The evening before midsummer, over a dinner of home-made crusty bread, nectarines and plums baked with cardamom and drizzled in vanilla-infused balsamic vinegar, a cool pasta salad of toasted almond slivers and almond oil with arugula and garlic cloves, sprouts and a dollop of plain Greek yogurt with cumin and orange juice (pulped fresh: there's a seed; there's a seed caught between one of Penelope's rings and the space between her fingers), Nicholas Hyde's red-haired wife leans back on the couch and sets her bowl in her lap, fish-wife graceful fingers (good for gutting fish; good for gutting murderers; for holding the tools that do the deed; for creating fire with a wand; for telling the stars how to shine) circling the clay of it (for it is a clay bowl, with a colorful print), and she says, "We don't have a tower, but I think I have found a place which will be sufficient unto a tower up in the mountains. The walls are only suggestions, but we can make a circle with the stones. What will you watch for? We can make whatever rules we want, as long as we stick to them."
crow
Nicholas always eats the most quickly in the morning: Pen has observed this before, how in spite of his honey-slowness he devours food in a few quick bites. By evening he is no longer so in need of fuel to tell his brain that it is time to wake for the day, perhaps, and so he is still eating, spearing noodles on his fork and dredging them through yogurt and sprouts and diced clove and scraping them from the fork with his teeth.
"I was planning to watch for the thinning Veil, and for the things that are at their prime right now as summer's beginning. It's for appreciating the growth from spring and it's for finding wonder."
lake-light
Pen leans forward to set her bowl on their coffee table. She straightens a coaster with an idle gesture, then collects with a seemingly-careless hand a glass of still water, slices of orange (everything must be used) floating among the ice; the ice is flux; is crystal. The condensation drips down her wrist; loses itself at the fork of her veins. Pen watches it stop dripping, as if momentarily confused, as if it doesn't know which way; she smiles. It's a private smile; it drowns in the cup when she drinks, lifts her eyes and sets them back on Nicholas.
Swallow, and, "Maybe the Veil will thin enough that you can tear it apart and show me what is so wonderful on the other side." Teasing, the cadence of her voice, and solemn too. It is a knack she has, for expression.
Beat. "Or maybe the growth from Spring will suddenly decide it has had enough; it will look at how handsome you are, then - whip!" She makes a noise and a hand gesture, watches her hand zip in a straight line until it is before her face. She snaps her fingers and thumb together, then 'strikes' at Nicholas and undulates her hand. "It will slither under your skin and try to wear you for a mask."
"What helps you pay attention?"
crow
"If I did manage to tear it apart, I'm not sure I could put it back together again," he says. "But sometimes things can manifest here, if it's thin enough for them to come over from the other side. You don't always have to have the Sight to see them then." So: perhaps she will.
He raises his head and fixes her with a smile as her fingers undulate toward him, waver serpentine (not unlike the skin monster of nightmare, not so long ago.) His mouth smiles; his eyes too are solemn. That there are things that could come through that would gladly wear his skin: this he does not say.
"Connecting memories to the day helps me pay attention. Sometimes it's...less of a sort of discipline, like it would be if I were meditating or trying to read, and more of a sort of immersion in the memory and experience. Is it ever like that for you?" A beat. "What will you be watching for?"
lake-light
Is it ever like that for you? Nicholas wants to know. Pen's hand (shadow-puppet, shadow-bird) undulates toward him again and, since there is no food and no fork in her way, strokes the bridge of his nose. Draws back. Slowly, slowly, takes up position again: does the same thing twice, in rapid succession, first from the stitch between his eyebrows, then from his brow.
"I'm not certain I take the distinction you are drawing between discipline and immersion. Explain, Nicholas? Expand. Expound." Her smile is small and neat and it is smoke on the horizon, and the threat smoke brings: threat, and warning. Is it a cloud? No; is it near? We cannot say; it is only the first suggestion of something burning; we cannot say if it is wild, or tame. "Answer me, and then I will answer you."
crow
Nick's eyes cross at first as he tries to follow her finger, though it gives up as she lines the bridge of his nose, the straight slope from brow to the sharp tip. His eyes fall shut; the expression is contented, the look a person might carry were they to float downstream in a gentle current on a summer afternoon: idyllic almost.
