Chương 183: Chapter 178. Sam

The way back went faster. Sam slept through most of it, but he'd earned it twice over. The worst day of his year, a kraken, a leviathan, and a dunk in the open ocean, all packed into one stretch of dark. He went down in the bottom of the boat somewhere past the second hour and didn't stir until Arkhos was a low smudge of harbor lights on the horizon. Adom didn't sleep.

He simply sat at the tiller with the wind in one hand and the book closed on his knee, watching the city rise slowly out of the dark, turning the rune over and over in his mind. They came in tired. Bone-tired in Sam's case, and even Adom felt the day sitting heavy behind his eyes by the time they tied off and hauled themselves up onto the dock. The sky was just beginning to think about going gray at its edges.

"All right." Adom rolled the stiffness out of his shoulders.

"We'll need somewhere private for the inscription. I've got everything we need at the—" He stopped.

"... The lab." Sam looked over.

"What about the lab?"

"My tools. The fine set, for inscription work. They're at the lab." He pressed the heel of his hand into one eye. He was more tired than he'd realized.

"I cleaned them after the last session and never brought them back home. And the lab's across the whole city, and it's the last place I want to be doing this with people able to walk in on us."

"So come to mine." Adom looked at him.

"My place." Sam was already tugging his coat tighter against the dawn chill.

"I've got tools. Not as nice as yours, but I do fine work, I've got what we'd need. It's quiet, nobody comes by, and it's half the distance to the healers' from here anyway." He looked back at Adom, and his voice dropped.

"And it's where I want to be. For this." Adom didn't argue.

"Lead the way." Sam's place turned out to be a manor. Adom always forgot that, somehow, between visits. The Harbinskys had come to Arkhos a few years back, not long after Sam finished at Xerkes; moved the whole household, and moved his mother with them, for the healers. Arkhos had some of the finest in the world — Adom's own mother among them, and a good many besides. If there was a chance for the woman, it was as good here as anywhere.

Adom had been to the house only a handful of times, and gotten lost on every one of them. It was that kind of house: wings and back stairs and corridors that folded in on themselves, staff appearing and vanishing through doors he hadn't known were there. He'd even once gone looking for a bathroom and wound up in what he was fairly sure had been a small ballroom. A man met them at the door before Sam's hand even reached it.

Silver-haired, immaculate, entirely unbothered by the hour or by the state of the pair of them, which was considerable.

"Master Sammenel." A small bow.

"Master Adom. Welcome home."

"Morning, Albrecht." Sam dragged a hand through his salt-stiff hair.

"We'll be in my practice room. Don't let anyone bother us, please."

"Of course." If the butler had questions about why the young master had come home at dawn soaked to the skin with the Ghost of Arkhos in tow, not one of them reached his face.

"Will you be wanting anything? Tea, perhaps. I could bring something up; a little of the sweet, a little of the savory."

"That'd be—" Sam glanced at Adom, who realized he hadn't eaten in longer than he could readily calculate.

"Yeah. That'd be great. Thank you, Albrecht."

"Very good." Another small bow, and the man was already gone. Sam's practice room was up two flights and down a hall Adom would have hardly found on his own. It looked nothing like a battle mage's training space. There wasn't a scorch mark or a practice dummy in sight. It was a workshop: long clean benches, good lamps, drawers labeled by hand, and along one wall, in careful rows, every tool a working runicologist could want. Fine styluses. Etching needles.

Loupes and ruled glass and little stoppered pots of inks and binding agents. A proper inscription set, better kept than Adom's own. Adom took it in and wasn't surprised in the least. Sam had the wrong title. The fire, the combat spells, the whole battle-mage track the young man had walked was all because Adom walked it first, and Sam had followed. Left to his own shape, with no one to keep pace with, he'd have ended up here. At a bench like this one, a loupe to his eye and a needle in his hand.

He'd have made a fine runicologist. Maybe a great one. Which was, Adom thought, rather convenient tonight.

