The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  In his engineering lessons, he’d studied all manner of plumbing systems, but generally they relied upon some form of combustion—whether man-made or naturally occurring—to heat the water. Loukas couldn’t see anything remotely resembling a heating system connecting to the barrel over his head.

  Of course, everyone knew the Vestian Sorceresy provided a plethora of mechanistic, magical things to its nobility for the small price of their third child. Loukas just wouldn’t have thought to find such an arcane thing out in the middle of the forest.

  But he wouldn’t have thought to find a lodge such as this in the middle of the forest either. He was beginning to feel a bit like he’d been transported into a fairytale.

  He pulled the cord again to stop the water, shoved fingers back through his wet hair and turned to find the Vestian leaning against the shower stall, smirking at him.

  Loukas took the towel his host was holding and scrubbed at his hair. “See something you like?”

  The Vestian just kept smirking.

  Loukas tossed the towel back at him and motioned to the bundle tucked under his arm. “Are those for me?”

  The Vestian nodded but didn’t hand them over. “You should burn that other outfit. Dressing like a peacock this side of the Ver, someone might mistake you for prey.”

  “My shirt alone probably costs more than this lodge of yours.”

  The Vestian continued smirking. “So many reasons to love Avatar. Rigid caste system, legislated bisexuality...” the smirk deepened, “inflation.”

  Loukas looked at the clothes beneath the Vestian’s arm. “Are you going to give me those or not?”

  The Vestian handed them over wordlessly and left him. The pants and tunic were of soft linen, similar to the Vestian’s own, and the lace-up boots were made from supple calfskin.

  Loukas dressed and then found the Vestian again in a pantry that doubled as an armory. He tossed Loukas an archery arm guard the minute he walked inside.

  Loukas strapped it on while the Vestian was choosing a bow from among many hanging on the wall. He glanced to Loukas as he tested the tension on one of the strings. “I thought we’d catch some dinner before Fate’s rain hits.”

  “Fate’s rain?”

  “The rain heading our way, that brought the flood, that pinned you on this side of the Ver.”

  “Yes, I know what rain, but why did you call it Fate’s rain?”

  The Vestian slung a bow on his arm and offered another to Loukas, but he held onto it as Loukas wrapped his hand around the curved wood, and equally held his gaze. “You don’t think it’s fate, your getting stuck on this side of the Ver?”

  “Why would fate be involved?”

  The Vestian studied him quietly. “You think these things just happen?”

  “I think men make things happen.”

  The Vestian chuckled and released the bow. “Men are pawns of the gods, Furie.”

  Loukas followed him out of the armory. “You can’t blame the gods for everything.”

  He tossed Loukas a grin. “Well, technically, you can.”

  “To no practical purpose,” Loukas argued.

  “It might appease your own displeasure,” he returned with a wink as he opened the front door and ushered Loukas out. “It usually helps to blame someone, I find, and the gods are convenient. They never refute your claims.”

  Loukas shook his head. “No wonder your Vestian gods are all so menacing. I wouldn’t long remain benevolent if my followers’ idea of worship was a litany of accusations.”

  The Vestian pulled the door shut and led away down the steps. “A real god would never seek to be worshipped by its creations.”

  “Is that so? And you know this how?”

  They headed off across a lawn towards the forest. Above, the sky was darkening with clouds. The Vestian angled him a look. “If a god is purported to possess human qualities, that alone is proof he cannot exist. It’s only logical.”

  “Nothing in your convoluted thought processes remotely resembles logic.”

  “So says the Avataren, whose logic has half the population bound into slavery.” He shot Loukas a sidelong look full of hauteur. “Feel free to call it Vestian logic if it helps you sleep better at night.”

  Loukas stared after him for a moment, grinding his teeth. Then he jogged to catch up again. They headed into the forest, slid down a leafy ravine and followed a creek for a little way. On the far side of a cascade of little falls, the Vestian aimed a familiar look at Loukas.

