said, ‘Mm.’
‘Are you blushing, Kuro-rin?’ Fai asked, heart still pounding. ‘Are you a fussy old gentleman, too? I’ll have to be very polite around you, so as not to offend your delicate sensibilities.’
‘’m not blushing,’ Kurogane grumbled. ‘’m not fussy either. Shut up.’ Still his hand would not stop shaking. Fai kissed it again. Kurogane stiffened: blurted out, ‘Say a - say a poem thing. Or a song. You had songs, right?’
Fai breathed out a little puff of surprise. Far below, among the cold dimming lights, shadowy figures were beginning to move, readying for battle and the break of day. He drew Kurogane’ hand down to his heart and held it tight, even as he felt himself beginning to blush: ducked his head so that he could speak into their twined fingers, drew in a breath that was almost guilty: and sang out soft to the hillside -
tymily oc sauru oc sagaru oc calony
mylu rinieshec edh ybe ume yve
adhaly yve sudhuic ube uilliesshi
mylu ryloremmi oc aei uveru
The tune was old, the words older still. They had not been spoken aloud by any living thing in years. Fai remembered it as a cradle-song, the sort of melody murmured over cribs and into firelit corners in the deeps of winter: a sweet song, small and almost nonsensical, but also a love song, simple and aching. He pushed the words into Kurogane’s cold cupped palm like little gifts, pretending that the tremor in his voice was nothing more than laughter. If his cheeks were hot, it was only because the wind had pricked them to blush: if his hands shook, it was in weariness. The fires in the valley below burned in the blue light of morning.
Then, ‘I have no idea what the hell any of that meant,’ Kurogane grumbled, loudly. ‘I give up. You’re crap at teaching.’
Fai swallowed. ‘Kuro-sama’s just a lazy student,’ he said, and pulled their hands apart, gestured away down the hillside to the speck of red light that blinked on the outskirts of the camp. ‘There! Do you see it?’
Kurogane stirred behind him. ‘Yeah,’ he said, and unfolded himself from the tangle of limbs, stretched to shake the sleep from his system. ‘The signal. Finally.’
The loss left him cold: still he glanced over his shoulder, angling for levity, and saw that Kurogane’s smile was very soft in the half-light. He grinned, suddenly, and reached for the bow at his feet. He said, ‘Time for things to get exciting, wouldn’t you say?’
Kurogane dropped a kiss onto the top of Fai's head and unsheathed his sword.
The last of a light dry snowfall blew grey across grey earth. In the distance, row after row of dark pines rose up the slopes of the mountainside and faded away into the red twilight. ‘Mokona doesn’t feel so good,’ Mokona managed to say, weakly, before curling up into a very small ball and hiding inside Syaoran’s jacket. This was also the last thing that anyone could understand: Kurogane stammered out the few rough and very irritable sentences that weeks of language-learning had helped him to piece together, and Fai cycled through the only three words he still remembered from that long-ago army camp, and Syaoran divided his time between poking worriedly at Mokona and mediating peace treaties between his parents with makeshift sign language.
But, ‘Who the hell are you?’ said the first guard at the gates to the little concrete-walled compound they found halfway up the snowy mountainside, and, ‘Oh, now, don’t be so mean - they look lost, poor things!’ said the second guard, and Fai stiffened. Their accents were thick, and their verb-endings strange, but their meaning was clear, and their language familiar. He looked around, aware thanks to the prickling at the back of his neck and the faint sensation of pins-and-needles in his fingers that his own magic was being siphoned off, and spotted what looked like a perfectly ordinary ball of black glass, perched atop a marble column just inside the walls of the compound and covered with a light dusting of snow.
‘Could you please turn off your magic-harvester?’ he asked, speaking very slow and clear, and gesturing as he did so to the glass sphere. ‘It is hurting my friend. My family needs her to talk -’
‘How do you know we have a magic-harvester?’ the younger guard said, suspiciously.
