Archive of Our Own

On their wedding night Illuga swallows his pride, puts on the silk abomination they gave him, and goes into the bedroom with a face unsteadier than he’d ever worn on the front lines, even in the toughest of battles.

“Husband,” he says, and sits on the edge of the bed.

His new husband, the Lord Chudomirovich, stares at him. Then he laughs.

Illuga tugs the robe closer to him and considers the merits of running away to the Lightkeepers again, empty-handed. “If you’d like me to wear something else, please let me know, rather than laughing at me.”

Finally his new husband stops. “Forgive me,” he says, with his lovely voice. “It’s only that I’ve never seen someone look so profoundly uncomfortable in their bedclothes.”

Illuga flushes. “These are—they aren’t for sleeping,” he says, and hates that he stumbles over it. In some regards he feels so much older than he is; in others, his hesitance betrays his age. He’s barely twenty-one, and though he’s been fighting wars for four years, he’s severely lacking in romantic experience. It never felt like a fault, before he was thrust headfirst into this arrangement. Now he feels as though he’s been put on the front lines without a strategy.

The Lord Chudomirovich looks at him strangely. Much about him is strange. Illuga expects that’s why he accepted the marriage offer: no one wants a strange husband, he supposes. But the Lightkeepers need funding, and money doesn’t come without sacrifice.

“I suppose the—” Illuga swallows. “Lingerie, is designed to Lightkeeper tastes more than…” Fae, he thinks, but doesn’t say. He’s not sure if he’s supposed to bring that up, or if it’s polite to pretend he doesn’t know. “Foreign ones. I apologize.” If they’re going to consummate the marriage, he doesn’t need to be wearing anything, really. He stands up and starts taking it off. Might as well get it over with.

“Goodness,” says his husband. “Is it that uncomfortable?”

Illuga, halfway through stripping entirely nude, doesn’t even look up. “The fabric is very fine,” he says, a non-answer. He clears his throat. “But if you don’t like it, I might as well do away with it.”

“I never said I didn’t like it.”

Illuga’s hands fumble and the whole silk thing falls to the floor.

“That said, I don’t mind if you want to change,” says his husband, and then he looks back down at his book like nothing is going on at all.

“But we’ve just been married,” Illuga blurts, spectacularly tactless. “We’re—my lord, I’m naked. Don’t you know what married couples do with one another on their wedding night?”

Finally his husband looks up. He says, “Do you like to play cards?”

Illuga nearly trips over his own silk robes on the floor. “Cards?”

“Checkers will do, if you prefer. Might you like to put on some clothes? I fear you’ll freeze.”

Illuga flushes. He’s suddenly struck by an unfamiliar embarrassment in his nudity—does he look too battle-worn for anyone to find him worthy of a second glance?—but he hates the lingerie, hates how it tries to make him look pretty and instead makes him look like a caricature. He picks it back up off the floor and slides it back on over his shoulders, haphazard. “My lord,” he tries, still skeptical. “Certainly you don’t expect me to play cards in this.”

“Of course not. I already said that if you prefer checkers, I’m more than willing.”

Illuga stands there and forgets to close the robe. What the hell?

“And please don’t call me by my title. My name is Flins.” Then he returns to his novel like nothing is amiss at all.

Illuga stands there for another moment, looking at him. He doesn’t get it. Doesn’t get it at all. “Flins,” he repeats, almost incredulous, before he can think better of it.

His new husband—Flins—looks up at him again with his piercing eyes.

The cold of the room suddenly catches up to him, and Illuga shivers. He tugs the robe all the way back on, tying it in the front to cover himself like some kind of ridiculously wrapped gift. “I only know soldiers’ card-games, but I’m sure I can pick something up.”

So on his wedding night he sits in his lingerie robe across from his new husband and they play two-handed euchre. It’s not really how Illuga imagined his marriage going. Flins isn’t half bad at playing cards. He also doesn’t protest the soldiers’ game, doesn’t suggest something more high-brow. He just holds his careful cards and looks across the table.

Illuga picks up his freshly-dealt hand, and they play until the green dawn peeks through the cavernous windows of the estate.

***

When Illuga was nineteen the Lightkeepers ran out of money. No one told him, but they stopped ordering imports of alcohol and began farming their own wheat and rye for porridge, and then they started trying to marry him off to someone rich.

Illuga was sixteen when he took his oath. He went up with the other Lightkeeper knights and said it proudly: For the benefit of all Nod-Krai, we shall serve and protect, and love our country and our people above all else. It was service when he fought on the front lines. It was also service when he stood at the altar with a Snezhnayan fae lord and took vows he didn’t really mean for a fortune he’d never get to see.

He hated his wedding clothes. He did not tell anyone, because he was not raised to complain. The person they wanted was Illuga Starshyna, son of Nikita, the Lightkeeper’s luckiest charm and the brightest glimmer in the night. A beacon, not a man. Of course he wouldn’t complain.

Throughout the whole wedding ordeal Illuga didn’t complain about anything. He wasn’t entirely sure he remembered how to.

***

Illuga must have fallen asleep, because he wakes in the bed with the sun falling on his face in thick, blinding rivulets. He blinks into the glaring light and rubs his eyes.

“Hello,” says Flins. He doesn’t look up from whatever he’s doing.

Illuga watches him, perplexed. How did he know Illuga was awake? “Good morning.”

Flins turns from the desk and smiles at him, a faint glimmering thing. “Not quite. Would you like to try again?”

“…What?”

“It’s not quite morning. Not anymore, at least.”

Panic ripples down his spine. Illuga sits bolt upright and throws himself out of bed to the tall frosted window. By the sun, it has to be at least midday. “Fuck,” he mutters, pacing in front of the glass. “I was—I wasn’t supposed to—” He pauses and inhales deeply. Focus. “Okay. It won’t happen again.”

Flins sets down his pen. His fine forehead creases. “Are you quite alright?”

“I’m usually up at dawn, I promise. Or at the very least by the time people are up and about. But there’s no use lamenting it now.” He exhales sharply and stands straighter. “What’s on today’s checklist? I’ll get started.”

“Nothing.”

Illuga’s feet come to a complete standstill. “There’s… nothing to do today?”

“Did you expect there to be work for a noble’s husband?”

“Well,” says Illuga, because he did expect that, on some level. He’s never gone a day without working in his life, not even his birthdays. “Surely you need me to keep house, or something like that. I’m good with budgeting; I can handle your accounts.” This is a skill developed more out of necessity than interest, but it’s the best thing he can think to offer. The vast majority of his skills only apply in a soldiers’ camp.

Flins smiles a little. He looks up at the snow-blinding light in the window. “If you’d like to change before our meal, I can offer you some privacy.”

Only then does Illuga realize he’s still wearing the silly lingerie from the night before. He flushes with warmth and tugs it off. He’s never been too fussed about nudity in a practical sense, not when he’d spent his formative years in an army, so he strips down and begins searching for something to wear.

He has a trunk full of clothing that he has yet to unpack. It’s not very full; most of his clothing was deemed nowhere near fine enough to take with him. Almost everything inside the trunk isn’t his, not in the way that matters. He sifts through a stranger’s clothes, but they feel better than the lingerie, at least. He puts on inoffensive brown pants and a thick-woven linen shirt and a wool coat and calls it good enough.

“I’m sorry,” Illuga says, when he’s done dressing.

Flins, strangely courteous, has turned to face the wall the whole time he’s been changing. When Illuga apologizes he still doesn’t turn around. “For what?”

Illuga hesitates. He doesn’t know. Sorry for wearing a stranger’s clothes; sorry for sleeping past a soldier’s waking-time; sorry for being such a poor excuse for a beautiful spouse. He tries something else entirely: “You moved me to bed, didn’t you?”

“It was no trouble. The fault was mine, anyway; I was the one who kept you up all night.”

That was no surprise. Illuga had been informed, in quite some detail, about the ways he would be kept up all night after his wedding. Somehow they had neglected to mention the possibility of playing cards. He’d had a lovely time, though, he’ll admit that much. Apparently lovely enough that he’d fallen asleep right on the table.

Flins finally turns around. “Shall we?”

His attention, no matter how perfunctory, makes Illuga’s heart stutter with something like anticipation. Thrilling, terrifying. He doesn’t like this. He doesn’t like not knowing exactly what he’s supposed to do.

“Lead the way,” Illuga says, and so Flins does.

***

The estate isn’t as big as Illuga was led to believe. Even with Flins pointing things out along the way, it takes less than two minutes to reach the kitchens.

“The kitchens?” Illuga asks. He stumbles over his own feet on the perfectly-shined floors. “I’d have thought we would eat in the dining room.”

“There is no dining room. I have a banquet hall, and a ballroom, but I never eat there. If you prefer, I can ask Ineffa to set up the meal there next time.”

Illuga frowns. He’s seen the banquet hall before, and he’d had the sickening thought that it was bigger than his squadron’s camp ever was. He could fit his entire life in that hall and have room left over. “The banquet hall is meant for dozens, if not hundreds.”

“Much too big for one man,” Flins agrees. “I wagered you’d find it much too big for two, as well. Was I right?”

Illuga laughs drily. Of course he was right; he’s only surprised that Flins wouldn’t want to enjoy the splendor of his own mansion from time to time. “The kitchen will do just fine.”

“Mm,” says Flins, and he keeps walking.

The kitchen isn’t anything remarkable. In fact it’s quite small. Illuga is used to large kitchens, huge things used to prepare food for a hundred people at a time. By contrast Flins’s kitchen is nothing. It’s got a large, cold marble counter and a series of stoves, no icebox. That makes sense, Illuga supposes. This is Snezhnaya, after all. They have no need to artificially imitate the cold, not when they have it outside in lethal droves.

In the other half of the kitchen sits a square wooden table. Flins heads to this table and pulls out a chair for him.

Illuga takes his seat carefully. “Do you cook?” he asks, and then immediately feels idiotic.

Flins raises his eyebrows, either in dignified amusement or subtle offense, or perhaps both. “Ineffa prepares the household’s meals. She’s very skilled.”

“Right,” Illuga says quickly. He should have known the house would have servants. Someone had to make their bedsheets and polish the windows and all that. “Ineffa? Is she your cook?”

“Head housekeeper,” says an unfamiliar voice.

Illuga blinks. How did this person approach so quietly…?

“Ah, Ineffa,” says Flins, inclining his head to her. “Thank you for waiting on us for lunch.”