  They’d hunted together countless times, but always on Loukas’s side of the Ver—everything they did together was on Loukas’s side of the Ver. Loukas had never yet learned how the Vestian knew exactly where to find their prey, but his sense never failed them. Knowing well that look, Loukas drew an arrow and nocked it to bow. Ready, his gaze said.

  The Vestian nocked an arrow, aimed it at a nearby bramble and let it fly.

  A rabbit darted out towards Loukas. He released his arrow and took the animal through the chest. The Vestian’s next arrow claimed a second rabbit as it scurried in the other direction.

  It was the fastest hunt Loukas had ever been on. He walked to retrieve rabbit and arrow. “That was anticlimactic.”

  “Truly unfair, actually,” the Vestian agreed, “but the rain’s almost here.” He grabbed up his rabbit, still twitching, and broke its neck with a practiced twist.

  As they were heading back to the house with their brace of rabbits, Loukas found himself staring at the mercuric tattoos on the Vestian’s shoulders, which were easily visible through his shirt. The patterns covering his shoulder-blades connected into a spear tracing his spine, resembling a double-bladed axe. For some reason, seeing the tattoos made Loukas wonder: what was the likelihood of him getting stranded on the wrong side of the Ver?

  A rising wind was starting to shake the limbs above them as Loukas muttered, “There’s nothing in this to indicate that Fate is involved.”

  The Vestian aimed a smile over his shoulder. “Finished calculating probabilities, I see. All of existence can’t be explained by mathematics, fire prince.”

  “Yes, it can.”

  The Vestian eyed him enigmatically. “Then walk me through the calculation that shows how I know that this storm will keep the river risen for three days.”

  Loukas came to a standstill.

  Three days?

  It would be one thing for him to sneak home in the morning hours before the dawn—his father’s guards would chalk it up to a late night of carousing in the city—but he could never account for a three-day absence. His father would be livid.

  In fact, the contemplation was so disconcerting that Loukas strongly pushed it from his thoughts. He had only the Vestian’s prediction, after all. That didn’t mean it was going to happen.

  They walked back to the cabin beneath a lashing wind, which continued to beat and howl the entire time Loukas skinned and cleaned the rabbits and the Vestian prepared vegetables for a stew. Then they sat at one end of the long table, drinking wine, while the stew cooked and the rain ran in rivulets down the windowpanes.

  In one of the silences that accompanies a night shared by old friends, the Vestian was reclining in his chair, his black hair hanging loose, halfway to his shoulders, his gaze distant. The new tattoo in the center of his chest glimmered between the open folds of his tunic.

  Loukas hadn’t been able to look away from it for nearly a quarter hour. He finally said, “Tell me about your tattoos.”

  The Vestian shifted his gaze to him. Nothing in it invited conversation on the subject. “What’s to tell?”

  “Why did you get them? What do the designs represent? What do they mean to you?”

  “Fethe, you ask a lot of questions.”

  Loukas smiled. “Well, if you weren’t so bloody mysterious about everything—”

  “There are things I’m not able to talk about. I’ve told you this before.”

  Which is pretty much anything about yourself, Loukas thought d
erisively. Still, the heat in the Vestian’s tone had cooled his curiosity. He asked more sedately, “Things like where you vanish to for months at a time?”

  The Vestian flicked his gaze to him and away again. “Things like that, yes.”

  Loukas studied his friend’s face as the latter stared off, noting how his brows narrowed into a furrow above his knife-straight nose, how he held his jaw clenched tightly even when he wasn’t biting back a retort.

  Loukas had rarely seen the Vestian show emotion. Generally he cloaked himself in satirical disregard and stood remote from the world. But on the subject of his tattoos—on this he was clearly fighting fury.

  “Would you tell me if you could?” Loukas wasn’t sure why that seemed so important to him suddenly.

  The Vestian’s gaze shifted back to him, intense and accusing, yet not accusing of Loukas. “Yes.”

  Loukas retreated to his wine, thinking about the searing look the Vestian had leveled him just then and how it had varied so greatly from his deeply intimate tone, considering which one had been the truer...wondering if he was reading too much into the answer just because he wanted to find it there.

