Chapter Text
The light falls soft and golden between the trees, warming as the sky shifts from blue hour. For a moment, it is beautiful enough that Wei Ying forgets his own pale reflection in the window, and presses his cheek to the glass in the hopes of catching more of the sun as it pushes away the night. The road is winding and the forest thick with old-growth trees, and the mountains tower up around them. It is hard to see the sky but Wei Ying tries anyways.
He is so besotted, so focused on catching a glimpse of sunrise that he doesn’t even notice it happening. Doesn’t realize that his head is still pounding in pain. Doesn’t notice the small burns on his fingertips, the rash spreading down over his wrists. Doesn’t even notice the telltale wet trickle down to his upper lip until Wen Ning politely taps him on the elbow.
‘Patriarch,’ Wen Ning whispers, bending his head slightly. ‘You’re bleeding.’
Wei Ying blinks, and turns.
Wen Ning’s arms are squashed beside him against his ribs—there isn’t much space in the back of this cramped van and he’s hardly a small man, his long legs are all folded up in front of him like a spider’s—but he makes an awaked gesture at his nose.
‘You’re having a nosebleed,’ he offers helpfully.
Wei Ying dabs at his own nose. His fingertips come away stained brilliant crimson.
‘Huh,’ he says.
And then he remembers. He is watching the sun rise from the embrace of the forest, he is not breathing deep that sharp-deep scent of the Wild. No, he is jammed in the back of a narrow compartment made of steel and fiberglass, whose iron gears are controlled by a device veined in cobalt and copper and gold and transmuted sand, hurtling along a road made of a black corruption that smothers the soil beneath.
He feels as though he’s a very small frog in a jar, and the lid has just closed in above him. Wei Ying’s lungs constrict. He makes a horrible, rasping gurgle as his throat begins to swell. His eyes are hot in his head.
‘Driver!’ shouts Wen Ning. ‘We need to stop! We have to get off.’
‘Oh shit,’ says Mei from Wen Ning’s left. ‘Patriarch’s having a reaction.’
‘Stop being dramatic,’ sneers Calvin from the front seat. ‘It’s really not that bad. I read that their kind play it up to get more favors from us.’
‘Oh shut the fuck up, Calvin,’ snaps Mei. ‘Save your micro-aggressions for when a member of our team isn’t fucking dying.’
I’m okay, Wei Ying wants to tell Mei, but his tongue has now started to swell in his mouth, so all that comes out is a wheezy: ‘Haffffff.’
‘The van!’ growls Wen Ning, his voice dropping several octaves as part of his glamor slips.
They come to a screeching halt. Calvin whinges as Wen Ning, Mei and several other hands hurriedly push and shove Wei Ying off the van and into the roadside ditch. Wei Ying makes it a few steps before he stumbles to his knees—but that’s a good thing, because now he can dig his hands into the wet grass and the soft soil.
He retches once, twice, then heaves up the remnants of his lunch. He doesn’t do well with cooked food, especially the sort served perfunctorily at a cafeteria or a pit stop, not one that he’s had to pay for in money. It hurts more coming up than going in. He can feel the tears stinging at his eyes, the locks of hair sticking to his sweaty, feverish forehead.
Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong screams his head.
It’s all wrong.
The polyester in his fisherman’s vest is an abomination of dead creatures dug up from their graves. The metal buttons on his jeans are poison. The elastic in his socks, the tiny label that presses on the back of his 100% cotton t-shirt feels like a hot poker on his over-sensitive skin.
Worst of all, he can smell everyone in the van. He can smell their borrowed magic, their barters and their trades and the iron.
He retches again. There’s nothing left to come out.
Wen Ning’s hand rubs soothing circles on his back. ‘It’s okay,’ he murmurs. ‘You’re going to be okay.’
‘What the fuck,’ says a disembodied Calvin. ‘We’re going to be late.’
‘I swear to fucking god, Calvin, I am going to rip your face off if you say another word,’ snaps Mei, who sounds like she actually means it.
It’s enough to make Wei Ying chuckle. The chuckle becomes a laugh, and then a full-bellied laugh.
And suddenly as the attack came, it is over. He sits back in the dirt, hair plastered to his face, sweat trickling down his neck uncomfortably, pulse stuttering and heart racing. His mouth is sour and his eyes sting and quite frankly, his head is splitting with a headache.
