Once Stef had reached the age of thirteen his preferences were well established - and his frail build combined with those preferences got him into more fights than the rest of the apprentices combined. Breda had patched Stefen up so many times she declared that she was considering having the Healers assign him to one of their apprentices as a permanent case study.
and
He hadn't known until much later that a number of the sharp-tongued boys who initially closed their ranks against the stranger were children of high-ranking nobles, or were nobles in their own right. When he would have gone after them in the straight-forward "fight-or-be-beaten" manner of the streets, Medren had kept him from losing his head.
So basically it's a compilation memory: him coming out of rooms in a state of dishevelment, or just walking down the hall while people whispering, and then someone says something sharp or pointed or shoves him or something, and him just coming out SWINGING. Brawling. Black eyes and bruises and bloodied lips and him getting patched up and doing it again until EVENTUALLY it's obviously some noble prat at court and he's about to roll up his sleeves and a friend is like HONEY NO. then the memory compilation cuts off.
[Tylendel fell in love with a boy named Nevis and slept with him, but Nevis then cried seduction after, apparently something he was known to do with any boy or girl. Tylendel got his heart broken, and begged Gala to tell him bedside stories to distract him. She was trying to horn up a stallion at the time. He never did it again.]
"I talked to your parents a lot, too," Stef said. "I hope you don't mind." He tried to muster up a hint of mischief. "Treesa and I have a lot in common; she says I'm more fun to have as company than any of her ladies. I helped her get herself settled in when they got here, you know."
"I didn't know," Vanyel replied with a kind of absent-minded chagrin. "I just saw Father taking to the job of Councillor like a hound to the chase, and I guess I just assumed Mother would be all right."
She wasn't all right; she got here and found out that she was in the same position Savil said you were in when you first came here - a provincial noble from the backwater, twenty years behind the fashions, with no knowledge of current gossip or protocol, Stef thought. She saw less of you than before. She was terribly lonely, and if there had been a way to get home, she'd have taken it.
"I thought she was fine. It just seemed like after the first couple of weeks, she was as happy as Father," Van continued, peering through the curtain of snow at the road ahead. "Every time I'd see her she was the center of attention, surrounded by others." He paused for a moment, then said, "Was that your doing?"
"Some of it," Stef admitted. "I coached her, and I introduced her to Countess Bryerly and Lady Gellwin. You probably hadn't noticed, but there isn't much 'court' at Court with Randi so sick and Shavri's time taken up with it. The real Court, the social part, has pretty much moved out of the Crown section of the Palace and into the nobles' suites. And those are the two that really run it. Countess Bryerly is distantly related to the Brendewhins, so that made everything fine. Lady Gellwin took Treesa under her wing as a kind of protege, put her in charge of a lot of the younger girls once she found out that your mother did a lot of fostering."
The emptiness of the suite almost oppressed Tylendel. With the "lovebirds" gone, Savil due (so the dinnertime rumor in the kitchens had it) for a till-dawn Council session in her capacity as speaker for those Heralds teaching proteges, and Vanyel presumably entertaining his little coterie of followers, there was nothing and no one to break the stifling silence. It closed around him like a shroud, until the very beating of his heart was audible. Outside the windows it was as dark as the heart of sin, and so overcast not even a hint of moon came through. His scalp was damp, hot, and prickly. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck and soaked into his collar. It felt a whole lot later than it actually was; time was crawling tonight, not flying.
Tylendel gave up trying to read the treatise on weather-magic Savil had assigned him and switched to a history instead. A handwritten pamphlet on weatherworking was not what he needed to be reading right now, anyway; not with a storm threatening. His energy control often wasn't as good as he'd like, and he didn't want to inadvertently augment what was coming in. He was a lot better at controlling his subconscious than he had been, but there was no point in taking chances with Savil out of reach.
