Evening was setting in on the streets of Ostmont, and the alcohol had nicely permeated the crowds. There was staggering, there was jostling, woo and fists were being pitched in equal amounts and adjacent quarters. Celino noticed none of it. He drifted past scenes of passion, drama, and truly bad dancing without even a mental comment about shaved monkeys. His mind was filled with the knowledge that:

King Jareth was real.

REAL.

Exactly as advertised.

Except that he was old and ugly, all that youthful liveliness and voluptuousness withered like a plum becoming a raisin, soured like wine becoming vinegar.

And Bitch-Queen Varonah was real, and in Ostmont, and a good friend of Ald–Silver, and had escaped the ravages of time, and gone completely mad in return.

Bitch-Queen Varonah had thrown nuts into his hair. It wasn’t at all like he thought it would be. He fully expected, in a half-hearted way, to someday meet Her (and Him) because that was what one did on the Continent: One met and was corrupted by King Jareth and Bitch-Queen Varonah. Having come through the experience, he was dazed, and slightly disappointed, and no more corrupt than he remembered being.

He wondered if he weren’t intriguing enough to be corrupted. He was convalescent, after all. Under the weather. But that made no sense; he was still him. Maybe his lack of interest in King Jareth was too obvious. The man was handsome enough, startlingly so in the right light, but only if one took him as he was now. The comparison between now and then–it was too painful.

That must have been it. His disinterest. He would have to pretend more carefully next time. He didn’t want to be corrupted by King Jareth, but it would be a pity to lose a chance to not be corrupted.

Aldridge. He had to find Aldridge. Where did he say he would be? “Working the festival.” No help there. Celino went on tiptoes, scanning the crowd for the unmistakable pattern of blue and white. Everything was turning blue in the lowering dusk, but Celino was sure he could pick out that particular blue anywhere and anywhen.

—–

Being on duty during a festival was a little like being dropped into the middle of a tornado, and being told to ‘tidy up’. One might be able to neaten the very small area that was the eye of the storm, but there was no escaping the knowledge that in every direction beyond utter chaos reigned and you could do precious little about it until the whole thing had blown over.

SsillvrR did not enjoy damage control. Preempting problems was infinitely more efficient, but short of obliterating the idea of holidays altogether (and stopping up any and all available casks) it was impossible to prevent civil issues from breaking out all over the city like chicken pox. Festival nights meant many things to many people. To the elf, they were generally sleepless, but not for the same reason most people found themselves awake to greet the dawn.

But it was early yet, and this far incidents had been limited to a few drunken shouting matches, and a loose dog muddling up the bull fight. Rather than throw a perfectly serviceable wish away on something that could never be (like the night’s events being limited to those that had already transpired), SsillvrR wished pragmatically for a relatively uneventful evening. A fight or two would be fine. Maybe even an attempted burglary (harvest night never passed without at least three), or an ill-conceived duel between two hot heads (that could usually be resolved, so long as you kept them apart long enough for cooler heads to prevail).

With the sun’s slow death, bonfires were being lit on nearly every street corner. Anything flammable within reach was considered fair game (inevitably someone lost their shutters, and a few establishments would be ordering new shingles painted as soon as their proprietors were sober enough to stand) and there was generally some contest between neighbors to see who could afford to be frivolous enough to destroy something of actual value in the name of the year’s end.  In the great houses fires were restricted to the symbolic; small alchemical bowls crackled with cool flame that politely destroyed only the slips of scented paper provided to the guests should they wish to destroy the sins of the previous year that they could start out fresh on the morrow. Here and there figures in crudely made horned masks drifted, casting odd shadows as they waltzed dramatically from fire to fire, tin plates affixed to their feet to mimic the clop of an unshod hoof. There were those who swallowed fire, those who juggled knives painted with sap from Ralk trees, that they glowed eerily as they flew, while dancers linked arms and leapt merrily to whatever tune was available. If there were any particular meaning behind any of these actions, any religious subtext left at all, no one drew attention to it.

—–

Too busy scanning the crowds to pay attention, Celino backed into someone. He turned around to offer an absent-minded apology, and came face-to-face with a creature from an even older book than King Jareth: a horned man dressed all in rags, hair wild, hoofed feet that should have walked on leafmould clattering on the dirty cobbles. Between the flickering light of the bonfire on one side and the silent dark of the new night on the other, Celino saw strange things under the mask, animal lines drawing human skin into new contours, eyes that were not human looking out the slits of the mask with a gaze like a man’s. Then another partygoer jostled the horned stranger, and the illusion was broken–an ordinary town boy in a mask and old clothes, knees bent to mimic the turned-back legs of a goat, smelling of beer and greasepaint and working his way toward being sick in a gutter before midnight. Celino bowed to the vision he had had, then nodded to the boy who was, and with a murmured apology backed out of the cluster of revelers.