His eyes still closed he says, "One way I'm sharp and another way I'm...not unfocused, but relaxed, I guess. I let things in rather than trying to parse and select what I want. One way focuses on remembering, and the other on forgetting everything else. Does that make more sense?"
lake-light
His eyes fall shut; Penelope leans back against the couch's back, languid and languorous, and takes another sip from her glass of water; holds it over Nicholas's face; watches as the condensation beads, threatens to drip, and threatens to drip, and her hand is high and so is the glass and the ice shifts because ice in water is a transformation happening and the light glancing through the ice and the water sends little fairy lights across his cheekbones and they shiver they shift when the ice shifts and Pen -
"I should like to paint you as the head of Orpheus, Millais-style. Could you hold a pose half-submerged in a cold bathtub for hours?"
Beat. And, "I think so. Or at least I believe I understand what you were driving at. Discipline is forgetting everything else; immersion is memory?"
crow
There is a rattle of ice in the glass, the faint sound of bells as she raises her water above his face. It is threatening to drip; it does not; either way his eyelashes flutter because he has some sense of what she's doing but they do not open. He trusts that she will not let the water fall on his face, see. "It depends on how cold the water is," he says. "But yes."
Perhaps he has posed for her before; perhaps he is aware of how his muscles will cramp and he will long to scratch his nose or move a lock of hair even though he will not. He agrees anyway.
"Something like that," he says, with a slight bob of his head. "One of those things that looks the same, but feels different."
lake-light
He trusts her. He shouldn't. Naiads drown curly-haired young men, and it is almost always an accident, almost always in good sport. Of course: Penelope is not a Naiad. Penelope is a human woman, mortal with a dark muscle for a heart always singing. Still; couldn't she also be a Naiad? The way she watches the glass, her eyes half-hooded; the way she measures the distance between its bottom and Nicholas's head. She is not really looking at him any longer; she is looking sidelong at the drama of cup and crow.
And she is contemplative, too. "I often think about perception; it is often in the back of my mind; it is often like - let us say like a bracelet of bells. When you move your wrist, it makes a sound; when you move, it sings. It is there; you notice it and remember it and it is conscious, the remembering. It won't let you forget. I try to make perception of the world around me be like that, you know?" He does know. He knows her. He's seen the way she looks at the world; studies it. "But I suck at letting it become a wash; I suck at letting it just be present; at forgetting - I'm really fucking bad at meditation." He knows this, too. Perhaps they've tried to meditate together before, and Penelope has fallen asleep: or, eyes glazed with boredom, started to write.
"But... have I ever connected memories to a day in order to pay attention, found myself immersed in a thought rather than taken in by it? I believe I would say yes."
crow
Beneath his eyelids, his eyes move like polished stones, like river rocks. Beneath his eyelids he can see only darkness, but he can sense the water hovering still; perhaps Pen could be a Naiad. Perhaps she could drown him in good fun.
Nicholas has been drowned before; Nicholas died beneath the water and was reborn. Maybe it's not trust: maybe he knows this as deeply as any other truth writ upon his soul.
"There's no one way to do meditation," Nick says. "Ask ten different sects how to meditate and you'll get a hundred answers." And now he does open his eyes, but it is only to look up at her, at what he can see of her around the glass, at what he can see of her through the glass: the bloody red of her hair split fractal-like by the spin of water and glass, a grey eye magnified. "What memories did that for you?"
lake-light
"No way that I've tried has worked yet for me. Even when I was supposed to be praying, and I did pray, I never left myself in prayer. But I like the idea of vocalizations -- or chanting. I can almost get how that would empty you out."