But he is himself again. He struggles to his feet, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand.
From the open door of the van, inquisitive faces peer down at him. Many of them haven’t seen anything like this before—his kind are a rarity here.
Not fey, of course. They’re a dime a dozen here, with the amount of wild, ancient forests that press in on every direction. This land is old, old in a way that does not respect the linear demands of human time. Old in a way that requires song to describe.
But it’s rare here, rare everywhere, really, to see a Disowned. Changelings are absorbed into the family, passed down like valuable heirlooms or married off for money and power. No one would be stupid enough to Disown a changeling.
There was a shuffling of limbs in the van, some mild swearing, and then the Chief Stage Manager stuck her head out of the van door. ‘Patriarch,’ she called, ‘would you like to get back on? Or do you need a few more minutes?’
Wei Ying glances at Wen Ning, who gives a single shake of his head.
‘Um,’ says Wei Ying. He swallows nervously, his throat clicking.
The swelling hasn’t gone completely down and he knows that trying to climb back in that thing will only set off another attack, and they are still a good two hours’ drive from Woodsmoke grounds. Behind him, however, Wei Ying can feel the sweet cold air of the forest calling to him.
‘I think I’ll walk,’ Wei Ying replies, joking his thumb over his shoulder.
‘Walk?’ The Chief Stage Manager wrinkles her nose in disgust.
‘I’ll go with him,’ offers Wen Ning.
The Chief Stage Manager presses her forefinger and thumb over the bridge of her nose. She’s young—only in her early forties, with short-cropped auburn hair that curls at her temples—and if team gossip is anything to rely on, well advanced in her career. But she’s not dealt with their sort much. This is the first inter-kind project she’s ever worked on.
‘I do not believe that would be safe,’ she says at last, the strain evident in her voice. ‘The Wild can be treacherous.’
‘Oh, we’ll be safe as houses,’ assures Wen Ning with a bright smile.
‘Wen Ning’s a changeling,’ Mei supplies helpfully from the depths of the van.
‘Oh,’ says the Chief Stage Manager. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I couldn’t tell.’
Wei Ying tries not to grimace. Wen Ning’s hand clenches slightly, then he flexes it out, releasing whatever impulse he’d felt.
‘Right then. We’ll see you at Booth 5 in a few hours,’ instructs the Chief Stage Manager, and she pulls the van door shut with a single yank.
The engine turns over and the van comes to life, gravel crunching under its wheels as it starts off on the road again. Wei Ying watches its progress until it makes a turn behind a thicket of trees and is lost. Above, the sky has opened into a delightful azure. The air smells of pine and sweet rotting leaves and rain-pummeled earth.
‘You didn’t have to get off the van with me,’ Wei Ying says to Wen Ning.
‘Nah, I wanted to,’ replies the other man with a shrug. ‘It was so uncomfortable in that van. I’d rather stretch my legs anyways.’
With that final statement, Wen Ning turns, the breeze ruffling his close-cropped hair out of its neat parting, and he strides into the thick of the woods.
Wei Ying takes another look at the sky, at the gold-dusted cotton-ball clouds. He bends down, unlaces his shoes, pulls them off one by one. He peels his socks off, shoves them deep into the shoes and ties the laces of his shoes together so that he can sling them over his good shoulder for safekeeping. For a moment he stands there, on the border that cleaves man and fey in two, toes digging into the dirt, eyes on the road that meanders like a black river.
He shouldn’t think it, but he does.
He misses belonging, misses loving the feel of the open road beneath the wheels of his bike and the pummeling of wind on his bare face, the scent of sun warming hot tarmac, misses not having to be so fucking afraid of the ingenuity of human invention. He misses having a name and a surname, misses being able to pick up the receiver of a phone and hear his sister’s voice.
Wei Ying squeezes his eyes shut until red and green explodes in fireworks on the back of his eyelids. He inhales deeply, turns on his heel, and with his eyes still closed, walks into the shadow of the woods.
The Wild greets him almost instantly. It washes over him like a wave crashing to shore, trickling down the back of his neck and soothing away the throbbing pain, pour down through him and easing the ache in his stomach. He looks down at his arms and can see that the rash is beginning to look a lot less angry.