As he walked between gatherings more carefully, still looking for a flash of blue, he mulled the meeting over. He wasn’t a religious man. He rarely looked to the spirit for answers; they were usually there in flesh and bone, or in the curlicues of the human mind. Even the “demons” he sported with were earthy things. But he also knew what that was, the–the more-than-man back there. What was he meant to make of it?

He was so absorbed that he almost passed over Aldridge. He looked again–and there he was, shining white, a religious procession of one. “Ald–Sil–Captain Aldridge!” Celino called, breaking out of the crowd with a grin. The sight of the man made him want to glow. He wondered briefly if he still could. “Fair festival!”

—–

There were several things within visual range of the pair that could have been accurately described as glowing. Three were whirling blades, one was a fire, and the others were poured out of a silver flask by a square-faced man whose mask tettered precariously atop his skull into any cup that passed within his reach. The drunk gave off an unhealthy sulphurous yellow luminescence, and the smell was enough to convince any but the most hale of drinkers to stick with something a little less exotic. Alchemy was useful for any number of things, but had a lousy track record where the enhancement of foodstuffs was concerned.

When Celino broke from the crowd like a porpoise through the crest of a wave, SsillvrR was making himself unpopular with a small group of young men who, while doing nothing of obvious note besides milling, had the twitching fingers and darting eyes set in tense faces of those who were at least contemplating something treacherous. Either that, or concerned about being caught with liquor purloined from the family cabinet. The call jerked an ear sideways in its direction; SsillvrR gave the group a polite smile that would, because it was pointed at malcontent teenaged sons of merchants, be recieved as smug and even challenging, before turning to address Celino.

Who was grinning like a carved jack-o-lantern.

“Good weather for it,” SsillvrR said pedantically, still firmly entrenched in the sort of public persona that went hand in hand with being on duty. On the other side of the fire, four pairs of teenaged eyes exchanged flashing glances and a stolen flask. SsillvrR’s ear swung in their direction.

—–

“Cool, dry, and wild,” Celino said. “One wonders what’s going on in the forest tonight.” He wanted to take Aldridge’s hand and issue an invitation–come dance with me, come see the sights with me, come see what’s happening in the forest with me–but one didn’t do that in Ostmont. At least, not with the buttoned-up sort. And oh, did Aldridge have his captaincy buttoned all the way to the chin tonight. Celino’s eyes followed the swing of Aldridge’s ear, and he smiled. “Just some lads who haven’t figured out where the girls are yet,” he said. “Come, walk with me. I have something to tell you.”

—–

“The sort of party I’m not invited to,” SsillvrR said with the sort of authority that suggested he had first-hand experience in the matter. Ostmont’s celebrations were of a sort more civilized than what the forest would see this evening; that however, was beyond boundaries drawn in around his guard and involved crimes against decency rather than the prosecutable sort.

Celino was smiling as he pointed his gaze at the sullen group lurking across the bonfire. Someone threw a heavy pine bough atop the blaze, and it began crackling madly almost immediately, throwing a heavy sharp scented smoke into the air. “The blond one is Reth Welland’s son; and if he doesn’t want to have strips peeled off him, he’ll get home before his father figures out he’s missing.” The elf’s voice caught its target, when across the blaze one pair of eyes widened briefly then vanished as their owner broke into a dead-run, heading for the manor he’d climbed out of when all signs had pointed toward his father having already left for the evening. Mission accomplished, SsillvrR inclined his head northward toward the city’s old quarter, then followed the indicative gesture with his feet. When they had moved past the crush of the crowd into the dim of an empty stretch of street, SsillvrR glanced sidelong at Celino. “This about the wells, or is there a new medical crisis I should know about?”

—–

“Are you so certain you haven’t received a single invitation?” Celino asked with a sly smile. The shadows danced, stirred by the growing bonfire, and for a second Celino thought he saw the shadow of horns at Aldridge’s temples. He smiled a little wider. Yes.