  He reached for the bottle to refresh his goblet and noted the label for the first time. His eyes widened. “How did you come by a Rogue Valley Volga?”

  The Vestian’s smirk reappeared in all its condescension. “What, we barbarians can’t enjoy a good wine?”

  “Fiera’s breath,” Loukas waggled the bottle at him. “All I meant is that this vintage is hard to come by. My father would love to know your supplier.”

  The smirk became a smile. “I seriously doubt that.” The Vestian flowed out of his chair to check on the rabbit.

  Minutes later, they were dishing steaming stew into footed cerulean bowls that the Vestian had chosen from among his shelves of pottery. The last thing he planted on the table was an alabaster jar. He lifted off the top as he sat down.

  Loukas’s eyes nearly popped from his skull. “Crimson salt?” His gaze flew to the Vestian. “How in Fiera’s name did you get crimson salt?”

  The deep red salts were mined from the fire deserts of Avatar and were so rare that even the wealthiest of households had a limited supply. Only nobility were allowed to possess it, and it certainly wasn’t sold outside of the kingdom. The Vestian had enough of it on his table to purchase a small-sized satrapy.

  The latter settled back into his chair. “There are few things I cannot acquire if I desire them.” He looked Loukas over with this pronouncement, his tone speaking volumes in defiance of a mysterious smile. Loukas didn’t know which part to trust—his words or his intimation. “What do you desire most, fire prince?”

  Loukas gave him a withering look. He liberally sprinkled crimson salt on his stew, relishing the luxury, and thought of the last time he’d been served the rare salt—every guest at the palace of the Fire King of Kell Ashkelan had received a thimbleful to use with his meal.

  “There is a dessert they serve in Kell Ashkelan,” Loukas answered. “Very fine, very expensive, made with orange water and passion flowers.”

  “A dessert...” the Vestian said flatly. “This is your greatest wish? I give you a djinn’s proposition and you answer with a dessert?”

  Loukas smiled, shrugged.

  The Vestian shook his head. “Just when I think you can no longer surprise me.”

  They ate all the stew and drank a lot of wine and debated politics until their logic ran in tired circles. Eventually the Vestian fixed Loukas with half-lidded eyes and waved him nebulously off. “You take the bed.”

  Loukas roused from a stupor to look over at the massive ebony thing. “Where will you sleep?”

  “I don’t sleep.”

  He gave him a look. “Everyone sleeps.”

  “Fethe, do you have to argue with every bloody thing I say? Do you want the bed or not?”

  Loukas grinned and took the bed.

  The next morning, he wasn’t smiling nearly so broadly, for the dessert he found sitting on the table when he rose made his eyes grow large while his face and his wits both fell slack. “How in Fiera’s name...?”

  The Vestian murmured from across the room, “Fiera had nothing to do with it, Furie.”

  Loukas speared a stare at the Vestian, who was seated in the armchair by the fire. Then he speared a finger at the dessert. “How did you get this?”

  The other was sipping at a cup of Akkadian caffe. “I told you, I can acquire most anything I desire.”

  Loukas shook his head and stared at the impossible. He tried to compute the probability of the Vestian somehow having the rare ingredients on hand to make the very dessert Loukas had named in answer to a random question. The equations ran into non-terminating decimals.

  The Vestian had always claimed to be a prince of Vest. He seemed to live a simple life there in his lodge miles from nowhere, but clearly he had access to vast resources—the expensive furniture, the salt, the wine, the Akkadian caffe...

  The impossible dessert sitting on the table.

  “Well?” The Vestian aimed a secretive smile at him. “Aren’t you going to eat it?”

  Loukas ate it. It was perhaps even more delicious than he remembered.

  It didn’t help the day’s surreality when they went to the river and found it swollen far beyond its borders. It would be easily two days—maybe even three, Loukas hated to admit—before he could get back across it. Even the ferry seven miles upriver would be swamped.

  There was an eighty-sixty percent likelihood a night’s heavy rain would make the river rise, but the likelihood of the Vestian being able to predict how long the river would stay risen...? That was not so easily computed.

