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It’d be more in keeping with their relationship if Cerrit were standing in Orwyn’s living room late in the night, both of them trying to crack a case open as the hours go later and later. Maybe with rain rattling the shutters on the living room windows and wisps of arcane light throwing shadows around the room, a crystal recording of some moody jazz underscoring the scene. It would... It’s not that the scene before Cerrit doesn’t make sense, but it’s not how he was expecting his first time at his new partner’s house to go.
For one, it’s two in the afternoon and sunlight is filtering gently through the light curtains that hang in the windows. There’s no music playing—and it wouldn’t be raining in Avalir. There won’t be weather for a year and a half. And he’s not here for a case, he’s here because Wrayne had to take Maya to a friend’s dance recital and Kir’s too young to be quiet through the meeting with the senior Sightwardens Cerrit’s going to observe. It starts in half an hour.
The living room is well-lit and somehow cozy, despite the time of day. Cerrit catalogues it reflexively: the thick red rug in the middle of the floor is a disenchanted flying carpet; one chair was made by a novice carpenter who carved their initials into the back of the seat and the other is from a discontinued line of office furniture; cabinets of casefiles line the wall opposite the fireplace, keyed to the Eyes of Avalir; there’s a worktable in one corner of the room, splotchy with coffee stains, holding a multitude of delicate tools and scraps of wood.
And floating at various heights around the high ceiling is a veritable fleet of model ships.
“I have to say, I didn’t expect this,” he drawls, nodding at a schooner.
Orwyn coughs. “I like the fiddly bits,” he grumbles. “Don’t much care about the enchantments that make them float, but anybody can do it. It’s not even a spell, you just carve a couple lines during the construction.”
Cerrit is the senior in their partnership—but he’s been with the Eyes of Avalir only a handful of months longer than Orwyn, and they’re too close in ability to be mentor and pupil. Over the past few weeks, he’s been settling into what might be a friendship with the other man. At least, it’s enough of a friendship to ask him to watch Kir for the afternoon on one of their rare days off.
The model ships aren’t powered by a spell but they are magic, just as much magic as a Sightwarden might dabble in on a bored afternoon. Cerrit’s sensitive enough to arcane energy to feel the little pinpricks of it on the hulls of the ships.
Kir cheeps happily on the carpet, lying on his back to watch the fleet bobbing above his head, and Cerrit is content to leave him in this room with his partner, surrounded by models that echo with Orwyn’s rough laugh.
---
“You ever think about it? What’ll happen if it all goes to shit?” Orwyn asks, voice rough.
They’re three days into a case that started with an ugly scene: gore splattered walls and an apprentice enchanter turned inside out, their teacher nowhere to be found. When Cerrit goes home and sleeps, really sleeps, he knows it’ll play out in pristine clarity. Wrayne will have to wake him up six times a night—no, he’ll sleep on the couch. One of them should get a decent rest.
He doesn’t have to worry about it yet. Neither of them have been home since that first abrupt morning. Orwyn’s drinking a mug of the awful sludge they’re used to calling coffee and he’s been going over the scene in the psychometry chamber while Cerrit is out interviewing suspects. They’ve been partners for a couple years; long enough to know when a distraction is needed. This case is hard on him. Orwyn had a teacher once, one that wasn’t very good. Cases about students always get under his skin.
Cerrit twists the world for a second in his mind, trying to imagine the impossible—what it’d mean, for everything to really go to shit.
He turns away from the possibility and chooses a ridiculous answer instead.
“I figure we’ll take to the seas, all of us,” he says, remembering a kinder afternoon, two o’clock sunlight on the miniature hulls of meticulously painted ships.
“You want to retire to the ocean.”
“You sound,” Cerrit kills the laugh before it can surface and fills his voice with gravel instead, “doubtful, my friend. Think we couldn’t do it?”
“Maya can’t stand to be in the same room as anyone and you want to stick her on a boat with us? Her parents and her little brother and her dad’s old partner?”
Orwyn raises an eyebrow and Cerrit thinks on it for a second, the whole world narrowed down to five people. It’d have to be a bigger ship, more likely, with cabins enough for the Ring of Brass—but when he tries to think of them at sea, Nydas is the only one who fits with ease. And this conversation is for Orwyn.
“Plan on being first mate, if you would. You’re already training for the role.”
Orwyn laughs just once, the kind of laugh men like them laugh. It’s his first in three days. He takes a swig of coffee and grimaces at the taste of it, sets the mug right back down over the ring it left on his desk. “I’ll keep that in mind, Captain.”
Cerrit grins and snags a note out of the air, unfolding it to skim the next lead. The apprentice’s friend’s ex’s mother might know something, apparently. He grunts and goes to leave, pausing at the door.
He turns to meet his partner’s eyes. “Don’t think I could do it?”
“What, retire?” Orwyn looks through him, chewing the end of his cigar. “You want the truth?”
“Always.”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “I think if the city went down, you’d be there solving the rubble. You wouldn’t be able to walk away, let alone sail.”
