#koshak

Fennel was in her cotton shift, too tired to perform modesty around Koshak, who had seen her by now in much worse states, and besides, had not moved since he laid down in his bed two hours earlier. Her Catfolk companion could nearly blend into the gray mattress, so quiet he was. They had checked into the poorly named Lovely Inn yesterday with the hopes of finding the speaker for the Saltbearers – a cult, Koshak explained shortly – before she left on a pilgrimage to Roshou. They’d had no luck yesterday, and some of the dun-cloaked members became suspicious of her and Koshak when they returned to watch their priory today. Koshak wasn’t worried yet, but Fennel was restless, and his stillness now made her even more so. The window of their shared room had been wrestled open to little effect, and the sheets smelled like someone else’s sweat, and her joints burned with a soulful ache whenever she moved. Fennel sighed heavily and rolled from her stomach to her back again.

“It’s no wonder that it’s so hot in here, you fussing like that,” Koshak said suddenly.

“Oh!” Fennel sat up, apologetic, but guiltily grateful for the distraction. “I’m sorry if I woke-”

“There is no sleeping in this. I was resting, but you are evidently not.” He waved her off. “In times like these, I find it’s best to adjust our goals to the means at hand.”

He stood from bed in a smooth motion, and Fennel instinctively looked away, chiding herself all the while. It was true, he wore no shirt, but why should he, head-to-toe in fur? There was no excuse for it, getting embarrassed just because they were near each other at night instead of in daylight. She didn’t even know what she was embarrassed for; Koshak didn’t care.

“Hound.” Koshak tapped her arm with a wine bottle he’d retrieved from his bag. “If you’re praying, can you tell your fucking sun god to go easier on the mortals down here?” Fennel looked up and realized that she was curled over her lap, indeed, much like when she prayed. She straightened and wagged a finger at him.

“Blasphemer,” she scolded, because she knew it would make him laugh. “To ask the Morning Mother, weaver of life, to stifle the sun-”

“Alright, alright.” He raised his hands and sat on the floor against his bed. “What about the other one?”

“The other…?”

“Your other god. The death one.”

Koshak tilted his head expectantly, and Fennel pressed her lips together, suddenly unsure.

“What,” she said carefully, “about her.”

He opened the wine and passed it to her first. It was not very good, Fennel noted.

“What does she…do? Because you say she is dead, but you call on her still- Don’t look so surprised, I hear your prayers every day. I hear her name.”

“It's…” Fennel joined Koshak on the marginally cooler floor. It wasn’t his fault that Dwarvish didn’t have the language to describe it, but it wasn’t proper to speak of the Mourning Mother carelessly; she had no place in the breath of the living. But maybe because it was night and the air was so still anyway that Fennel unfolded the story of the sky for him: the two mothers, in various regions told as wives, sisters, or, as Fennel knew them, parent and child. One, with the fiery eye that bloomed color and light into the day. The other with a silent silver that soothed the night. Then, how the Mothers together watched the Early Wars as people were directed by their gods to spill blood and blood and blood until the young goddess of the night - peaceful, dutiful, tragic girl - sacrificed herself to end it. She tore herself away from her mother or her sister or her wife, and cast herself to the earth. The impact was incredible. Great fissures formed in the earth between the people, and the sea rose to separate them. Her divine blood cleansed everything that it touched, and so the world forgot the great violences that were enacted on each other.

“And from her sacrifice, there was peace and is peace still, because even though it killed her, she is…absorbed in the world, in all of the dark or dangerous places that the sun can’t reach.”

A clock tower was ringing the next hour of the night by now, and the wine was mostly gone between them. It was dark, with only a sickly gas lamp outside casting shadows over the room. Koshak didn’t say anything immediately, had fallen into a pensive quiet while Fennel spoke.

“…Ko-?”

“I can see why you would like that story,” Koshak said neutrally.

Fennel looked at him curiously. She did, but the way that Koshak kept his eyes on the window behind her made her hesitate before agreeing.

Then, like a coin flip, his easy grin returned.

“I would tell you one in return, but Beastfolk are so scattered that most are anecdotal: times that a spirit helped someone, others that they fucked them blood-to-brine.” Koshak shrugged. “There may be one about some great crash between worlds that let the spirits travel to begin with, but I don’t know it very well. Maybe that was your god.”

It was an interesting thought. Fennel took another sip of wine. Eugh.

“I’d like to know the story, if we can find someone to tell it. Oh! That spirit tender we met in Laudum!”

