Chapter 22

I returned to their room with the pair of collars I had commissioned from the tanner and the pies. “The apothecary told me this is the last free town before we go over the mountains toward Blij. Talking to the smith and the tanner. They both told me that it would be better to put you in collars if only to keep the people of the towns thinking you were fair game.”

Rowan and Farrow stared at the buffed leather and chomped on their pies quietly.

“You knew this, right? Rowan?” I asked as I ran my thumb along sewn edge.

He rolled a shoulder. “We are entering the Findou territory. Of course I knew.”

“And when were you going to tell me this was going to be the option for getting you through Findou?” I spat, ears going flat.

Farrow took one of the collars to look it over. “It’s common enough. Where there is war, ore, and work to be done.”

“Don’t ask me to like this.” I sagged.

“There’s no buckle to this?” Farrow held up the collar. No, there wasn’t. For want of a better word, it was just a rectangle of leather. “Or loop.”

I pulled a pair of gold clinks from my pouch. He looked at them in question. “Here, put it around your neck, and I’ll show you what I planned on doing.” He did as I asked, though the dubious look on his face told me he didn’t believe me. I pressed the metal to his collar, and watched the metal flatten out to the image in my head like I had coated the skull I now wore as a necklace. Slowly it circled around to be a seamless, thin sheet of gold holding the hide in place. Expansion gaps allowed for Farrow to bend his neck without restraint. Embossed sparrows and clouds fluttered across it’s surface, and they continued to do so when I took my hand away. There was no way to ignore that the collar was enchanted. “Can you breath? Comfortable enough? Can you move your head around and it not dig in?”

“Why?” Farrow croaked, stunned. He was entranced touching the metal, finding it moving beneath his fingers.

“Value. The blacksmith sat me down and explained different ways of showing value when it came to slaves– quality of materials, decorations, jewelry and such. I don’t have the clink to want to pay for jewelry, but I have the magic to turn clink into something that looks incredibly expensive.” I took out another two gold clink – leaving me with ten to get by with for the rest of the trip. I still didn’t know how to break down the platinum coins. I had to hope I could do it at a bank in Blij. If it was a capital, someone there had to have the knowledge.

I turned to Rowan, who was still regarding me with a thin veneer of distrust. “Do you want it or not?” I asked him. He sighed and let me do the same to him that I had done to Farrow. This one instead of sparrows, I had a rowan tree growing on the collar, experiencing the four seasons in the span of minutes.

“What is it doing?” He asked, hesitantly. I paused, trying to interpret that look of wonder. He finally didn’t look angry. I described it to him as he felt the leaves shiver beneath his fingertips. “And this is the tree from your world?”

“Yeah. It’s the wayfarer’s tree and special to the fae of my world. It protects travelers.” I rubbed at the back of my head.

Farrow brushed a knuckle against the back of my arm to ask for attention. “I-?”

I gave him a tired, but gentle smile. “Sparrows back home are birds that represent good fortune.” I led his finger to trace the moving birds and the swirling clouds, letting him understand each.

“You’ve done a lot for us,” Rowan’s defensiveness finally slipped off.

“I care deeply. Please do understand that. I refused your season, not because I’ve lost interest. It’s that I wasn’t comfortable, knowing we hadn’t talked about…” I spread my hands to the room and then slumped, “anything. The fact your world doesn’t have condoms and none of those pots seems to be some kind of spermicide, I’m not about to get you pregnant when your brain is ten ways twisted to Tuesday. It wasn’t because of your aim to be a demon lord and some kind of heirarchy, though that is something for you to consider. If only for the sake of optics – how people would look at us and who they would honestly consider in the position of power. Or that you’re Rugoshi. Fuck that.

“As it is, and something I want clarified just because: your dad’s the one that birthed you, isn’t he?”

Rowan stilled, his brow cinching into a frown. “What makes you say that?”

“You don’t have horns.” I pointed out.

“I have horns, Matchstick.”

I stared at his head, and saw nothing. I blinked at him like he was the one being daft here. He swallowed and touched the area where there might be horns and drew around a spiral. I went to touch that same spot and found it empty.

“Sparrow bones?” I asked.

“He has horns; always has, Tan. The fact your hand is going right through them is creepy, though.”

I turned to look at Farrow, concerned. I scrawled across his features. He looked entirely normal to me. “Don’t tell me you have features of Karamide that I’m not seeing.”

“Is this one of your sights, Matchstick?” Rowan offered.

I turned back to him, scouring his face for any sign that they were playing with me. “You haven’t had them since you got me down from the Wraith.”

“But look, Tan. Drop the shine you’ve put on everything to be perceived as normal and use that sight of yours.”

“No…no, I don’t think that’s quite it.” A dawning realization occurred to me. I had been using a degree of non-sight without even realizing it. I slow blinked, willing myself not to see Rowan and Farrow as their evident truth. The room skewed sideways, the beams a little less plumb and the now see- through amber wood a touch more rough. Rowan looked down at me, his once yellow eyes a soft copper. He did have horns, large, black, waxed, and curled tightly like they had been purposefully shaped. A core of deep magenta throbbed beneath his sternum.

I looked to Farrow, finding he had a thin coating of dark cream fur across all of his exposed skin, softly pointed ears, and long whiskers protruding from his cheeks. He didn’t flinch back when I approached, gently flicking the edges of the long whiskers. He and Rowan shared a silent conversation around me.

“What have you been seeing, Tan?” Farrow finally broke off from what Rowan and he were trying to communicate without me.

“I’m going to do something that’s probably going to scare the shit out of you, if you don’t mind?” I hesitated, my hands shaking.

Farrow rooted himself to the floor, preparing himself for a solid hook to the jaw. I could see that much. Instead I set my palm against his chest. He startled, looking down at it.

