Char & Ash: A Little Longer

The Pub thrummed with attendants and minor Folk, part of the eternal entourages the Truce Council members appeared with in mid-swarmed. Truce Council meets swelled the Pub’s liminal spaces to pulsing crowds, and in the thrum Caleb saw the slim number of eventual Truce breakers scowl beside the gloriously inebriated, the dancing throng of bodies and spirit ichor. Caleb stormed through a part in the crowd, guarded by the hushed whispers of the damned or those near enough to a Truce Breaker to have felt the edge of Caleb’s pistol against their loved ones’ temples. Hand on the small of Tuija’s back, Caleb felt her speed up, divert behind the bar, where Donovan the gjenganger poured pints and filled drinks. Tuija grabbed a bottle of whiskey from a mid-top shelf, the label lost under her hand. 

"Hey! At least tell me what kind it was, Tuj! My numbers'll be off again!" Donovan poured pints with multiple ghostly arms, his apparitional body a flow of fog and glassware, as orders were filled and spoken for by nebulous hands. 

"Whiskey! The brown kind!" Tuija gesticulated behind her at the disembodied gjenganger, the ghost with enough ties to corporeality to pour drinks and serve the denizens of the pub. 

"Are you serious!? Don't you do this to me again, y'all're nuts!" Donovan threw his towel onto the bartop. "I blame you for this Judge Mauthisen, Sir! She ain't half the trouble when you're not... gah! Hey! No fair!"

The glass Tujia threw tumbled through the air, narrow in its escape from ending broken on the floor, when another set of hands caught and righted it. 

"You sure?" Caleb wove his arm around her waist, flashing the label at Donovan over Tuija's head. "She's always been a feisty one.”  

"My saviour!" Two of Donovan’s hands cued in the whiskey to a notepad as the others rushed to pour more drinks. A mad dash of the crowd butted against the bar in varying shades of corporeality, limbs of multiple configuration clutching for glasses in a wild dash.

 

"What's Finn going to do, bill me? Thank me later, Mauthisen. After all, it's a party innit it!?" Tuija's hand was rougher than Caleb remembered, when she set her fingers to his palm and tugged him toward a reconstructing staircase made of lost bric-a-brac and wandering old carpet. He followed in automatic pilot through the twists and bends of Finnegan's upper floors. The walls swerved and undulated for their hidden Master.

"You don't have to... Tuija slow down." 

"Once we get to my place."

"We ought to talk."

"Depends on what we... Finn... he'll cover for us." Tuija tossed a sideways smirk back at Caleb as they rounded the last corner before she kicked open a door with her bark clad foot. "In." 

"Yes Ma'am." Caleb dove into the offered doorway, the echo of uneasy laughter permeated the walls of Finnegan’s Pub. 

The night sky battled with sunshine as a vault of kaleidoscopic starlight tempered a shock of blue so rich it made the jewel of the sun appear a common bauble. To the left, the night sky was so black it sucked his soul toward it, a slim memory of the primordial chaos which tempted and accused in equal measure. The moon spun in place, an outline of chariot and charioteer milk-white as a thin nebula. The flat itself opened onto the back vault of the worlds, both piece of the primordial forest and bastion of modernity with a flat screen tv and kitchen tucked to one of three walls. 

"Woa." Dropping his knapsack at the door, Caleb kicked off one boot at a time, from loosened laces. 

"What, forgot my place already?" Tuija smirked sideways, tugged the bottle from Caleb's hand and set it on a marble slab counter top. As she searched for a couple of glasses, she opened the refrigerator and huffed. 

"No, ah... hey, it's a lot to get used to." 

"I don't feed Scandis often, got a couple dozen eggs and a big pitcher of children's laughter. YouTube. Excellent harvest point." Tuija pulled out a pitcher of iridescent liquid, lips skewed in an attempt to keep level. "Thirsty? It's a bunch of giggles."

"I'm fine with the whiskey. Guess I've been distracted." 

"Understatement of the century, last few months you've been a kettle of exhaustion. Water's in the creek by the leaves of Yggdrasil. Should be cold, still winter in Niflheim. Har har." She shoved the pitcher of children's laughter back into the refrigerator and shut the door to lean against it, one hand shoved in the pocket of her jeans. "They shouldn't have dismissed you."