The woman who stands before them is, undoubtedly, strange. She has a humanoid face, but it looks just slightly off, like it was painted onto her. When Illuga looks down at her hands they glimmer silver, and she tucks them away quickly. Every other bit of her skin is covered by a long silver-white apron. It looks more like a noble’s wedding gown than the ensemble Illuga wore yesterday. Illuga half-wonders if she’s a ghost.

“It is no issue,” says the strange woman before them. She blinks once, leaving her eyes closed for a millisecond too long. When she sets the tray down on the table it doesn’t make a sound. “I will wait as long as Mister Flins requires.”

Flins doesn’t look fazed. “Thank you regardless.”

Ineffa nods, and then she disappears, leaving them alone at the little wooden table in the kitchen with the bowls. Illuga peers into one of them: vegetable soup with round pearls of buckwheat pasta. It smells fantastic. He closes his eyes and inhales. On the side is a plate with thick-cut slices of bread and several pickled herring with a small fork.

“I hope this is alright,” Flins says, gesturing to the food on the table. “I asked your entourage what the Lightkeepers prefer to eat, but they were not particularly helpful. They said their Young Master likes to eat anything, and has no preferences.”

Young Master. No one had ever called him that before all this. He supposes it makes him sound more like nobility, like this was some kind of arranged marriage between houses rather than a dying army’s last-ditch effort to secure funding. “They were quite right,” Illuga says. “I don’t mind, so long as it’s a hot meal.”

Flins’s eyes flicker like embers sputtering out. “Yes,” he says softly. “You don’t mind anything at all, do you?”

There’s a strange lilt in his words. There was a strange lilt, too, when he spoke his simple vows at the altar. His voice had a rich sadness to it, a sadness thickened with time like a pot left to stew for ages and ages, slow-cooked until that sadness was infused into every word he said. Illuga felt bowled over by it at the ceremony. He, at least, had only had twenty-one years to imagine his life going differently; Flins had probably had centuries.

The marriage was a sacrifice dressed up like a blessing. He had known that, and so had everyone else. But he didn’t mind. He never minded. He was Illuga Starshyna, the-beacon-not-the-man, and he never minded anything.

“No,” he agrees, not talking about the meal at all anymore. “I don’t ever mind.”

They eat quietly. Illuga devours his soup like a man starved. Flins watches him drink it with a strange expression on his face.

When he finishes eating, Illuga turns to him, takes in a breath, and says, “Would you—”

“I’m needed in the study,” Flins says, too quickly, and he leaves Illuga alone in the kitchen.

He’s gone too fast. The only proof he was ever there at all is the faint, cold breeze left by his swift departure, and the second bowl on the table.

Illuga peers into Flins’s bowl. It’s empty.

He stares into the empty bowl for a while. Strange—he suddenly can’t remember if Flins ate anything at all, or if he’d only watched.

***

Taskless, Illuga stumbles around in an attempt to find the study. Instead he finds the powder room, the cavernous-ceilinged ballroom, the spotless guest quarters, the dusty smoking parlor, and the kitchen again.

By the time he reenters the kitchen he feels like giving up, so he sighs and sits down at the wooden table again, feeling like a dog chasing its own tail. All that, and he ended up exactly where he started. This place is a maze. He sighs heavily into his own hands.

Only then does he notice someone at the sink.

Illuga lifts his head. It’s Ineffa, this time with her ghostly white sleeves rolled up. Her arms are a patchwork of silver and white metal. She’s washing dishes. Illuga watches for a short while, enthralled by the motions of her hands.

Ineffa looks over at him. Her expression doesn’t change.

“Miss Ineffa,” Illuga says, for lack of anything better to converse about.

She blinks again, too long. “Yes.”

Well. Okay. He tries to think of something to say, and comes up with, “I’m—”

“Illuga Starshyna,” she says. “Third-ranked individual in my command chain.”

The sound of his own name makes his jaw feel heavy. He didn’t know they would let him keep his last name. He’d taken a sick sort of relief in the changed name: Illuga Starshyna would die on the battlefield where he belonged, and Illuga Chudomirovich would take his place, someone entirely new and unrelated. But no. He’s just the same as he always was.

“Is this incorrect?” Ineffa says in the face of his silence.

Illuga has hesitated for too long. “No, that’s right. That’s me.”

“Okay,” Ineffa says, and returns to washing dishes.

Illuga watches her for a while. At last he says, “Are they prosthetics? Your arms, I mean.”

“No.”

Illuga waits for her to elaborate. When she doesn’t, he continues: “What are they, then? If you don’t mind me asking. Armor? Augments?”

“My arms.”

“Oh.”

Ineffa moves on to another bowl.

“I didn’t know we used this many bowls.”

“You did not. This one was Aino’s. I brought it to her in her workshop.”

Illuga has never heard that name before. “Aino? Is she another one of the staff?”

“Aino is Aino.”

…Great. Illuga leans against the counter and looks at her hands again, covered in soap. The metal glimmers under the light.

“If you are interested in my arms, you may investigate them when I am done with my task.”

“Sorry, sorry,” Illuga says quickly. “I’m just—where I come from, prosthetics are very common. I’ve never seen something like this before, though. I’m only curious. Technology like this could change my people’s lives.”

Ineffa’s expression doesn’t change, but she seems pleased.

“Hey,” Illuga says. “Do you, uh, want any help?”

“Want,” Ineffa repeats, her voice clicking strangely around the sounds. “No. I do not ‘want’ anything from you.”

Illuga sighs.

Ineffa’s soapy hands suddenly pause. “Do you wish to help?”

“Please,” he says, too fast. “I’m—” How to put this delicately. “I’m used to feeling useful. If there’s anything I can do, I’d love to.”

Ineffa suddenly looks like she understands. “Oh. You, too, require a task.”

“Yes,” Illuga says, relieved. “Exactly. I require a task.”

“Mm,” says Ineffa, halfway between the whir of an engine and the idle hum of a thinking woman. “Okay. You may help me dry the dishes. I am also going to tend the garden, and you may investigate the planters with me to determine which flowers are hardy enough to survive the year.”

“Sounds perfect,” Illuga says, and for once, he isn’t even lying.

His fingers nearly freeze off in the dirt outside the estate. Ineffa makes him come back inside and hold a warm cup of water until his fingernails stop looking blue, and he laughs and laughs and thinks maybe this life of his won’t be so bad.

***

Illuga drops a teacup that night while he’s reading at his desk in the bedroom. It falls to the table, unharmed, but spills the hot tea all over his hand.

Flins rushes to his side, almost suspiciously fast. “Are you alright? Are your fingers burned? I’ll fetch ice for you.”

Illuga grimaces at the idea. “Please don’t.” He wipes the tea from the table with his shirt sleeve, and thoughtlessly continues: “I already froze my fingers off once today.”

Flins stops in his tracks. “You were injured?”

Under his gaze Illuga suddenly feels like he’s done something wrong. His heart stutters in his chest. “I’m fine. Ineffa was very insistent that I warm my hands again after they turned blue.”

“Blue,” Flins repeats, incredulous. “What happened to you?”

All he did was go outside, really. Outside into the unforgiving Snezhnayan everwinter, where nothing can grow unless it’s beaten into shape like hot metal in a forge. “Everything can hurt me,” Illuga says, a little sharper than he intends. “I’m only human.”

Flins’s expression slips away into nothingness.

Fuck. Illuga shouldn’t have said that. He’s not sure if he’s supposed to avoid referencing Flins’s fae nature, if it’s bad luck to bring it up or something. He turns away, looking at the wall. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m sorry.”

Flins looks at him for a long moment. Then, out of nowhere, he drops to his knees before Illuga’s desk and takes his hand carefully between his own.

Illuga’s stomach drops. Is this—? Shit, just because he escaped the wedding night didn’t mean Flins wouldn’t want something in the future, he shouldn’t have been such an idiot, he shouldn’t have let that first night make him too complacent, now Flins is going to sit here and ask him so sweetly if he can have him, and Illuga will say he doesn’t mind, because he never minds, and he’s going to be sick to his stomach, why couldn't they have done this last night when Illuga was ready for it—

“You are human,” says Flins. “There is no ‘only’ about it.”

Illuga blinks down at him.

Flins presses his mouth to the back of Illuga’s hand, quick and chivalrous, and then stands again. “Tomorrow,” he says, voice light, “I will show you my library, and you can read instead of freezing your hands off in the garden.”

Illuga’s face nearly crashes in relief. A library! He’s always loved reading, but the Lightkeepers’ library was pitifully small; most of the books he’s read belonged to his fellow soldiers, whose tastes leaned much further toward ‘raunchy’ than ‘educational.’ He’s still thinking about some of those fae romances they made him read before the wedding; he swears they were anatomically impossible. How would one’s ankles even get that high…?

By the time he remembers to nod in approval, Flins is looking at him like he’s on his knees again, although he’s long since stood up.

Illuga’s stomach swoops. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” Flins says, quite thickly. “You are—” He cuts himself off, blinks several times. “I feared you might prefer blue hands over anything I had to offer.”

Illuga laughs.

Flins’s expression finally softens. “I suppose that was a ridiculous thought, wasn’t it?”

“Of course it was. I don’t mind freezing my fingers off when it’s good work, but the library sounds nice. Very nice.”

“Mm,” says Flins. “Rest well, then.”

When he turns around Illuga swears the lantern on his desk flickers, like the flame itself has been gentled into burning a little longer for him.

***

The next day they go to the library. Its door is magnificent and ornate, and Flins unlocks it with a strange flick of his wrist. “Charmed,” he explains for Illuga’s benefit. “To keep people out.”

Illuga blinks several times. “Charmed…?” This must be a fae term. He’s not familiar with the concept, except in excruciatingly raunchy contexts that he doesn’t feel like getting into. He can’t wait to read something else, if only to get those damn novels out of his mind.

“My kind are quite protective of what’s ours.” He doesn’t look at Illuga, but it seems like it’s a close thing. Illuga’s pulse jumps.

“This estate, then, is something of yours?” Illuga asks. Me, he thinks, I am something of yours, and it makes him feel dizzy.

Flins ducks his head and breathes a half-laugh through his nose. “I am not so beholden to my nature that I’d charm the whole estate. No—only the library. I care too deeply for it to let anyone in.”

“And yet I’m getting a free pass.”