  They spent the day debating probabilities.

  Loukas’s calculations pointed to a lucky guess regarding the river and some logical explanation for the dessert—a large estate nearby, perhaps, where the Vestian might’ve acquired the ingredients. His family’s estate, say. That answer certainly made more sense for a hunting lodge planted seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

  They debated it over a meal of pheasant cooked with dried apricots and sage and another bottle of rare wine, after which the Vestian sat back in his chair to observe Loukas with a droll half-smile and those ice-pale eyes of his, so alluringly rimmed in dark blue. “All we’ve covered today, and I still haven’t convinced you?”

  Loukas stared at the wine in his goblet with numbers running through his head. Better that than hold the Vestian’s gaze; the latter was reading too deeply of him already, and Loukas was reading far too deeply into the Vestian’s come-hither smile.

  “Mathematics defines the universal structure,” Loukas said, taking refuge from the other’s arcane arguments in the practical and the known. “You’re never going to convince me otherwise.”

  His host rolled his eyes. “I’m only trying to point out that some things cannot be defined by this discipline.”

  Loukas regarded him in unconvinced response.

  The Vestian chuckled. “Well enough. I’ll guess I’ll have to offer you incontrovertible proof.”

  The next morning, Loukas woke to find a breakfast of sapphire eggs from Dheanainn, yellow pine fruit from the island of Palma Lai, and Malchiarri djawa, a dark form of caffe popular in the Fire Courts.

  Djawa had to be made with spring water imported from the Malchiarri cloud forest and protected in wax-sealed amphoras. Otherwise the caffe turned to mud in the cup.

  The famous Dheanainni sapphire eggs lose their color within a day of being laid, and the wild hens won’t lay while in captivity. If they serve the eggs in the Fire Courts, the king’s baddha yayin has to travel the nodes to the city of Dheanainn and back in a single day.

  Similarly, the yellow pine fruit must be eaten within hours of being picked or its flesh turns sour. In order to enjoy it in the Fire Courts, the kings had the plants imported and cultivated in special indoor gardens, carefully tended.

  Loukas knew little of the resources of the Vestian nobil
ity. It was conceivable that they also had pine fruit gardens and a baddha yayin to fetch sapphire eggs from Dheanainn.

  But the djawa really boggled Loukas’s mind. Whether the Vestian had acquired it from Malchiarr itself or had stolen it from the tables of the Fire Courts, there was no way he could’ve acquired it and returned with the drink in its authentic mosaic cup still steaming hot!

  “Djawa grows bitter if it cools before you drink it.” The Vestian was sitting by the fire again with an ankle propped over one knee, barefoot, mirth dancing in his eyes.

  Loukas glanced to him and back to the table. “It has to be a trick,” he muttered.

  He knew it couldn’t be a trick.

  The Vestian sipped from his own cup of djawa. “Do you now submit that there are events even mathematics cannot explain?”

  “Never.” Loukas stared at the items on the table. The odds against what was plainly before his eyes ran into the millions. “It simply hasn’t explained them yet.”

  The Vestian grinned at him. “You going to drink that djawa or just calculate probabilities in its reflection?”

  Loukas drank it. It was very hot, and very good.

  The days passed in surprising bliss. They hunted, they climbed, they cooked, they debated. They found agreement in reality and fought over ideals, and discovered new things to admire in each other.

  Loukas wasn’t sure what the Vestian saw in him, but in the other he saw reflections of the kind of man he wanted to become: steadfast in defending his beliefs, strong-willed, self-confident and independent...all of the things Loukas struggled to achieve.

  Their friendship had always been complex...complicated in the way any forbidden pursuit would be, but in those days together it deepened. The roots of their fraternity grew interwoven in ways Loukas couldn’t explain, even to himself.

  On the third morning, Loukas woke to find his clothes cleaned and laid out at the foot of the bed.

  As he stared at the once-ruined silk, so impossibly restored to integrity and color, he concluded—finally and inarguably—that the Vestian had to have some kind of talent, called the ‘binding gift’ in his own language.