Antal’s second section of carvings began with teal lines like waves, paired with… were those lines of energy conduits?
“A short time at an academy by the sea. I had aptitude as an engineer, I was told.”
“Anengineer?” Fi jabbed his chest, giggling as he dug his leg tighter around her waist in retaliation. “You’ve been holding out on me, Antlers.”
“It wasn’t much,” he said. “Basic conduit design. Energy theory.”
“That’s how you’ve known how to repair the conduits in town? How you fixed my gramophone?”
“Conduits are simple circuitry. Gramophones, even more so.” His grin wavered. “I… haven’t worked on anything more complicated than that for a while.”
“Why not?”
“My father insisted on loftier aspirations.”
Well, look at that, another daeyari to add to Fi’s slap-worthy list. Not a new development, considering what little Antal had mentioned of his parents. He tapped a claw to the next design: a constellation of stars.
“The Daey Celva. The…Dusk Council,” he said, translating the name to seasonspeak for the first time.
Fi logged her growing list of words. “Daey meansdusk? So daeyari, are…?”
“People of dusk,” Antal said.
How fitting.
“The Daey Celva is the governing body of the Twilit Plane,” he went on. “The center of daeyari administration across the worlds. My family helped found it. My father has served for over six centuries. He set me on an apprenticeship. Until…”
The image was hard to picture. Antal, the brooding raccoon who’d haunted Fi’s rafters, apprenticed to the governing council of his species? He sounded equally dismal about the prospect. As for what ended that career, Fi could guess.
Upon his antlers, the latter half of his second century had no carvings. Utterly blank. Fi touched the smooth, Void-like space, struck by the emptiness. The grief.
“This is for the friend you lost?”
Antal’s arm tightened on her waist. “Yes.”
Half a century. Longer than Fi had been alive, vanished in one chunk of blank antler.
“A long time to grieve,” she said.
“My father didn’t want me to forget.”
The pit in Fi’s stomach deepened. The same father who’d slaughtered Antal’s friend in front of him, no better than an animal.
“Is it such a bad thing?” she asked. “For a daeyari to care for a human?”
“I’m my parents’ only child. All their expectations laid on my back.” Antal’s scowl showed fangs. “I’ve long been a disappointment.”
A disappointment? May the Void stop Fi from strangling hisungrateful parents if she ever met them. Not a wise proposal. They’d killed their son’s friend, sent Antal to this Plane as punishment. Beyond the blank patch on his antlers, the first mark into his third century was a carving of Winter Plane conifers and aurora. His story up to now.
Antal could have kept this from her. Instead, he offered honesty. Vulnerability. The night before had been intimate, yet this was something else, a glimpse behind the icy mask. On the other side was an entireperson. Not a creature of folktales or a ruler upon a throne, but a man. One who could have been an engineer, who’d suffered loss and betrayal yet still held his ground here, working toward a better future.
Fi didn’t know what to say.
That was a lie. She knew words that would be kind, supportive. She didn’t know if those were therightwords, whether they’d push a step too far.
“I don’t suppose your parents would approve of how you plan to rule your territory?”
He laughed, humorless. “No.”