He let Aldridge scare off the boy–”That was mean,” Celino commented mildly as he and Aldridge passed out of earshot–and followed him away from the crowds. The dark street was full of possibility, as though it were only the space between two bubbles, and could be swept away at any moment by another rush of light and merriment. Celino reached for Aldridge’s hand. He aborted the movement halfway, remembering too late that Aldridge wouldn’t take it, and awkwardly ran the hand through his hair to draw it back from his face. The night was abruptly cold; the press of the crowds and the heat of the bonfire had drawn a light sweat on his temples. “Neither,” he said. “I wanted to–” just talk to you “–there was something I needed to tell you. Damn! What was it?” It came to him in a rush, breaking through his thoughts of hooves and horns. “Oh! I believe you now,” he said, and this time he did reach for Aldridge’s hand. The memory brought with it a surge of adrenaline; he fought not to bounce excitedly on the balls of his feet. “About–her son. The other one. He’s here. I met him.” He grinned triumphantly. “He’s horrible.”

—–

To that comment, SsillvrR gave the man a look that suggested he would offend the forest-skulkers by even suggesting such a thing. While in looser more private moments the elf could have convinced himself that there was some primal satisfaction in leaping around a bonfire in the middle of a woods; even some religious precident as far as shamanistic rituals and transmogrification went, there were no circumstances in which he could see himself playing any integral role. The elf receiving an invite to a forest meet (apparently all the invitations were written on oak leaves with walnut dye, and no one ever saw them delivered) would have been the equivalent of giving a fisherman a seat on the horse trader’s council.

“I know his father. Mean is what he’ll get if he’s caught,” SsillvrR corrected, unapologetic. Welland had only one son, and temper enough to keep a string of six unruly boys in line. Not that the boy had any reputation for trouble-making; but when the archer has an itchy finger it’s best not to go skulking around the woods in antlers.

Without the ruddy glow of firelight, the houses dissolved quickly into shades of blue. Only here and there was the monochromatic dark broken by the golden glory of a candle, filtered through the carved maw of a turnip or lumpish squash. The tiny grinning lanterns squatted like botanical goblins on doorsteps and window wells, flickering determinedly when a little breeze tickled their flames. SsillvrR kept a judicious eye on the unlit windows above them, ears hanging at a comfortable slant that belied what was almost an expectant air. It evaporated like dew in the blazing sun as Celino’s fingers curled around his own; SsillvrR had the sense to keep walking, though at least two steps bore the sort of hesitance that suggested his instinct went against sense.

“You what?” the elf blinked, then waved the question off like a mosquito. “Oh. Well…–” Fingers twitched absently inside the circle of Celino’s, as their owner having been blind-sided both by the knowledge and the simple gesture, reorganized his thoughts.

If he were in Ostmont, it wouldn’t be for long; SsillvrR was ashamed to admit that was something of a relief. Giving Celino a brief examination SsillvrR smiled slightly, amusedly. The fact the physician was grinning meant one of two things; either Jareth was tired, or Celino had been deemed unimportant enough to escape harrassment. Probably for the best, whichever it was. “Ah…–well…–he’s not so bad as all that. So long as you don’t owe him any favours.”

—–

“I know better than that,” Celino said happily. He ignored Aldridge’s offended look. Lovemaking on a bed of moss, oh horrors. “Don’t owe him favors, don’t be owed favors–I read all the books. All of them. Even the ones whose chief virtue was that they were printed on soft paper.” He squeezed Aldridge’s hand, walking a little closer. “He was always my favorite. Of course, he doesn’t look a thing like he ought to.” He looked up at Aldridge and was struck by the man’s smile, so private and so entertained. Whatever else Aldridge was feeling, Celino was succeeding in amusing a hard-to-amuse man, and that was success indeed. “Older. Too old. He should eat more. You have a beautiful smile. He was exactly as sarcastic and abusive as one could want; and he had a curious interest in a cactus. That was never in any book. I can’t believe I’ve met him.” He did bounce a little, and just barely stifled the impulse to hug Aldridge. He rubbed his thumb over the back of Aldridge’s hand, missing the scars. Damned glove. He would have to peel it off Aldridge. “Are you entirely certain,” he said, walking a little closer still until their shoulders touched, “that you haven’t received a single invitation, not one in the least, to see in the dawn in some still corner of the forest where no one else goes?”

—–

Celino’s hand was warm; SsillvrR fixated briefly on that warmth, radiant even through the abused leather of his glove before realizing that the continued sound in his ears was in fact, language. Coming into the conversation on the tail end of a sentence, the elf blinked a bit. “The books?”

