We're Okay

     “Jazan?” Nabile said, squinting into the Qasalan sun to try and make out the figure below. “There’s some sort of clown man outside.”

     Jazan shuffled blearily across the floor only to be catapulted into wakefulness by what he heard next.

     “Hanso!” he snarled.

     As usual, he heard the horrible little man before he saw him — Brynn had apparently gotten held up by the palace guards, which was reasonable, given that Jazan hadn’t expected them. Less reasonable was Hanso’s subsequent course of action, which was to shout Jazan’s name at the top of his lungs until the king himself showed up to punch him in the face.

     “Jazan, my pal, my buddy, I—”

     Jazan punched him in the face.

     He shook out his hand and turned to Brynn. “What is your business?” he said, perfectly composed.

     Brynn saluted him stiffly. “Captain Brynn Bowen of the Faerieland Guard—”

     Hanso groaned on the ground.

     “—and Master Thief Hanso Madeleine of Queen Fyora’s employ, your majesty.”

     “We’re treasure hunting,” Hanso said into the sand.

     “Securing dangerous artefacts.”

     “Same diff.”

     Jazan pinched the bridge of his nose. “Your presence, I understand, but why is he here? Don’t answer that, I understand the reasons perfectly,” he added as Brynn opened her mouth to respond, “I just don’t like them. Which artefact?”

     “The orb of Zer-Ak-Ur.”

     That vaguely rang a bell, but not an alarm, meaning it was probably one of his father’s nondescript bits of cursed junk. “You can have it if you can find it.”

     Hanso picked his head up, smiling insufferably. “Great, I—”

     “Not you. Nobody is letting you into a secret vault filled with accursed objects.”

     “Well, what am I supposed to do? Sit around waiting for Brynn to find the thing?”

     “Yes — perhaps while being glad that you’re not doing so inside a dungeon.”

     Hanso blew a raspberry.

     Jazan slipped away to see the court physician later that morning — the last thing he wanted was for Hanso to know that punching him in the face had probably hurt Jazan more than it hurt him.

     “The king, dirtying his hands?” the physician tsked, mixing herbs, oils, and wax into a salve.

     “Some people aren’t worth the magic.” The physician approached him holding the mixture; Jazan waved her off. “I can take care of myself.”

     “As you wish.”

     Jazan didn’t have to resort to such crude measures as wrappings and bandanas to hide his old wounds. He was a sorcerer, after all, and his arms were easy to cast an illusion over.

     Most people conceptualized magic as a thing you were either born with or not, but that wasn’t completely true. It was possible to forcibly awaken one’s magical potential.

     If they survived the process.

     And even if they did, their magic came shrink-wrapped together with a lifetime of chronic pain. Even though the fractal scars ran all the way up to Jazan’s elbows, it was mostly his hands that gave him trouble.

     He sighed and squeezed a handful of the wax salve. His knuckles popped.

     It was going to be a long day.

     “Captain, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think you should follow Hanso’s lead — regarding clothing choices, if nothing else.”

     Jazan was torn about the situation. On one hand, he counted himself lucky that this artefact required no adventure, puzzles, or ridiculous stunting on anyone’s part. On the other hand, he might’ve preferred such to being forced to keep Hanso from committing crimes and Brynn from getting heatstroke.

     Brynn had refused to change out of her official uniform, which, among other things, included a padded gambeson. Even inside the shelter of the vault, the midday heat left her panting.

     “Listen to the scary wizard, Brynn,” Hanso said, sing-song, holding a silly little drink. In the last twenty-four hours he’d mostly kept himself busy bothering the kitchen staff. He supposedly wanted to learn how to make flatbread. Jazan had very specifically tested the flatbread at last night’s dinner to make sure he hadn’t done something to it. He hadn’t. This did not make Jazan any less uneasy.

     Jazan glared. “I told you to stay out of the vault.”

     “I’m not in the vault!” Hanso waved at the several feet of space between him and the vault door.

     “You can pull off shorts,” said Brynn, having caught her breath, “but my body is different.”

     Hanso’s choice of outfit was… suspicious.

     His normal attire covered essentially everything sans the arms, but changing into a tunic and shorts made it obvious that Hanso was determined to conceal specific parts of his body.

     His wrists and ankles were covered in dark wrappings. Jazan didn’t find this particularly sinister: he’d already seen Hanso’s shackle marks when he needed healing after a wraith attack. The thief just wasn’t proud of them. Nabile was much the same, although hers were less severe. She hadn’t been in love with a person who put handcuffs on her for a living.

     Jazan was not privy to what Hanso was hiding on his neck.

     Was he speculating about nothing? Had Hanso had just put a bandana on for fun? He didn’t think so. Even relatively stripped down, the Ixi still complained about the heat, and yet it never seemed to occur to him to take off the bandana.

     “You can pull my shorts off anytime, babe.”

     Brynn threw a knife at Hanso and he scuttled away.

     Nevermind, this guy was just an idiot.

     “Is there not some method of organization to all this?” Brynn said to Jazan.