Flins looks at him strangely. “Of course. You are welcome to anything of mine.”

“Anything?”

“Whatever I have to give."

Then he throws open the library door.

It’s magnificent. Illuga marvels at it, at the towering oak-wood shelves filled to the brim with books bound in every color. He practically skips with delight as he navigates the shelves. It’s not an exceptionally large room, but it’s packed with shelves upon shelves of beautiful things. Some of the books are shelved haphazardly on top of one another. There are piles of books on the table in the corner, one of them open and flipped-through. It’s the first room in the whole house that truly looks lived in.

“Whatever you have?” Illuga breathes, incredulous. He nearly laughs. “Flins, you have everything. Are you kidding? This is—it’s—I can’t believe they didn’t tell me about this in the marriage negotiations!” He’d have been so much more willing if he knew this was what was waiting for him. He’d have married someone half as good-looking and thrice as poor for a library like this.

“I didn’t tell them,” Flins says, following Illuga inside. His eyes aren’t good at hiding his emotion; he looks very pleased. “As I said, I care too deeply. This place is mine.” He looks around, his eyes luxuriously slow. “No one else’s.”

Illuga’s good mood suddenly falters. Flins’s space. No one else’s. “I’m taking that away from you,” he realizes, feeling terrible. “Your place.”

But instead of being gloomy, Flins just laughs. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m a collector. Isn’t the point of a collection to show it off?”

“Yes and no,” Illuga says, still skeptical. That might be what human collectors think, but Flins is hardly human. “Are you sure I should be here?”

Flins steps closer. He places his hand on Illuga’s shoulder, just a gentle touch trailing down the back of his arm. Illuga can hardly feel it through his thick undershirt. The touch makes him feel alert nonetheless. Awake. Like he’s got warmth simmering under his skin.

Illuga looks over at him, struck speechless. He tries to say something. No words come out.

“If you must,” Flins murmurs, “think of yourself as the latest item in my collection. And you belong here, with everything else of mine.”

The words should make Illuga sick to his stomach. Instead he just feels the echo of that touch along his arm again, over and over, like he’s one of the books on the shelves and he’s been placed right where he goes. “Okay,” he says, his voice shaky. “I can do that.”

“Mm,” says Flins. “In that case, please browse at your leisure.”

He leaves. In his wake Illuga can only stand there trying to remember how to breathe.

After dinner he brings a book with him into bed. A mystery novel. Flins looks at it and makes a pleased noise. He lights a lantern on the bedside table with a strange blue flame. Illuga reads by the light of that lantern until he falls asleep, and dreams of hot soup and clear skies.

***

Flins’s estate only has two staff. Really there’s only one: everything around the house is done by Ineffa, while the mysterious Aino spends all of her time in the west wing.

Illuga has never met her. He knows scattered facts about her, because Ineffa talks about her at length while she’s cooking or cleaning or shoveling snow with her impressive mechanical arms. He knows she likes sweets. He knows she’s very fond of animals, especially small ones that are helpless and sickly and prone to imprinting on her. He also knows that she has a laboratory, and that she’s creating something.

“What’s Aino doing in there?” Illuga asks Flins one day.

Flins makes a noncommittal noise.

“You don’t know?” Illuga asks, incredulous. “She takes your money practically without restraint, and you don’t even know what she’s making?”

“I have enough money,” Flins says, a little sadly. There’s a strange look in his eye, like he’s thinking of someone else, someone long gone. “Aino can do what she pleases with it.”

Illuga swallows. His curiosity isn’t quelled, not in the least, but he can’t very well ask to go into the west wing. That seems like the sort of place that would be forbidden. In the novels, the fae nobility always have a forbidden wing with a magical secret kept locked away. It’s always the west wing, too. Never the east, never the north.

Quickly, he imagines a way to sneak into the west wing. His first plan involves stringing together bedsheets to get down from his bedroom window, which he subsequently scraps when he remembers that Flins has placed zero restriction on his movement. His second plan is to fake his own death, which doesn’t seem very effective.

Flins looks up from the table. “Do you want to visit her?”

Illuga blinks. That was much easier than he expected. “…Now, you mean?”

“When else?”

So Flins sets down his pen and Illuga does his coat buttons properly, and they go to the west wing to see Aino.

It’s not nearly as dramatic as Illuga expects. In fantasy, the west wing is always grand and isolated and locked off. Flins’s west wing is just a building. They have to use the outdoor hallways to reach it. Flins doesn’t look cold, but then again he never looks cold. Illuga tugs his coat closer to himself and grits his teeth. They knock.

A series of alarming mechanical clanks sound from inside. Illuga winces.

Finally the clanking stops. Then a girl’s voice yells, “HELLO?”

“It’s me, Aino,” says Flins. He sounds gentler than usual, more casual. Illuga, strangely, feels warmer. Like he’s gone inside, although he’s still outdoors in the unforgiving everwinter.

“OKAY,” the girl yells, and then the door swings open.

Aino is very small and covered in mechanical grease. She beams up at them and says, “Heya, Mister Flins!”

Flins smiles indulgently at her. “Hello, Miss Aino. My husband and I have come to see what you’re up to. He’s very curious.”

Aino raises her eyebrows skeptically. “How curious? What if I’m buildin’ bombs and he reports back to the big guys? I don’t wanna get in trouble.”

Flins’s expression doesn’t change at all. “Well, are you building bombs?”

Aino sticks out her tongue.

Flins laughs. He ruffles her hair gently with one gloved hand. “May we come in? He would like to see what you’re working on.”

Aino perks up. “Yeah! But you have to promise you’ll listen, okay? And I mean really listen!” She points at Illuga, accusatory. “That means you! You gotta listen to me, okay? I know I’m a kid, but I’m a fuckin’ genius!”

Illuga blinks. She’s certainly got the attitude of one. “I don’t doubt it, Aino.”

This is apparently the correct answer, because Aino looks delighted. She skips into the workshop and beckons for Illuga to follow.

Her project is, apparently, a giant robotic duck. Illuga looks at it in confusion for a while, and watches in amazement as she explains everything it can do. It moves large items; it fights off enemies; it builds and cleans and polishes and does everything she can dream up. “And,” Aino adds proudly, “it can dance.”

Illuga steps closer. “This is incredible,” he breathes. He runs a gentle hand over the masterful craftsmanship of its inner workings, the shoddy paint job proclaiming it a giant duck. Maybe she really is a genius.

Aino puffs up her chest and plants her hands on her hips. “Told ya!”

“Something like this could change my hometown forever,” Illuga realizes, almost giddy at the thought. “Miss Aino, do you take commissions? I mean, for something big? Like a deployable shield, or maybe a defense mechanism for a whole city?”

Aino scoffs. “Easy peasy. I can build anything.”

“I don’t mean to question your abilities. I only worry that it’d be too nuanced.”

“My work is the definition of nuanced,” Aino says proudly. “I built everything mechanical in the whole estate! I even built Ineffa, y’know. This guy won’t be nearly as perfect as Ineffa is, but he’ll be pretty good.”

Illuga whirls around. “You… built Ineffa?”

“Mm-hmm.”

In retrospect, this makes much more sense than all the explanations Illuga had come up with in his head for Ineffa’s robotic features. It isn’t that surprising that she was a robot to begin with. He still has questions, dozens of them, about Ineffa, but the only one he can seem to ask right now is, “Why?”

Aino’s eyes drop a little. “I wanted a friend,” she says simply.

Oh. Illuga suddenly feels hollow and heavy all at once, like his insides have been replaced with empty leaden containers. “Is it very lonely, here?”

Aino shrugs. “Nope. Not since I built Ineffa.”

“You were lonely before her, though?”

“Well, mostly I was just glad to be here,” Aino says, quieter than before. She sits down on her table and swings her legs. “Mister Flins found me in a shipwreck. It was s’posed to kill me but it didn’t. Now I’m here, and I get to build things. It could be a lot worse.”

Illuga sits down next to her on the table’s edge. “He’s—nice,” he says, a little stilted. “Flins, I mean.”

“Mm-hmm.”

Illuga looks over at Flins, who is still standing by the doorway, looking at one of Aino’s finished projects along the wall. “He’s been very kind to me, too. Probably kinder than I deserve.”

Aino laughs.

Illuga flushes. “What?”

“Dummy,” says Aino, bonking his shoulder. “Mister Flins isn’t nice to people unless he thinks they really, really deserve it.”

Something in Illuga’s chest constricts, keeping him from breathing properly. He was trained as a knight, to serve and protect, and yet the greatest service he had to offer his army was to leave them. To sell himself off like so much cattle in exchange for however much silver his people needed to keep surviving.

And on top of all that, he doesn’t even have the decency to hate it here.

Aino hops down from the table. “Anyway, now I won’t be lonely ever again. I have Ineffa, and Mister Flins, and now I have you. Mister…”

“Illuga.”

Aino smiles. “Mister Illuga.”

Illuga suddenly feels like he can take a full breath again. He inhales, and it smells like oil and spilled sawdust. It’s so welcoming that he doesn’t even mind when Aino gets grease stains all over his pants as she hugs him.

***

“And this is how you do your eyeliner,” Illuga explains, holding the pen steady in his right hand as he leans in closer to Ineffa’s face. “You’ve been doing it straight out from the corner of your eye. That works on my face, because my skin moves with the pen, but for you, you should angle it up like—”

Illuga draws the eyeliner onto her face. It’s not perfect, but it’s human. Much more natural than the look she’d had before.

Ineffa looks into the mirror appraisingly. “It looks different,” she observes, her voice impossible to discern. “My eye is not so round anymore. More angular.”

“Yeah, exactly. Human eyes aren’t as round as yours.” Illuga holds out the eyeliner pen to her. “Here, you do the other one.”

Ineffa’s robotic hands, usually so steady, hesitate against her own face. She looks at him quickly, then back into the mirror. Her fingers fumble with the pen like she’s never held it before. She sets it down again without finishing.

Illuga waits for her to try again. When she doesn’t, he offers, “I can do one more to demonstrate?”

Ineffa shakes her head.

Illuga watches her eyes trace her own reflection in the mirror. He waits.

“It’s only that I am not,” says Ineffa haltingly. She stops before the last word. “I am not,” she tries, and fails again.

Illuga’s chest aches for her.

“I should not look human,” Ineffa says at last, and it sounds like it takes everything in her to say it. “You should not teach me how to look human.”