“Eugh…” Koshak’s lip curled. “I was hoping that was the last time I would see him. Actually, I had hoped that the first time I met him would be the last.”

“You don’t like that he plays the same game as you,” Fennel teased, and Koshak bristled.

“I do not play games,” he hissed. “I have a way of going about my dealings, this is true, but I am effective and I am careful, because negotiations are what keep me alive. That arrogant asshole plays games; he thrives in making complications. You have no idea what he was-”

“I know.” Fennel was laughing fully now. “I know what he was trying to do. And it’s kind of you to have been worried about me.” She patted his hand. “We’ll find someone else, then.”

Fennel considered their journey so far. Four months of travel. Four months of grueling investigation in town after city after village. Four months to consider Koshak her friend. They did well together, better than Fennel had expected and certainly better than Koshak would admit. She had traveled on her own for three years before they met in the capital, and she’d convinced herself that she wasn’t lonely if she had her prayers and her work. But one day, maybe even one day soon, their investigation would conclude and…

“What do you think you’ll do after?” she asked.

“What-? Oh, you mean if the Imperial Guard holds to their word?”

“They will,” Fennel said firmly. Koshak shook his head, but continued.

“If they hold to their word, and my record is erased…”

Koshak leaned his elbows against his knees while he thought. Fennel found it hard to believe that he hadn’t considered this before. He had been resistant at the start, and for good reason, but a lot had changed since then. There had to be something more keeping him here than the bland curiosity that he started with. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “Work on a ship again, I suppose, if I can find one to take me. But the truth is that I will probably get arrested again anyway. I have very good skills for one kind of life, and I don’t really have the temperament for another.” Then, a harsh scoff. He extended his long, furred arm to demonstrate. “Or the looks.”

Fennel’s heart stung as it often did for her friend, and the wine said, “I’ve always thought you looked-” 

Koshak’s ear twitched, and Fennel froze, whatever she’d been ready to say having abandoned her. Koshak looked… 

Well, he had terrible posture, always leaned askance or hunched forward to sneer at her, and as nimbly as he moved, he looked gangly and awkward when he was still. His gray fur matted into a rough, uneven texture, even in the unlikely event that he groomed it, as if he’d been raked up from the dredges of the ocean. His face was difficult to read, even his laugh was nothing more than a staccato flash of teeth.

That didn’t mean she hadn’t been just a little entranced when she first met him. Koshak was quick, in all senses of the word; the way that he could spin solutions out of nothing always seemed to Fennel to be his very own kind of magic. She had seen very few Beastfolk in Illari, and the long lines of his body were alien compared to her square, squat Half-folk build, or the barrel chests of Dwarves. And more fragile; she hated to see him hurt.

“…Nice,” she finally finished weakly.

Koshak’s vivid eyes fixed on her curiously. Fennel felt the strangest rush of panic when he began to lean toward her, but she didn’t move.

He picked up the wine bottle beside her and made a show of gauging how much she’d drunk of it.

“Wow. Thanks, Fennel.” He was laughing at her. She let out a breath.

Koshak didn’t return the question. It was something they didn’t talk about. Even now, at rest, at night, Fennel could feel the heat of the Morning Mother that she had sworn to carry in her heart and in her body. Does it hurt? Koshak once asked her, and she hadn’t known how to answer. What did it feel like to channel a god? There wasn’t a comparison in the mortal world. Spirit tenders could lose their sight and even their minds. Wizards were well known for their watery lungs and fouled blood. Even the great alchemists had their slow, inevitable tumors. But how did Fennel explain the equal crushing burden and weightless clarity, or the stinging intensity and warm comfort. When the Mothers worked through her, it was a feeling of everything that left no room for anything, including Fennel herself. It didn’t hurt. It felt like she was dying. But she couldn’t say that without…

He wouldn’t understand.

“You’ll be alright, wherever you go,” Fennel said. She added gently, as if she was only speaking to the night, “…I’ll miss you.”

Koshak tensed and then very deliberately relaxed.

“Don’t talk like that, Fennel. You can visit me in jail.”

“You won’t go to jail,” Fennel said stubbornly.

“Granted, it might be hard to find me if the next poor bastard I’m stuck with drowns me first-”

“It’s not going to happen!” He was trying to make her laugh, but she hated to encourage him.

“That’s beyond even your powers to decide, Fennel.”

