Midwinter Gifts, a Good End AU ficlet

[guardiansverse]

Two years later...

The Land’s Own Guardian of Hyem rode into Alsden three days before midwinter, while the pall of a great storm tried and failed to breathe down the neck of preparations for the holy day. For all its hardships the city wore its best for the darkest night of the year, white holly and golden winterling blooms above every doorway, laughing children brandishing their winter cups at every stranger who looked to have a treat or penny to spare, and all within a cloud of sweet raisincake smell. He tossed out his share of pennies, and accepted a number of raisincakes that once would have surprised the bakers who knew him. But this year they already expected it, and the careful way he wrapped the cakes up and put them all in one saddlebag. This year it was expected, too, that he would hurry through the most urgent of business – never less than meticulous, but clearly with more on his mind – before parting with his companions and heading to the Ilyigan quarter.

“Not figured out how to get rid of them yet, have you,” he said with a tip of his head at the storm clouds, making the man who met him at the gate scoff.

“You should’ve taken the train.”

“I don’t take the train on winter circuit.”

“And then you catch a cold and complain about it.”

“Brat,” Detrich laughed, and pulled Saul into his arms.

For a moment Saul indulged in noticing he had nearly caught up to his mentor in height, give or take no more than two or three inches, surely. Then he forgot it and leaned his brow down against Detrich’s shoulder. Some folk stuck their heads out their windows to curiously watch their Land’s Own and the Refugees’ Guardian, but he paid them no mind at all.

They’d been fraught reunions, in the first two years serving as Guardian to the quarter. The first time Detrich had visited had been in the midst of war, with both of them distracted and on edge. Last winter, too, had had something of the test in it: the Land’s Own seeing how his strangest Guardian fared in peacetime, with peacetime’s own winter problems. This was the first time nothing else hung in the balance. Detrich had come on the winter circuit, of course, under the banner of a Land’s Own’s duty. But for the first time, when pulling out of the hug, he didn’t launch into business: only stood back for a long moment, looking at the man he’d made.

“You’ve grown taller again,” was his verdict, as if Saul didn’t know.

“Did you expect me to stop?”

“It will happen,” Detrich said wryly, then grinned at Saul’s half-hearted swing of a fist. “Stop that or you won’t get any raisincakes. How are you?”

“Practicing my fire-jumping,” Saul said cheerfully, for no reason but to see Detrich puff up in disapproval only to deflate again with a sigh of futility. His mentor would come see the midwinter show, of course. “How many rainsincakes can you eat by yourself? Not giving me some would be a waste.”

“You never change, do you, lad.”

“Never, sir.”

“Have your damned raisincakes, then,” Detrich said and threw the saddlebag at him, his grin now all helpless fondness.

Saul had changed, and so didn’t open the bag at once to see his haul. He did see, as he went to sling it over his shoulder, something threaten to drop out, and caught it: a brown paper package, wrapped by a careful hand. He made to return it only for Detrich to raise a hand to stop him.

“That is also for you. From Mia, with her love.”

Saul blinked and pulled the package back out. Light, soft – some article of clothing, he thought, and braced himself for a warm scarf accompanied by a note about refusing to believe Alsden’s winters were not hardly that bad.

But it was a vest – a votive soldier’s red vest, golden tassel and all. Wonderfully well made, each button a shining copper sunburst, and he unfolded it fully to realize it was long enough to fit the height he’d gained. How did she even know?

“Gus gave her the idea,” Detrich said to his wide-eyed delight. “Said a young man your age ought to have one. She sends apologies for not realizing sooner.”

Sooner? It was a moment before Saul remembered his own eighteenth birthday, come and gone with little fanfare that past midsummer. In Ilyiga it would have been different, had his life gone to its original plan. His full and proper initiation as his sacerdote grandfather’s heir. Here in Hyem, there were years of study to catch up on still.

Detrich would have found the thought painful, he knew, in that strange way that he saw his mentor as he did no one else. Would have keenly felt each year as a loss. But I came back – to Him, as He meant me to.

“It’s a finer gift than the suit Anké gave me,” he breathed out, half laughing at the face Detrich made, then scrunched his own nose. “I’m in her debt now. Mia always keeps count, you know.”