Pen's gaze has been caught by the slice of orange in her water glass, the ammonite spiral of it, the drifting tendrils of white the bubbles curling along its underside giving it a luminous quality it would not otherwise have. A drop of water does fall; that's when Pen takes the glass away; rests it on her thigh. She has curled one leg beneath her; turned her knees toward Nicholas; one of them touches him
.
What memories did that for you?
"Ummmm," she says, and reaches toward the crusty bread. Reach, reach, reach, there: got it. Begins to tear the soft flesh from the crust. "Imagine me with a knife in one hand and a wand in the other; imagine me waiting, under boughs heavy with fruit that never will drop; imagine me waiting there, knowing that: soon, one who loathes my eyes is about to come and try to humiliate me and maybe take a patch of skin at the same time. Imagine me waiting, like that, knowing: I would have to fight. Imagine this other person -- someone mercurial, and bright; someone with wings on his feet, someone with gold on his hands -- coming through the trees that never were trees: okay? Imagine that. How that person would walk; how that person might strike. That's when I'd immerse myself in memory in order to be aware of what is happening right now; whenever, I think, it was time to fight someone like that. It'd be visceral, thinking about it: not thinking about it.Just remembering, and moving -- so."
crow
A drop of the water found his cheekbone; it is sliding down and leaving a wet trail on his cheek before he reaches up and wipes it away with his thumb. He wicks the moisture away as cleanly as if it were a tear.
"I don't like chanting," Nick says, and here a smile because it's an area where they are so different, see. Sometimes they emerge. "But I know people that it works for. Some people appreciate the structure."
Nicholas folds his arms in his lap. The bowl he has allowed to rest there balanced between his thighs, scraped clean of every last sliver of almond and crumb of bread. The stitch she smoothed away earlier has reappeared between his brows. "Is that a memory? It sounds more like a dream."
lake-light
"It's a memory," Pen says. "From soon after I met Ari, actually. One of my earliest fights in Lysander's house. Tell me one of your memories; tell me of immersing yourself in an experience in order to be more aware."
She begins to nibble on the bread. Nibble, nibble, wide-eyed wonder.
crow
The faint smile is still there, slanting one corner of his mouth upward as he watches her tear the soft flesh from the crust of bread. Nick casts a glance down at his bowl, but it is only so he can pick it up and set it aside on the coffee table; then he twists himself around and lowers himself back so that he can rest his head in her lap. He runs the risk of having crumbs scattered across his face; he is in a trusting mood tonight, evidently.
His hair spills out over the top of her thigh, and he shakes one lock of it out of his eyes and it sproings down and off the side of his head instead.
"I think I try to do it daily," he says. "When I'm with a client and want to be fully present. But..." It isn't what she asks, and so there's a thoughtful cast to his features now, in how his gaze drifts toward the room beyond. "When I learned to look back and forward through Time it was like that. I had to be fully immersed in the present to differentiate it from the past and the future, to remember the past and the future."
"I was sitting inside the old chantry back in New England, and someone had lit some candles. Probably Patricia. Dragon had gotten into the trash can so I'd had to chase him outside, and it was really hard to focus just then. So instead of trying to sharpen my attention I thought about the heat from the candle, and how the room felt with me in it and how it felt before I was in it. I just felt...like the room became a part of me even as I was leaving my imprint on it. It reminded me of other times, and other places. Like that."
lake-light
Pen would never scatter him with bread crumbs so carelessly, so callously. Christmas Cookie crumbs, perhaps, but then only when snapping a sugar cookie in half and: oh no. She catches crumbs in the palm of her hand, and by the time he is done with his story she is done with her bread. She has found her fingers in his hair and has begun to massage his scalp see here she pauses at the temples here she cups the back of his skull here she kneads because his hair is an irresistible shadow because it is as black as the written word. And she keeps coiling his hair around her fingers, watching the surfacing brightness of the two rings she is wearing when she isn't watching his face.