A raccoon lumbered across the street ahead of them, a dripping twist of butcher’s paper clutched between its jaws and from somewhere ahead the breeze carried them a wisp of fiddle music. “If you ever see him again, don’t say any of those things, unless you want to get a personal tour of an oubliette,” SsillvrR indulged, brushing a thin coat of exageration over the facts. The odds of Celino running into Jareth again were not the sort anyone would lay money on, nor was it likely anything the physician said could induce so drastic a move… still, in the interest of detering the free-speaking Celino, a little exageration wasn’t out of line, as the elf reasoned. There was another phrase bracketted by comments about the king that was processed, and shoved aside in the same moment. Days, women, horses and flowers and jewelry were beautiful. Anything outside of those preordained brackets did not merit the word’s use, and anyone who strove to apply the term to an object or body not therein was only engineering an awkward situation. The best course of action was to ignore it, and move on.

Particularly when it was Celino, who the elf was more or less certain would argue his point until he was blue in the face and so far removed from the original subject as to be entirely lost in the conversational woods.

Was he…–bouncing? One ear twitched back, and the raccoon picked up a waddling trot, before disappearing into an alleyway. Curiousity jabbed at him, until with a badly counterfeited casualness he inquired, “Was there anyone else with him? Say, a tall skinny guy with black hair?”

Elryn would have been insensed at being called skinny. SsillvrR felt just the slightest satisfaction knowing that.

Celino bumped absently against him, and the action seemed to jostle the knowledge that he was technically speaking, on duty, back into place with an almost audible click. SsillvrR stiffened a mote, then wiggled his fingers and waited favouring the physician with an expectant look. “Do I look like the sort to you?”

—–

“You know, the books. About him.” Celino avoided giving titles; they would be dead giveaways to whom he and Aldridge were talking about. “He really uses oubliettes?” It was a pleasant distraction from the local wildlife. Ring-rats; it was a wonder they hadn’t been exterminated yet. “I always thought that was over the top. Really? Have you seen one? Where are they? Is it true about the spiked machines?” Celino turned sideways so he could watch Aldridge’s face as they walked. He really was beautiful, even looking bewildered. Were all elves that way? Celino had seen many, many creatures tha looked like elves, but none as beautiful as Aldridge; and if some of those elves were in fact not-elves, maybe they all were except for Aldridge. Maybe elves were rarer than the books said.

“Skinny? No… no, it was only him and Her. Why? Who is that?” He racked his memory, and turned up only a handful of courtiers and heroes whom he was reasonably sure were fictional.

Ah. The Captain was back, the one Celino had gotten so far in dispelling. Celino took his hand in both hands–don’t expect me to be the one to break it off, Captain–and said, “You look like the sort who would rather not make noise in a crowded inn… or a crowded barracks.”

—–

SsillvrR rolled his eyes, flashing silver like a startled minnow in the dim light. The orange glow of another distant bonfire threw long spidery shadows up the street at them; he stood within the cool blue of one as Celino blithely ignored polite social signals and took both his hands. Gods, how did he survive behaving this way? SsillvrR answered himself; by being the weird foreigner. Whereas you are the ordinary foreigner.

Somewhere, under the concern for appearances, worry about being distracted by improprieties with glowing smiles who bounced when they were excited and the generalized anxiety that one of the guards was going to ride around the corner and force him to either pretend he’d been practicing dance-steps with a physicial in an empty street, or say something even less plausible, there was the thought that Jareth would be tickled pink about being the subject of fairytales.

“Yes, all over the place but I think primarily around the capital, and no. And nobody–…nevermind.” SsillvrR abruptly felt the sting of embarrassment at having even asked. Of course Elryn was probably playing host while Jareth irritated Tourmaline; Elryn was good at making conversation with nobles, smoothing ruffled feathers and collecting gems of information. Elryn did not get tongue-tied, or forget what to say, or worst, to whom he was talking.

Hands… a small sing-song voice reminded him. SsillvrR smoothed the wrinkles out of his expression like one might a freshly made bed and offered Celino a small tight smile bracketed by concerns. As peace-offerings went it was flimsy. He’d opened his mouth to speak when the physician trotted out a particularly shiny gem about making noise in crowded places. That was enough to snap the elf’s jaw shut again with an audible click, and the seconds that followed were a silence in which he gathered up his scattered thoughts for the second time in so many minutes. “This,” he lifted his hands demonstratively, and Celino’s came with them, contrastingly dropping his voice, “…is not…–” words slithered out of his grasp like greased snakes. SsillvrR cursed under his breath and rolled his eyes heavenward for a moment. “Bad time.”