”It’s a gift of love, lad.” An odd hoarseness in Detrich’s voice. Saul looked up from the vest with one of the many choice comments he’d been stocking up about winter journeys and winter colds, only to find on his mentor’s face that particular look, half pain and half eagerness, that Detrich wore whenever Saul was surprised by something that ought to have been very simple. “There is no counting. The giving is its own reward. For her, and for – “

And cut off, suspiciously abrupt. Saul studied him with a frown. Not quite surprised: there were still moments where Detrich would stop, hesitate, caught in some emotion he seemed unable to permit himself. And this was the first visit of its kind – no duty, no pressing affair, only the two of them.

But the Land’s Own was grinning, faint but clear within his dark beard.

If anything, Saul frowned harder. “What?”

“You’ll see.” Detrich’s grin flashed briefly wider. “Now come, show me what you’ve learned.”



Saul continued to be suspicious, but only until they took up the swords.

He never used the chain-whip, sparring with Detrich: it could not feel clean in his hands. But they never wielded other than live steel. The first few rounds with swords only, weaving around each other in a mix of expert insight and dazzling daring. Both of them knowing, delighted and galled, that they faced an equal – or nearly so. Detrich lost four in five times, as he did in every one of their sessions since Saul had first beaten him years before, winning only when Saul let himself get cocky. He wasn’t even graceless about it: they both knew.

Five rounds in, sufficiently warmed up, they began to use soul-power.

Saul’s world narrowed down and expanded at the same time: the sky, his ally, and the earth, his enemy. Staying still even for a moment would end in pain. He wrapped himself in fog: Detrich tracked him by his footsteps. He called blasts of wind to keep Detrich back and was answered by rocks springing up to trip him and keep him within striking range. He fought as no man had ever fought and hoped to live, never mind win. Fought against the might of a Land’s Own Guardian on his own soil.

And always too soon: “Enough!”

Saul froze with his arm halfway up to command a burst of hail, every muscle alight and his veins all one rush of savage joy.

He breathed out slowly, blowing away the fog with it. The wind and rain were no longer all his own, the storm now melting into winter’s much greater power, but he had control enough to allow the two of them a patch of relative peace within it. Detrich stood catching his breath, grinning fiercely as he raked his wet hair back where the wind had pulled it loose from its plait.

“Enough,” he said again at Saul’s throwing up his hands in frustration. “I can’t waste a month’s worth of this city’s power entertaining you. Tell the other Guardians you have youthful energy to spend.”

“None of them dares to even try!”

“That’s what happens when you outfight the Adalan royal fleet by your lonesome.” Never mind that that particular feat had been Detrich’s own idea. The Land’s Own moved to wipe his rain-slicked sword on his jacket wing before sheathing it, only to pull up short when he realized the fabric was too soaked to be much help. “Sun’s mercy, lad. I’ll know who to blame when I do catch a cold.”

Saul laughed, but stopped short to see Detrich clear his throat and swallow uneasily. Every damned winter. He should have stayed home. It wasn’t even duty that had truly brought him to Alsden…

Detrich dropped his hand to raise an eyebrow at him. “You aren’t getting another round just for me to prove I’m fit,” he said, wry and faintly grinning once more. “Let’s go to the temple. You know what else I want to see.”



The storm could throw itself against the city, but inside the temple the Sun shone always. They stopped three times: once to bow to the sunburst where it stood, the light from the temple fire caressing its gold; once to speak with the grand sacerdote, who mostly hurried them along to their next stop; and lastly at Saul’s quarters to change into dry clothes, which was perhaps the most important errand. Then at last they went upstairs to the scriptorium.

No one worked there this close to midwinder, with all the temple’s attention on the upcoming holy day. Silence towered up to the high arched ceiling, added itself to the sheer weight of the books on their dark oak shelves that could make any man feel a child again. Some earliest instinct made Saul keep his voice very low as he walked through pointing out the latest projects and purchases. Detrich walked slowly behind him, his eyes everywhere but on his own path ahead. Saul had seen him walk into a table, three chairs, and at least half a dozen people without noticing on his various visits to the scriptorium: he looked at the books not unlike how Saul remembered looking at food on the first days of his exile.

