"Dammit," grumbles Gelebor. It's been his mantra for the past hour. "Damn it to darkness."
He's weaving in the darkness, warm and soft and shapeless as the blanket growing in his hands, of Chibree's hut. He is not so adept at it as his companion. His hands fumble in the faint firelight. They tangle the corded silk. Chibree's hands, slim and magnificent, dance like white spiders across the weaving-frameâand dart out, now and then, to flick Gelebor's foolish fingers.
Gelebor gives him a reproachful look. An old habit. "Ouch."
Chibree's face, pale and sightless as the moon, wrinkles into a smile.
This, he says with his fingers, guiding Gelebor's hand to the next cord in the weave, over that.
The folk of the Vale winter underground, in the warm deep: snug creches, crystal lakes, tunnel walls worn smooth. Gelebor had thought, trekking down into the dark to his people's sunless camp, that he had lived long enough in a lonely cave to navigate a crowded one. He had thought he and his eyes could be of use. But to Chibree and the others who have lived, for all their lives, in a darkness vaster than the camp'sâthe frowning hunters, the giggling children, the wives who whisk up their bowls when he blunders byâhe's a lumbering creature who, without a cookfire nearby, cannot walk ten steps without treading on someone's toes or tumbling into the chaurus-pit. (He shudders, remembering the curious legs.) The clan's elders tolerate him with amusement. The children, when they hear him pass, have taken to tugging him around by the hand. Usually into doorframes. He can't see well enough, by the pinprick lights of ventilation shafts, to know when to stoopâ
I think, says Chibree, tapping the words upon Gelebor's wrist, you are doing this on purpose.
Gelebor blinks down at his hands. Then he raises his eyebrows.
"Let's not sleep under this one," he says, touching a gaping hole in the weave.
Chibree laughsâa dear, dry click in the back of his throat. We will give it to Virrut.
It's so mundane an exchange, so comfortable, that Gelebor furrows his brow. There's a living hand resting on his wrist, he thinks. It is warm. He is not dreaming it. When he covers it, dazed, with his own handâa blunt old bludgeon, clumsy in the darkâit does not disappear.
Thank you, he says, tracing the nonsensical words in Chibree's palm. At times when his throat closes and something in his chest opens, bruised and soft and overripe, they are the only knock-talk he remembers. Thankâ
Chibree, with a gentle smile, catches his hands.
This over that, he says, and weaves their fingers together.
blakekathryn
snowghoul
ellievsbear
tangentwithtanner
yousharknotpass