Illuga takes one of her metal hands. “Why not? You’re just as human as Flins is, and he looks like this.”

Ineffa blinks at herself in the mirror. Her cooling fan whirs gently, like she’s processing something very, very fast.

Maybe she’s not ready to do it herself, not yet. “Here,” Illuga says, and takes the eyeliner pen back. “I’ll do it for you today. If you like it, I’ll do it again tomorrow. And you can try to do it the day after that.”

Ineffa’s fan whirs louder, like she’s taking a deep breath. “…Okay.”

So Illuga lines her other eye, pointing upward the same way his own eyeliner does when he paints it on for special occasions. It’s a little uneven, but that’s human, too, and Ineffa smiles when she sees the flaws.

***

“You smudged your hands,” Flins observes over their meal. “Is your inkwell giving you trouble?”

“Oh.” Illuga looks down at his own hands, tipped with black from his first failed attempt at doing Ineffa’s eyeliner. Turns out metal isn’t the easiest material to do makeup on, not when you’re used to working with skin. “No, my inkwell is just fine. I was showing Ineffa how I like to do my eyeliner.”

Flins sits up too straight, like he’s trying to be exceptionally polite. “It was very—ah, dramatic at the wedding.”

Illuga bursts out laughing.

Flins looks like he’s going to be sick. “I didn’t mean to insult your preferences. Please forgive me. I’m only saying that it was very… artistic.”

Illuga laughs harder. “Don’t bullshit me,” he manages to say eventually, kicking him under the table. “God, it was awful. I don’t know what they did to me at the wedding. I don’t want to think about it.” He fakes a shudder. “I meant the kind of eyeliner I do when I’m going out drinking with my soldiers, or something like that.”

“You didn’t choose your wedding look?” Flins says suddenly.

“Of course not,” Illuga says, waving his hands in wild amusement. It all seems so ridiculous now that it’s behind him. “The whole thing was—was theater. You know. To make me look like something I’m not.”

Flins looks floored.

Illuga laughs again, this time dry and almost humorless. “They tried their hardest. But I was never meant for this.”

A long moment of silence. Flins looks at him carefully, his eyes flickering with something like guilt. “What were you meant for, then?”

Suddenly it doesn’t seem funny at all. Illuga swallows. “It doesn’t matter, now.”

Flins drops his eyes. “Forgive me for overstepping.”

He looks so sad, so overwhelmed. The silence in the wake of his words lingers like a thick blanket of dust. Neither of them eat for a good thirty seconds.

It’s too much. Why is Flins so distraught? It’s not so important; it’s only Illuga, and Illuga isn’t anything worth worrying about. So he opens his mouth and blurts, “The battlefield.”

Flins looks up again.

“The battlefield,” Illuga repeats, feeling a little stupid. “Uh—I was a commander. Before this. I had a volunteer legion, and we fought off the Wild Hunt together. It wasn’t easy, or glamorous, but it was good. You know? We were useful. My life meant something. I meant something.”

Flins keeps looking at him. His flickering eyes grow somehow even stranger.

“Surely they told you this in the marriage negotiations,” Illuga says weakly. “That’s—that’s my whole life.”

“I asked, once,” says Flins, much softer than before. “If their Young Master had any responsibilities tying him to Piramida. ‘Nothing,’ they said. ‘Nothing at all.’”

Illuga feels stunned. He sits back in his chair, reeling.

“I didn’t know,” Flins says, like it’s wrecked him from the inside out.

Illuga breathes out and looks at the ceiling. “Four years,” he admits. Four years he fought to protect Nod-Krai, and they’d erased all of that in three words, just to make him palatable for marriage prospects. Nothing at all.

Neither of them finish dinner. Flins gets out the teapot and brews some strong ginger-black tea for them both. They drink it in silence.

***

That night Flins brings his own eyeliner pen and holds it out. “Show me,” he says.

Illuga understands. He goes to the mirror and draws it onto his face, imperfect and understated and a little slanted along the bottom edge of his eyes. “This is how I like to wear it, when I’m given the choice.”

When Flins takes the eyeliner pen back, their hands touch for too long. Illuga suddenly feels odd. He looks up at Flins’s strange eyes and wonders if they’re going to kiss, if Illuga will have to watch himself be kissed in the mirror, watch himself fall apart.

But Flins lets go, and the moment passes.

“I like this version much more,” says Flins, with his soft mouth and his shimmering eyes.

Illuga smiles a little. Flins should learn to hide his emotions better; Illuga can tell that he isn’t quite talking about the eyeliner. “Let’s play cards again tonight,” he offers. “Whatever game you prefer.”

Flins chooses gin rummy. Illuga’s first hand is so unlucky that he nearly throws the cards back down onto the table. They play until the diamonds and hearts start to blur before Illuga’s tired eyes. He pretends to fall asleep just to feel the way Flins carries him to bed: gentle, like Illuga is a signed first edition whose pages he doesn’t want to damage.

***

It seems too much for Flins to know him and for him not to know Flins, so the next morning Illuga makes up his mind. “Show me what you do,” he demands over breakfast.

Flins looks startled. “Ah—to be honest, I didn’t think you cared much for administrative duties.”

Illuga really doesn’t. He hates paperwork and diplomacy; he’d much rather be direct about it and get to what really matters. “I respect you all the more for doing something I find difficult. Show me anyway.”

So Flins takes him to the study, just off the library, and sits down at his desk with its large pile of papers.

“No wonder I couldn't find this place earlier,” Illuga muses as he walks in. “It was charmed, wasn’t it?”

“Only the library is directly charmed, but seeing as the door is adjacent, this place is also harder to find. You should, of course, be able to find it easily now that I’ve identified you to the charm mechanism.”

Illuga still doesn’t get how the charm works, but whatever. He can find the library, and he doesn’t get quite so lost in the estate hallways anymore, so that’s alright. He leans against the side of Flins’s tall desk instead. “This is… a lot of work.”

“I enjoy it,” Flins says mildly. He picks something up and begins poring over it.

Illuga squints at it. It doesn’t look like tax forms or tithes or whatever a lord should have to deal with. Instead, it’s… “Gemstone appraisal?”

“One of my hobbies,” Flins says, not even looking up. “I’m a very well-known appraiser. People come to me from across Snezhnaya to discuss their jewels.” Instead of reaching for the appraisal forms, he removes a dusting-cloth from something on his table. It’s a green gemstone, glimmering under his intense desk light. “This one is particularly valuable. See—this is a garnet, but it’s facet-cut in such a manner to highlight the golden horsetail trailing through the center. This is impeccable craftsmanship.”

Illuga stares at the gem. He can hardly see any of the things Flins is talking about. Maybe it’s a little gold in the middle, if he squints. “Aren’t garnets red?” he asks, because that’s the easiest part to tackle.

“Ah. This is a demantoid.”

“That isn’t a garnet.”

“It is,” Flins says, like this makes perfect sense, and then he returns to looking at the gemstone with his tiny magnifying glass. He hums to himself all the while, looking delighted.

Illuga watches him. His eyes, so easy to read, are entrancingly bright as he looks through the magnifier.

“Ah,” Flins says, turning the stone over carefully between his gloved hands. “I see now why appraisal was necessary. One of the key cuts here has been redirected to refract light through the horsetail rather than through the green body. Hm. An artistic choice, perhaps…”

Flins suddenly scrawls down notes on the assessment paper like a man possessed. Illuga watches him, fascinated. It’s like he’s been struck by a bout of inspiration, though all he’s doing is describing a rock. He needs so many words for it. If Illuga were describing it, he’d go with big, green, and shiny, and call it a day.

“I’ll have to talk to her,” Flins says, almost to himself. He covers the stone again and moves the paper, waiting for the ink to dry.

Illuga gestures to the boxes and papers. “Are these all…?”

Flins nods.

“Then who manages your estate?” Illuga asks, bewildered. All this time he’d thought Flins was managing his land or settling disputes or whatever. To find out that he’s been… appraising gemstones?

“Ineffa takes care of all the housework.”

“I mean the estate. You know, your land and money and all that.”

“Oh,” says Flins. He suddenly seems very interested in the wood grain of his table. “I am not nobility in that sense.”

Illuga stares at him. “You’re—? What? I mean, you’re a lord. You live in a mansion with a ballroom, for fuck’s sake.”

“There is a reason I am called fae nobility, rather than ‘nobility’ with no caveats.”

Illuga didn’t know there was a difference. He blinks.

Flins’s eyes suddenly look heavier, duller. Like the flame is almost extinguished. “Perhaps this isn’t so well known. There was… a conflict. Between the Snezhnayan fae and the human royalty. Many fae fled. In the end a deal was reached: we would retain our houses and titles, but would not be part of the true nobility. I am… nice to look at, for the noble courts. Not so nice to engage with.”

Illuga’s chest hurts. No wonder there haven’t been any parties. No wonder there hasn’t been any tithe-collecting or land-surveying. No wonder he hasn’t had to host some group of stuffy assholes as the Chudomirovich house representative.

Flins touches the back of his hand with his gloved fingertips. “Don’t look at me like that. I am quite happy like this.”

“You appraise their jewels,” Illuga realizes, feeling sick to his stomach. “God, they keep you around just to remind them how wealthy they are. That’s—that’s cruel, it’s…”

And Flins laughs.

“Cruel?” he says, his mouth turned up. “Has your soldier’s heart softened so quickly? Surely you know there are worse fates than being given my own house and a job appraising gemstones that I quite enjoy looking at.”

Illuga tries to smile through his thick throat. “Here I’d thought I would have to play the part of a noble spouse all my life,” he says, a little rough. “All that, and I married a geologist.”

“Hardly,” Flins says, smiling down at his table. “I’ve studied geology extensively, but I’m sadly not well-versed in actual geologic formations. I’m familiar with the theory, but Snezhnaya’s weather isn’t exactly conducive to fieldwork.”

Illuga looks at him and bursts out laughing.

Though he tries to hide it, Flins looks very obviously pleased. He goes back to the gemstone with a subdued tilt to his mouth.

Illuga watches him work. They make an odd couple: two fakes, pretending to be something they never were. A fake nobleman married to a fake young master.

How strange, to have someone else in on this deception with him. How strange, to not be alone.

***

The marriage contract specified that Illuga would be required to live with Flins for the first two months, but could visit Piramida after that time was up. As such, on the two-month anniversary of their wedding, Illuga wakes up with a spring in his step and a smile on his face.