 

"Can we not deflect to me, please?" Caleb reached for the whiskey and cracked the top, taking a whiff of the alcoholic nuttiness and spice from the top of the bottle. "I'd rather discuss the Grout Market." 

A stiff pull from the bottle, and Caleb grunted at the slick burn of a fairly balanced irish whiskey, all peat and vanilla and caramel on the back end of smoke. He took another quick drag before holding it out for Tuija. Eyes which should have matched narrowed on the bottle, one as amber as its' contents and the other a subtle blue. 

"We ought to eventually. They're fucking with you, baby. Spent so many years using your birth as a reason for their tense peace they think you're nothing but its' symbol... but..." She saw a skewed reflection in the glass of the bottle, the cedar bark which grew out of her face like an untameable cancer, its inevitability as disastrous as the dart which struck. "... Ule got out. Cale, Ule..." 

"We don't know what Ule did. He's probably dead, we..." 

"If he got out..." 

"I know! But Tuj, we only have the story of a fucked up seer to go on, it's not enough evidence to confirm anything."

"So we find the evidence."

"Yes! Yes, we do, we look but..." 

"But?"

"But I need to figure out this case before I do anything else." 

"Of course, yep! It'll be this one then the next, then what, Cale? By the time they give you a minute to breathe, I'll be halfway to a Redwood! If it was Delilah asking, would you do it?"

 

Caleb's lungs cut out like a knife taken to a filled paper bag. "Where did this come from?"

"She's got a hold on you." 

"Delilah and I broke up fourteen years ago." 

"And every time she comes up in a Truce conversation, or as a curse in the Pub you go running to check up." 

"No I... Tuija, why does this matter right now?" Caleb reached for her.

 

"If Delilah asked you for a way out of the Truce, would you do it?" Tuija stomped her foot, angled her cheek from Caleb's side. 

"What? No!" 

"Don't..." She gesticulated at his chest, "Don't lie you'd look, you know you would." 

"Not with your life on the line!" His shout echoed across the vault above them, becoming a line dark as space without stars, which coiled around the nearest bauble above like a ring. "Someone is targeting the Rastenivitsya and I will be damned to every apocalyptic underworld if I don't find who it is and stop them before you go up in flames! I don't give a shit about Delilah, or if Ule found some magical mcguffin! He can have it for the fifteen hours I need to stop the world from going ablaze with the love of my life along with it!" 

The echoes returned as muffled as Tuija's silence, as she wrapped her hands around his wrist and tugged him into her body. "Say it. Tell me again, what you said so clearly. Say it again?" 

"I..." Caleb's throat worked, jaw taught. He struggled with the sound, the essence so clear in every second of his hand on her cheek, brushing the hair away from the back of her neck. "I lo-... you're the love of..." 

Tuija sighed and let go of him to pace the grass and moss of her floor. Hands in her hair, she shook her head and bit down on the ire which tried to erupt from her lips. "What did she do to you?"

"Nothing! I... don't know." Caleb reached for Tuija's shoulder and found it soft under his hand. He pulled her into a hug, his cheek propped on her hair. "You're the one who said no, not me. I'd thought you realized what I wanted." 

"If being with you is political, you choosing a tradition to marry me by is as much a declaration of allegiance as Ares claiming God-Kingdom of Midgard." 

"Jase offered." 

"Oh yes, that will suffice, Jase isn't an awkward subject at all, besides, I'm sure there can be concessions made for when I bury myself like an acorn and grow into a tree. The ring might not fit around my branches, but maybe Hephaestus could build me something." 

"That's not fair." Kissing her hair, Caleb rocked in their embrace. "Hold out a little longer, we'll figure it out."

The cure for her curse spat at his inability to find it, a raucous jitter in the back of his mind every day the bark which covered part of her skin increased, or she knicked herself, or got a bruise which in a day's time turned into another patch of cedar-like, discoloured bark. An urge to build a castle for her to inhabit, a place where she'd be safe and stay by him as she was longer was as dashed as the futility of time's spell. 

