27 Sarenith

27 Sarenith 17 MINUTE READ

“It won’t be long now,” Essa said, playing her fingers over the dimmed light of the lantern filtering through the hood. “The metamorphosis will begin at midnight on the hour.”

Fayr sat in bed with her stuffed animals; Leggy the spider under one arm, Anca the angel under the other, and squished between them Dave, the newer owlbear plush. She looked at her mother over the cover of the book she’d been reading. Essa undulated her fingers in front of the lamp to make strange shapes on the wall.

“When the clock strikes twelve, and you hear Sarenrae’s bell ring out from distant Sandpoint on this, the eve of your thirteenth birthday, it will begin.” Essa dragged her hand down over her face. “Your skin will melt, your hair will fall out, your arms will become twice as long as your legs!”

Fayr gasped and suppressed a giggle. She knew it was a joke—well, she half-suspected it was—but her mother loved to feel she had Fayr on tenterhooks. Essa raised her hands and curled the fingers into an impression of terrible claws.

“When all is said and done,” she whispered, “you will be… a teenager!”

“A teenager?” Fayr asked, feigning confusion. She set her book aside. “What’s that?”

“Oh, a terrible beast,” Essa explained. “Dank and sweaty, smelly and strange. They live in caves and basements almost exclusively.”

“Is Raelus one?” Fayr asked.

Essa laughed for a long time, more than Fayr thought was appropriate. Raelus was okay. He didn’t make her talk, and sometimes when she was up wandering the house at night she’d watch him in the forge as he made something new and cool-looking. Essa wiped her eyes and caught her breath before she finally said, “No, probably not.”

“Are teenagers so bad?” Fayr asked. “Did you fight them when you went adventuring with Sir Gwinn?”

“Oh, lots and lots of them,” Essa said, throwing her arms out to indicate a massive pile. “We’d poke into a cave to see if anyone had left any gold lying around and no, just smelly clothes and dirty plates, and then we’d hear them— teenagers, crawling on every wall! They struck such fear in our hearts! Even Big Marris, who you know wasn’t afraid of anything.”

Fayr pushed the limits of her imagination to visualize Big Marris, nearly seven feet tall and wielding a stone hammer as large as her mother, shrinking back in horror from a smelly beast with too-long arms. She frowned and Essa waved her hands, trying not to lose her.

“They’re worse than you think,” Essa pressed. “And becoming one will be so terrible. But I promise I’ll still love you, no matter what kind of smelly beast you become. That’s my job.”

“So I have to go to sleep, and when I wake up I’ll be evil and awkward?” Fayr asked. Essa tapped her chin with a finger.

“Essentially.”

Fayr held up her spider doll. “Can Leggy stay with me, then? To wake me up when I’m a monster, so I can get used to it?”

“Leggy’s right there in your hand,” Essa pointed out. Fayr rolled her eyes and pointed at where Essa’s tattooed hand was still tapping at her chin.

“No,” she insisted, “real Leggy.”

“His name is Lord Urulas Fornan Patroclis Madrighal II, thank you very much, but yes, you can have ‘real Leggy,’” Essa conceded. She laid her hand on her daughter’s bedspread and the black spider tattooed on the back of it stood up, shook itself out, and crawled over to Fayr’s open palms. “Just don’t feed him any bugs you’ve secreted inside from the garden. He’s getting fat.”

Fayr lifted Leggy up and turned him all around, studying his slick abdomen and lustrous legs. “He’s a spider, mama.”

“A fatter spider,” Essa insisted. “The ink is thicker, don’t even try to pretend you’re not wretchedly spoiling him.”

Fayr set the real Leggy down on her pillow where he wandered around, eventually settling in front of the fake Leggy and studying it with eight beady black eyes and an air of superiority. Fayr considered asking if there would be a party tomorrow anyway, whether she turned into a monster or not, or if they could wait until the rest of the guild came home. Before she could ask, Essa gathered her skirts and stretched.

“Anyway, keep Leggy, do not feed him pill bugs, and wake me when you become a gangly beast,” Essa said, taking up her lantern again and swinging it to cast the room in crazy shapes of light and shadow. “We’ll need to discuss hair-braiding options once you can reach across your room for the brush without getting out of bed.”

