Felsdam was foremost concerned. He had never before witnessed someone make such close contact with the form of the wyrm who did not subsequently meet fate or come near to it. That no indication of discomfort or unhappiness was evident in the countenance of the wyrm was itself another thing unfamiliar to the Scholar. Only Haddock and his Inferno had such rapport.
The second lieutenant appeared in good spirits. Though perhaps it was more apt to say that he seemed as though he had good spirits in him. There was no injury to him, aside from a small splotch of blood staining through the collar of his uniform. His eyes were dilated, his breath quick. As they walked, the officer listed sharply, his feet slipping over the paneling.
“Do you suppose we’d better detour to medical, sir?” Felsdam asked, as the second lieutenant slumped over his shoulder.
“Oh I really don’t think that’s necessary, Scholar,” said the second lieutenant with a chuckle. “Just a moment to get my feet back under me and I’ll be alright.”
“As you say, sir,” Felsdam acquiesced. Perhaps it would be better if the man could get a few hours quiet rest. Put a little damper on the fire that would soon be raging through the ship. His Captain would have to be notified, Felsdam wondered if the officer would suffer punishment for this. The ministers, oh, there might be an inquest ordered. Likely to be, with their humours.
The spiking terror coming to him from Madeline subsided as they reached the second lieutenant’s modest quarters. Whatever upset it was, Felsdam had little doubt it was of Sister Young’s making. The monk was a gnat constantly buzzing about. A distressing, aggrieving, insignificant thing.
“Would you allow me to stay a moment?” asked Felsdam as the second lieutenant stumbled through his doorway. The man looked over his shoulder at him with faint dismay. Felsdam understood with all too much clarity how the man must feel at that moment. “To see you settled I mean. It’s quite a taxing thing before one’s got used to it, even then…”
“Yes, come in Scholar,” panted the second lieutenant, leaning against a counter in his front room. “Would you take tea?”
“Yes. perhaps—pardon my offense, sir, but perhaps I had better tend the pot in this instance, and yourself find a seat,” Felsdam proposed, catching a flash of relief cross the other man’s face.
The second lieutenant sank into a chair, head lolling over the backrest. “I think perhaps you are right, Scholar.”
Quiet lapsed as Felsdam fiddled with the tea service, a beautiful blue glass set from Mars Prime. In the snatched glances over his shoulder, he saw that fatigue was by degrees overtaking euphoria in the second lieutenant. A pang of heartsickness shot through Felsdam. He had some notion, from the bloodstains on his collar, to the idle activity of his mouth—as if worrying some minor irritation—what the second lieutenant experienced. Thoughts of his teachers and their secluded valley pulled at the Scholars heart. Never again for him, but he could watch this newly blessed student, and take solace in his budding education.
“I’ve heard you wrote on this, is that true, Scholar?” asked the second lieutenant idly.
Felsdam put a half full cup of partly cooled tea in the man’s unsteady hand. “I did, for a long time I thought that was my purpose.”
“Purpose?”
“I understood that my teachers had meant to make a teacher of me. In later years and now, I doubt that conviction.”
“What did they mean, then, by teaching you?”
“I believe it was a test of themselves as much as it was of us. To see if they possessed the capacity to educate, and we the capacity to learn.”
The second lieutenant sucked at the lip of his cup, tea escaping at the corner of his mouth and running into the collar of his uniform. “They surely learned that, it is…” he broke off to smile at a memory, before turning to Felsdam with wonder. “What is it? This gift that they give? And how could such a thing come to be?”
Felsdam smiled though it ached to witness the younger man’s wonder. “It has no explanation as of yet, and we know not why they possess the quality. My hope some day is that human and wyrm will together answer these questions.”
The second lieutenant raised his cup in salute to the notion, before falling back into the support of his seat.
“It is normal to feel spent or weakened afterwards,” Felsdam supplied. “After my first lessons, I could not walk for a handful of hours.”
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“Yes, though this is not the first taste I’ve had of them,” said the second lieutenant, nodding along in agreement.
“It is not?”
“My… education, as you put it, began before the ministers boarded.”
“That long ago?”
“Yes, if I recall correctly, I met with them shortly after you showed me those tapes of the poetry and dancing.”
“Indeed?” Felsdam said, sipping from his cup to cover a shocked expression.
“Though this is the first that they’ve sought knowing from me,” he sighed. “I admit, I am rather put out by the interruption, but then, you understand, do you not, Scholar? You too had a teacher.”
