POV: john-west
Summary
John wakes at seven sharp to the ding of a HUD notification congratulating him on having reached his health goal of six hours of sleep in three days — once, this year. He vaguely remembers setting the goal after Jen complained about his hours. The Preserve is already up and bustling; Ealstan is out somewhere with the men, and Sefawynn has washed her hair, changed dresses, and gathered the household's children around her in a corner.
She is telling them the story of the rescue at sea — Runian, aelv prince, casting his boast at the Hordamen in proper alliterative verse, and Thunor's thunder splitting the lead ship in two so the heroes could leap clear into the water. The children gasp at the right moments. John, on cue, flashes his fingers through a slow rainbow of skin-camouflage colours and earns them. One older girl declines to be impressed: he doesn't look like an aelv, she says — he looks like the sickly fellow who tried to steal apples last summer. Aelvs are supposed to be beautiful.
John picks hay off his neck and glances at the pile of stones by his pallet. Still a pyramid. He knocks it flat again and resolves to keep an eye on it. Yazad sweeps in with news: strangers visited the reeve overnight, rode out at first light, and left one of their number behind. Sefawynn knows at once that this is her brother. There is more, Yazad adds: a different stranger passed through the preserve two days ago, and this one is *odd*. He waves them to follow him out.
Climbing to his feet, John notices the stones have reassembled — and have been glued together with a thick amber sap. Sefawynn raises an eyebrow at him: has he been antagonising the wight? He claims he gave it piles to make so it would stop. *For a runian,* she says, *you are not very clever.* He answers in his most aelv-ish register that his reasonings are beyond mortals. She picks a piece of hay out of his hair.
Outside in the orderly orchard, John finds the rows of trees oddly comforting — the first thing in this dimension that has felt familiar. Past the trees, the true forest begins, and *that* unnerves him: a primal darkness that hasn't existed in his world for centuries. Night vision is no comfort there. Sefawynn notices that he is wary of it and grudgingly allows that he may not be as stupid as she had assumed. John asks about the Black Bear the others keep naming. A Waelish king, she tells him, from before her grandfather's time. *And he's still alive?* Yes — it is said he can be slain only by his own child, and so far, he has fathered none.
They find Ealstan in the orchard, lord notwithstanding, helping the men dig out an apple-tree stump. He hops out of the hole and bows to the *honoured aelv*, which John barely manages not to sigh at. He passes on Yazad's news. Ealstan thinks they can plead with the midfather for Wyrm's release, but worries that Ulric and Quinn will not be content with that — John tells him the kidnappers almost certainly continued to the earl's at Maelport to seize real power, and dropped Wyrm only because they didn't want to bother carrying him. Ealstan declares that his next path is Maelport, but first they free the youth.
Yazad trots up with the second piece of news — a stooped old hearth-tender he has brought in off the road. She is short, thick of body, white-haired, kept in a bun stuck through with wooden sticks. Her round face strikes John, with sudden warmth, as that of his Grandmother Dobson; another sliver of memory drops into place. Thokk looks him up and down, declares him a fine specimen of aelv, presents him with a stick from her basket of tinder, leans in confidingly, and tells him she is *very* dangerous when she has a mind to be, and asks if he is properly intimidated. Yes, John says. Good, good.
Yazad prompts her: the man on the road. Thokk obliges. He was an aelv too — a beardless red-head, like a northman, with an odd way of speaking and unusual features. Ealstan recognises the description: that is the man Ulric and Quinn were asking after in Stenford before they took the skop's brother.
Something in John clicks. He leads them all back to the Preserve, where he digs out a page with a clear bottom margin and starts trying sticks from the fire for sharper charcoal points. Thokk fishes him a good one. He asks her to walk him through the face — round or angular, broad nose or narrow, hairline high or low — and gets to work. Everyone else gives him space; Thokk leans awkwardly close and corrects his proportions, smacking him on the back of the head with a stick when he overshoots on the cheek. He bites down a yelp; she winces and apologises, having thought he'd be sturdier, given that aelvs can leap mountains and turn themselves into steel. Those things, Sefawynn mutters, are not part of the stories.
As the face takes shape under his fingers, the past comes back with it. He has done this many times before. After he dropped out of art school and joined the police academy — at a friend's urging — his old training had folded neatly into work as a forensic sketch artist. Another panel of his life slides into view.
He smudges, refines, smudges. He knows this face. A laughing man who liked to dye his hair. Evenings together at a bar. Asking for help in his studies. Eventually working together. Two cops. Friends from before the academy and through it and out the other side.
Thokk crows in triumph — *yes, that's him* — and tells the others, who are pretending not to watch, that they're keeping quiet only because they don't want to admit how often she's right.
John stares at the sketch. The name comes last.
His partner.