“No!” Fayr cried, pretending to be genuinely distressed as her mother cackled. Essa blew her a kiss as she backed out the door, taking the amber glow of the lantern with her off to bed. The hinges creaked as the door shut.

Fayr’s world descended into shades of gray.

Leggy ate sixteen pillbugs over the course of two hours and finally laid down on her pillow to play dead, legs curled in with intermittent twitching, after twenty rounds of slap, which Fayr had to play with him very carefully for fear of squashing him with an overly enthusiastic play.

She spent some time staring out the windows, the new ones Loren had brought all the way from Absalom, which helped when the sun was too bright and anyway got rid of the scratches the Bad Man had left while she was sleeping one morning. Then that got boring. She crawled into the old tent Essa had pitched for her in the corner of the room and closed her eyes. Fayr tried to remember all the smells and things she’d heard when she went camping with Bidgug on the way to Magnimar. The new windows were thicker, though, and she couldn’t hear any crickets or smell the trees. No good.

There was still an hour till midnight. Bidgug had gone with Loren and Raelus and Illya, out on an adventure, and Kaz had gone to bed at eight like some kind of old man. Dagny had cooked something downstairs that smelled so awful Fayr didn’t want to enter the main part of the guild hall anyway. Misra would be up and be happy to let Fayr play with Geoff, and she could always try to garden, but…

The forest loomed. Fayr went back to laying in her bed and poking at Leggy.

“Teach me a spell,” she said. “I know you keep spells for Mama. Teach me how to make fire.”

Leggy twitched a leg at her in slothful irritation.

“Just a little one.” Fayr pointed at the unlit lantern by her bedside. “Just in there. Promise I won’t burn down the guild.”

Leggy flipped himself back over and made a series of emphatic gestures with three of his eight legs. Fayr knew Leggy could talk to her mother best, but over the years they’d gotten better and better at communicating with motions and the little squeaks he could manage. This series of gestures seemed to mean “down,” “under,” “boom,” and “death.” He topped it off by sketching what looked like a beard over his tiny face.

“You’re just being dramatic,” Fayr said. She crossed her arms. “What about light? Can you teach me how to make a light?”

Another series of gestures. “You,” “eyes,” and a funny little gesture she knew meant “dummy.” Fayr threw her hands up.

“But it’s in grays!” she argued. “What if I want to see in blues or purples? It’s my birthday, almost. Mama’s giving me my first tattoo. What did you get me?”

Leggy seemed to ponder this for a long moment. Fayr took the chance to reach under her bed for the wooden box where she kept her treasures. She opened it and pored over the contents: a bent golden brooch stamped with a pair of clasped hands, a thin scroll of parchment with angular runes on it, the dagger Sheila Heidmarch had given her, one of Raelus’ prototype rose pins she’d retrieved from the slag, a heavy silver ring with a stylized spider on it, and, finally, resting atop the little pile in a bit of tissue paper, the luna moth.

Fayr had found it lying motionless in the tall grass by the garden while she was weeding. She picked it up and hid it away before Bidgug could figure out it was dead and get upset. At four days old it wouldn’t keep much longer. She admired the patterns on its wings, almost like peering eyes, one last time. Then she turned and set it on the pillow in front of Leggy. He immediately perked up.

“You love the crunch,” Fayr pointed out, motioning at the moth’s spread wings. “You know you do. Teach me how to do a light, just a small one. Please?”

Leggy stared at her. Then he stared at the moth. Then back at her. Several sharp gestures– “bad,” “dummy,” “Essa will squash me” (a very succinct but evocative chop with one leg over his head), “fine,” and last of all “come here.”

Fayr laid her head on her pillow and let Leggy walk up until he could lay two legs on the side of her face. Learning from him was… hard. It didn’t seem hard for Mama. But when Fayr closed her eyes, the things he tried to convey were difficult to parse, obfuscated by flickers of light and darkness, concepts reaching her in unwieldy language, as if translated five or six times over.

Leggy didn’t like to teach her, either. After an indeterminate amount of time he pulled back, signing “wrong,” “no,” “blood,” “fire,” and then, strangely, “wings.”

“No, you don’t get the moth until I can make a light,” Fayr insisted, sitting up. She had the beginnings of a headache behind the bridge of her nose, it felt like, which wasn’t unusual after trying to learn a spell from Leggy but was always irritating. Food helped, but the downstairs was still a no-go fish zone.

