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It was the nature of Fjord’s unusual life that he might find himself anchored at the docks of Nicodranas in the morning—delving into a Rexxentrum archive by mid-afternoon—and sitting in Blumenthal’s town square a few minutes after midnight, watching his now-fiancée develop a migraine as she cast Sending.
She’d started with: “Mama! Mama! You won’t believe this, but Fjord just—ah, fuck!—it hurts!”
And then: “Papa! Pack your bags! Fjord and I are getting—ouch—shitballs!”
While Jester clutched at her head, Fjord sighed and looked about for any eavesdroppers. By that hour, many of the villagers had retreated home, though a fair few were still celebrating in the Tower. Its doorway stood open, spilling a column of warm and welcoming light across the square.
So, what had lured the couple away from the festivities? . . . The near-convergence of two ley lines directly overhead, which Jester felt would improve her reception for Sending.
It had not.
But that wouldn’t stop her from trying.
Now, seeing that she was poised to cast again, Fjord hooked his fingertips over her belt and brought her nearer to where he sat. He gazed into her eyes, and he adopted his most affectionate, persuasive tone of voice.
“Jester, dearest.—My love.—Why don’t you let that go, before you give yourself a fucking aneurysm?”
“Because everyone has to know right now! This is big news, and they’ll be so happy!”
“Yes, but they’ll be even happier if the bride is still alive for her wedding.”
With that, Fjord pointed to his nose. Jester blinked a few times, and then she scuffed her hand above her lip.
“Oh, it’s just a tiny little nosebleed. I’ll give it a minute to stop, okay?”
Fjord watched as the tiefling bounced from foot to foot and did a twirl, like she was trying to find an outlet for all the giddy energy and impatience she was feeling. It’d been hours since he’d asked a particular question, and still, her excitement showed no sign of easing.
She’d said yes. And she certainly seemed happy.
And yet.
“Did I fuck up?” Fjord blurted out. Jester turned to face him, her full skirt curling tight about her before springing back into shape.
“What?”
“Did I fuck up, asking you like that? In front of everyone, after a fight, and—”
“You always have big feelings after fights!” Jester pointed out. “Remember the first time you said you loved me?”
“Well, I . . . I experience post-battle clarity.”
“I know. It’s adorable.”
Fjord scoffed, averting his gaze so as not to fall prey to Jester’s fond look. “What I mean is: I know the types of stories you favor. Maybe you had another idea in mind?”
“I have ideas for all sorts of things! But—”
Jester stopped and went still to her fingertips, which had already been tracing the early gestures of Sending in preparation for her next attempt. Her expression turned thoughtful, and she began to look . . . shy.
“Can I show you something?”
“Of course.”
“And you won’t run away?”
“That’s a frightening question. But—no?”
Jester chewed her bottom lip for a few seconds longer, and then her excitement overcame her again. She swung her haversack off her shoulder, rested it on Fjord’s knee, and opened the bag with a flourish.
“So,” she began, “a while back, I started a sketchbook to just sort of, like—get my thoughts on paper for . . . stuff . . . .”
Fjord furrowed his brow. “Is this like when you first saw a narwhal and you became fixated on drawing ‘unicorns of the sea’?”
Jester stopped, still elbow-deep in her haversack. She looked keenly offended.
“They’re very cute, Fjord. They’re bean-shaped and they have horns!”
“Those are the facts, and I wouldn’t dare to refute them.”
Pursing her lips, Jester proceeded to take a small but thick sketchbook from her haversack. It wasn’t one of her common ones, and while Fjord had seen her drawing in it from time to time, he didn’t recall ever being invited to peruse it. Its cover was slightly bowed and faded by the sun, and the edges of the pages were worn.
“How much of this is pornographic?” he teased as she offered it to him.
“The usual amount.”
“Ah. And would those pleasures be scattered throughout, or is there a spot where I can—”
“Just open it already.”
Fjord pretended to brace himself, holding the sketchbook at arm’s length and peering at it through one squinted eye. Then, he snapped it open to a random page, prepared for whatever manner of depravity might await him.
Instead, he found drawings of party decorations.
Lots of them.
The left page featured an archway with greenery and gauzy bunting draped from it, while the right was filled from edge to edge with flower arrangements: bouquets, and corsages, and enormous, colorful sprays. Try as he might, Fjord only spied one exceptionally subtle dick.