"I want midsummer vigil to be our rite, Nickolai. I want it to be a thing we both fashion. So I want a tower, and we'll make it of stones. What do you want?"
crow
There is a contented hum as she kneads the surface of his skin beneath the dense thicket of his curls. The overhead light reflects on his eyelids, shut as they are, smooth and still as a pair of twin moons. He curves his arm back around behind her, slides it beneath her and the couch and splays his hand across the small of her back.
"I want us to find a place where worlds meet at sundown, when the Veil draws so thin you can't tell whether you're in this world or the next," he says. "And I want a crown of ivy, and I want one for you too."
lake-light
"May I wear an ivy-crown, Nicholas Kissokomês?" Her smile is a quick thing, light skimming over a dark lake; it reveals as much as it hides; such is her tone of voice, too. How often is it a lure? This way. This way. She shapes his curls into horns, then unweaves them. Here: she shifts, minutely, to better situate Nicholas' head in her lap, to better be aware of his hand on the small of her back, a warmth over the fine weave of her cotton dress. "May I bear a lantern, too? Or would you rather we have torches and a little bonfire?"
"If we are going to find such a place, we should find it before daybreak. So we are there, ready to begin keeping watch when the sun cracks the horizon. "We can search before we sleep."
Today there is a lingering scent of linseed oil on Pen's skin, beneath cooking-smells and air-smells, as if it had got into the cracks of her; as if it would reveal her, lit like a lamp (ardent, the archaic use of the world) painted in oils by a master of the form.
"We can search now. What else do you want?"
crow
"Torches and a bonfire," Nick says, his tone quick and decisive in a manner that is unusual for him. Perhaps it is the mere mention of a bonfire; Pen knows by now that he enjoys using her as a glorified lighter whenever possible. They have lit bonfires and bonfires in their backyard and within the home during winter there was one blazing almost nightly.
His hand smooths itself in lazy circles over the soft cotton covering her back. He has angled his head in against her stomach, breathing in the scent of linseed oil: he is not sure what it is, but the scent is familiar and comforting, somehow and inextricably tied both in with his adolescence (something about Anna) and with Pen too. "I want you," he says simply.
And then, "When do you want to start searching? What else do you want?"
lake-light
"I want to feed you the strawberry moon as soon as it is risen," Pen murmurs, meditative, foam-light and her voice gone all silver. "I want to place pieces of it, dripping honey-light, on your tongue with my own fingers, and I want you to lick them clean."
The moon-murdering fingers (?) in question are still in Nicholas's hair; are still stroking his curls into other shapes, pleasing and playful; are as musing as her voice. Just moments before, inexplicably and unaccountably, Pen blushed; breath, catching, caught. But one recovers.
"What I want is preparation," she says, after a moment. "We have a tower; we have fire; we have crowns. Or we will. What I want is to be readied, I think - prepared. Burnished and rubbed with copper, then silver, then gold. A bath, for purification, an entire submersion? And then, in oils, an Enochian invocation written on the eyelids, clear sight, then washed away; I could do you, too - what do you think?"
crow
Nick doesn't flush: not quite. She has been able to make him blush before on many occasions, and she stops short of that just now; they are having a serious conversation about serious things, so it is for the better. Nevertheless, his eyes flick up to her, and his head tilts ever so slightly into her moon-murdering fingers.
"I think that's fitting," he says. "What are we preparing for?"
lake-light
"Vigilance," Pen says, simply. "Whatever we might see; whatever we might experience."
crow
Nick nods, then, thoughtful; Pen is Hermetic, she is Flambeau, and this is the sort of response he has come to expect from her. It is not the sort of thoughtfulness that minds, or that does not give her statement the gravity it is due.