‘Now, now, can’t you tell he’s got magic of his own?’ the older guard put in, and then, ‘Oh, now, calm down -’
For the first guard had leapt forward, knife drawn, and caught Fai quite unexpectedly by the collar, pressing the blade to his throat. ‘Who sent you?’ he demanded, hand shaking, as though this sort of violence were quite new to him. ‘Who are you? What do you want with our magic?’
Three things happened in quick succession. Syaoran called something in his own language and stepped forward hurriedly, palms outstretched in a gesture of peace: Fai gave a little sigh and began building a rune in his hand, struggling a bit against the interference of the harvester but wholly capable all the same of putting up a shield should the need arise: and Kurogane, sword drawn and eyes blazing, leapt forward very heroically and bellowed, ‘I’ll bake you a cake, you bastards!’
The insult at the end was, of course, perfect.
The younger guard let go of Fai immediately, looking deeply contrite; the older straightened up, blinked at Kurogane. ‘Oh, really?’ he asked, sounding quite touched. ‘What a good idea! We’ve got some lovely almond tea back at the compound - it would go perfectly with cake!’
‘Ma? Ma ngehen?’ Kurogane demanded, which was a very good approximation of what the hell? He had, it seemed, a natural flair for profanity, if for nothing else.
The two guards squinted at each other, then shrugged. Fai sat down in the snow and began to laugh. He had never thought that he would hear anyone say anything as simple as cake, that his language would ever be something he could remember as simple, as serviceable, rather than a relic of tragedy. He allowed himself a full minute of helpless giggling, while the guards pulled faces at each other and Syaoran made worried little noises, before he wiped his eyes and stood up: said ‘Almond tea sounds like a wonderful idea. Let’s do some baking, shall we?’
The magic harvester was powered down (‘Mostly just to power our back-up generators - don’t worry, we can afford to keep it on standby for a few days!’) and Mokona was prodded gingerly into wakefulness (‘The nasty machine made all Mokona’s magic go away! Mokona couldn’t understand anyone!’) and almond tea was procured. ‘Are you telling me I agreed to making sweets?’ Kurogane snapped, clad in a striped apron and drizzling honey into cracked porcelain bowl of almond flour, while the younger guard hummed happily and added a few drops of lemon juice to his fluffy cup of frosted sugar.
‘I’m afraid so, Kuro-pon,’ Fai said, blowing a quick heating-spell into the oven and reaching over to steal a palmful of candied orange peel from a jar. The yellow-walled kitchen was small and cramped, but warmly lit by a pair of flickering magical lights, and a familiar song came crackling through the magical radio in the corner; the two guards were now bickering happily over how many cherries they could spare from the pantry. Syaoran was investigating a half-built gingerbread house. ‘These language lessons aren’t going so well, are they? Either I must be terrible at teaching, or you must be terrible at learning. One of the two.’
‘Or both,’ Kurogane said darkly, glaring down at the pot of honey. ‘Whatever. At least I can tell people to kiss my -’
‘As far as I’m concerned, they can stay as long as they like!’ the older guard put in, slinging one arm happily around Fai’s shoulders. ‘What do you say? This little lady here’s been telling us all about your adventures! Care to spin us a few stories while the cake rises?’
So they all huddled together around the oven and ate orange peel: swapped stories of far-off worlds and discussed the difficulties of inter-dimensional travel. Mokona had taken up residence in the gingerbread house and was becoming acquainted with the joys of marzipan. The radio crackled away happily to itself, cranking out song after cheerful song in a language Fai had never expected to hear again. He leaned against Kurogane’s shoulder in the sweet-smelling warmth and felt more at home than he had in a hundred worlds.
‘So, wait,’ said the younger guard. ‘You all started out in different worlds, right? There’s no way all of them used the same language! How do you understand each other?’
‘A little bit of magic,’ Fai said, beaming over at Mokona. ‘A little bit of help from our friends. A little bit of guesswork, sometimes! In the end it all works out.’
‘And you’ve never had any trouble?’ the older guard asked, marvelling.
Kurogane shrugged. ‘Words, languages, that stuff doesn’t matter,’ he said, giving Fai a little shove. ‘We understand each other well enough.’