That storm was at least part of what was making the suite seem stuffy; Tylendel Sensed the thunderheads building up in the west even though he couldn't see them from where he was sprawled on the couch of the common room. That was the Gift that made him a Herald-Mage trainee and not just a Herald-trainee; the ability to See (or otherwise Sense) and manipulate energy fields, both natural and supernatural. His Gifts had come on him early and a long time before he was Chosen; they'd given him trouble for nearly half of his short life, and only his twin's support had kept him sane in the interval between their onset and when his Companion Gala finally appeared —
:Are you tucked safe away, dearling?: he Mindspoke to her. :When this blow comes, it's going to be a good one.:
The drowsy affirmative he got told him that she was half-asleep; heat did that to her. Heat mostly made him irritable. He had propped every window and door wide open (and to hell with bugs), but there wasn't even a whisper of breeze to move the air around. The candle flames didn't even waver, and the honey-beeswax smell of the candles placed all around the common room was almost choking him with its sweetness.
He shook back his damp hair, rubbed his eyes, and tried to concentrate on his book, but part of him kept hoping for a flash of lightning in the dark beyond the windows, or the first hint of cooling rain. And part of him kept insisting that all he had to do was nudge it a little. He told that part of himself to take a long walk, and waited impatiently for the rain to come of itself.
Nothing happened. Just an itchy sort of tension building.
He gave up trying to concentrate, got up and went to the sideboard for a glass of wine; he needed to get centered and calmed, and a little less sensitive, and he wasn't going to be able to do it on his own. The only wine left was a white, and it was a bit dry for his taste, but it did accomplish what he wanted it to. With just that hint of alcohol inside him, he finally managed to relax and get into the blasted book.
He got so far into it, in fact, that when the first simultaneous blast of wind and thunder came, he nearly jumped off of the couch.
Half the candles - the ones not sheltered in glass chimney-lamps - blew out. Wind whipped through the suite, sending curtains flying and carrying with it a welcome chill and the scent of rain. The shutters in Mardic's and Donni's room banged monotonously against the walls; not hard enough to shatter the glass yet, but it was only a matter of time. He dropped the book and got up to head for their door just as Vanyel stumbled in through the corridor door and into the brightness of the common room.
The boy stood as frozen as a statue, blinking owlishly at the light. Tylendel's stomach gave a little lurch; Vanyel looked like death.
It was bad enough that the boy was light-complected; bad enough that he was wearing stark black tonight, which only accentuated his fair skin. But his face had no color at the moment; it was so white it was almost transparent. His eyes looked sunken, and his expression was of someone who has seen, but been denied, the Havens.
"Vanyel - " Tylendel said - whispered, really - his voice barely audible above the banging shutter and the sound of the storm. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Vanyel, I didn't expect you back so - uh - soon. Is something wrong?"
For one moment - for one precious moment - Tylendel thought he had him; he was sure that the boy was going to open up to him. His eyes begged for pity; his expression, so hungry and haunted, nearly cracked Tylendel's own calm. The trainee made a tentative step toward him -
It was the wrong move; he knew that immediately. Vanyel's face shuttered and assumed his habitual expression of flippant arrogance. "Wrong?" he said, with false gaiety. "Bright Lady, no, of course there's nothing wrong! Some of the Bards just came over from their Collegium and started an impromptu contest; it got so damned hot in the Great Hall with all those people crowded in that I gave up - "
Just then the shutters in both the lifebonded's room and Savil's crashed against the walls with such force that it was a wonder that the windows didn’t shatter.
"Havens!" Vanyel yelped, "She'll kill us!" and dove for Savil's room. Tylendel dashed into the other, mentally cursing his own clumsiness, and cursing himself for letting his reaction to the boy cloud his reading of him.
By the time he got everything secured and returned to the common room, Vanyel had retreated into his own room and the door was firmly and irrevocably shut.
"I'd drop into a fit - when I'd wake up again, I'd be in the middle of a fifty-foot circle of wreckage. That was the Mage-Gift and Fetching working together in a way Savil and I haven't been able to duplicate under control. Seems I have to go berserk."