Flins is doing his hair in the mirror when he sees Illuga’s expression. “You look quite happy.”

“Of course I’m happy,” Illuga says, already shucking on his favorite coat. “It’s our two month anniversary.”

Flins doesn’t look away from the mirror, but he makes a pleased sound. “I didn’t take you as the sentimental type.”

“What? No, I meant that it’s been two months.”

Flins frowns at his own reflection. “Yes…? This is usually what anniversaries entail.”

“Oh.” He must mean that he doesn’t have an entourage prepared, but in light of the epiphany about his noble status, Illuga isn’t really surprised by that. “I don’t need a going-away party; it can be a simple affair.”

The color drains from Flins’s face. His hair, too, dulls down to a whitish-blue, like a shallow puddle of oil glistening under sunlight. “You are leaving.”

His voice makes Illuga feel guilty. He swallows with his suddenly cottony mouth. “I wasn’t allowed to, for the first two months,” he explains, feeling a little guilty. Flins signed the marriage contract too. He must have read it. Must have known that he was restricting Illuga’s movement. “Surely you understand that I want to see my soldiers again. Check in on everyone. Help with the rebuilding efforts.”

Flins looks ghostly pale. “Of course I understand. It had… slipped my mind, is all.”

Strange that Flins could forget something that seemed so monumental. Illuga, for one, had practically been counting down the days. But then again, it’s not as though Flins had anywhere else to go. He wouldn’t know the feeling of missing home. Wouldn’t know what it’s like to be kept away from it.

Flins is much quieter when he speaks again. “I’ll have Ineffa escort you there by noon.”

“That’s… soon.”

“I thought you were eager to leave.”

Illuga’s teeth feel heavy in his mouth. “Eager to return,” he corrects, like the distinction matters. “It’s not—it’s not that I don’t like it here. I just want to go home.”

That old sadness returns to Flins’s eyes. “Noon,” he says.

Illuga doesn’t feel like eating breakfast anymore. He hadn’t been intending to leave until the next morning, but he starts packing his bags.

At noon Ineffa takes his luggage and loads it into the carriage. Flins sees him off with a courteous kiss to the back of his hand. Illuga looks out the window, back at the estate, until it disappears behind him in the white fog.

***

Being home is—

“Wonderful,” Illuga says all in a rush, beaming at all his former soldiers. His face flushes with the campfire’s warmth. “It’s really wonderful to see you all again.”

An older woman whose sword he remembers sharpening claps his shoulder and grins. “Great to have you back, Captain!”

“Back from the front lines,” agrees a young soldier, raising her eyebrows.

“Poor Captain!” cries another, raising their glass. “Fighting all day long for us!”

The whole campfire erupts in appreciative cackles. A man snorts into his soup.

Illuga frowns. Everyone seems so flushed with amusement and yet he doesn’t get it. He hasn’t been fighting at all. In fact this might be the least fighting he’s done in his whole life, childhood included. “What do you mean?”

The laughter snuffs itself out like a candle flame.

Illuga lets his frown loosen up. “I’m just married,” he says, a little sheepishly. “And I know he’s a noble, but there’s really no fighting involved. No turf wars; it’s not like the novels.” Not least of which because Flins isn’t proper nobility anyway.

The crowd looks at each other across the round camp. Eventually, one of them—a middle-aged woman named Darina, who baked three sheets of flat spelt bread to go with their soup tonight—stands and looks at him with an almost pityingly gentle smile.

“Captain,” she says. “We know what the marital duties entail.”

Illuga blinks.

The. Marital duties.

Oh. Oh.

“It’s not—I mean, I already said it isn’t like the novels,” Illuga sputters. He tugs his heavy Snezhnayan winter collar away from his neck. He’s never felt strange about his and Flins’s relationship, or lack thereof, but somehow this feels like something to be ashamed of. Something to hide. “My husband is really—he’s not—”

The young woman from earlier nods sagely. She opens her mouth, and Illuga feels a brief moment of glorious relief. Finally, someone normal, to say something reasonable—

“So he doesn’t have two dicks?”

Illuga’s jaw drops.

The whole campfire bursts out laughing again.

Illuga flushes and tucks his face into his collar petulantly. “Laugh all you want. I’ll have you know I was your captain for four years, and a strict one at that.”

Darina steps closer to him and smiles. “Don’t be silly. There is no past tense.”

Illuga’s embarrassment slips away. He looks up at her, bewildered.

“You’re still our captain,” she says. “We wouldn’t treat you like this if you weren’t.”

He hasn’t felt like a captain in months. Has felt like at best a pampered spouse, at worst a useless trophy to be stored away with other once-beautiful things. But sitting here, with all his soldiers laughing at him, Illuga feels it again. That pull in his chest; that voice saying, You are responsible for them. They are yours. You are theirs.

“And I bet he’s got scales,” one of the young men says, sounding simultaneously appalled and enthralled. “My god! Does he shed his skin like a snake?”

It’s so odd that Illuga snorts.

“He totally does,” the young man says, petrified. “Shit, our captain married a snake. We made our captain marry a snake!”

“He does not,” Illuga says, smiling. “Flins is, by most regards, a perfectly normal man, and a perfectly normal spouse. I’m far more interested in hearing how you all have been getting on while I’ve been away.” He narrows his eyes, trying to channel that menacing commander energy he never quite mastered. “Have you been slacking?”

Strangely, no one in the camp looks nervous.

Illuga’s easy confidence falters. “Am I not intimidating anymore?”

“Of course you are,” says the young man, with perhaps too much enthusiasm.

An even younger soldier, maybe only sixteen, nods instead. “It’s only that we have nothing to be afraid of, Captain,” they say. “We’ve all been training harder than ever.”

Illuga can’t help smiling. “What, I leave and you all decide it’s high time to improve? Was that all I had to do, all this time?”

A small round of laughter.

“No,” someone says. It’s the same older woman who welcomed him back before anyone else. “You’re out there doing your part for the Lightkeepers.” She claps her hand over her heart. “So we’ll do our part too, Captain.”

Illuga’s chest feels warm. He doesn’t know exactly how much money they got in his marriage contract, but the Piramida is nearly twice the size now, and all the houses have metal roofs to keep the rain out. This is all because of him. He earned all of that. He’s the reason the Lightkeepers’ children will grow up with hot food on the table and well-fitting shoes on their feet. He’d known that, in an abstract way, but seeing it himself is another thing.

He looks at the towering silhouette of Piramida and realizes, not for the first time, that this will be his greatest contribution to the Lightkeeper history books. But somehow the thought doesn’t make him feel ill anymore. Now he thinks of his marriage being immortalized as something beautiful. Illuga Chudomirovich, the bargaining chip that earned Piramida half her buildings. Illuga Chudomirovich, the Lightkeepers’ lucky seven.

Illuga holds his soup closer to his chest. “Good,” he says. “I’m glad.”

The Lightkeepers all smile, and the night goes on.

***

The contract specified that Illuga could only be away from Flins for two weeks at a time in the first year of their marriage. It seemed strange to Illuga, but apparently this was the noble convention; spouses were expected to remain together during this first year, probably to make the most of the honeymoon phase. Illuga didn’t quite get it—still doesn’t quite get it—but he spends his allotted two weeks in Piramida, and then he returns.

Illuga is still thinking about Flins’s distraught expression when he packs his bags. At least now, he thinks, they will have to make up; he will arrive to pick Illuga up, and he’ll have to make nice with the Lightkeepers. And people will think they are in love.

In love. Because they are married. Illuga feels like he can’t breathe enough to fill his lungs. Like all the air in the world might not be enough.

For all his enthusiasm, Illuga is eager to return. He loves seeing everyone in Piramida, but he misses the library, misses Aino’s workshop, misses Ineffa’s easy companionship. Misses Flins. Misses him in a way he can’t quite describe. Misses hearing him hum as he works. Misses the way he stops breathing when he thinks Illuga isn’t listening.

Illuga is, suddenly, determined to impress him when he returns. He puts on his best coat and ties it at the waist. He straightens the crease in his pants and polishes his boots. He makes sure his hair is dry and clean and that the ugly part of his scar isn’t showing too much. He makes sure he looks nice.

But all his preparation is for naught, because Ineffa comes to pick him up alone.

“Hello, Illuga Starshyna,” she says. Then she turns to his farewell party—half the Lightkeeper company, standing at the Piramida border to see him off. “Hello, esteemed Lightkeepers.” She salutes.

As she lifts her hand, her coat sleeve slips down, revealing the intricate metal workings of her arm. Several of the Lightkeepers gasp audibly.

Ineffa lowers her arm. “I apologize. It appears this salute was not the correct thing to do.”

“Is that a prosthetic?” a young girl asks, her eyes huge.

Ineffa blinks.

“It’s a really cool one,” she says. She’s the only one brave enough to step forward; everyone else is scared of Ineffa, of her power and her influence. But this child just sees her arm, and walks toward her.

“It was made for me by Aino,” says Ineffa. She holds out her arm, and the girl looks at it, astonished. Behind her, a hundred adults peer at it too, just as curious.

Ineffa demonstrates her arm’s many uses, to incredulous looks. By the end of her demonstration, all the Lightkeepers are looking at her with something closer to admiration than fear. Like she’s interesting, rather than terrifying.

Eventually the sun rises higher, threatening the loss of daylight, and they have to get going. Illuga packs his bags into the carriage and joins her. “Thank you for coming to get me, Ineffa.”

“It is my job,” Ineffa says. This sounds cold, but she adds: “However, I am fond of you.”

Illuga smiles a little. This strange woman.

She must see his expression, because she turns to him skeptically. “You are still third-ranked in my command chain. Do not get ahead of yourself.”

Illuga’s smile widens. “I know,” he says, looking out the window. “I don’t mind. I’m fond of you too.”

Ineffa doesn’t say anything more. They ride to the estate.

***

Illuga arrives just past dinnertime. Ineffa was with him, and is busy taking the carriage apart, so she obviously doesn’t have time to cook dinner. Thus Illuga is confused when he sees the light on in the kitchen.

Maybe someone’s broken into the estate? Hmm. He approaches stealthily.

From the doorway, he sees two silhouettes in front of the stove. They’re talking, quieter than usual, so he strains to hear them:

“But Mister Flins, I want it extra extra tasty! Can’t we skip the vegetables just this once?”