"We'll have to leave early in the morning - or late tonight - to find a place then and prepare."
lake-light
"After we're done with the dishes we can find the place," Pen says, and it is a mundane threshold to cross. Her fingers leave his hair at last; some of them do; they trace a line across his eyebrows and then his cheekbone. "But is there aught you wish to add, my crow? Do you want a quiet pool to gaze in; should we fast; should we be chaste - " and see, she draws a line from his cheekbone to his jaw to his collar. Then she traces the string of the bag of offerings he often wears around his neck, under his shirt. " - or should we drink wine? Should we set out gifts to soak in the night? Is there a stone we have left unturned?"
crow
"Maybe we could find a pool," he muses then, and his eyes close once more as she traces the charcoal-dark line of his eyebrow, the edge of his cheekbone. "I like that more, when I can find water." A beat, because he has to think: he adapts the tools for the situation, he adapts them intuitively (a thing which always drives Ari mad.) "I don't always fast, but if we're doing a purification ritual it would make sense."
More thought; Nick tilts his head further in against her, nestling his ear and the side of his head into the curve of her stomach. "I've found candles to be helpful lately."
lake-light
Pen doesn't say a thing in response at first. Only reaches the lump of a bag beneath Nick's shirt and then reaches further, until she can find his arm, the hand not at the small of her back; this she pulls up to her mouth; plays with his fingers.
This is perhaps a way in which she is not a very good Order of Hermes mage. Too much Chaos Magick: too much experimentation; too much improvisation - but there are strong bones, beneath: and she was Disparate before she was Order.
Pen: she sets her canine lightly into Nick's knuckles; then says, "Will you play a game with me, Nicholas, of word association?"
crow
Nick's hand is relaxed as she takes his fingers in hers, which is not the same as it being limp. The muscles in his hand are firm (perhaps the firmest muscles in his body; holding a pen and a shovel and a knife and pulling weeds will do that) and are warm, are ready, are contained movement.
His eyes drift open as he feels the press of her canine into his knuckle, and they find hers. "Of course. What are the terms?"
lake-light
"One of us begins with three words. The other returns with three words, or a phrase. And so on, nine times."
crow
He smiles, then. "What happens at the end of nine times?"
lake-light
"We have a new idea," Pen says. He can feel her stomach move a certain way: feel the laugh he cannot hear. "Do you want it to be a win or lose game? Do you want a prize?"
crow
"I like prizes," he says, and there is a modest slant to his eyelashes as he glances toward her stomach as the muscles ripple against his head. "But I like your terms. You can name words first."
lake-light
Pen: she presses her thumb against the palm of Nick's hand; touches her tongue, meditative, to the knuckle formerly indented (gently) by a canine; she likes the salt of him: it evidently helps her think.
"Air. Liminal. Immanent."
crow
There is this moment while he watches her even as her tongue touches against the back of his knuckle: her eyes contemplative and soft and unfocused, ripples across a lake. Maybe he thinks about pointing out that she can meditate sometimes; he does not. He absorbs her words, and his eyebrows loft and then with a little laugh he says, "This is harder than I thought."
A beat. "Zephyr. Ethereal. Arc."
lake-light
"And so the cloud to fog and foam becomes," Pen says, with a smile. The kind of smile that carves out long dimples; she runs her index finger and thumb up the length and down his middle finger. Each finger is ruled by a planet; she knows which, and what.
crow
Nicholas does not know which finger the planets correspond to; if told, if she has not told him before, he might indeed even be surprised that the planets have fingers, or that the fingers have planets. (But it makes sense, doesn't it? Each one for one of ten, and in your hands the sun.) Still, he does not catch whatever purpose is in her fingertips but he does smile again at her poetry.
"Effervescent. Crystalline. Home."
lake-light
Pen pushes his fingers back: gentle, test, stress; no pain; no strength. Only testing, see; only splaying them out, just so: she says into his palm: "A hollow tree, wracked by lightning; an owl pellet; a song."
crow
His fingers are pliable; she'll find them relaxed enough that she could bend them as far back as she wanted without causing pain. "Desolate. Haunting. Hope."
lake-light
"Now is day's break." She kisses his palm, and then his wrist.
crow
His palm fits itself to her cheek as she turns her mouth into his wrist, almost reflexively. He covers the side of her face, grazes his thumb over her cheekbone. "Ardent. Reaching. Auspicious."