“I did, yes,” said Felsdam. He did not in fact believe he understood to what the second lieutenant was referring. “I was the special project of Dawning Sky, Aurora Before the Stars.”
The second lieutenant hummed and chuckled. “The green vision, the poetess, I remember.”
“You… remember?” asked Felsdam, holding tight to hope in case he needed to throttle it.
In the second lieutenant’s eyes flashed a transient heat. “I’ve seen her compose, Scholar.” he leaned forward conspiratorily. “I’ve witnessed her poetry, and knew it.”
“Well, that is indeed a blessing,” Felsdam said, choking off his grief. “She is very skilled in fyre.”
The second lieutenant made an incomprehensible sound of happy agreement, staring up as though his visions were projected on the chamber ceiling. “They are so wonderful, Felsdam, so… so strange—alien! And yet, they fit against my mind, and mine against theirs and all at once it is as if I were three in one and one in three.” he broke off into joyous laughter. “And such a thing is impossible and eternal all at once with them.” He sighed and smiled and ran his hand through his hair. He looked to Felsdam, “how could such a thing so pure be vilified?”
The Scholar made no immediate answer, beginning to doubt then that he had correctly reckoned the full nature of the second lieutenant’s associations with the emissary. He at last asked, “sir, pardon me the intrusion, but I feel I must ask you, what exactly, and in full, has transpired between yourself and the emissary?”
“You do not understand? But I had thought—you were yourself a student of their teachings—did you not come to know the all encompassing embrace of their love?”
“Their what?”
Felsdam was met by Madeline’s embrace seconds after stepping clear of the second lieutenant’s quarters. “Is the fellow alright? She hasn’t hurt him?”
“No more than they hurt us, love. He is content, and sleeping now,” Felsdam replied. He settled on the flooring in front of the door, DuCourt fluttering down at his side. “Rest that he won’t be well done by if it is interrupted.”
“Did he tell you how it was with her? She held him close! The monk of course managed to give offence again, touched her!”
“Woman or wyrm?”
“Woman, but wyrm put an end to it. Oh, Liam, that came very close to being the final nail in the thing.” Madeline worried at her hands. “I felt that she would kill the Sister. If it were to happen again, I don’t know that she’d stop at a warning.”
“The Captain and the crew should be made aware.”
“I’m sure they have been—or soon will be—the Sister scuttled off as soon as she got her papers back together. I let her roam where she would. Probably she’s taken herself straight to the bridge.”
“Or to the ministers.”
“I’m not sure she holds any more affection for the Mr.’s Reed and Ludsic than we do.”
“I suppose they rather tire her hand, waste good recyc.”
Madeline chuckled. “They do have a love of their own voices.”
The pair sat, small gray shapes, stray motes of dust in the channels of the ship. Shoulder to shoulder, alone in the universe. Their small solace that they were together, to share these worries, as they had for those past twenty five years, shared all that was between them.
“He confirmed our theory,” Felsdam said into the silence of their vigil. “She is two in one, and one in two.”
“She gave him knowing of herself?” Madeline asked.
“She did, and he gave the same back.”
Madeline froze, Felsdam could feel the tension signing through her. “To what extent?”
Felsdam took his wife’s scarred hand and held it in his lap. “They’ve been busy these past years, my love, they have developed fine control in the transmission.”
“To what extent, Liam?” her voice rising to echo sharply down the passage. “To what extent?”
“They found his name,” Felsdam began, trying to hold solid against the torrent flowing wild through DuCourt. “He described the experience as being briefly completely intertwined with her.” Madeline let loose a choking half stifled sob. “In a moment of communion so pure and entire that it has found words to him only as true love.”
Madeline wept, leaning against Felsdam’s shoulder. He knew his wife’s heart was on her Tranquil. The giver—through an accident—of her scar. His darling, his heart, who had been unmade and remade in the garden in the valley. In whose blood had been placed the strange iteration of their power that had bound himself to her.
“As he left her side, the oneness left him,” Felsdam said. “She knew him and named him and let him go. He is himself now, complete and unharmed.”
“It is not between them as has happened before?” Madeline asked. “Not as it is between James and his Inferno? Or my Tranquil, or you and I?”
“It is not,” Felsdam assured her. “It is something wholly new.”
“As is the emissary herself,” Madeline said, a thread of hope interlacing her grief, fear and doubts. It was a bright thread that Felsdam found himself also clinging to. “Perhaps this time it will be different.”