He frowned, and reached up to rub his forehead between his eyebrows. "Staven was the only one who could get near me - who was willing to stay near me, in or out of a fit. They said I'd been taken by a demon. They said that because of what Staven and I had tried to share, I had been possessed. [...] when everyone else abandoned me in one of my fits, he stayed, he took care of me, absolute and unshakable in the belief that I would never hurt him. Positive that, despite what was whispered, what had happened was not that I'd been possessed, but was something that would somehow be worked out."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
[STARTER 01]
Once Stef had reached the age of thirteen his preferences were well established - and his frail build combined with those preferences got him into more fights than the rest of the apprentices combined. Breda had patched Stefen up so many times she declared that she was considering having the Healers assign him to one of their apprentices as a permanent case study.
and
He hadn't known until much later that a number of the sharp-tongued boys who initially closed their ranks against the stranger were children of high-ranking nobles, or were nobles in their own right. When he would have gone after them in the straight-forward "fight-or-be-beaten" manner of the streets, Medren had kept him from losing his head.
So basically it's a compilation memory: him coming out of rooms in a state of dishevelment, or just walking down the hall while people whispering, and then someone says something sharp or pointed or shoves him or something, and him just coming out SWINGING. Brawling. Black eyes and bruises and bloodied lips and him getting patched up and doing it again until EVENTUALLY it's obviously some noble prat at court and he's about to roll up his sleeves and a friend is like HONEY NO. then the memory compilation cuts off.
[STARTER 02]
[01]
"I talked to your parents a lot, too," Stef said. "I hope you don't mind." He tried to muster up a hint of mischief. "Treesa and I have a lot in common; she says I'm more fun to have as company than any of her ladies. I helped her get herself settled in when they got here, you know."
"I didn't know," Vanyel replied with a kind of absent-minded chagrin. "I just saw Father taking to the job of Councillor like a hound to the chase, and I guess I just assumed Mother would be all right."
She wasn't all right; she got here and found out that she was in the same position Savil said you were in when you first came here - a provincial noble from the backwater, twenty years behind the fashions, with no knowledge of current gossip or protocol, Stef thought. She saw less of you than before. She was terribly lonely, and if there had been a way to get home, she'd have taken it.
"I thought she was fine. It just seemed like after the first couple of weeks, she was as happy as Father," Van continued, peering through the curtain of snow at the road ahead. "Every time I'd see her she was the center of attention, surrounded by others." He paused for a moment, then said, "Was that your doing?"
"Some of it," Stef admitted. "I coached her, and I introduced her to Countess Bryerly and Lady Gellwin. You probably hadn't noticed, but there isn't much 'court' at Court with Randi so sick and Shavri's time taken up with it. The real Court, the social part, has pretty much moved out of the Crown section of the Palace and into the nobles' suites. And those are the two that really run it. Countess Bryerly is distantly related to the Brendewhins, so that made everything fine. Lady Gellwin took Treesa under her wing as a kind of protege, put her in charge of a lot of the younger girls once she found out that your mother did a lot of fostering."
[02]
Tylendel gave up trying to read the treatise on weather-magic Savil had assigned him and switched to a history instead. A handwritten pamphlet on weatherworking was not what he needed to be reading right now, anyway; not with a storm threatening. His energy control often wasn't as good as he'd like, and he didn't want to inadvertently augment what was coming in. He was a lot better at controlling his subconscious than he had been, but there was no point in taking chances with Savil out of reach.
That storm was at least part of what was making the suite seem stuffy; Tylendel Sensed the thunderheads building up in the west even though he couldn't see them from where he was sprawled on the couch of the common room. That was the Gift that made him a Herald-Mage trainee and not just a Herald-trainee; the ability to See (or otherwise Sense) and manipulate energy fields, both natural and supernatural. His Gifts had come on him early and a long time before he was Chosen; they'd given him trouble for nearly half of his short life, and only his twin's support had kept him sane in the interval between their onset and when his Companion Gala finally appeared —
:Are you tucked safe away, dearling?: he Mindspoke to her. :When this blow comes, it's going to be a good one.:
The drowsy affirmative he got told him that she was half-asleep; heat did that to her. Heat mostly made him irritable. He had propped every window and door wide open (and to hell with bugs), but there wasn't even a whisper of breeze to move the air around. The candle flames didn't even waver, and the honey-beeswax smell of the candles placed all around the common room was almost choking him with its sweetness.