"I've been holding out for one hundred and sixty three years!" Tuija tried to slow her breathing. Ran her fingers through hair which tangled between sheets of cedar bark. Grit-toothed, Tuija groaned and yanked as Caleb surged in, both hands untangling her hair from partially transformed fingers. "One hundred and..."

 

"I know! I know, baby I know. I... hold on." He whispered into her scalp, hand freed and fingers woven through hers to bring her arm down to his waist. Brushing her hair back with his other hand, Caleb clucked his tongue, rocking gently in place. A sordid helplessness consumed "Hold on. There's got to be..." 

"A way? What if Ule found it, Caleb? What if Ule found the way out?" Tuija settled into his arms, the scratch of her cheek against his shoulder enough to catch the wool of his sweater. Wrapping her into an embrace, Caleb hummed a melody the origin of which he didn't remember. His hand stroked her hair, mind swimming the chaotic waters at the edge of his periphery any time he closed his eyes. Tuija settled her arms around the small of his back, rocking in his rhythm, face pressed into his jumper. 

"You're scared, and you've the right." The sun tracked across the sky, fading in brightness for the balm of the evening rise of the moon in its chariot, and Caleb wondered if Tuija's long day was ebbing to the twilight hours of an existence dwarfing his ten times. He continued to hum, kissed her hair and temple as he felt her arms shake in a mirror of his own. "But... you're strong like none of the others were, before they dug their graves and settled in the earth. You're here and you're fighting and... maybe Ule found a way, but the chances are way less slim that he's dead in some alley after pissing off the wrong gangster..." 

"But if he didn't..." 

"I know! I know, if he didn't we'll track him down, but... for us to go there, to leave the Truce, it's... never been done. I've spent the better part of a hundred and fifty years dealing with Folk doing their best to escape its tenets or get some fucked up version of revenge. All they found was death on a good day." Caleb felt the pressure of the worlds, the executioner's cloak an invisible mass bending his shoulders. What could he offer her? If Ule was the keeper of his own forbidden way, if Caleb found Tuija's freedom from the curse eating her alive, could he join her in that desolate place? 

Two beings cast out of a second Eden to till the earth with no help nor heard whisper of the gods? Could he leave? Would he be damning Realms to a new cacophony the second he stepped away and pushed past where they could follow? 

"If Ule didn't find the way out, whoever's torching Sacred Groves is as much a danger to you..." 

"Don't..." 

"Tuija. I have to think about this, I have to be prepared. Whoever is torching Groves has a vendetta against the Rastenivitye and you're the last one left. Going after the bastards torching the dead matters. If Ule is out, and not dead, he's likely stable and comfortable somewhere. Which means we have time. All you need to do is keep swinging." 

"It's getting harder." 

"We're going to figure it out. I'll tear down half the Realms of the Cosmos to keep you." 

"Only half?"

"Gotta leave enough standing so we have a decent retirement plan." Caleb smirked into her hair, Tuija's lopsided smile moved against his shirt, her arms tightening around his lower back.

 

"Oh yeah, some decent hunting grounds, space for a dog or seven..." 

"Picture it. Everything you want to do, everywhere you want to go." 

"You're coming with me." She spread her fingers along his back, looked up to a face creased with the weight of the Realms. 

"There was no manual for this, being the Judge." Caleb shook his head, doused his mouth with more whiskey and sighed into the air with its' thick charge, and thinner texture. "I've got Realms stacked upon Realms, stacked upon the cosmos and somehow I'm the one who looks at situations with a fairness I don't feel. Keep doing what I think is best, and inevitably one or more groups are pissed off to high heavens, which is in itself a problem, since Hera's only recently back on Olympus' throne. Did you know the Olympians are probably listening to this conversation right now?"

"If they are, I could really use a pizza, no cheese, extra basil, prosciutto and some... truffle. Yeah. Fire oven, not the hot electric things. Oh, and some wine. Whiskey is the bomb, but a good few bottles of red would set the evening off. Send it via Finn's. With one of those little chocolate cheesecakes on the side. You want anything? If... if they're listening, that means they're available, right? Mercury would probably do the delivery for a lark. Oh, and bubbles. We could use a bottle of bubbles." 