lake-light
"The library of Alexandria, Troy burning," Penelope says, "and an arrow, falling."
crow
Nick wiggles his shoulders, settling his head farther into her lap: settling in to stay for a while. "A column standing alone in a ruin. A bent tree, pointing the way farther into the wilds. A fraying tapestry."
lake-light
"Ah! Somebody is getting fancy," Penelope says, with a wide (dimpled, again) and pleased grin; she presses the curve of it into Nick's hand, idly bites his index and middle-finger: not hard, just to hold; love-bite, pressure without sharpness; considers as she does. "Tower; spinning; river, running, down to Camelot."
crow
"Well, you inspire me," he says, and his eyes flicker open just in time to catch sight of her smile. The hand against her face shifts a little, and the ball of his thumb curves across the little indent in her cheek made by one of her dimples. His own smile is half a smirk, but only half: because she does. "Crossed swords. Maelstrom. A paper kite being flown on a hill."
lake-light
"A raptor, crying sharp as the taste of a penny; a deep pool; a playing card."
crow
"A fish swimming upstream, Fate, a water nymph."
lake-light
"Two more rounds," Penelope says, stroking the back of Nick's hand, his wrist, feeling for the bone. "A drowned knight, a tangle of thread and a kitten with claws, a boy sucking on a burned thumb by soup."
crow
She can find the knob of bone that marks the edge of his wrist with ease; his forearms are slender things, and his wrist is prominent. There's a crescent scar at the edge, slick and smooth with age. He raises his eyebrows and lets out a little laugh at her imagery. "Your hair, tangled in a gold chain. A barrow hill. Petulance."
lake-light
Penelope laughs: ardent, unconstrained; it's the waver of light under water, or shadow under water, and difficult to tell which; it is the action of water and leaves together with the moon, or the dawn, and anyway; her hand finds her own hair, buries in it. Her other hand follows his arm down; rests on his chest. She sinks downward, curling her spine against the back of the couch, and if this means he has to adjust himself in her lap again, well so it does. But: she laughs in a way which seems like it should end in a question; it almost does. Instead; a look, and then, "Drizzle. A king, hanging by roots, a naked sword clasped in his naked hands. Your fingers, knotted in my hair."
crow
He does not laugh with her, but his mouth curves in a smile, his eyes open and there is some gleam there contained within the crinkled corners of his eyes: mischief, and affection, and a certain clarity. He does have to adjust as her spine curves into the back of the couch, but this he does almost reflexively. "Falling leaves. Brine. The hour just before dawn."
lake-light
That was the ninth round. Pen doesn't speak immediately. Her fingers leave her hair; she stretches her arm across the back of the couch instead; glows, quietly, like a coal taken fresh from the fire; it would be easy to stay. But immediately is soon gone, and Pen says, "Which we must be ready to greet." Doesn't stir herself yet; she is too comfortable.
crow
Nick does not move, even to go up to bed where they would both also be comfortable. His exhale, a soft sigh, ends in a contented hum as he wraps his arm around and behind her once more. For a moment he is quiet, dangerously so; he could fall asleep here. "Is there anything we didn't mention that you need to prepare?"
lake-light
"No." A pause.
And then, "Let's do the dishes, and then find our tower."
Pen: she finds one of Nicholas's curls and pulls it out and straight; lets it go and watches it sproing into a slinky curl; has the urge to cut it, keep it. Instead: she disturbs him entirely; shifts and shifts again until there's no lap for Nicholas to lie in.
"Come, come."
crow
If Pen did not bestir herself, it is possible that the two of them would never get anything done; here she is nudging him out of her lap, suggesting that they do the dishes and look for a tower. The curve of his mouth is rueful, it is affectionate, and he lifts his head so that she can rise. He twists himself around so that he can push himself to his feet.
"All right. Dishes, then tower." And hopefully, sleep in between. The hour before dawn is not so long in coming, and the Veil between the worlds is already growing thin.
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