She was halfway to standing up when she heard the Sarenrae Bell ring. It was still loud, miles and miles away, echoing over the plains between the guild hall and Sandpoint. Fayr stopped on the edge of her bed, listening to the long, clear chimes of the hour. It should’ve made her headache worse. But by the time twelfth ring had faded she felt better, almost sharper. Sharp enough to catch the soft sound of footsteps outside her door.

“Fayr…” her mother called. “Fayr… Where is my gangly, smelly teenage creature…?”

Fayr shot up. Mama was still awake. She had seemed so stressed about the new adventure Bidgug was on that Fayr hadn’t wanted to ask for anything special on her birthday. She didn’t want to distract from her mother’s scrying and frantic letter-writing, maybe be the reason someone got hurt. But if she hadn’t gone to bed, what had Essa been doing?

The door creaked open with theatrical slowness. Proceeding Essa into the room was a round cake on a plate with a candle stuck in it. As Fayr watched she followed it in and snapped her fingers. A tiny flame sprang to life on the candle’s wick.

“What’s this?” she asked, in mock surprise. “Why, this isn’t a teenager at all! It’s just Fayr. How boring!”

“I am a teenager!” Fayr insisted. “It just means my age is in the ‘teens’ now. And I knew what ‘teen’ meant before Durhmol gave me her old abacus, counted out thirteen beads, and went teary-eyed.”

Essa snorted. “Why…? Never mind. Yes, yes, you’re numerically a teenager, even though you failed to transform into some horrible ugly monster, I will give you that one. Now, do you want to cast Wish or do I get to?”

“You get one on your own birthday!” Fayr insisted. She held her hands out for the plate. Then she paused. “Actually, do you want it? I don’t know what I want to cast for this year.”

“No ideas at all?” Essa asked. She sat down on the edge of Fayr’s bed and amused herself by waving her hand over the flame and turning it different colors. “I suppose Bidgug did take you to the zoo. Durhmol is teaching you algebra, which, ugh, but if you like it… The others have given you plenty of stories to listen to. Misra, I’m sure, is still letting you put your head in her familiar’s mouth, which—”

“Geoff’s nice!” Fayr cut in. “He never bites. I think he thinks it’s funny. Anyway! You’re giving me a tattoo, and Leggy tried to teach me a new spell, which I can keep working on! I don’t know what to cast Wish for this year.”

Essa’s face twisted into a confused and somewhat upset expression. “You know Leggy can’t teach you spells, he’s a sorcerer’s…”

“He’s done it before,” Fayr insisted. “And I said I’d give him a moth, so he— Hey! My moth!”

Leggy had made a web against her headboard and was about halfway through spinning the luna moth up in a cocoon. He took a pointed bite of greenish wing and signed something that approximated “my moth now.” Essa groaned.

“Not a moth,” she said. “He’ll get even fatter, and he sheds wing flakes everywhere.”

Fayr’s attention turned back to the candle still flickering away, mostly on the little cake it sat in. “Did… did you make that, or…?”

“No, baby, it’s your birthday,” Essa said. “I bought it in town and kept it fresh for you these past few days.”

“Okay. No offense.” Fayr sat down on the bed next to her. “Really, though. Do you want the Wish?”

“No, just think a minute,” Essa insisted. She reached out to run her hand over Fayr’s braids. “It’s a tall candle. We got our share of boons this year, but there’s gotta be something you want, or wish was different.”

Something did occur to Fayr then. She glanced out of her window at the forest outside. Then she turned back to her cake, closed her eyes, and blew out the candle. The flame sparkled as it flickered out.

“There’s your Wish,” Essa said, smiling again. “What’d you cast for this year?”

“It’s a secret,” Fayr said. Then, unable to hold onto it, she added in a stage whisper, “Me and Bidgug are gonna kill the Bad Man.”

Essa sighed and rubbed at her temples. “I told you, there’s no such thing as the boogeyman, the Bad Man, what have you. Please don’t talk Bidgug into killing random people in the forest with you. He’s biddable, trusts you completely, and at least two of the people in it at any given time are now employed by me.”

“Well, that’s what I cast Wish for, so too bad.” Fayr crossed her arms. “We’re gonna kill the Bad Man and I’m gonna be an even better knight than Sir Gwinn.”

