wingfic | {{ voicetest / khola }}

Here comes a boy: a tall, lanky, unfortunately familiar boy, with a weathered book under one arm and a knife buckled into his belt. It's easy to hear Tristan before sighting him, because he's not exactly paying attention to stealth; in fact, it hasn't occurred to him that anyone else could be here. The resting smile he customarily assumes in the company of others is gone. His brow is knit in concentration. Whatever he's up to, it's not bothering Tara-Fay Smith.

Yet. He finds a patch of earth on the bank and crouches down, mindful of his clothes. He closes his eyes and murmurs a word, a simple spell. When he opens them again he blinks -- and casts a look in Tara-Fay's direction. Were she trying to hide, he wouldn't stand a chance; but half-hidden is only half.

This is awkward. For once Tristan finds himself with no more desire to interact with her than she does with him. But they're both here, and it's not getting any less awkward, so -- "Tara-Fay?" he calls out, as if he's uncertain of who she is. He's not. The list is short.

She hears him coming, of course--all that time spent spying on people has at least given Tara-Fay good ears. She would, actually, have been perfectly content to ignore him, save for a brief confirmatory glance in his direction. Tara-Fay is pretty good at pretending other people aren't there. She's spent a large chunk of her life trying to do just that.

What she has never been content to do is talk.

She levels a glare in his direction. "What?" she says testily, as though showing up here is something Tristan has done to personally affront her. "Did you want something?"

Contrary to reputation, Tristan is just shy of leaving her alone; he came here to spellcast in peace, and she came here to scry in peace, and neither of them particularly wants to converse or budge but here they are. He'd be on the verge of budging, too, except that she's about to scry, in fact.

Scrying is interesting, magically speaking. Scrying is also dangerous. It's hard to do something interesting and dangerous in Tristan's vicinity without a risk of interference.

His eyes flicker to the bowl. "No," he says. "I came here to do something else. I hope I'm not bothering you."

He bends down and draws his knife, and starts to sketch a circle in the dirt around himself with the point. He's a little more used to working with an audience: thanks, friends.

Tara-Fay just bites back a yeah, actually, you are bothering me by reminding herself that she doesn't actually want to engage Tristan's Tristan-ness at this particular hour. She seriously considers moving herself, but some combination of curiosity and I-was-here-first stubbornness keeps her rooted to the spot.

Instead, she lowers the scrying bowl--from everything Vartilet has said about the practice, it wouldn't be wise to get distracted mid-question--and turns her head to watch. A more normal person might actually ask Tristan what he's doing, but then, a more normal person would probably try a little harder to conceal the staring, too.

So that's how it's going to be. Tristan shrugs off the nonresponse and sets to work--he has a streak of the showoff in him, if not the theatrical, and while Tara-Fay's silence is ever-so-slightly vexing it's not unfamiliar.

The spell he's working with was written in Persian, as are the glyphs he has to transcribe around the circle. It's a different feel from the dwarven magic he briefly studied in Altstadt, which he still harbors hopes of returning to re-examine; perhaps exile has an expiration date. If not, he'll figure something out.

He transcribes the cuneiform as meticulously as he can imagine--all the more meticulously for his audience--getting a little grime on his fingers in the process, which he brushes off when he's finished. Then Tristan reads the Persian words aloud, or rather, recites them mostly from memory: "In the name of my father, and my father's father, I--"

The lettering glows an in-between color, something on the edge of bright lavender and bordering gold, somehow. Tristan glows too, for a moment, faintly. Then it dissipates and he blinks down at himself, narrowing his eyes; he murmurs another spell-word, this time in distinctly better-pronounced Hebrew. He's checking to see if it worked. From his expression, it seems as though it did--though perhaps not as expected. He looks like he's temporarily forgotten Tara-Fay.

Is it too much to hope for death by mangled Persian?

Tara-Fay probably doesn't mean that. Probably. Anyway, she's no scholar, not of magic or of languages, so she can't actually tell much beyond the fact that the language and glyphs are unfamiliar: she might guess at Alexandre's involvement, but she doesn't know.

It's certainly not something she's seen him cast. A ritual for strengthening, maybe, or protection--?

She watches him narrowly the whole way through, her fingers drumming against the side of the still-empty scrying bowl. "Done?" she says, when she senses a lull.

"Yes," comes the answer without a glance to the side; apparently he hasn't forgotten her. The truth is that no one as self-conscious as Tristan is capable of tuning out another person's presence, least of all another person's disapproving presence: as he's come to think of Tara-Fay by default. Still, he keys to her implied curiosity, and elaborates, "It's something I studied when I was first learning, and only started trying to apply to other spells. Executed the right way, it should extend my armor spell by a few days."

He doesn't mention how often he casts his armor spell nowadays, and what a generally weird amount of time he spends wandering around wearing it. Surely Linnet knows, but if she's impolitic enough to bring it up, that's not his problem--well, not his problem right now, anyway. Besides, if he knows Linnet at all, she hasn't got a hill to stand on.