Odd, he thought.
He brought the sketchbook to his lap, and he paged forward.
There were a dozen drawings of Marion in elegant dresses—nothing unusual. Then, similar depictions of Veth and Beau in formal attire—again, nothing unexpected, but why them in particular? . . . And very suddenly, there were many pages devoted to different kinds of food, savory and sweet alike.
If the artist had been anyone other than Jester Lavorre, the presence of so many elaborate cakes would have been a clue. Instead, Fjord arrived at the answer when he noticed another dish all together—specifically, one that was only ever served at Menagerie Coast weddings.
“Oh!” he said, looking at her with wide eyes. “When you said you had ideas, you meant for—”
“Mm-hmm.”
“—that is, for if we'd—”
“Uh-huh.”
Knowing her methods well enough, Fjord checked the cover for a date. “You started this six years ago?” he said, stunned.
“Well—yeah!” Jester tucked her hair behind her ear, her gaze fixed on the sketchbook. “I’m big on planning. You know that. And—”
“Right.”
“—I wasn’t like, expecting it to happen right away. And maybe not at all! But when I saw something cool or I had an idea, I didn’t want to—um . . . .”
“Forget. I see,” Fjord said distractedly.
He turned the page again. And once more. And again, and again, slowly taking in the contents of the sketchbook from a new perspective. Over the years, Jester had noted locations and recorded color palettes and scribbled down interesting traditions, taking inspiration from the various cultures they’d encountered. In some places, the volume was more like a scrapbook.
A piece of sheet music from a concert hall in Emon, folded thrice.
Swatches of fabric from a shop in Rosohna, attached with mismatched pins.
Dabs of perfume from an open-air market in Ank’harel, labeled with their ingredients.
To be true: Fjord had no sense of how any of this would fit together. He’d attended quite a few weddings on Jester’s arm, but apart from some vague awareness of “dress shopping” and “dessert sampling,” he’d never dwelt on the particulars.
Instead, what caught his attention—and charmed him—was how the sketchbook captured the evolution of Jester’s tastes.
And how it captured them.
Look at this page! Here was the genesis of the pirate-princess phase that Jester was going through! And on the next page was . . . well . . . whatever the fuck he’d been trying to accomplish with his beard a few years before. There was just so much here—pages and pages of them, growing and changing—and seeing it made him feel the years they’d spent together.
It felt like a long while.
It felt like no time at all.
“We’ve certainly been places, haven’t we?” Fjord said warmly. Jester stepped nearer to him, taking the corners of the sketchbook in her hands.
“Is this weird? . . . It’s okay. You can tell me if it is.”
Her tone of voice made Fjord look up. Jester’s face was flushed, and her tail was weaving an anxious pattern in the air. Now he understood why she’d joked about him running away: She was worried this would overwhelm him.
Holding her gaze, Fjord laid his hand open on the sketchbook.
“All of this,” he said, “anything and everything you want—we’ll make it happen.”
At once, Jester’s eyes went round. “Really?” she breathed, and Fjord found himself damning his own romantic impulses.
“Of course!—Yes.—Anything for my Sapphire,” he said rapidly, delighting Jester all the more. “I just wish you’d shared this with me sooner, so we could have started budgeting for”—he flipped through multiple pages of names—“approximately seven hundred guests.”
“You’d have freaked out!” Jester declared. “You never talked about getting married. And you always got super nervous when people brought it up—”
“I’m not nervous—”
“Then why did you take seven years to—”
“I’m terrified.”
Jester looked taken aback. Her hands dropped to her sides, and her tail came to rest on the ground with soft thump. As she took a trembling breath, Fjord feared that he’d just ruined everything, and he’d be bunking with the Tower cats for the foreseeable future.
“Is it because I keep calling us pirates, and it’s bad for business?” she asked in a little voice.
“What? No.”
“Then why?”
“Because—in my eyes, what we have is already perfect,” Fjord told her in exasperation. “I didn’t see a reason to hurry and change it. And maybe I thought that if we did, something could go wrong—and you might regret that you ever . . . .”
As Fjord let his words trail off, he saw Jester’s expression soften into a look of concern. Gods, he thought—this was a lot to unpack, and he’d scarcely arranged his thoughts on the matter.