“You keep expecting me to lay you out flat. Only did that the once when you called me a whore for want of a better word. Gonna tell you to clench your teeth, though. Not sure what this is going to feel like.” I cautioned, and pushed. I slid in through his skin like it was water, until I found what I could only call his core. It pulsed from magenta to a soft blue light under my touch. It had the same texture as the core in the ancient trees. I drew my thumb along it’s prickly edges, breaking off little protrusions, like popping green sprouts out of potatoes back in my world. He gasped, his hand wrapping around my wrist, his color going pale. I let go of the core and pulled my hand out carefully. He didn’t let go of my wrist, instead using it to support himself for a minute longer. I slow blinked through my sights again. He didn’t have the fur and whiskers. “Now you look like what I’ve seen since I met you. Oh cool, you have the blue wisp now. Huh.”

“Rowan?” Farrow fought through another painful gasp.

Rowan’s eyes had gone wide. “What did you do, Matchstick?”

“I took the edges off of his core. I told you, I haven’t looked inside of either of you. I refused. That was private. You both have one like the ancient trees. You remember how I pulled that one out once?”

Rowan nodded.

“What by Nodding’s Hell do I look like now?” Farrow finally got air to the bottom of his lungs and was able to straighten up without needing to lean on me.

“Like royalty.” Rowan traced a thumb along Farrow’s cheekbone then to his lip. His fingers kinked into Farrow’s red curls, tracing the curves as they framed freckles. The look of heated appreciation made me warm in watching them. I thought I had grown sick of watching these two pleasure each other, but tenderness seemed to re-ignite that fire in my gut. Farrow blinked at that, his hands going up to feel his skin. A wash of horror then confusion doubled up across his brows.

“You saw him as royal Karamide?” Rowan asked me without turning from his admiration.

“How did you know?” Farrow asked beneath his breath, his eyes goig huge with terror as he tried to duck away from Rowan’s fingers.

“Farrow?” Rowan’s growl stopped him.

Farrow flinched at that demand. “Son of a low concubine. No line to the throne. Not looking like a commoner. Got tired of the back courts and ran.”

Rowan dropped his hand, stunned. “I’ve known you since you were twelve or thirteen, Farrow. You ran when you were just a kit.”

Farrrow pursed his lips, refusing to meet his eyes. “Yeah, and?”

“You weren’t going to tell me?”

“Not looking the way I did. I looked like any other furry Karamide out there. Who’d believe a furball calling himself royal?” he went from snapping at Rowan to hissing at me. He hiccuped as he met my eyes and realized what I had been seeing all along. “You weren’t disgusted with my fur? It wasn’t even there for you to notice.”

“If you’re asking why I didn’t take you in your season, no it had nothing to do with your fur.” I glanced away as heat built up in my cheeks. I cleared my throat, trying to talk beyond the lump in it.

“Wait! Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.” He waved the thought away. “That.” He pointed at my face. “You liked that, didn’t you?”

“What?” I turned away from him to poke at the fire.

“My fur!” His indignant pitch crawled around in the rafters.

“Shut up.” I tossed a log on the fire.

“You were into that! A Yujin-” He chuckled at my plight. “You saw me as royal.” He quieted. “You’ve seen me since the day we met. Is this how you see people? What they imagine themselves to be? What they really are?”

I shrugged, not sure how to respond to that question. I just saw people. Maybe I needed to work on my sight, try not to do that.

“Matchstick?” Rowan drew my attention. “This why some people make you nervous?”

I rubbed a shoulder, focusing on the fire. “Maybe.”

“You see them. The real them, beneath their facade? And that can be scary?”

“I just thought it was normal to the different species here. Fangs. Massive eyes. Sloughing skin. Holes in cheeks to show more teeth than there need be.” I shivered.

Rowan grabbed my trap and pulled me around. He dragged me up to look at him, anger flashing in his eyes. “Do I scare you?”

Maybe I was being mean. I slammed my hand through his sternum and grabbed his core, twisting all the sharp edges off of it while he gasped at my reaction. “No. So quit trying to.”

“This is what you’ve seen him as all this time?” Farrow asked when I pulled my hand out of Rowan to watch him collapse onto his knees. Maybe I’d been a bit too rough. He gulped, fighting to drag air into his lungs.

“Told you I didn’t see horns,” I muttered.

“No. You didn’t see horns.” Farrow studied Rowan’s face before looking at me. “A mercenary?”

“Is that what I saw? He’s always had the yellow eyes to me. And no horns.” I ran my fingers through his hair and down to cup his cheek. Blue wisps finally rose and fell around him. “You tell me. What was it you saw yourself as?”

“Someone my dad would have been more proud of than a paladin lapbeast to the Empire,” he cussed as he tried to get off the floor.

“I’m not sure I can put you both back to the way you were. I rubbed off pokey bits from your core. Maybe they will come back after a time?” I offered, regretting my actions all at once.

“No. Don’t. This is more effective than any disguise I could have asked for. No one will recognize Farrow or me. It’s going to be you that we have trouble hiding.” Rowan regarded me. Drawing a finger along the chain on my ear, he huffed. He grabbed up his bag of clink and left, the door slamming behind us.

“How’d you know messing with our core would change us?”

“The same feeling I get with making gold dance around your neck. It’s just something I think, and therefore can. I can’t even guess. It just is.” I sat on Rowan’s bed to regard Farrow. “I want you to understand that I genuinely didn’t do anything with either you or Rowan not out of disgust, but out of principle. The last six days have left me exhausted and having you both swap from begging to angry has been a lot emotionally. Do you mind if I sleep?” I leaned over and dropped my head onto the pillow, not waiting on Farrow’s reply.

Sometime after lunch, by my guess at the light playing around the edges of the curtain, I found that a blanket had been pulled up over my shoulders.

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