“Certainly not. This soup is designed to let the cabbage absorb the broth, so we must add it. The beans are also essential for fiber, and the tomato for the soup’s color.”

“But can’t we have a bad-colored soup? With no fiber?”

“Ah, but Miss Ineffa says you need fiber. You don’t want her to be angry with you, now do you?”

“She can’t be angry with me. I made her.”

Flins laughs. His silhouette, outlined in gentle orange and gold, reaches for Aino’s. He sets the little girl on his shoulders and lets her stir the pot from her high vantage point.

Aino makes a noise into the soup like she’s taunting it. “Boooo. Stupid soup.” But she keeps stirring it with great passion, still sitting on Flins’s shoulders.

“Don’t insult the soup,” Flins chides gently, much softer than usual. “It’s my husband’s favorite, and I know you’re fond of him.”

Illuga blinks rapidly. His favorite? He doesn’t have a favorite. He’s never minded anything; that means never picking favorites, either.

But the soup smells… incredible. Perfect. It smells like exactly what he wants after a long day of travel.

“Speaking of Mister Illuga,” says Aino, turning her head from Flins’s shoulders. “He should come in already instead of standing out there like a big idiot!”

Flins laughs to himself. Then the words seem to click in his head, and he turns around abruptly. Aino sways on his shoulders. He looks at Illuga in the dim light of the kitchen, his face too open—too sweet—and Illuga’s chest clenches.

“I’m home,” Illuga says, a little embarrassed.

Flins inhales sharply, like he’s exaggerating the sound on purpose. “Yes. I suppose you are.”

Illuga thinks about saying something else. He says them all in his mind: I’m sorry for wanting to leave. I’m sorry for wanting to leave you. I’m sorry for making you think I wanted to leave you; I would never want to leave you; I would never want to leave.

“I’m hungry,” he says instead.

Aino grins at him. “Good thing we made your favorite!”

Flins, with his smile unsteady, nods.

Two months ago Illuga would have said that he doesn’t have favorites. Today he looks at Aino’s hands clutching the wooden spoon, and Flins’s hands wrapped tight around her legs so she doesn’t fall, and says, “Thank you. I love it.”

***

They had a spring wedding, although no one could have told it from the climate. By the time Illuga settles back into his life at the estate, summer is in full swing.

Of course the Snezhnayan summer is quite similar to the Snezhnayan fall, and also the Snezhnayan winter; they don’t call it the Land of Everwinter for nothing. But the wildlife must notice some difference, because it was silent when he left but now Illuga keeps waking to birdsong outside their window.

It’s on one such morning that Illuga throws open the window and eagerly looks upwards for the birds.

Behind him, the bedside candle flickers and dies. Just as it extinguishes, Flins blinks his eyes open. His usual composure is missing in the face of the early morning light. “If it was too hot,” he rasps, “you could have simply dressed down.”

Illuga flushes and shuts the window, leaving just a crack open. He didn’t realize he was letting so much cold air in. “I just heard the birdsong.”

Flins sits up in bed. “Does it bother you?”

“What? Of course not.” He’s still looking through the crack in the window for the birds. “I already told you I typically wake at dawn.”

“I wasn’t sure you were serious.” Behind him, the blankets rustle like Flins is standing from bed. “I’ve never known a soldier before you.”

“We’re not so different from everyone else,” Illuga says absently. Then he catches sight of the bird again. “Oh! I think that’s a shrike. Northern, or maybe a juvenile red-backed. Or it could be a brown shrike, but I don’t think they migrate this early. It’s not late enough in the summer, right?”

Flins says nothing.

Illuga frowns. He shuts the window and turns around. “Really, Flins, I’m sorry for waking you, but you must understand, this is—”

And then his voice cuts out.

Flins is standing right behind him. Illuga could have sworn he’d been in bed this whole time, watching from a safe distance, and yet here he is, close enough to touch. His eyes are huge, like he’s surprised to have been caught sneaking up on him. If he’d been any closer, Illuga would have felt his soft breath on the nape of his neck. The thought makes his pulse stutter in his wrists.

“Interesting,” Illuga finishes weakly. He clears his throat. “It’s interesting. I’m not exactly an ornithologist, but I’ve always liked birding.”

Flins makes an odd noise in his throat and steps back slightly. “Yes. Of course.”

They stand there in silence for a moment. The birdsong fills the space between them. Illuga’s face heats up.

“There’s a tree,” Flins says, apropos of nothing.

Illuga raises his eyebrows. “There are lots of trees, actually.”

Flins laughs to himself. His face isn’t quite pink, but his hair has a strange blue glow to the ends. “You didn’t let me finish. By the south gate, there’s a tree that the birds all gather in. I’m not sure what kind—I’m not much of a birder myself—but I’m sure it would be quite the sight.”

Illuga practically jumps away from the window. “Are you kidding?” he says, already fumbling for his shoes. “Let’s go right away! I have to see them. They’ll all fly away for the day to go hunting, so we might as well go now.”

Flins blinks several times. His usually sure hands hesitate.

Abruptly it occurs to Illuga that Flins could refuse him. Could tell him it’s too early, or that it’s silly to cross the estate at sunrise for a tree full of birds, when the birds will probably be there all day, and anyway they’re just birds, nothing special. Could tell him it’s too cold, and that he ought to stay indoors, kept safe and docile like a good spouse should be.

But Flins looks at him and makes half a smile, and puts on his boots.

Now that Illuga knows how to read him, he’s fascinating. Illuga’s so busy watching his face that he messes up the laces of his boots twice more before he finally succeeds.

They walk across the estate to the south gate. Along the way Illuga explains that almost all of Snezhnaya’s birds are migratory, and will only be here for part of the year. “They’re easy to lose track of,” he explains, waving his hands wildly in the cold morning air. “If you miss the summer, you’ll look up and all the birds will be gone again, and you’ll have to wake up on your own without any company.”

Flins looks over at him. “I’d hate to have them disappear,” he says quietly. “I don’t like being alone.”

Illuga glances over at him, then away again. He coughs. “They’ll be back every summer,” he replies, a little flushed. “I mean—not that they don’t like to go home from time to time, but they’ll always return.”

“Mm. I’m glad.”

Illuga’s face is hot again. He tucks his cheek into the collar of his coat and turns his face away. “Are we nearly there? It’s cold.”

Flins looks amused. “You’re the one who suggested we head out right away.”

“I’m an idiot. Don’t listen to me.”

Flins laughs. His breath doesn’t cloud in front of him, not the way Illuga’s does. Instead his laugh seems to melt the ice for miles around with a warmth greater than any human should have. “Look up. We’ve already arrived.”

Illuga lifts his head from his collar, and—

“Oh,” he breathes. The ghost of his amazement mists before his face. He waves it away and laughs. “Oh, it’s—”

The tree is enormous. It’s a grand thing, the sort of tree that might have taken seven hundred years to grow. It’s gnarled and towering, like it knows all the secrets of the land. And every shrike in the country seems to have taken roost in its vast web of branches.

Illuga stands there on the icy ground for what feels like hours, just gazing up. Slowly, he steps forward. Then again, and again, and—

The ground slips from beneath him.

Illuga yelps and stumbles forward. He must have tied his shoes wrong; he probably shouldn’t have been staring at Flins while he was lacing them. He hits the iced-over ground with a dull, muffled groan.

As he falls the whole world goes loud all at once. The birds cry out from their tree, and the branches rustle with the weightlessness of every shrike taking flight, and Flins’s steady footsteps rush towards him on the grass, and everything blends together in this beautiful symphony, and Illuga has never liked anything so well as he likes lying here on the ground and listening to it all.

Eventually Flins’s footsteps stop, and he kneels down on the ground next to him. “Illuga?” he asks urgently. “Are you alright?”

Illuga slowly blinks open his eyes. “Yeah,” he says, voice thick. “Yeah, I’m—”

And then he looks up.

Flins is looking down at him, silhouetted by his gorgeously inhuman halo of flame-hair. His eyes glow silver-blue in the morning sunlight. Above him, a thousand shrikes soar high into the clouds.

Struck breathless, Illuga laughs.

Flins’s expression grows even more concerned. “Did you injure yourself?”

“I’m fine,” Illuga breathes, still beaming. “Flins, you’re beautiful, you know that?”

Flins blinks his beautiful eyes many times.

Ridiculous man. Illuga nearly laughs again. Instead he just smiles, a little too fond. “Help me up,” he says, holding out his arm.

Flins pulls him back upright. He steadies him with a hand at his waist. “Ah,” he notes, once they’ve stood up again. “All the birds flew away.”

“No matter. I can always see them tomorrow.”

“Mm.” He still hasn’t removed his hand from Illuga’s waist. “Shall we head back and have breakfast?”

Illuga nods. They walk back across the estate’s frozen grass, back toward the early-morning sun. Above them, a thousand birds flutter in their separate directions, and Illuga understands, suddenly, that the Snezhnayan summer isn’t so cold after all.

He doesn’t realize until much later that it’s the first time Flins has ever called him by name.

***

The summer brings new plant life. Illuga still can’t quite discern the subtleties between the four, very cold, very icy, seasons in Snezhnaya, but he can at least see that Ineffa is tending the results of their early planting endeavors, when his fingers turned blue.

Illuga puts on his coat and goes outside to help her. This time he makes sure to put on gloves.

“Hi,” he says, kneeling down next to her. “Can I help you?”

Ineffa nods. She hands him a trowel. “The crocuses are outgrowing the planter. We will transfer them to deeper pots.”

Illuga gets to work carefully scooping out the dirt, filtering through it for the thin flower roots. They’re barely even visible among the icy dirt. Eventually he gives up with the trowel and sifts through the dirt with his gloved hands, carefully checking for roots growing out of the crocus bulbs in the shallow planter.

Eventually he realizes that Ineffa’s staring at him. He looks up at her, confused. “Am I doing something wrong?”

“No,” Ineffa says, uncharacteristically fast. “I am… fascinated. By your hands.”

“Oh.” Illuga looks down at his own hands, covered in deep brown gloves. “They’re nothing special, I guess. Not like yours.”

A sound: maybe Ineffa’s processor whirring, maybe the wind. Illuga can’t tell. He gets back to work.

“Your people,” Ineffa says, slightly thicker than usual. “They were not scared of my hand. They thought it was very interesting. I could tell.”