“Low bar,” Essa muttered. But she relented in her confusion at her daughter’s stubborn insistence and gave Fayr a tight hug. “Well, it’s your Wish. So be it. Just one thing though…”

“What?” Fayr asked.

“I left the forks and knives downstairs,” Essa said. “No cake in bed for you! Come on!”

Before Fayr could protest or try to catch her, Essa swept back out of the room and down the stairs, her overblown cackling echoing back up as Fayr gave chase.

“I knew Dagny couldn’t be that bad at fish!” Fayr cried, slightly out breath on chasing her mother through main door of the guild hall and coming to a skidding stop before the bar. “She practically is one! I knew it!”

The bad fish smell that had permeated the guild hall for most of the afternoon was, indeed, gone. In its place was the smell of fresh flowers, familiar and sweet, wafting from refreshed vases and a large display on the bar itself. Fayr broke out into a broad grin and her mother matched her.

“She’s a real hero for taking the fall though,” Essa admitted. Then she spread her arms and said, “Happy Birthday, Fayr. Courtesy of Bidgug, and a little preservative magic on my part.”

Essa set the cake on the bar next to a tangle of wild roses and went around the counter to fetch another two small plates and some cutlery. Fayr wove her way around the tables, admiring the different arrangements assembled in everything from Essa’s one remaining piece of family crystal to a milk jug. It looked like a spring day had decided to come inside for a drink. It looked amazing. The centerpiece was the bar, and that’s where she found her birthday gift from her friend.

It was a poster made with incredible care from glued-together layers of brightly colored paper. Here were Essa and Fayr, in the center, and Bidgug on the right holding her hand. Here was Illya in white and blue crepe, Raelus with a painstakingly cut beard, and Loren wielding a sliver of thick brown paper as a bow. Kaz with no shirt and eight well-defined abs, Misra riding on Geoff’s back, the alligator’s mouth open in a comical v of jagged paper teeth, and Dagny sailing a tiny boat. At the top were the words “HAPPY BIRTHDAY FAYR” in Bidgug’s massive but incredibly careful handwriting.

“I didn’t know he knew how to spell my name,” Fayr observed, smiling down at the poster. Essa coughed and waved her hand.

“Well, you know, Raelus has been trying to teach him, and, uh—” She came back around the counter with the plates and set them down to hold Fayr’s hand. “Yes, it’s a birthday miracle. Do you like it, Fayr?”

Fayr turned to look up at her mother but found her eyes lingering on where they held hands. Bidgug had been kind. He’d cut them out of the same color paper. But now, even in the dim amber candlelight Essa had magicked, there was a difference. A profound one.

Fayr didn’t think it was the way her eyes worked making her skin seem grayer against the warm brown of her mother’s.

“What are you thinking?” Essa asked. She raised her free hand to push the baby hairs back from Fayr’s face. “You’ve got on that faraway look you get sometimes. It’s your birthday, baby. What’s wrong?”

“Were you joking,” Fayr asked, quietly, “or am I really gonna change into a monster as I get older?”

Her mother looked thunderstruck. “Of course I was joking, Fayr. You won’t…”

Essa crouched and took both of her daughter’s hands in hers.

“You will change,” she admitted, “not into a monster, no, but there’s no living without changing. You’re entering a time in your life when you will… well, you’ll start to become the person you’re going to be.”

Essa squeezed her hands. “People may treat you differently. They may treat you like a monster. But you aren’t, you never will be, and I mean it when I say I will always love you. It’s not just my job, it’s… raising you and loving are the greatest things I’ll ever do, baby.”

“You finally learned how to cast Hellfire,” Fayr pointed out, staring at the floor with a wobbling lip. Essa lifted her chin so Fayr was looking at her.

“You’re better than Hellfire,” she said.

Fayr threw her arms around her mother’s neck and squeezed tight, and Essa stood to swing her around. Fayr found the tips of her toes grazing the floor. She hadn’t noticed that happening before.

“There, there, enough weepiness,” Essa teased as she set her down. “Now, it’s chocolate cake for breakfast by tradition, then you go back to bed. At noon I’ve got another surprise for you, and, after that, you and Misra show me how to put my head in Geoff’s mouth so I can scare the living daylights out of Durhmol. How’s that sound?”

“I love you, Mama,” Fayr mumbled into her hair.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 6/28/2017 | REHOSTED 2/27/2024