Saul’s desk stood beneath the great window, meticulously neat and clean. Not a pen nib out of place and not a scrap of paper wasted. I really have changed.

Detrich nodded in obvious gratification to see the well-kept wood. The hungry look in his eyes grew keener by the moment as Saul sat down and opened the drawer. Awe, Saul thought: there had been a time he had neither understood nor believed it. And yet even then, Detrich had said, Keep practicing. And he had obeyed.

Now he took out from the drawer a handful of sheafs, cheap paper all, but Detrich reached out to them as though they matched the sunburst’s gold.

“I see the improvement,” the Land’s Own said, resonant with pride’s particular pleasure. “Even with an untrained eye. Here, this transition where you used to slip the pen too hard left…”

“The trick is in the wrist, not the fingers.”

“Greater economy of movement, too. I suppose they don’t let you spill ink like water…”

“Unlike you, sir?” Saul asked, the wry approximation of his mentor’s voice perfect. Detrich gave a snort, then a laugh.

“A wonder, lad,” he murmured, shaking his head in – there it was again. Awe.

Saul left him absorbed in leafing through the pages and reached back into the drawer. A wonder, Detrich was saying, and that hungering look… there were still moments when Detrich would stop, would pull himself back from what was so wanted as to be dreaded. Once Saul hadn’t understood it, had been too much of a boy to understand; now he was a man, and had had his lesson at being nearly destroyed by what one loved.

But only nearly: and fortune favoured the bold.

He pulled out the palm-sized slip of parchment. No paper for this: fine vellum, a week’s wages for the full piece, as tender to the touch as spring sunlight. Putting his quill to it had been almost terrifying even for him. But the lines lay straight one below the other, as they had been practiced a thousand times, and then twelve times again from memory alone to consecrate the mind, the eye, the hand for the final act of true scribing.

He held it up just as Detrich lowered the sheafs. “Here. For you.”

A flash of surprise on his mentor’s face, and then fascination. “This is a… psalm card?”

Of course he knows. Trust Detrich to know everything, even Ilyigan practices unheard of by the Hyemi Easterners. “Not a properly sanctified one. That requires initiation, and I…” Saul shrugged. The god knows what He knows. “It isn’t really right for me to make them. But I wanted you to have it.”

He was braced for some disapproval at this small disobedience, but Detrich was already preoccupied with running a slow finger over the scribed lines. “I don’t read this script. What prayer…?”

“For a peaceful night.”

“Hah!” Detrich said: but the sound was hushed with emotion.

He turned the card in his hand, and again. Seeing with his particular sight, every lovingly rendered inch for the work it was, and the work for all the effort that went into making it possible.

Quietly he said, “The vellum would have been costly.”

Saul shrugged. “I can afford it.”

“Can isn’t should.”

Some things did never change, then. Saul jerked his chin up. “Did you want me to scribe holy prayer on a rag paper?”

It stopped Detrich in his tracks, which served. Saul rose from his chair, carefully took the psalm card from his mentor’s hand and slid it into the coat pocket of Detrich’s greatcoat. “I made it for you. I don’t care how much it cost. It’s a, a…” There was a word, there on the tip of his tongue, but still it would not come.

He expected Detrich’s look at him, that saw as always deeper into him than Saul sometimes thought he could see himself: expected his mentor’s nod, half resigned, and the hand clasping his shoulder. He did not expect Detrich to then reach over and ruffle his hair, as he’d not done since Saul had been sixteen and first left for his new home in Alsden.

“Study for your own self, lad,” his mentor said. “When I see you initiated, with your future sure, that would be the finest gift you can give me.”

My future. Perhaps that would never change, either: the shiver down to Saul’s bones when Detrich spoke of it, like the sight of the seaward horizon of his boyhood, endless and arching blue-into-blue toward the sky. Most days Saul forgot them, the would bes and could bes, that had never been anything but gnawing on dry bones during the war. But Detrich saw the horizon always, clearer than he saw the everyday fog around him: and Saul had never trusted a compass more.