Oh. This is about the people of Piramida. He should have known—it was quite the scene, especially for Ineffa, who usually interacts with a maximum of three people per day. “Yeah. The Lightkeepers are a military group. We sustain a lot of injuries fighting off the Wild Hunt, so good prosthetics are always in demand. They give people their independence back. Give them something to call their own.”

Ineffa doesn’t look up from his arms, but her fingers twitch.

“The people of Piramida would love you,” Illuga says quietly. “You saw that yourself.”

Ineffa’s voice trembles a little. “My limbs are not prosthetics. I am not—” She hesitates. “I am—”

“Ineffa,” Illuga interrupts, before she can say whatever word she’s thinking of. “You’re Ineffa.”

He longs to say the rest of it too: You are Ineffa, and you are a real woman, and you are beautiful. But he doesn’t think she’s ready to hear it. Maybe she never will be. Maybe she’ll be thinking she’s not quite real for her whole life, until she breaks down into scrap metal and gets carved into a different shape entirely.

But Illuga cares for her anyway, and so do Aino and Flins. And one day they’ll all be bones and scrap metal together, and that’ll be that.

Weirdly, the thought makes Illuga smile. Bones or scrap metal, they’ll all be buried in the same dirt. He digs up the flower roots.

***

The next morning Illuga makes up his mind. He goes to Aino’s workshop and knocks thrice. “I have a commission for you!”

Aino throws open the door with a big grin on her small face. “‘Bout time!” she declares. Her eyes are obscured by giant round goggles. The whole ensemble makes her look like a mad scientist in the making. “So whaddaya want? A moving house? That big giant cannon? Two big giant cannons?”

She’s so eager. Illuga’s request feels silly now, but he persists anyway. “I was going to ask you to make prosthetics.”

Aino blinks behind her round goggles.

Maybe she only wants big, glamorous projects. Illuga hurries to backtrack. “Actually, you know what? I don’t need you to do that. What kind of—”

Aino waves her hands. “Shhh! I’m thinking.”

Illuga’s brow furrows. “Thinking? About what?”

“Your project, duh! I’m trying to remember all the functions I put in Ineffa’s arms and legs.”

“Oh. They don’t have to be as intricate as Ineffa’s. Just… things that will help people keep living.”

Aino tilts her head. “But it’s more fun if you get an upgrade, right? Like, I’d be really sad if I lost my leg. But then if I got a cooler leg, I’d be a lot less sad. So I should make ‘em cool!”

Illuga’s chest feels strange. He remembers the scar across his shoulder, how he lost functionality of his arm for months. How his fingers still sometimes don’t respond to signals from his nervous system. “You have a point.”

“Each one’s gonna be different,” Aino says. She’s… putting a large bolt in her hair? “Not everyone wants a vacuum in their arm. Maybe they want cooking stuff instead. Or a paintbrush! Or spray paint, for graffiti murals…”

As she speaks, she pulls a huge sheet of blue paper out from the ream on her worktable. From somewhere in her pink mess of hair, she pulls out a white pencil, and starts sketching.

Illuga watches her pencil move. He can hardly make sense of this stuff normally, let alone upside down.

“And I’ll have to make neural sensors, like Ineffa’s,” Aino mutters to herself. “But Ineffa’s brain is wired to hook up to those, and regular people aren’t. So I have to figure out a way to get the electrical signals working without any wires. Contact points? But what kind of magical energy can we use…”

“Kuuvahki,” Illuga supplies. “It’s—uh, it’s only found in Nod-Krai, but these would be for the Lightkeepers. So you could use kuuvahki.”

Aino looks very intrigued. “Energy only found in Nod-Krai?”

Illuga nods.

Aino looks at him like the holidays have come early and he’s holding the full year’s worth of presents. “Tell me everything.”

***

Illuga returns to their bedroom exhausted. He gets into bed with the draft blueprints and stares at them for a while, trying to make heads or tails of Aino’s strange brilliance. Flins lights the candle by their bedside with that blue flame in his hands.

Illuga, too tired for tact, decides to bite the bullet. “You don’t sleep, do you?”

Flins doesn’t even turn around. “All creatures sleep.”

“But you don’t sleep in the sense that I do,” Illuga presses. “When you lie next to me in bed, you aren’t sleeping.”

Flins hesitates. “I am.”

Illuga sighs and puts down the sketches. This conversation will, apparently, require his full focus. “I know what you are. You don’t need to pretend to be human with me.”

Flins sits on the edge of the bed, facing the other direction. “I am resting, at least, when you rest. It is only that my rest looks different from yours.”

“I know.” It’s true, but only in an abstract way; he’d figured that Flins slept too deeply to be resting like a human would. He doesn’t know exactly what that means, but he doesn’t mind. He doesn’t have the most typical relationship with sleep, either. What does it matter?

Flins finally turns around. His face is lit by that blue candle’s strange flame. “You do?”

“Well, not entirely, but I presumed.”

“Presumed what?”

Illuga flushes. “I’d assumed—” Here he falters, but he pushes on. “If you were sleeping as a human would, you'd move around a bit. Or you’d wake me at some point in the night. But I always sleep soundly, even with you in the bed. It’s like you’re not even there.”

Flins looks a little embarrassed. “I thought you’d prefer that.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t mind if my husband woke me on occasion.”

“Why would you want that?”

Illuga’s face is on fire. He can’t say this. If Flins can’t figure it out on his own, that’s on him. “Never mind. I’m going to bed.” He puts his book down on the bedside table and pulls the covers over his face.

“No, no, come back,” Flins says, pulling the covers back again. “If there’s something I could be doing better as your husband, then naturally I should know about it.”

Illuga turns his face into the pillow. He mumbles it.

“Hm?”

“I wouldn’t mind if you wanted to touch me a little,” Illuga blurts, spectacularly embarrassed about it.

Flins’s face goes entirely blank. His hair flames bright purple.

Shit. That isn’t exactly what he meant to say. “I mean—if you wanted to put your arm around me as I slept, or something like that, I wouldn’t really mind.”

“There’s a difference,” says Flins, “between not minding something, and wanting something.”

Illuga exhales harshly at the ceiling. Whatever. He doesn’t even care. “I’m sleeping,” he announces. “Goodnight.”

Flins breathes a soft laugh into the quiet air. “Goodnight, Illuga.”

Illuga shuts his eyes tightly. Flins laughs again, and then there’s a rustle of bedsheets and his arm is wrapping around Illuga’s waist, and his hand is settling just below Illuga’s ribcage, holding him like a gemstone caught below his magnifying glass, and his skin is cold and he doesn’t breathe as often as a human should and Illuga feels some long-held tension in his shoulders melt away into nothing and sink softly into the thick, warm blankets.

Flins looks a little tired the next morning, like he never slept at all. Sweet man. Illuga keeps the curtains closed and lets him and his strange blue-flame candle rest.

***

The work with Aino is—good, Illuga realizes. He hadn’t known it, but he’d missed having something to do. Something to keep him from falling prey to idleness.

When the marriage started, he’d felt that he was wasting his life away, at least a little. That he’d been sold off, and now his life was over, and that was that. But that isn’t the case at all. This marriage is only the beginning. There’s still so much he can do for Piramida. Maybe more than there ever was before.

Aino’s drawing up her third draft of the blueprints for prosthetics that pick up electrical signals from the brain when she looks over at him.

“Hey, Mister Illuga?”

Illuga looks up. He’s been writing to his father about the project. This time he’s writing a very intense, very descriptive letter about Aino’s work, insofar as he can understand it. “Yes?”

“Why are you so interested in this stuff?”

Illuga would have thought that was obvious. “Because it can help my homeland. I’ve told you and Ineffa about that already.”

“No, no, I know that. I mean, why get so involved? You coulda just told me to make some stuff and send it off to Nod-Krai. You know I answer to you.”

“You do?”

“Yep. Just as much as I answer to Mister Flins.”

So, not at all. He’s pretty sure Flins has never commanded Aino to do a thing in her life, unless he’s got an unquenchable desire for large, dancing ducks. “I wouldn’t order you around like that. I’m a military commander, not a mansionmaster.”

Aino looks at him crookedly. “I mean, you kinda are. A mansionmaster, I mean.”

Illuga swallows. He’d forgotten that. “Well,” he decides, “I’m not a very good one.”

“I think you’re great at it. You treat me real nice, and I know you treat Ineffa real nice too.”

“It’s what you deserve,” Illuga says, and means it wholeheartedly. He clears his throat. “I was never a very good commander, either. I was nice to my soldiers, too. But to be fair, everyone in Piramida is nice to each other. There’s no other way to be, for us.”

Aino’s eyes go wide. “Really?”

“Mm,” Illuga says, smiling wistfully. “We never had much, but that’s the point. If you and your neighbor both don’t have bread, you bake it together. If you both don’t have clothes, you sew matching coats. If you both don’t have houses, you make a home together. We have nothing, so we share the nothing we’ve got. That’s just how it goes.”

Aino is quiet for a long while. She looks at him, her eyes a little sad. Then she says, “It’s funny. When people have everything, they don’t want to share at all.”

Illuga’s chest hurts, but he smiles anyway. There’s a large ink blot on his paper, where he forgot to stow his pen properly.

“Your home sounds pretty great,” Aino says, already pulling her blueprint out again like nothing happened.

“It is,” Illuga says, with a sudden rush of fondness. He’s glad the money hasn’t spoiled Piramida. That even though they have more now, they’re still sharing it around, still giving people what they need. “It really is.”

Aino hums and keeps working.

Illuga picks up his pen. She is not just a great scientist, but also a good one, he writes. She will help us.

***

“You look especially wonderful tonight,” Flins says over dinner, looking at him with that striking sincerity in his eyes.

Illuga snorts. He’s been in Aino’s workshop all day while she works. There’s no way he looks good. “I smell like dirt and engine grease,” he argues back, grinning. “Don’t kid me. I know I look terrible.”

“You could never.”

Illuga gives him a pointed look. “The wedding eyeliner?”

Flins is suspiciously silent on the subject.

“No,” Illuga gasps. “You liked that??”

Flins, looking rather uncomfortably at the ceiling, says, “I find you striking regardless of your makeup.”

“I’m striking? You’re practically an angel on land, and I’m striking?”

Flins stutters. His hair goes almost entirely white at the ends.

Illuga, still buoyed by Aino’s good humor, cracks up. He digs into his beef bone stew with relish. It’s very good; he never got the hang of cooking beef. Not that it mattered, though, with how little of it they were able to afford on the battlefield.