"I didn't ask."

It nettles her that he just assumes she cares. It nettles her even more that he's right. Tara-Fay turns pointedly away from him--that he's not presently looking at her is irrelevant here--and dips her scrying bowl into the river. In time, it might occur to her to wonder what exactly Tristan thinks he needs an armor spell for, in the middle of Khola. For now, she's preoccupied trying to recall Vartilet's words about the potential dangers of scrying--an unclear vision, or a too-clear one, was it? She supposes that rules out yes-or-no questions. Can you scry into the past as well as the future?

Sometimes, it turns out, an inveterate reluctance to actually ask questions comes back to haunt you. She supposes she could always write Vartilet. (Haha. No.)

So . . . the future, for now. An open-ended question, but a specific one, asked without a preconception about the answer. That's going to be hard, considering what she's most curious about, but she tries to clear her mind. There's no guarantee the future will take her towards answers about--anything. For all she knows, she could still be in Khola, tending to the bar as her parents greet guests.

God, she hopes not. She sets the bowl down on the riverbank, and doesn't look at it yet.

Tristan does glance at her at this point, with open interest. He would come closer, maybe even ask to watch, except that dealing with Tara-Fay is something like interacting with a feral cat--at least in his estimation--you don't just assume. Or rather, there's a bank of assumptions you can make in any given month without her losing her temper and storming off, and he's fairly sure he's already overdrawn his. His initial irritation (that's a strong word, perhaps disappointment) over his own privacy being breached has worn off in favor of curiosity.

The existence of magics apart from his own field never bothered him before. At least it didn't with Linnet. He followed his discipline and Linnet followed hers. He was content with the division of labor. But scrying is different. Though it doesn't concern the dead, it concerns the future, and Tristan cannot claim not to be constantly preoccupied with the future.

The things he would ask that bowl if he could. He wishes fewer of them involved the word Alexandre; Hell, truthfully he wishes fewer of them involved the word Evangeline. But he can't--yet, he appends, ever enterprising--so he just watches Tara-Fay.

Edited 2017-05-02 06:30 (UTC)

Right. Clear mind. No preconceptions. Tara-Fay is not the most cautious or conscientious of teenagers, usually, but--well, it's not like she wants a repeat of what happened with the donkey. (Even if it almost certainly would have happened anyway, she thinks stubbornly, given the apparent nature of dragon-ism.)

She takes a deep breath, in and out, and assumes the closest thing an untrained fifteen-year-old can manage to a meditative pose. Then, and only then, does she glance down into the depths of the now-rippling water.

Where will I be five years from now?

For several long moments, all Tristan sees will be Tara-Fay leaning over the scrying bowl, her expression stretched into a frown of concentration. Whatever she sees seems to be absorbing her entirely. When she finally looks up . . .

. . . suffice it to say, it is probably not often that Tristan gets to see Tara-Fay looking animated, much less smiling. But this is a definite, if faint, smirk.

If it were possible for Tristan to crane his neck enough to see into the bowl, he'd have done so. As it is, he sits with a schooled patient expression until he's fairly certain Tara-Fay is finished. Once this comes to pass, he looks down and away, and only after a demure moment passes does he say, "See something interesting?"

She may well not tell him anything. That's very likely. But she definitely won't volunteer it if he doesn't ask.

"None of your business," she says, but she seems unusually good-humored about it.

There hadn't been much, at first. An unfamiliar bird, circling high overhead; the roofs of buildings, and below, figures milling around a square, pausing here and there in clusters. An ordinary city, if even that--but just as clearly, by everything from the buildings to the fashion, a foreign one. Not somewhere she's ever been, in her admittedly limited travels.

It had taken her a while to realize the full significance of what she was seeing. It doesn't answer everything she's desperately curious about, not by a long shot. But it's more than enough for now.

She drains the bowl carefully and stands, shooting another smirk back at Tristan. A girl of a different nature might be dancing outright; as it is, she can't resist one last comment: "I'm not going to be stuck here much longer," she offers. "Not much longer at all."

Not that five years is so short a time in her mind. This is a promise, as much as it is a prediction.

What is Tristan's first reaction to that? He doesn't know, exactly--the lumbering presence of how he thinks he should feel about such a thing comes shouldering up against him before he can even really process it, crowding everything else out. How he should feel about that is: concern, worry even, over the prospect of Tara-Fay running or being taken away; Tara-Fay's not ready for that sort of thing, the angels of his better nature say, Tara-Fay doesn't know anything about the world. Maybe she's misinterpreted, his reasonable mind puts in: maybe this is wishful thinking. Or maybe she's making something up.

But in truth, Tristan's first reaction was the thought of Evangeline--of his wedding, and the rock-solid knowledge that whatever Tara-Fay's future holds for her, his involves being planted squarely in Khola for the rest of his life. Taking over the farm and the watchpost. And that's... of course, that's what he's signed on for.