Caleb blinked with a slow shake of his head, and a dawning smile. "Yeah, beef dip for me. Extra au jus, extra mushrooms. Thicker than Tuija's wrist. The wine sounds... sounds good." 

They hung in companionable silence for as long as it took the giggles to break out first from Tuija, then Caleb. He hucked his phone backward onto the grass, and shook his head. 

"Think we'll get my pizza?" 

Caleb ached, set his elbows against his knees as he laughed and shook his head slowly from side to side, taking Tuija's hand to walk them onto a grassy hill sized right to use as a seat. "I don't know, but now I really want a sandwich. Eh. I'll be fine." 

"You're not though. Doesn't take a telepath to see you're in need of some serious R&R."

"Oh yeah! I can put a 'closed for business' shingle up and trot off into the sunset. While I'm at it, I'll stumble magically into the ones torching Groves, and happen across the perfect way to solve all woes. Including yours." 

"Sarcasm. Worst invention in human history since the laser disc."

"Oooo, oww, shots fired! Don't go near Athene with that, laser disc was one of her babies."

"Oh... Oh gosh, did I just potentially offend the Olympian academic? S-save me, Caleb save me! I thrust myself into thy arms for judgement!" Tuija made a play of flopping into Caleb's lap. He grunted hard, but pulled her up to sit on his thighs, one arm hemming her in and holding her against his sore side. "You copacetic, Cale?"

"Guess there's a lot of broken in the Judge tonight."  

"Everyone's a little bit broken, how empathy works, innit it?" The sprite played at his jumper, fingers on wool knitted in patterns. "None of us know what to do, but look at the Truce and find too much blood outside of it to stomach. I don't envy you. Being Judge? It's... a metric lot. But I've seen you, Caleb. The way you conduct your business, drink Finn's booze and trudge to the next spot half-sober until those bursts of magic in your pocket tell you where to go next. You lost something... or someone. And I think I know who to blame, her name starting with a D..." 

"Tuija, we don't have time."

She tightened the arm around his neck, pressed a sloppy half-kiss on his cheek. "Leave it for the morning."

"There a morning in here? Over there? Up there?" Caleb squinted and pointed this way and that, toward the sun, to the edge of the blue. Tuija burst out laughing, clanked the side of her head into his as her laughter infected him with deep chuckles. "Couldn't resist." 

"Hushabye." Her lips crashed upward, arm around his neck. Caleb reached his hands along her waist, picked her up until she straddled him, the juxtaposition of Finnegan's curse scratching against his skin sang as loud as Aphrodite's siren-chorus. They crashed into the night, the bottle of whiskey forgotten, until a knock came at the door. 

A confused and confounded man in Kopis Industries uniform averted his eyes, when a shrtless Judge swung it open and took delivery of a bag filled with clinking bottles, a rolled up sandwich in brown paper, thermos of au jus, and one extra large pizza box. 

"Are... holy fuck!" Tuija grabbed hold of Caleb's shirt and pulled it over her chest, as Caleb kicked the door closed and walked mutely to the marble counter top to put the food and wine down. "You were... every day?"

"At least the Hellenes answer back. The rest? I'm sure they hear it, they don't say. Took that oh so common 'not our problem' approach of 'wouldn't want to rock the boat'. Wine?" Caleb dug in the bag for the first bottle, a red with a label in French. He searched for a corkscrew, finally grabbed his pen knife and stabbed the cork, dug it out with a twist. Caleb drank the first glug from the bottle, held it out for Tuija. "Your pizza's getting cold." 

"... yeah. Hunger." 

"Got murders to solve in the morning." 

"Why don't you cantrip it? Your new phone. The passive magic for a pocket cantrip doesn't leave enough residue to trigger the wards." 

"What?"

"The wards that alert your little black book? They get triggered by passive spells created and maintained by the Realms. I was one of the persons who helped set them up for neutral ground. There are cantrips and minor magics that don't trigger. Cleaning a stain off a blouse, card divinations, passive scrying. Cantrips to open windows or keep your phone or notebook or wallet in your pocket, even if it gets removed. They're minor magic that remains irrelevant to the Truce.... didn't you learn this?"