“See,” Flins says, out of nowhere. “How am I to find you anything but beautiful?”

What? “I’m just eating soup.” And not very elegantly, at that; he’s practically shoveling it into his face. He’s tired after a long day in the lab with Aino, trying to process her lessons.

Flins, looking as though he’s thinking very hard, says nothing.

“Oh! That reminds me. I was thinking, would you mind if I invited Aino and Ineffa to dine with us? I’m certain Aino would love to tell you about the project we’ve been working on. Besides, it feels wrong to leave her alone. She told me she was very lonely, before you found her.”

Flins’s eyes snap up to him. “You’re working on a project with Aino?”

“Well, not working, exactly. I suggested a project, and she’s become quite invested in it.”

Amusement flickers in his eyes. “Ah. Yes, Aino does tend to enjoy her projects to the fullest.”

Illuga laughs. “That’s one way to phrase it. But her obsession is warranted this time—her work is so impressive. I’m trying my hardest to understand what she’s doing, but mostly I just end up thinking about how brilliant she is.”

Flins sits up very straight and his hair goes back to blue, flowing down from the roots like a waterfall crashing into rocks. “I am glad you enjoy partaking in her company,” he says, more formal than usual.

He sounds so awkward. Illuga runs back through the conversation, trying to find what could have possibly set off this reaction. Not anger; not sadness; not discomfort, exactly, but rather—

“Flins, don’t tell me you’re jealous.”

Flins, the poor man, somehow manages to sit up even straighter. He’s always been a terrible liar.

“My god,” Illuga says, almost laughing at how ridiculous it is. “You know you can come see Aino any time, right? And she still likes you much better than she likes me. Half the time we’re talking about you, anyway. She sings your praises, Flins. You really don’t have anything to worry about.”

Flins blinks several times, too rapidly. Under the lantern-light of their dim dinner table, his eyes seem a different color entirely. “You think I’m jealous that you’re spending time with Aino.”

“Well,” says Illuga, suddenly feeling out of his depth.

“Not,” says Flins carefully, “of my husband spending the full day away from me.”

Husband. Husband. Husband. God, sometimes Illuga forgets they’re married entirely. Sometimes he thinks Flins is just a strange man that shares his bed and his meals and looks at him too sweetly from time to time. “That hardly seems reasonable,” Illuga says, a little hastily. His breath is shallow, sitting high in his chest like he’s waiting for something.

“How so?”

“I mean—you don’t treat me like your husband. Not really. You haven’t—you don’t—”

The look in Flins’s eyes could shatter ice. “I haven't what?”

There are many things Illuga could say here. Flins hasn’t done any of the things Illuga expected him to: hasn’t taken him to bed, hasn’t dressed him up like some pretty thing to put on a high shelf, hasn’t ever asked him to change. He swallows and changes tracks. “I’m not supposed to like you.”

This seems to catch Flins off guard. His cold demeanor evaporates, and he sits there staring at him.

Illuga looks down into his glass and pretends the red tinge to his face is from the wine and not the blush on his face. “I married you for money, you know that. I spent a long time thinking I wouldn’t like you very much. So it’s—odd. That I do. Like you.”

Flins says, “You do?”

Unable to find the words, Illuga nods.

“Hm.” Eventually Flins breathes out slowly and says, “In all this time you never asked why I married you.”

“…No.” At first he didn’t think he would be allowed to; now he’s not sure he wants to know the answer. He bites the bullet anyway: “Why, then?”

“I wanted someone to be fond of,” Flins says softly. “I was lonely, and so I decided it would do me good to care for someone. They told me you were very kind, and didn’t mind when people were not quite right.”

Not quite right. Illuga’s chest aches sweetly. “There’s nothing wrong with you. There never has been.”

Flins smiles drily. “You are proving my point. This is why they sent you, clearly.”

“I’m serious. I don’t mind that you don’t sleep the same way I do, or that your hair does that thing it does. I don’t mind that you only pretend to eat your meals—don’t look at me like that, of course I noticed—and that you drink more alcohol than any human ever could. I don’t mind that you’re yourself.”

“And you thought I wouldn’t afford you the same courtesy?”

Illuga stops in his tracks. He’s never thought of it like that. Flins can’t help that he isn’t human; Illuga’s constant need to be busy, his rough hands and his uneasy heart, aren’t quite the same. Shouldn’t it be terrible, having to deal with all that? Shouldn’t it be a chore, and an unpleasant one, at that?

“I do not mind that you are yourself, either.”

Illuga sits there, struck silent. He looks at Flins and thinks maybe he’s never known him at all.

Flins relaxes from his stiff posture and reaches for his glass. He takes a long sip of firewater like it’s juice. “You know,” he says at last. “In my correspondence with the Lightkeepers, I requested a ‘companion.’ I did not know they would interpret this as marriage.”

Illuga blinks. Then he grins. Before he knows it he’s doubled over, laughing so hard his vision blurs.

Flins looks at him sideways. “It cannot possibly be that amusing.”

“You’re telling me you didn’t even want to get married?” Illuga gasps, still fighting off his astonished laughter.

Flins pauses. “Not at the beginning, no.”

Illuga’s laughter strikes a final chord and dies in his throat. “And… and now?”

“You know my answer, Illuga.”

His name sounds strange in the low echo of the empty dining chambers. Illuga swallows with his dry mouth. “You don’t call me by name very often.”

“Mm. If I say it too much, I’ll never want to stop.”

Illuga rolls his eyes. “Just because you like me doesn’t mean you suddenly need to put on the charm. We’re already married.”

Flins’s gaze goes intense for a moment. “Illuga,” he says.

Illuga jolts. Even the air in his lungs feels still and serene, like nothing can ever change him. It’s simultaneously electric and grounding, like fire licking down a line of oil.

Flins says, “That is why.”

“Oh,” Illuga says weakly. He still feels like a fuse waiting for a match to strike him alight. “Well. Alright.”

“You don’t want to ask about it?”

Illuga raises his eyebrows. “Do I?”

“This depends on whether you would like to bed me or not.”

Illuga flushes bright red. So that feeling of waiting is…! “Oh! Oh. Okay. I see.”

Several moments of silence ensue, in which Illuga notably does not say he does not want this to happen. He can see the exact moment it clicks in Flins’s head: his hair goes purple, purple, purple, bright blue, like ice and fire, and then—

“I will not ask this of you,” Flins says, his voice softly urgent. “Please understand this. I would never ask this of you, if you didn’t ask it of me first.”

“I thought,” Illuga says, but his voice is still rough from whatever just happened. He clears his throat and persists. “You haven’t shown interest. I’d thought you just didn’t care to bed me. Which is fine! I don’t mind if your affection doesn’t take that form.”

“Did I give the impression you were not desirable?”

He’s certainly not giving it now. Illuga feels bowled over by the way Flins is looking at him, like it’s inconceivable that anyone could ever think him ordinary. “Generally, you’re meant to sleep with your new spouse the night you marry.”

“I know,” says Flins. “But you did not want to.”

Illuga blinks. He was ready to, but it’s true that he didn’t want to, not in a way that mattered. “It’s that simple?”

“Yes and no. I did not particularly expect to get married, and it appears neither did you. We were both out of our depth.”

“Yeah.” Illuga huffs a laugh. Eventually he says, “I never really thought I’d marry. Even when I imagined getting married it was never quite for love. More for… I don’t know. For companionship. For understanding.”

Flins looks at him strangely. “I’m sorry to have taken that away from you.”

Illuga turns his smile on him. “My idiot husband,” he says fondly. “You never took it away. You’re the one who gave it to me.”

Flins looks at him strangely.

“See? What did I say,” Illuga says, standing from the table. “My idiot husband.” Then he leans down to kiss Flins square on the mouth, and at last Flins looks like he understands.

***

“So we’re leavin’ for Nod-Krai in… what, a week?” Aino asks eagerly. She’s chosen to forgo a chair and is instead sitting on top of the small dining table, legs crossed beneath her.

“Nine days,” Illuga corrects. “Miss Ineffa will escort us there, and this time she’ll stay for the duration of our visit.”

“I will be pleased to assist,” Ineffa says, bowing her head. “The people of Piramida received me very well. I am enthusiastic to provide support.”

Her monotonous voice is exactly the same as always, but if she says she’s enthusiastic, Illuga believes her, probably. “We’ll probably only be gone for a few weeks. Aino’s got a plan for connecting the prosthetics, but she wants to build custom pieces for everyone who requests one.”

“‘Cause imagine if you lost an arm, but then you got a sick new one that did fun shit!” Aino waves her hands wildly above her head. “That would be sooo cool. And then you could paint stuff on it, like tattoos.”

“Actually, this is already common practice,” Illuga says. “People sometimes decorate their prosthetics with charms or even stuffed animals. But you could paint them too, as long as it won’t rust or degrade the metal.”

“We can just test ‘em on Ineffa!”

“Please do not paint me,” Ineffa says. Somehow she manages to convey great fear without changing her tone of voice at all.

Illuga laughs. Only then does he notice that Flins has been quiet for the whole conversation. “Flins?” he asks, a little confused. “Is something the matter?”

Flins visibly collects himself. “I’m very glad you all will be pursuing something so meaningful.”

“Don’t bullshit me,” Illuga says. “Something’s wrong.”

“I will miss you all,” Flins says softly. Then, as if he’s afraid: “Very much.”

Illuga laughs at him. “No, you won’t.”

“If you think that after all this time you have not grown to mean something to me, then you are truly the most foolish—”

“You won’t miss us because you’re coming too.”

Flins falls silent.

“You said you wanted a companion,” says Illuga, a little gentler. “Well, you’ve got one. Good luck getting rid of me.”

“Three, actually,” Ineffa corrects. “You have three companions.”

Aino beams. “Yeah! Good luck getting rid of us!”

Flins looks between the three of them, at the now-full square dining table. What once felt like an abandoned part of a too-big house now seems just big enough to hold the four of them and all their affection. He visibly takes in a deep breath. When he exhales, his hair shimmers white one last time, and then shines brilliantly blue, like it’s finally woken up from its years-long slumber.

“If good luck is what it’ll take to get rid of you all,” Flins says at last, “I hope I’ll be unlucky forever.”

Illuga smiles. Maybe, he thinks, maybe marrying for love was never so far-fetched after all.