He's not normally an impulsive thinker. (Or so he's decided.) But, on impulse, he says, "Hey. Tara-Fay. Before you go."

And before she has time to snap something back, he continues blithely, "Can I ask you something?"

She stops.

On any other day, at any other time, she wouldn't even bother with that much. Tara-Fay has long known, or at least sensed, that Tristan thinks of her with a kind of condescending magnanimity, as if to him, the eight or so months' difference in their ages might as well be eight years. Well, she's no less stubborn or prideful than he is, and quite a bit more contrary. She certainly doesn't need the judgment cloaked in wide-eyed concern he's so fond of directing at her.

Some part of her, though, senses that for once he might have the advantage: that the boy who acts like he knows everything has something he wants to hear from her. And Tara-Fay's not the sort of person who avoids the chance to revel in that. She cranes her neck around to look at him.

"What is it now?" she says, trying to sound bored. She is not, alas, the best of actresses.

Answers aren't easily pried out of Tara-Fay. He knows that, but it doesn't grant him any more insight on how it's done. He thinks, for a moment, about the most tactful approach to take; he thinks, what would I want me to say if I were her? That's no use. The answer is 'nothing,' and promptly leaving her alone. If Tristan was capable of divining the magic words one spoke to Tara-Fay to gain her trust, their relationship would've taken a very different turn years ago.

So he glances at her and opts for candor. "Can you teach me how to do that?" he says. "I could help you with something else. If you liked."

He doesn't elaborate on what. He's not in the habit of striking bargains. Help from Tristan is usually freely and gaily offered. But he intuits, on some level, that this might be an easier way to deal with Tara-Fay than trying to engage her in some kind of complex favor-based economy.

"What?"

Out of all the things she might have been expecting him to say, it certainly wasn't that. Maybe she should have: now that she thinks about it, of course the magical bookworm would want to know how to scry into the future. What doesn't he want to know?

Still, it throws her. Tara-Fay is not at all used to thinking of herself as a teacher. "You want me to teach you how to scry?" she repeats, with no small amount of incredulousness.

Edited 2017-05-04 19:32 (UTC)

"Sure," says Tristan, a little too brightly to sound casual; he adds, in a more tempered voice, "I mean, unless it's something only you can do?"

On account of your bloodline, he doesn't say and doesn't need to. He doubts it, though, given what he's inferred of Vartilet. In truth he's not in the habit of thinking of Tara-Fay of all people as a teacher--or anyone, really. He's become something of an autodidact, save Alexandre's involvement. But there are no chapters on scrying in Khola's collective library. He's checked. Sometimes you just have to buckle down.

"It's a steppe people thing," she says, with more assurance than she feels. (That is what Vartilet had said about it, right?) "Nothing to do with demons."

She is . . . tempted by the offer: more, perhaps, out of an attraction to power than any compensation Tristan could give her. But she also remembers Vartilet's dire warnings, and her role in starting the whole Parsbit mess. Tara-Fay's not so prideful that she can't admit, at least to herself, there's a whole lot she doesn't actually know about scrying.

Maybe she should write Vartilet after all? Maybe Linnet would do it for her. Maybe she could pretend to be Linnet--no, that's ridiculous.

God, she's actually considering this, isn't she?

"It's a really easy thing to get wrong," she says, when she senses the silence has gone on too long. Hopefully that sounds sort of authoritative. "And you could get--everyone--in serious trouble if you did."

He'll remember Vartilet. She really doesn't need to tell him about the donkey.

"I understand." So is magic, after all. He tends not to mention the possible consequences of a ritual or a cantrip going awry, but they exist--he's careful, he tells himself, it's not the same. And indeed it isn't, he's fairly sure: the consequences of meddling with the future are in another league entirely. That gives even Tristan some pause. Not enough pause to stop him, however--

"It's just--" He hesitates. "There are some decisions... I'd rather make as informed as I can. That's all."

That's not all, but it's a start. He adds, "I'll be careful." He doesn't consider asking her to scry for him. That's off the table, for numerous reasons.

Tara-Fay could, of course, tell him exactly what she thinks of some of those decisions of his. The decision to continue dating the asshole ghost of a conquering king, for example. The decision to go off and marry Evangeline Miller, of all people, while one is doing aforementioned king-dating. But they've never been friends, no matter what Tristan has to say about it, and she's not in the habit of telling people things unless she's pretty sure they're going to listen to her.

The thought does present another point in favor of helping him, though: surely anything that might help Tristan make less stupid romantic choices is good for everyone?

"I'll think about it," she says slowly. She needs time, to write Vartilet or . . . decide not to write Vartilet in a fit of panic, more likely, or . . . well. To do something. She's also quite sure she's met her daily quota of Tristan.

{{ voicetest / khola }}

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