“Yeah,” Cerrit muses, more to himself. “You might be right.”
“We’re all like that,” Orwyn shrugs. “We’re the Eyes of Avalir.”
And Avalir is the triumph of Imyr Por’co, Avalir is the City of Crowns, Avalir floats but is no ship, and it promises no lifeboats. It doesn’t come with a way off.
---
It’s silent at the office.
Cerrit thinks for a wild moment of the little fleet of ships, bobbing along in the empty air. His partner had added to them over the years. There’s one with Maya’s artwork painted on the sails and one where Kir donated a downy feather to adorn the mast. There’s the elaborate one that Wrayne designed as a present from both of them, before she headed north to research a warp in the leylines.
Every line of their play has already been written.
There is Cerrit, Senior Sightwarden, a man for gravel and shitty coffee and the occasional scotch, who loves his family more than anything and failed to show it a hundred hundred times. There is Orwyn, his partner, with his empty house and his model ships and his teeth-gritting conviction that there is consequence in a world that defies it. There is Avalir, a city that never once considered the possibility of drowning.
Avalir has no lifeboats; Orwyn made them anyway.
Cerrit knows he’s dead before the door to the office creaks open. It’s an old instinct, nurtured slow and steady like a necessary fire, fed on stakeouts and chases and the two of them up against every evil thing they could see. After enough time, you learn your partner. You recognize his absence.
The goddamn note, because after enough time you learn your partner, because Orwyn knew Cerrit would think of the kids and the blinding, desperate need to get them out. He doesn’t think about how long ago Orwyn ordered these runes. He doesn’t think about Orwyn asking him about contingency plans in the middle of a case that felt like it was straight from the hells. He doesn’t think about his son rolling around happily on the carpet, his partner’s solemn promise to watch out for his children whenever they might need it.
Cerrit is a dagger sharpened to a point. Orwyn has given him a way to strike true. All that remains is getting the runes to the kids, soothing Maya’s embarrassment at being interrupted at a party by her kid brother long enough to take a bundle of their things and hear that he loves them more than anything.
And then he only has to break himself, and send them away.
He’s glad, horrifically glad, that Orwyn didn’t find a rune for him. It’s a selfish, raw kind of gratefulness that his partner knew he’d go down with the ship, or is forcing him to; at least he doesn’t have a choice to make. At least for one second on the worst night of his life, someone he trusts has decided his course.
---
Cerrit flies for weeks over seas choked with ruin. His body aches and he loses more weight than he can afford. His fingers tremble on his ‘hawks.
Wrayne's face is the horizon. Her face and Maya's history book on the corner of her desk and the toy axe under Kir's bed; he flies on. There's no other choice. There’s no other possibility.
Sometimes there are echoes in his head, those first weeks. As if, four rooms down the hall from reality, Zerxus is screaming.
He tries not to listen. He tries not to join.
He tries not to ask Patia and Laerryn arcane questions and tries not to share weak jokes with Loquatius and tries not to start problem-solving with Nydas and tries not to lean on Zerxus. His head is empty, besides the echoes.
The bedrock of the Ring of Brass has fallen out from under it, but Cerrit endures. He promised he would.
---
"Come on, Captain," Orwyn says in his ear.
Cerrit jolts back to wakefulness on a beach of jagged glass. It cut him while he slept, but not too badly.
He shakes when he tries to stand. The problem is exhaustion now.
"You're not there," he tells the air, ragged. "Show yourself."
No one is there, not even invisibly. It could be a trick from some agent of the Betrayers. It could be a boon from a passing god. It could just be Cerrit, sick with tiredness and aching with loss and desperate for one thing, just one thing, something to give him the strength to go on.
"Kids make it out?" his partner asks, like he’d ask questions before the techs activated the psychometry chamber. It’s not a grim voice, but braced. It’s the way Orwyn spoke when he was ready for anything.
It could be him. It could be him, somehow, some way, reaching across the void like it’s nothing, because you learn your partner, because when your partner needs you you’re there.
"Yes," Cerrit answers, half a sob. The kids made it out, even if no one else did. Even with the city gone—if there’s rubble, he’s not solving it. "I'm hallucinating." You're haunting me.
"I don't know what you're doing, Captain, but you've gotta set sail. Get up."
"I can't."
"You can. You will. It's who you are."
Cerrit stands; the glass of the beach cuts his feet through his boots. Everything in him aches. He clenches his fists—it's a soul-deep sadness, a failure he's never felt before. No matter what answers he comes up with, they will never outnumber the questions of the world.
"You never called me Captain," he grumbles, stretching his wings and ignoring how his tendons cry and beg for mercy. "It's not my rank."
"Find your horizon," his partner instructs. "Where are you now. Where are you going."
"We're not sailors," Cerrit points out, but the wind is his only reply.
When he closes his eyes he sees each shining hull, painted and patterned and suspended by a scratch of will.
He sets his heart on his horizon and takes off.