     Jazan suppressed the urge to snort in amusement. He’d spent hours here as a child, filing objects under random organization schemes and constant scolding, whether he was doing anything wrong or not. Razul was addicted to anger. He seemed to feel no catharsis or shame or anything at all about his own rage. A productive argument was to his father what a fun night out was to comatosely drinking an entire bottle of punch in one unbroken chug.

     A lot of people had distant fathers. Jazan wished his father was distant. “Distant” is the only place you really want an on-fire wizard king to be, whether you’re his son or not.

     Even if he’d succeeded in organizing the vault before, it wouldn’t have mattered. After the curse, Jazan had turned this place upside-down trying to find something, anything to fix what he’d broken.

     “If you’d like to establish one, I’m not opposed.”

     Brynn scowled. Looks like there was a puzzle after all. At least it wasn’t his problem.

     On the way to his next meeting, Jazan allowed himself pause to look out at his kingdom.

     Merchants hawking queela fruits. Children playing in the city square’s fountain. Ladies fanning themselves in the shade of awnings.

     All alive and well.

     “No. No. No no no…”

     Jazan’s ears flicked towards the source of the noise — in the direction Hanso had fled in — but it still took him a few seconds to put together that the whimpering was Hanso.

     If he was trying to hide, he hadn’t done it well. He was crouched behind a large bamboo planter, head in his hands, breathing raggedly.

     …Huh.

     Jazan was bad at comforting people even when he liked them, but he couldn’t just stand there, so… “Ixi, if you’re going to have a panic attack, don’t cry into the plants. I’d rather you not literally salt the earth they’re growing in.”

     Wow! Okay! That sounded much less mean in his head.

     “Hhh — h—”

     Hanso toppled onto the floor, pulling at the bandana.

     “H — ghk — help—”

     A switch flipped in Jazan’s head.

     “Someone get a doctor! Now!” he screamed down the hallway before yanking the cloth away.

     Hanso’s face was getting bluer, his throat was swollen and red. Jazan had to pin him down to stop him from clawing his own neck open—

     There was some sort of tattoo there? Runes?

     Focus. Whatever was happening, it was happening fast. Too fast for the physician to get here.

     Jazan pulled out his scimitar. Hanso grabbed his arm, eyes wide with panic.

     “I’m trying to help you, idiot!”

     Jazan was never good at healing magic, but he didn’t have to be for this. He just needed to stab Hanso in the neck without killing him.

     It was actually quite lucky that he’d collapsed next to the bamboo plant — a stalk of it kept everything stable until the physician got there.

     “You did excellent work for someone with no medical training, my king,” the physician said as she moved Hanso onto a stretcher. Hanso made no attempt to resist, as dazed and literally breathing through a straw as he was. “I hope you’re not terribly offended when I tell you to never do that again.”

     “I would hope that I won’t have to,” said Jazan, his hands feeling very cold despite the midday sun.

     Brynn rushed down from the vault, literally shoving one of the physician’s assistants out of the way to reach Hanso. “What happened?!”

     “Some sort of allergic reaction, by the looks of it.” The physician’s Ruki antenna twitched as she palpated his swollen throat. “Luckily, the king was nearby and able to create a new airway. I’ve already given him adrenaline. The swelling should go down soon. Does he have any allergies?”

     “Angelpi give him hives, but—”

     “Hhk…”

     “Don’t try to talk, boy,” the physician said, holding the bamboo still.

     Hanso pointed mutely at a windowsill near where he’d collapsed, where his drink sat nearly empty.

     Jazan examined it. What little of the drink remained was cloudy — probably stopping Hanso from noticing that there was a small ring at the bottom of the glass. “You, there,” he said to a passing servant he’d seen in the kitchen before. “What’s this ring?”

     “An Angelpuss halo, sir. It’s a common garnish in the northern sands.”

     “Of course the one time someone tries this is also the one time I’m hosting someone with this specific allergy.”

     “Would you like me to find the chef that—?”

     “Later. I’m almost certain it was an honest mistake.”

     Hanso could talk about charisma all he wanted, but the fact of the matter was that he wasn’t very good at communicating his weaknesses. The likelihood of proper allergy disclosure was next to none.

     Jazan studied the scene before him — Brynn walking aside the stretcher, alternately worrying over and scolding Hanso.

     Hanso: enjoying the attention, but also trying to cover the runes on his neck with his hand.

     Running away and hiding was not a normal reaction to your throat closing up.

     “Tell my advisor to cancel my next meeting. If anyone needs me, I’ll be in the library.”

     One thing was for certain: the runes didn’t let Hanso cast magic in any way. If Hanso could cast magic he would’ve already been obnoxious about it.

     It had to be some sort of target, then, something conducting a spell cast by another person. Jazan had no leads on who, but he had to touch the runes to treat Hanso, and in doing so he’d felt traces of residual magic, like heat coming off a fire.

     Fear. Hunger. Trapped. Trapped. Trapped.

     Jazan shook his head and cracked open another book of binding spells.