He shook back his damp hair, rubbed his eyes, and tried to concentrate on his book, but part of him kept hoping for a flash of lightning in the dark beyond the windows, or the first hint of cooling rain. And part of him kept insisting that all he had to do was nudge it a
little. He told that part of himself to take a long walk, and waited impatiently for the rain to come of itself.
Nothing happened. Just an itchy sort of tension building.
He gave up trying to concentrate, got up and went to the sideboard for a glass of wine; he needed to get centered and calmed, and a little less sensitive, and he wasn't going to be able to do it on his own. The only wine left was a white, and it was a bit dry for his taste, but it did accomplish what he wanted it to. With just that hint of alcohol inside him, he finally managed to relax and get into the blasted book.
He got so far into it, in fact, that when the first simultaneous blast of wind and thunder came, he nearly jumped off of the couch.
Half the candles - the ones not sheltered in glass chimney-lamps - blew out. Wind whipped through the suite, sending curtains flying and carrying with it a welcome chill and the scent of rain. The shutters in Mardic's and Donni's room banged monotonously against the walls; not hard enough to shatter the glass yet, but it was only a matter of time. He dropped the book and got up to head for their door just as Vanyel stumbled in through the corridor door and into the brightness of the common room.
The boy stood as frozen as a statue, blinking owlishly at the light. Tylendel's stomach gave a little lurch; Vanyel looked like death.
It was bad enough that the boy was light-complected; bad enough that he was wearing stark black tonight, which only accentuated his fair skin. But his face had no color at the moment; it was so white it was almost transparent. His eyes looked sunken, and his expression was of someone who has seen, but been denied, the Havens.
"Vanyel - " Tylendel said - whispered, really - his voice barely audible above the banging shutter and the sound of the storm. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Vanyel, I didn't expect you back so - uh - soon. Is something wrong?"
For one moment - for one precious moment - Tylendel thought he had him; he was sure that the boy was going to open up to him. His eyes begged for pity; his expression, so hungry and haunted, nearly cracked Tylendel's own calm. The trainee made a tentative
step toward him -
It was the wrong move; he knew that immediately. Vanyel's face shuttered and assumed his habitual expression of flippant arrogance. "Wrong?" he said, with false gaiety. "Bright Lady, no, of course there's nothing wrong! Some of the Bards just came over from their Collegium and started an impromptu contest; it got so damned hot in the Great Hall with all those people crowded in that I gave up - "
Just then the shutters in both the lifebonded's room and Savil's crashed against the walls with such force that it was a wonder that the windows didn’t shatter.
"Havens!" Vanyel yelped, "She'll kill us!" and dove for Savil's room. Tylendel dashed into the other, mentally cursing his own clumsiness, and cursing himself for letting his reaction to the boy cloud his reading of him.
By the time he got everything secured and returned to the common room, Vanyel had retreated into his own room and the door was firmly and irrevocably shut.
[03]
"I'd drop into a fit - when I'd wake up again, I'd be in the middle of a fifty-foot circle of wreckage. That was the Mage-Gift and Fetching working together in a way Savil and I haven't been able to duplicate under control. Seems I have to go berserk."
He frowned, and reached up to rub his forehead between his eyebrows. "Staven was the only one who could get near me - who was willing to stay near me, in or out of a fit. They said I'd been taken by a demon. They said that because of what Staven and I had tried to share, I had been possessed. [...] when everyone else abandoned me in one of my fits, he stayed, he took care of me, absolute and unshakable in the belief that I would never hurt him. Positive that, despite what was whispered, what had happened was not that I'd been possessed, but was something that would somehow be worked out."