"..." Caleb took a bite of his drenched sandwich and waited until the unctuous meat sloshed down his throat before shaking his head. "I knew about the cantrips, but how far can something the size of a phone get from its' owner before the Truce guards trigger?"

"A hemisphere?"
"Pardon?"
"Yeah, so a hemisphere is..." 
"I mean what the heck? Why that far?"
"We had this fortune teller, real divination queen, when we began to form the Treaty Guards. She saw planes coming. Didn't want someone's spell books, grimoires, icons or shit getting lost in baggage claims." Tuija folded a slice of pizza in half, and took a bite, splashed red wine into a couple of stemware glasses from her cupboard and shoved one over at Caleb. "Try being the one to decipher her babbling, metal birds in the sky, who ate people then regurgitated them later... it was fucked up until the 30's."
"Yeah, planes are whack."
"Right!? Why can't they use doors like normal Folk?"
"I know! What's with all this time in transit!? They..." 
"Don't have any time to lose!?"
"Yes! Thank you!" Caleb slapped his palm against the marble and chowed down on another bite of his sandwich, drowned down the beef dip and au jus with a healthy gulp of red wine. Savoury garlic and salt paired with rich spice and the  "Like, why spend hours, a half day or more in airports waiting for a plane to get set in a seat with less room than a cattle car, to cross oceans or continents, when doors exist, right!?" 
"I know! It's so strange, and their cars!? I mean, hey, I do love a good stick shift, but come on!"
"Good with a stick, are you?" Caleb nodded at her with a sly smirk. 
"Oh! You wish, errand boy, I love a good stick... shift. If it's active enough, keeps its pace on the throttle." 
"I bet. Would take a hefty transmission to keep you happy."
"Depends, sometimes I enjoy an easier ride. You?"
"I... got my license a while back, haven't used it much." 
"So this is some form of sick joke?" Tuija flicked her fingers up from the dessert package, a foil condom wrapper and one-time use lube packet between her index and middle fingers. 
"Sclep, I am going to murder you myself and turn you into incense." 
"Is he working with Finn on this?"
"Bastards!"
"Has it been that bad? We got pizza."
"What? No! You're amazing, it's the cursed meddling." 
"Caleb, they might've shoved us in a direction, but we take it from there. I'm not going to be fucked around by the son of Apollo-the-prisoner-for-life. Cool your beans." 
"Sorry. It's been a rough..."
"... century?"
"Decade and a half." Caleb's chin fell, he shook his head then lifted his eyes along Tuija's body. Nipples barely visible in his shirt, the way her cedar curse cut into her flesh, tempered her into a magical being of no mistake. As wounded and horrific as he was, as tied to the Truce. How could they find some mystic freedom? Caleb reached to take her hand. "... Tuija..." 
Caleb tugged on her hand, until she straddled him, ran his right hand up her spine to the cedar-burned bundles of skin and bark on her neck. He searched her lips, the kind turn of her eyes as sharp as they were when she slaughtered others for Perun. Her nose batted at his and he let it, batting his own back. Their lips brushed and he gasped.
"It's okay, I promise not to break you." She whispered in his ear, kissed his earlobe and nipped at the cartilage of his ear. Caleb nuzzled into her neck, voice hoarse as he spoke sensuous secrets. Hopes and dreams. Desires for the night. Tuija pulled back, and nodded. "I agree to your terms. On one condition: I come with you. Shit like this, you'll need someone to watch your back. You leave me behind one time and a demon almost serves your liver for Sunday Roast. You need me." 
"Agreed. I need you." Hand on the back of her neck, Caleb attempted to disable the unease of being in her partitioned space in the Axis Mundi. The hum of liminal space seeped into the grassland and the dance of the sun and moon, a permanent sense of somewhere else or the strike of a belonging two steps too far over the cliff. Finnegan might've given Tuija access to the space, but the constant morph of land and magic shifted any sense of permanence as far off as the stone circle, where the Altar laid in state.
This was another space in passing, another temporary spot they occupied without owning. Tuija caught him up, arms around his neck and kissed him. Under the stars, swathed in the stringent sun and moon in their eternal retreat, Caleb and Tuija inspected what life became when an old soldier and a judge tried to forget about their pains for a while.