He didn’t want to point out the flaw in the vision, the plain fact that there was no one in Hyem to initiate him in the Ilyigan scribal tradition, never mind the Tezzeiste or Samari. Didn’t want to be contrary for once, though it was the truth. Instead he said, “You’ll be a while waiting.”

Detrich flashed a grin. “I might be.”

What on earth does that mean? But before Saul could as much as open his mouth, Detrich gave a faint shudder and pulled the collar of his greatcoat up, and that was the end of any thought except on the everyday. “Well, I am done waiting for a hot dinner. Come see what I’ve been learning about baking panforte.”

“You’ve... baking?” But his mentor followed readily enough, pausing only to pat his coat pocket once with a careful hand.



Detrich judged his panforte adequate, which Saul accepted magnanimously knowing the man could hardly claim any expertise. They ate in the temple kitchens with the other acolytes, the lot crowding around their Land’s Own leaving him hardly any room to breathe in the aroma of his meal, certainly never noticing when he began to flag with tiredness. But Saul was there, who had no duty to listen and be concerned with every dull young man’s dull tale, and who knew him and saw. And who knew, further and better, that Detrich was still too much the soldier to gainsay him when Saul snapped at these men he outranked, “Enough chatter. We’re hungry.”

“They obey you,” his mentor remarked as they climbed back up to Saul’s quarters. The storm was still howling outside, but in that small chamber the fire burned high and sure, as high as Saul pleased it to. Here was home, where he would be as warm as though he were in Ilyiga’s gentle southern winters.

“They ought to,” he said as he took his seat by the fire. Detrich took the other, stretching out his long legs. “I’m a scribal candidate, all they are is hymn-singers. One day they’ll be serving my meals.” Detrich looked at him sidelong. “I know it’s all important work. But that is the temple’s way.”

“You’ve never had trouble? Boys this age, they get jealous.” And you a foreigner remained unspoken.

“Some worshippers don’t like having a Guardian serve in the temple – say it’s a Westerner custom, which is true enough. But there is no prohibition on me scribing. And they know my lineage. The grand sacerdote tells them they’re blessed to have Ifreym Ansh’s grandson scribe for their temple.”

Detrich nodded once, listening but just a touch distracted. Eyes heavy-lidded staring into the flames. He did not think much of hierarchies or lineages, Saul thought as he rose to retrieve the bottle of schnapps from its crate under his bed. But he had respected the ways of Saul’s faith from the first, and had never once spoken against Saul’s choice of studying at the temple instead of university...

He was just turning back to the fire with the open bottle in hand when Detrich spoke up.

“Are you happy, Saul?”

Saul stopped where he stood, the bottleneck cool in his hand.

Likely sensing it, Detrich half-turned in the chair, squinted at him through the flames’ afterimage. He raised a hand in a vague wave then raked it back through his half-undone hair. “Forgive me, lad. I’m tired. I’ve not told you a single piece of news from the capitol, have I? Estate taxes would bore you, but the plan for the Traispunt-Alsden rail is at last to be presented to the Kaiser when I return from circuit. You’ll be riding to Traispunt in less than a day by next midsummer, mark my words. Remarkable, what can be accomplished when the Duchess makes her husband spend an hour listening to me... she’s taken to visiting the university, has she written you about it? Mia has been introducing her in the women students’ circles. They’re common in Lansikaa, I hear, women’s learned salons…”

“I remember.” Anké had spoken to him of her studies in Lansikaa. Three years past now, in the early days of their acquaintance. Before Saul had understood quite what she saw looking at him: another soul torn away from the life that it had once seen before it as sure as the white sail that flew a ship forward.

Am I happy?

He was alive, safe, well-fed, well-sheltered, well-honoured. He was a Guardian, knew his power and feared nothing and no one. And whatever his god knew, whatever He’d meant...

He settled back into his seat, poured one glass and another, then handed Detrich his before taking the first sip of the bittersweet autumn flavour.

“Do you know, sometimes I forget,” he mused, looking into the glass. Detrich was leaning slightly forward, watching him with those eyes that saw him whole. “I try not to, but that is who I am, too. The forgetting. Sometimes it’s as though my life here is the only one I have ever had. The way I was meant for, as if the war never happened. Other times…” he shrugged. “Other times it’s the other way around.”