Wei Ying moves on soundless feet through the forest, stepping over gnarled, curling roots. Oak bends inward above him, still spring-green from last season. The light falls in dappled bunches on the spongey moss, and even the leaning boulders here seem older than time itself. Far away he can hear the sound of birds tittering up in the branches.
He comes across Wen Ning leaning against a lichen-dusted rock wedged on its side between a young birch and an ancient coniferous tree.
‘This was a great idea,’ says Wen Ning, as though this was a leisurely walk and not the only method Wei Ying has left of making it to Woodsmoke. ‘This is so much nice than the van.’
‘I guess it’s nice,’ Wei Ying says awkwardly. They’ve had a few conversations about guilt and he’s done his best to not feel so bad about his… disability.
Wen Ning smiles serenely. He lifts his hands, palms cupped softly towards his heart, inhales deeply, and with an exhale drops his arms. The glamor doesn’t so much as fall off as dissolve completely, candy floss dissipating in clear water.
One minute he is a tall, awkward looking young man dressed in black, and the next, he looms as tall as the young birch, skin as white as sun-bleached bone, eyes black and pupil-less, long limbs covered in a feathered kind of armor that shivers like a hundred moths’ wings. When he grins, his mouth are full of wolf’s teeth.
‘It is nice,’ he says, his voice as deep and gravelly as the earth moving. ‘Nice to let my hair down,’
‘You don’t have hair to let down,’ Wei Ying says before he can stop himself.
Wen Ning, unlike his terrifying sister, takes no offense. He just gestures at Wei Ying and waits, expectantly. Somewhere in the woods, a raven croaks.
With a sigh, Wei Ying shrugs off his glamor. It comes off sticky, unwilling to peel off his skin, but eventually with a finger wiggle and a little push, his tan deepens into something honey-gold. He knows what he looks like, but he doesn’t want to think about that either. He’s too used to peering into mirrors that reflect a human face, human eyes, human skin.
‘There,’ he says. ‘Now we’re both naked. Are you happy?’
‘Yes,’ smiles Wen Ning.
Wei Ying has always found it easy to bend space within the Wild, so he takes the lead. A small dirt path appears before them, curving with the slight slope of the mountain. If he concentrates, Wei Ying can make it so they reach the camp in half an hour.
Which is good, because that’s less time for someone to notice that Wei Ying is here. Less time for princes and dukes and knights to smell him and come asking for a duel, because what’s better than boasting that you’ve bested the dread Patriarch, only nobody ever bests the Patriarch, and Wei Ying is always always always left with another dead fucking royal asshole and yet another grudge against his stupid fucking borrowed name.
‘Your eyes are glowing, A-Ying,’ Wen Ning says softly. ‘Remember, ujjayi breath.’
‘I don’t know why I convinced you to join that yoga camp,’ Wei Ying grumbles. And then he constricts the back of his throat, raw as it feels right now, and exhales long and slow.
‘Better?’ Wen Ning asks, ever so brightly.
‘You are such a dick,’ Wei Ying says. ‘But, yes.’
Wen Ning and Wei Ying joined Woodsmoke the same year. They went through induction together, jumped through the same hoops and over-cautious paperwork, sat awkwardly in the fey-friendly section of the office for a few days before they were dispatched to the field. There’s plenty of fey in the industry—of course there is, what could possibly be sexier than a pixie in a skimpy dress singing hyper-pop?—but not many end up back-of-house rather than performers. Very few work in the same team, if ever.
Wen Ning was hired for security, which Wei Ying found odd at first (his whole human family are medics and doctors and nurses and one uncle is a kindergarten teacher) but then one time at lunch Wen Ning lowered his glamor and Wei Ying was faced with the hilariously distressing ordeal of working with an adolescent ettin.
Wei Ying, despite his shady past, has decades of experience in sound engineering, magical and non-magical. Even went to school for it, before the whole war-Patriarch-Disowned business.
You’re not going to see each other much, is what Xiao Xingchen first told them both after completing their induction. But it would be nice if you two could be friends.
Joke’s on Xingchen, because literally day one of the fucking festival, a goblin marched out of the woods and challenged Wei Ying to a duel to the death. The cleanup alone was enough to make Head of Ops quit, then Wei Ying was forced to juggle Sound, Lighting and Ops until a replacement could be found. After that, Wen Ning is under strict instructions from Song Lan to keep an eye on Wei Ying and not let that sort of shit happen again on my property, please.