But he couldn’t leave her wondering.
So, he took her by the hand, and he brought her to sit next to him.
“Do you remember when we met on the road, and you asked to walk with me for a while? . . . I think about that sometimes. If I’d said ‘no,’ my life would have been so different.”
“That’s true,” said Jester. “You’d probably be lord of the seas or something. You’d have your own fleet, and you’d sleep on a pile of treasure every night!”
“Shit. You’re right.” Fjord paused to reflect on it. “Or I’d be dead.”
“Or you’d be dead,” she agreed.
The two of them shared a smile, pleased to be distant enough from that terrible possibility that they could now joke about it. Fjord took that moment to study Jester’s face, and in admiring her features by the sparkle of the ley lines, he felt a hint of déjà vu.
He remembered seeing her in the glow of the jellyfish bloom.
He remembered seeing her in the luminance of the Blooming Grove.
“Before long, it was hard to imagine a future without you,” he continued. “I wanted you to have the life you deserved, with the right person by your side. But . . . it took time for me to believe my luck had turned, and that person could be me.”
Saying this, Fjord could hear his voice become halting. It was difficult—and dangerous, in his experience—to admit to any of this: to feeling fear, or having doubt. He’d learned every trick in the book to avoid it.
Change the subject—
Go quiet—
Lie—
“I’m still not used to it,” he admitted instead. “I’m not used to holding onto something and not having it slip away from me. I’m not used to . . . being this happy and believing it will actually last.”
Fjord lifted his gaze then, and he saw a shine in Jester’s eyes. She blinked her tears back—sniffled quietly—and reached out to smooth the lapel of his coat.
“We can work on that together,” she decided, and Fjord gave a smile.
“I’d like that.”
“And you’re really sure?”
“About being your husband? . . . I’m really, very sure.”
Jester made no immediate reply. Or rather, she tried to, but all she could manage was a giddy trill of laughter. It amused Fjord at first, but very quickly, it started to make him self-conscious of all the lovers’ talk he’d just indulged in.
“Anyway!” he said briskly, holding up the sketchbook, “That’s why I’m shocked to see myself featured so heavily in this volume.”
“What! You’re my admiral! Who else would I draw?”
“Ah, I don’t know.” Fjord gave a labored sigh and flipped the page again. “Maybe you had some other Oskar in mind. Maybe I was just a fling.”
Jester gave him a droll look. “A seven-year fling?” she said, and Fjord wrinkled his nose at her.
“You don’t have to keep bringing up how long it’s been,” he grumbled.
Grinning broadly, Jester plucked the sketchbook from his grasp and put it away. She hopped to her feet, and then she moved to stand before him, intent on giving him a kiss. In response, Fjord gazed at her through half-veiled eyes—a playfully arrogant look that said: I am your admiral, aren’t I? . . .
It would have been irritating, had she not known that he’d melt at the first touch of her lips. Which he did, like always.
And he thought back to her saying: You’re really sure?
In all their years together, it might have been the silliest question that Jester had ever asked him. Yes, hers might be the only lips he’d kiss for the remainder of his life—the only voice he’d hear whispering “good night”—the only hands he’d reach for in the dark—the only heart he’d ever possess.
If he was lucky.
Now, as they parted, Fjord opened his eyes to see Jester gazing back at him.
“So,” she said, still holding his face in her hands, “You said anything and everything I want, right?”
“I . . . did.”
Jester patted his cheeks. “Okay. Listen,” she began. “I had this idea, and it’s not too crazy: What if Artie made us all mermaids—”
“Mermaids?”
She took his hand and pulled him to his feet. “Not permanently! Just for the ceremony,” she explained. “Then we could have it in the ocean! You’d like that, right? . . . Or what about the Plane of Water?”
“Hold on, now—”
Jester started to skip toward the Tower, forcing Fjord to jog to keep up. “And if we get married underwater—”
“This is about the fucking narwhals, isn’t it—”
The tiefling just giggled again, even more brightly than before. The amber light of the Tower’s doorway was before them, drawing a path on the stone—one of many they’d share in the years ahead. But as they drew near to it, Fjord felt Jester shift her grip on his hand.
She slowed down—
And she danced into the circle of his arm—
And she brought him to walk beside her, a sprightly gait matching a long stride, over the threshold and many steps beyond it.