—–

Celino sighed. This was going nowhere he wanted it to go. He gave up and released Aldridge’s hands. Idiot Ostmonters and their idiot prejudices. He composed his face into something resembling businesslike, and edging far more than he liked into worried. He leaned forward to keep his words confidential. “Please tell me, are you doing a nutcracker impression because I’m breaking a rule, or because you are genuinely uninterested in seeing in the dawn with me?”

—–

If nothing else, Celino could have found consolation in the fact that SsillvrR’s brief embarrassment was smote by guilt at his sigh and the slow sink of his shoulders. Celino looked like someone had snuffed his candle, and being as there was no one else around to have done the deed, SsillvrR found it fairly difficult to escape the notion that the mage’s deflation was his fault.

Oh…well…that explained the theme of Celino’s persistent comments. “Ah…” the elf lifted his hands palms-up in a gesture of helplessness coloured around the edges by chagrin. “Missed the insinuation completely. I ah, do that… quite a bit.” Unflattering honesty was at least a respectable peace-offering.

—–

Celino blinked, then settled into wry dubiousness. “I’m trying to think of how I could be more blunt next time. ‘Come have sex with me in the woods’?” he said sotto voce. “‘Let’s make love loudly where no one else can hear us’? I thought you wanted me to be more respectable.”

He leaned back, amused, and the elf’s last sentence caught him flat. He did what? Went into the woods quite a bit? Saw the dawn in quite a bit? In the same way that Celino meant? But he said he hadn’t–for ages. A misunderstanding? A rare moment of truth? Celino was so boggled that all he could say was, “You–what?”

—–

SsillvrR didn’t drag a hand down his face; that would have been too obvious an expression of exasperation. Though the urge remained, he transmuted it through careful force of will into nothing more telling than the slight drop of his chin, and the subtle twist of his right ear.

Did he sit in his room at night, making lists of inappropriate things he could say, then devise ways to work them into conversation? Celino, SsillvrR decided might well be an author. There were probably obscure volumes of ‘anti-etiquette’ floating around the expanses of several bibliophiles’ private collections, pages filled with helpful hints and simple recipes for ruining polite conversation and making one’s conversational partner gap like a dying goddamned fish. The left ear twitched this time.

Somehow, the bluntness was actually better than Celino’s open ended ‘what’. Four simple letters, like some arcane key opened a vault of entirely inappropriate options, any seven of which could have been what Celino was obviously envisioning. SsillvrR scrambled to stuff everything back into that vault, while the bright strains of fiddle music grew louder. “…miss insinuations.” The correction was like a lead hammer, with all the weight of his frustration at the handle.

—–

Celino–who would have been surprised to hear that he and SsillvrR were making polite conversation–watched the delicate twisting of Aldridge’s ears. First right, then left, like a dance move. Did that mean he could annoy half of Aldridge at a time? Was there a difference between the right side and the left? It bore looking into, perhaps some day when there was no recovering the conversation.

Miss insinuations? What? Celino reparsed the sentence. OH. Aldridge missed what Celino was saying, this was to be a regular occurrence, no answer offered to Celino’s question. “I see,” he said. “What did you think I was insinuating? Whatever it was, it offended you more than my actual offer did, so it had to be something educational.

“But–look–” he said, waving his hands helplessly, “I didn’t pull you aside to shock you. I wanted to talk to you about–” anything, just smile again “–two things that can’t be talked about in front of people, and maybe enjoy part of the evening with you. This part of the evening,” he amended, “not the part I was talking about earlier. Like normal people. As normal as you and I can get without boring you, O collector of eccentrics.” He smiled. “Consider it practice for speaking to you without making you glare like a wet hen, if you need a practical reason to do it.”

—–

Cranedance: (They were just chatting. Did you have another idea?)
TheWormwood: (Yes, but the timing, she restricts said chatting. SsillvrR’s answer is probably going to close with, “…I’m on duty.” And that’ll be that.)
Cranedance: (OK. Then pick it up after the festival has wound down?)
TheWormwood: ((Much better idea, particularly if there’s a practical reason for said chat/meet-up.)
Cranedance: (”We need to talk shop,” says Celino. “What kind of shop?” says SsillvrR. “The kind where the door locks,” says Celino. “Oh, you mean the Six Cups business,” says SsillvrR. “If you like,” says Celino.)

…and on to 22: Harvest Night – The King’s Guard.

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