“I’ll keep you safe,” she said firmly as if her heart didn’t jump at the thought, and she pressed herself against Koshak’s side. Again, she felt him still. He took a deep breath.

“Well. You would have to still be around to do that.”

Fennel barely kept from flinching from the cracks forming in what they didn’t talk about.

“I will for as long as I can.”

“Fennel…” Koshak used this tone when she was about to start a losing fight: two parts warning, one part resignation.

“Koshak,” she challenged back.

“Don’t.”

Fennel pulled back to look at him.

“You don’t want me to stay?” she demanded, and his shoulders curled defensively.

“That’s not-” His jaw muscle ticked silently. “You’re asking me to watch you kill yourself.”

You’d rather I do it alone?

Fennel shuddered from the thought. That was wrong. She’d already made her peace with her life. Most mages could last for twenty, twenty-five years before the demands of magic crippled them. Thirty if they were careful. Fennel had nearly five and could feel herself beginning to burn. That was why she left her home and her family. Koshak was different. He didn’t pull her from her work, he helped focus and ground her; she’d never been as effective on her own as with him. And he was better, too, a far cry from the wasting misanthrope she’d first met.

“Then tell me you want me to leave,” she said, praying that he wouldn’t.

“Fennel…”

“Because I’ll go if you want me to, but only if you want me to.” And there was a time that he might have, but now he only looked pained. “Because I want to stay.”

“Fennel, you don’t-”

“I do.”

Koshak leaned forward, and pinned her in place, neat as a bug, with nothing more than the weight of his heavy yellow eyes.

“You don’t know what that means,” he said hoarsely.

“Then tell me.”

What space remained between them was scorching hot. Finally, he shook his head and closed the distance to press his lips to hers. Fennel instantly felt it in every nerve of her body. She was shocked that such simple contact could do that.

This, Koshak. This feels like magic, she wanted to tell him, but she wasn’t sure he would understand that either.

When Koshak pulled back, way, sharp, defensive, he said, “That is-” but Fennel leaned forward again before he could speak. He’d been prepared to argue, she could feel it in the biting angle of his mouth, but all of his objections fell like cards around him. Fennel felt her back press to the floor and Koshak against her skin.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this, her friendship with Koshak. His hand hooked under her knee to draw it up, and a thought floated across her mind to point out, quite obviously, that friends didn’t do what she and Koshak were doing, but right now she couldn’t imagine any other way it could have gone. She felt soft and pliant, like she would go wherever he led her. Koshak didn’t have her mountain-born modesty and touched her like he was already deeply familiar with her. And of course he was. He had picked her up, she’d knocked him away from danger enough times that of course he knew her body. Of course she trusted him with it.

Koshak’s waist settled lower against her hips, and she sighed into the dizzying feeling that she was falling ever so slowly…

Too much. This was too much. She wanted this too much.

“Stop,” Fennel gasped. One hand - the other still buried in the ruff Koshak’s neck - batted against his shoulder for his attention, but Koshak had already pulled away.

Snap. The magic was broken, and a sick wave of shame engulfed her. She felt burned everywhere that he had touched. The room felt twice as dark as before, as if the sun had stared into her eyes. And Koshak…

Koshak was looking at her with such rare, naked concern that she wanted to scream.

It’s not fair.

Because Fennel could pull Koshak back down to kiss her again, and again tomorrow, and the day after. She could follow him for once and, after their investigation was concluded, they could travel on their own terms. She could try to repair some of the damage that magic had wrought on her body. All it would take was turning her back on everything she had sworn to do and spitting on everything she’d already given up to do it.

She felt feverish for want of it.

“I-” Fennel choked off into a pathetic whimper. Hot bile stung her throat, and so all she could manage was to shake her head.

Concern slipped briefly into confusion, and then…to a cold, dark nothing. Fennel’s hand slipped from Koshak’s neck to land meekly on her chest, and as if released from great bindings, he twitched himself upright. Fennel instinctively sat up and pulled her shift taut to her knees from where it had ridden up her thighs. Only through great effort did she meet Koshak’s scathing eyes.

“You…” He let out a shaky, insincere laugh. “You…never listen to me.”

I’m sorry, but it would have been to an empty room.

Fennel had to imagine that all the heat in the world left with Koshak. The cold had never bothered her, but her body shivered and then shook. She felt weak and loose-limbed — kittenish, her mother called it. Fennel stood and took one unsteady step forward, but then sank back to her knees. Where was there to go? She’d chosen to stay exactly where she was.