     Midday turned into afternoon turned into night. His advisor gave him grief, but dispassionately so — he knew as well as anyone else that when Jazan fell down a rabbit hole he wouldn’t come out until he felt that he’d reached the bottom.

     Unfortunately, the bottom was still eluding him and he was about to run out of leads. He felt like he’d looked at every binding, obedience, and mind control spell in Brightvale, because Hanso had a Brightvale accent, but now he was starting to wonder if Hanso was not, in fact, from Brightvale, and if his accent was fake. Normally such a thought would be ridiculous, but Hanso was just that kind of person.

     “It’s past midnight.”

     Nabile had entered the room silently, as she always did. Jazan had stopped having a startling response about a week after they got married.

     “Allow me a moment to find a stopping point,” Jazan said, rubbing his temples.

     “What is it this time?”

     “I’m in pursuit of a mystery spell.”

     “And that takes precedence over your wife?”

     “I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul.”

     “Exhort yourself into bed, dear,” Nabile sighed, wrapping her arm around his shoulders — and frowning when she saw the recreation he’d sketched. “I know that spell.”

     Jazan snapped awake. “You do?”

     “I’m positive. It’s a little warped, but that probably just means the poor thing got tagged before it was done growing. It’s basically a collar — if the target goes outside a boundary or does something to hurt itself…”

     Nabile pretended to choke.

     “It’s even got—”

     She pointed at a vertical scar lower on the throat, below the runes.

     Hanso had already had that. It was part of the reason Jazan had such an easy time saving him.

     “It’s even got the little cut we’d make in the throat to bypass it. Shk,” she said, drawing a line up her throat. “Stick a reed in there. Once we were far enough from the property line, bam — we had a free Baabaa.”

     “A Baabaa?”

     “Yeah. It’s a livestock collar.”

     “...”

     “Are you okay?”

     “I think it’s time to go to bed.”

     As usual, Jazan woke a couple of hours before dawn. He rolled out of bed, taking care not to disturb Nabile, dressed, applied his kohl, and made his way to the infirmary.

     Brynn was asleep on a bench next to an empty cot. Most of her bulky outerwear lay discarded to the side. Hanso had vanished from the room, but the curtains that framed the door to the balcony were snapping in the wind.

     Hanso had his chin in one hand and what Jazan recognized as pain-relieving tea in the other, staring out at nothing in particular. Jazan wondered if his thief eyes could see through the moonless dark. Nabile’s could.

     “Mornin’,” Hanso rasped without turning around.

     “Oh, good. You’ve recovered,” said Jazan.

     “How sarcastic is that?” Hanso sounded like he’d gargled sand, but the impromptu incision had been magically healed.

     Or rather, Jazan assumed it had been healed. The bandana was back.

     “It isn’t.”

     Hanso narrowed his eyes and took a sip of the tea. “Sure.”

     “It is good,” Jazan insisted. “I’m not going to wish death on a man just because I find him irritating. What do you take me for, my father?”

     The Ixi shook his head, smiling. “I’d know what an on-fire zombie wizard thinks of me — you, you’re a puzzle. If you cut my throat for real, at least I wouldn’t have died confused.”

     “As tempting as the peace and quiet is, that option will not be taken. I will accept responsibility for the incident — under normal circumstances, a palace guard would have seen you collapse, but I recently cut the budget and you suffered for my poor judgment.” Jazan rubbed his temples. “I wasn’t chosen as leader because I was the best, but because it was my birthright. Thus, I need to prove that I am worthy of the throne of—”

     “Man, shut up.”

     Jazan blinked. “Excuse me?”

     “You heard me.”

     “In this palace I am the highest authority and speaking to me that way is a crime.”

     “I’ve committed crimes every day of my life and I’m not gonna stop now. Anyway,” Hanso continued as Jazan gaped, “I was the one that screwed up. I shoulda told the line cooks about my allergies. You can’t manage every little thing in your kingdom… city… satrapy… thing. Also, wasn’t your dad an emperor? What’s goin’ on with this place politically?”

     Jazan raised his hands in exasperation. “That isn’t the point. I don’t want to rule Qasala through fear like my father did, but respect isn’t easy to obtain, and even more difficult to—”

     Hanso grabbed Jazan’s wrist and stared at his hand.

     The latter belatedly realized he’d forgotten to hide his scars.

     “Keep,” he said slowly.

     Hanso let him go after a moment.

     “For what it’s worth, I respect you.”

     “You’re capable of such?” Jazan said, sceptical.

     “Yeah, I had, like, three different opportunities to steal your jewellery during this conversation and I didn’t.”

     “What an honour.”

     “Truly.”

     Hanso stared at him.

     “I’ve discovered the nature of your runes.”

     “And?”

     “You have your fight. I have mine.”

     “Okay,” Hanso said, taking another drink, posture still guarded. “Good.”

     “But—”

     “But?”

     Jazan tried to think of a way to say this while still shielding himself, and then he didn’t.

     “Are you alright? Are you safe now?”

     Hanso seemed more taken aback by this than anything else.

     “I — uh — yeah.”

     He wiped at his eyes as the sun came up.

     “I think we’re okay.”

     The End.