No one is meant for anything, he thought Detrich might say. But his mentor only gave one, slow nod.

He took a sip and Detrich did the same, only to lean forward again and ask, “Are you glad to forget one or the other?”

Where does he find those questions? “What does it matter? It happened, all of it. And now I am what I am.”

“And is it what you wish to be?”

The future, Saul thought: what was it like to see it through Detrich’s eyes, to be shaped by it as much as by the past? “I have my duties here. I like them and do them well – “

“Not only your duties.” A trace of strange humour in the line of Detrich’s mouth. “Fire-jumping…”

“It’s for the midwinter rites.”

“Baking?”

“I like food. Sir.”

His mentor sat back for a sip and looked at him over the rim of the glass.

He’s still listening. There was no growing used to it, being listened to with such purpose. Saul’s thoughts wandered eerily back: a late autumn day in the capitol, Detrich’s full, patient attention on him after their first spar. The feeling of a quiet space in his own mind, the memory of living budding again where there had only been death and snarling defiance of death. I want, I want...

He’d thought it finished, that slow opening: Detrich would have said, Nothing is ever finished.

“Fortune favours the bold,” he said at last, slowly: the words a bedrock, the eye around which the world could spin where it would. That, and I have you. “I thought it meant only battle, when it had meant defeating you. And in another life...” he glanced out the window, to the storm, and back. “But I can outfight any man alive. I know what I can do. And I want... I want more. What I don’t know. This life, I don’t know if I can live it. But fortune favours the bold: so I will.”

Watch me. It was on the tip of his tongue to add. But Detrich already was watching, the eyes that saw him whole, and the echo of wry humour had turned to the seed of a brilliant grin. Nothing needed saying. It was all there already. Oh, lad, won’t I just.

They sat for a while after that, drinking and trading idle news: temple politics, Detrich’s time on circuit, Mia’s letters from university, and between the schnapps and the fire it might not have been winter at all. When silence came it did so comfortably, a soft quilt of the sudden presence of the room’s own sounds. The crackling hearth. The rain on the temple roof. The midnight chime and in its wake the hymn to the darkest hour’s passing.

Saul’s mind was drifting. Detrich had checked himself halfway through the bottle and welcomed him to the rest, and it made his bones light and his thoughts slippery. Easy to fall asleep like this, here and now, but there was something…

Softly, he asked, “Are you happy, sir?”

Detrich’s eyes had been nearly shut, but now opened readily. For a moment studying Saul as though he barely parsed the question.

Then he chuckled, a touch hoarse. “Even Ander knows better than to ask that.” And he grinned once more, leaning back in the chair and closing his eyes. “Ask me again tomorrow.”

Saul’s head was not yet so muzzy as to miss protesting that that made no sense: but enough that he let it go and let the midnight hymn lull him to sleep.



Come morning the storm proved spiteful, persisting in a lashing rain that hounded the two of them through their diverging errands in the Ilyigan quarter. Cold was one thing, but such vengefully wet weather on midwinter’s holy day would be a bad omen, and the community was suitably nervous and irritable, children staring mournfully out the window with their unhung swallowtail lanterns and women cursing undried white laundry. It hardly took Saul an hour to grow sick of being asked if he couldn’t dispel the clouds. Much too much of the rest of the morning was spent breaking up petty disputes, and at noon, just as he was taking out his own whites, the temple’s sacrificial bull broke loose and had to be chased and hauled back through half the quarter’s worth of muddy streets.

Saul’s afternoon had been set aside for a last practice with the fire-jumpers. Now he went back to the temple himself in a mood as black as the rainclouds.

It was evening by the time Detrich returned, rain-soaked, weary of web-work, and sniffling just as Saul knew he would be. He waved off Saul’s offer of hot cider twice before relenting, himself in some rumble of impatience and failing utterly to downplay it. Did he think he’d be happy once he’d worked himself sick? Saul thought with no little resentment: then decided there were perhaps better means for a man to prove his courage than saying that to Detrich’s face.