It’s not that Wei Ying needs a bodyguard, exactly. But a duel to the death can’t happen if a literal actual giant steps in and yeets the would-be-duelist back into the forest from whence they came.
‘A-Ying,’ says Wen Ning lightly. ‘Glowing again.’
‘Ah fuck,’ says Wei Ying. He waves his hand over his head, swatting away imaginary flies. ‘Sorry. Thinking about duels.’
Wen Ning clicks his tongue sympathetically. He ducks to avoid a low-hanging branch—or low for his towering size—and reaches up, plucking an acorn from within the tree’s heights. He extends a hand down to Wei Ying. ‘Put that in your pocket.’
Knowing better than to start a debate on the efficacy of charms on someone as cursed as he is, Wei Ying slips the acorn into the front pocket of his jeans. He rolls his right shoulder back, then forward. The tight, toughened tissue around his scar tugs with a dulled pain. Sixty years on and it still hurts. It will probably keep him up at night a hundred, thousand years into the future.
‘You think about it a lot?’ Wen Ning asks him.
‘What, duels?’ Wei Ying squints up at the ettin. ‘Hm, no, not that much. Just when we’re in the Wild.’
‘I don’t mean duels,’ Wen Ning clarifies. ‘I mean the Two Tigers War.’
‘I don’t like to,’ Wei Ying replies. ‘But it’s there.’ He presses the tip of his forefinger to his skull. ‘Like a stone in my boot, jangling around.’
They walk for a moment in silence. Somewhere nearby, an unseen brook gurgles musically as it trips over rocks, mingling with the scattered, syncopated birdsong. A yellow butterfly darts into view. There are wildflowers growing in the sunny patches between the trees, yellow and lavender and pink. Far off, Wei Ying catches the strain of a voice singing high and sweet above the plucked strings of a lute—not a lure in a trap, but a fellow traveler taking a break on their journey. Perhaps they’ll be performing at Woodsmoke. Many of the fey prefer to travel in the safety of the Wild, without having to book expensive transportation like private carriage or barge.
‘My sister might have a charm against bad dreams,’ Wen Ning pipes up.
Wei Ying smiles up at his friend. He halts beside a low pile of stones—an old shrine, perhaps, or the remnants of an ancient wall—and waves his hand dismissively. ‘No need, A-Ning. It’s a good thing to remember.’
Wen Ning doesn’t look too convinced, but he’s young. Young enough that his age is close enough to the age of the human boy he replaced, whose emptied cradle he was gently eased into. And though giants age a lot faster than Wei Ying’s kind, they last a long time. When the dazzling cities of men crumble and the cobalt and limestone mines have become toxic lakes, when every living thing has forgotten Wen Ning’s human-given name—he will remain.
It is a time of peace, but eventually humans will find an excuse to start murdering each other again, and Wen Ning, in his long life and great power, will be asked to fight in a war.
And when the killing is done, he will understand why it is important to wake up sweating and trembling in the night, why the sight of a toy gun unleashes within him a cold, old fury. Why it’s important that changelings remember the cost of war, when humans forget and the true fey relish in ancient rules of dueling and combat.
Until then, though, it is for Wei Ying to carry the burden. And it is for Wen Ning to learn to love his humans, to forget what it means to be fey and wild and violent.
‘Do you think the van’s reached Woodsmoke yet?’ asks Wen Ning, breaking Wei Ying’s brief reverie.
‘No way,’ huffs Wei Ying. ‘It’s only been like, twenty-five minutes? And there’s the steep climb at kilometer 52—no way the van is going over 30 there. Also, if you’re worried about us holding them up, don’t be.’
He points ahead past the thinning forest to six lopsided trees stood in a strangely neat row.
‘Woodsmoke is just there,’ Wei Ying says. ‘Past those barrier trees.’
‘Oh wow,’ says Wen Ning, eyes widening almost comically. ‘I mean, wow. Like, I know you’re good but. You’re good.’
‘It’s orienteering, Wen Ning,’ Wei Ying says, slapping his friend on the back. ‘Not rocket science.’