Instead he stoked the fire, made sure the windows were latched tight, and went downstairs to the temple kitchens to see what could be appropriated from among the great bustle of work on the next day’s feast. Melted cheese sizzled, sausages popped, and everything was redolent of cloves and roasted apples. But without claiming priority for the Land’s Own Guardian’s dinner – sorely tempting, but an offense Detrich would not have forgiven for all the roast apples in Alsden – all he could obtain were two bowls of sorrel soup. He was climbing the stairs with one in each hand and a hunk of rye bread held in his teeth when the noise started from below.

Commotions on the temple’s street were common as puddles in the storm, doubly so on holy days. Saul ignored the voices drifting up to the window in favour of balancing the bowls as he shouldered the door open.

Detrich was sat in his fireside chair, cider mug in one hand and a handful of papers in the other, now and then muttering irately or else giving a sniff equally attributable to his cold or to his impatience with what he was reading. At Saul’s entry he looked up, then blinked and glanced at the window with furrowed brows.

“Is something happening outside?”

Saul put both bowls on the desk, grabbed the bread and tore off a bite. Were that something outside within his purview, he reasoned, he’d have heard the screams already. “Children who can’t wait for their mornpennies, most like. The acolytes will chase them off.”

Detrich remained still and listening, apparently unconvinced. And there was something odd about the tone of the carrying sounds, Saul thought: some striking excitement.

Well: that didn’t change the fact that it was no duty of his, that he was hungry, and that the rain was coming down in great wretched sheets. He turned around from the desk with a bowl of soup and half the bread in hand to offer his mentor and scowled to find Detrich getting to his feet. “Where are you going?”

“To see what’s the matter, where else?”

“No, you aren’t. It’s hell’s own rain outside and you’re getting ill.”

Detrich snorted, already pulling on his second boot. “Try and stop me.”

Saul considered it. The day had been long, and he’d gone running around in the mud once already, and there was the soup getting cold to consider. But Detrich was up and out the door before grabbing him could be done without attracting some attention in the temple: and as Saul stuck his own head out, he realized the stairwell was full of temple folk all rushing down.

Something was the matter. He shoved his way through the gathering crowd. Detrich was not waiting for him to catch up but moving ahead with a Land’s Own’s privilege of not ever having to shove, out through the temple gates and to the street. Saul took a moment to both mumble a curse and flip up the hood of his coat, and then it was out into the street.

Briefly he saw only the curtain of miserable rain pounding on many heads. Then he saw the carriage.

He had never before seen a carriage – a proper, well-appointed vehicle, four handsome horses pulling – come into the refugees’ quarter: and he had never before seen Detrich offer a man coming down from a carriage a bow of full courtesy. The man wore sacerdotal red and white, and as he raised his hand to greet the Land’s Own, a tassel flashed at his wrist.

A scribe. Saul redoubled his pushing, shouldering through the press of other acolytes moving closer, his feet buoyed by astonishment and awe.

Not one tassel, but three: black, silver, and gold. A fully initiated scribe, a maestro. An older man almost of age with the temple’s grand sacerdote. And not Hyemi, either: dark-skinned, curly-haired, square-faced. Ilyigan.

The crowd was parting as Detrich led the man to the temple gate, and then they and Saul were face to face.

“This is the lad,” Detrich was saying to the scribe, then turned to Saul and said, “Saul, this is Maestro Bonico DiFiori, recently of the grand temple in Ardobur.”

He’d been three years in Hyem: but suddenly Saul found he’d forgotten all his Hyemi. He couldn’t speak a word. Ardobur – that’s in Adalas, he’d come all the way from Adalas. From the Ilyigan community there. And still Detrich was speaking on, “I invited him to come – it took time to arrange…”

“Bloody Queen Beatrice is not keen on her Easterner subjects traveling to Hyem of all places,” Maestro DiFiori cut in, smiling, though that couldn’t really be something to smile about – smiling at the sight of him, Saul realized. “But I could hardly stay away, hearing that Ifreym Ansh’s grandson had taken up the pen.”

Saul felt his own mouth move stupidly. The whole crowd both outside and within the temple must be staring at him, but they’d all but vanished from his awareness, they, the rain, the long day and all. “Maestro… I… you knew him?“

“By reputation. But you will find, figliolo, that every grand sacerdote on the continent knew.”