-
It’s a quarter past nine when they make it to Booth 5. Exactly thirty minutes since Wei Ying vomited all over the side of the road.
Mei called in ahead to report that the van’s broken down and that they’ll be four hours late. Six, if the mechanic can't make it to them in time. Which is well after sunset, and definitely not a nice and safe time to be driving through the narrow dirt road that winds its way into Woodsmoke, regardless of the amount of iron and gravel scattered there. Especially when Head of Security had to get off the van and walk.
‘Which would never have happened,’ rants Wen Qing, brandishing her clipboard like a weapon, ‘if they had just taken my recommendation to provide accessible transportation.’
It’s not the first year they’ve encountered a similar hiccup. Three years ago, F&B had mistakenly cooked Wei Ying’s dinner in a cast-iron skillet and he’d vomited blood for the entire night. Wen Qing had cycled from the medic tent through the woods in the dark (a brave thing to do as a human in the Wild) and physically tackled the man into the ground screaming about health and safety standards.
When asked about it at the debrief, Wen Qing had coldly informed Song Lan that a kid had put a horseshoe in Wen Ning’s locker once as a joke and it put him in a coma, and that no self-respecting inter-kind festival should ever take allergies lightly.
But Wei Ying has had so much worse than iron in his food. So much worse than sitting in a metal van.
‘Aiya, Wen Qing,’ Wei Ying sighs, patting her lightly on the shoulder. ‘No need to get worked up.’
‘No need?’ She whirls on him, clipboard narrowly missing his nose. ‘You had an attack in company-hired transport. Do you know what kind of a lawsuit that could mean? Do you know how much work I fucking put in every single fucking year to make sure we don’t fucking-‘
‘Oooo-kay,’ says Mian Mian, clapping her hands. ‘But look at the happy result, right? The boys are here and not stuck on the side of the road with a broken van. Patriarch even got to take his shoes off.’ She smiles at him beatifically. ‘Please put your shoes back on. There’s glass out by Dandelion Grove.’
Wei Ying unlaces his boots and begins to put a sock on his right foot. He’s fine talking back to Wen Qing, but Woodsmoke’s Stage Coordinator, Mian Mian, terrifies him. She’s like, a thousand years old and a dryad. You don’t piss off dryads.
‘Someone brought glass into Woodsmoke?’ frowns Wen Ning, a little wrinkle appearing between his brows. He’s back in glamor again, sunken down to a reasonable two meters. ‘I thought the detection spells were still working.’
‘Lightbulb,’ explains Mian Mian, shrugging. ‘Lighting gave Ops the wrong specs. Or rather, Su She told Lighting the wrong specs, and Lighting told Ops. Ergo: glass.’
‘Ah fuck,’ says Wei Ying, shoving his right foot into his boot. ‘Not that asshole again.’
If there’s anyone Wei Ying genuinely hates working with, its self-proclaimed ‘multidisciplinary master of the fey arts’, Su-fucking-She. He’s got three loop spells that he pretends he invented (he didn’t), a handful of derivative melodies, a rudimentary understanding of human technology at best, and an ego the size of Saturn. Wei Ying begged Xingchen not to allow the bastard back on the lineup after the Incident at Dandelion (bad spell; exploding generator; brief fire; many angry sprites; one very angry Wen Ning).
‘I’ll tell Mikael,’ Wen Ning sighs. ‘I hate glass cleanups.’
Wei Ying pulls on his second boot and laces it tight. ‘Chin up, kid,’ he grins. ‘I’ll come help.’
‘No, you won’t,’ says Mian Mian, waggling her talkie-stone at him. ‘We’ve got a headliner who needs you to help with technical setup. None of my lackeys seem to understand his sound system.’
Wei Ying frowns. ‘Didn’t you read his rider?’
‘Can’t.’ She pulls a folded piece of paper out of the back pocket of her cargo pants and tosses it to Wei Ying, who unfolds it. ‘It’s in Old Elvish. And I’m not that old.’
Wei Ying squints at the runes until his head hurts. ‘And I’m not either, you old hag,’ he grumbles.
‘No, but you understand fey artists and you’re the best hi-fi rigger in the continent.’ She retrieves the tape back from him and jerks her chin. ‘Go on. Moondark Glade. You have an ancient elf waiting for you.’