I left. It was on the tip of Saul’s faltering tongue. Not even with regret: if he’d ever known regret at all, his Guardian’s centre had burned it away. But with the freedom of that came certainty. I’ll never be what he wanted me to be. Even his God knew it, who forbade Guardians to act as sacerdotes in His temples: his God, and Detrich.

Detrich, who said, “I asked Maestro DiFiori if he would come to instruct and initiate you as a scribe.”

Three years he’d been in Hyem, under Detrich’s wing, three years since his exile, and in all of them, Saul had wept all of twice. Once with relief at his mentor’s bedside, once with desperate grief in his arms. And now again the tears came: and they were tears of awestruck gratitude.

“I…” he rasped, fighting and failing to speak through the emotion. All he could do was nod. My future. Standing before him, clear and real as sunrise. Without a care for the paths shut behind: asking only courage to be seized.

It was Detrich once again who saved him from that overwhelm, by means of a loud sneeze that made the Maestro gently inquire if they might step indoors. There the temple’s grand sacerdote met them and swiftly took over the welcome with a readiness that showed he’d been expecting his guest. Saul lingered by the gate with Detrich, wondering how long the three men must have planned the Maestro’s arrival together. The complexities of bringing such an important visitor over from Adalas. The expense. And all of it hidden from him, and the timing…

“I worried the weather would delay him,” Detrich spoke up, catching the glance Saul sent his way. His eyes were brilliant in the light of the temple’s hundred candles. “It’s bad luck, a midwinter gift given late… you’ll not act the brat with him, I trust. You’ll be on your best damned behaviour, and learn.”

Saul still didn’t trust his voice, still felt the hot tracks of his tears mingle with the cool rainwater on his face, his heart just as brilliant within him. He could only nod again, could only come close and lean his forehead against Detrich’s shoulder, pushing close.

“Good,” his mentor murmured, one hand stroking once over Saul’s hair. “You’ll learn, lad, and I’ll be happy.”



They saw little of each other the next day, both caught up in the flurry of midwinter’s eve. By the time Saul came up from breakfast Detrich was gone from the quarter altogether, away visiting Alsden’s Western shrines and the town square where he would lead the Westerner ceremony as Land’s Own – under a freshly clear sky, Saul noted with a duly thankful addition to his morning prayers. For himself he was spared half an hour to show his calligraphy work to his new master before finding himself needed in at least three places at once.

It was long past midnight by the time Detrich returned to the temple to join the overnight prayer vigil. He lasted an hour at it before the grand sacerdote, taking pity, sent him upstairs with the claim that his coughing was disturbing the other worshippers. Saul watched him go from the corner of one eye and duly added, too, thanks for his quick acquiescence: Father Sun was full of gifts this midwinter.

When he returned to his quarters in the morning, floating in a haze of tired contentment with a belly full of the dawn feast, the fire there was stoked as high as he might’ve asked for. Detrich was in the chair before it, half-sprawled and faintly snoring through an open mouth. A book lay face down on the floor where it had fallen from his hand. He’d even changed into bedclothes and taken a quilt to pull over himself, though it had slipped down and was now mostly bundled about his knees.

Whisper-quiet, Saul picked up the quilt. He was leaning down to drape it back over his mentor when the breast-pocket of Detrich’s shirt caught his eye.

Something had been tucked into it, very neatly folded, one corner made visible only as Detrich had shifted in his sleep. A piece of parchment – no. Of vellum.

Saul knew even before touching it. But he did, nonetheless, reached out to slip out the psalm card and unfold it to find his own golden handwriting, the prayer for a peaceful night.

Detrich stirred very slightly at his protégé’s soft, amazed sigh, brows pulling down. A cough scratched up his throat. Saul put a light hand on his shoulder, thinking to rouse him for a drink of water. But something rippled in the bond between them before he could, some plucking on that string of light: a single resonant note of soul-power shivering through. Detrich’s face smoothed out again. His next breath was free of the stuffy undertone of illness, easy and clear.
Healed.
Saul folded the psalm card again, then brought it to his lips to press a soft kiss before slipping it back in his mentor’s pocket. Yes, he thought once more: this midwinter was all gifts.