A rune on stone was a forgiving thing. A rune on paper, more forgiving still. A stone rune could be drawn wrong, scraped off, started over, and the worst anyone lost was an afternoon and a little explosion if they were unlucky. Unfortunately, flesh was not as forgiving. Almost nobody put runes on flesh anymore. Ancient mages had done it routinely; a rune carved into the skin became permanent, passive, always ready, no need to shape a fresh spell or hold it in the mind.

But the practice was archaic and dangerous, and the world had long since traded it for the daily headache of weaving the ordinary way after optimizing spells. Drawn wrong, a flesh-rune didn't just fail; the mana had nowhere to go but the body. Burns. Rot. Worse, sometimes. Adom had never done one. Neither had Sam. The only one he'd ever seen up close was Eren's, and that was natural, born into the skin, not cut there. So this was new ground, for both of them, on Adom's arm. And he was a little worried.

But the rune wanted flesh, and there was a woman across the city running out of month. So. Carefully. There was no real question about whose arm it went on.

"It has to be me." Adom was already pushing his sleeve up past the elbow.

"I've got more mana than you, by a wide margin. Whatever this thing ends up enhancing, the bearer's the one feeding it, and the more I can pour in, the stronger the effect. If your mother's as far gone as the healers think, we'll want every drop we can get." He turned the arm over, baring the pale underside.

"And I understand the rune. If it starts to go wrong while it's being laid, I'll feel it before you'd ever see it." Sam looked at the offered arm.

"... Right. Yeah. That all tracks."

"You're drawing it, though." Adom said it like it was obvious, because it was.

"I can't do clean work on my own arm at this angle, and you've got better hands than I do. Always have." He sat and laid the forearm flat on the bench, under the good lamp.

"I'll talk you through every line. You just have to understand what you're drawing while you draw it. The rune doesn't care how steady your hand is if your head's somewhere else. Intent's half the work." So Adom walked him through it. But not the way he'd teach a student, as there was no time for that. He gave Sam what he needed and nothing he didn't. This line carried the working outward. This one held it shut until it was called on.

This cluster, here, was where the mana entered, too shallow and it would never fill, too deep and it would flood. He went slowly and made Sam say each piece back to him. And by the end, watching his friend's face, he could see it had taken: Sam wasn't just looking at the rune anymore. He understood it, the way Adom finally had across a leviathan's stretch of black water.

"Got it?" Sam let out a slow breath. Picked up the finest of the needles. Set the tip to the skin of Adom's forearm. Didn't quite press.

"... This is going to hurt you."

"Probably. Go slow."

"Sorry." Sam pressed. The needle bit, and a thin line of red welled up behind it as the first stroke went down.

"Sorry. Sorry—""Sam. You don't have to apologize every time you—""Sorry." He was already onto the second line, brow furrowed, tongue caught between his teeth, eyes huge behind the loupe.

"I know. I know. I just— sorry —" Adom shut his mouth, let his friend work, and held the arm very, very still. Then a while into the work, a soft knock came at the door.

"Master Sammenel." Albrecht's voice, from the hall. Not coming in.

"May I bring this through?"

"Yeah, come in." The door opened just wide enough. The butler crossed to the side table, set down a laden tray: a pot of tea, two cups, and a spread of little things sweet and savory that made Adom's stomach announce itself, then withdrew, all without once letting his gaze drift toward the needle, the open book, or the half-cut rune bleeding faintly on a magus's forearm. He did his task and went.

"Thanks, Albrecht," Sam said.

"Thank you," Adom added. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. A small bow, and he was gone. After that, they worked for hours. Adom guiding every line, Sam's hands doing the work, the rune growing across his forearm a careful stroke at a time. It was slow, exacting, draining work, and they paced it the only sensible way: stopping every couple of hours to rest their eyes and hands before either of them made the sort of mistake there'd be no scraping off.

It was on one of those breaks, somewhere in the gray-gold middle of the morning, that they finally ate. Adom got through half the tray on his own and felt something close to human again. Sam sat across from him with a cup of tea going cold in his hands, the loupe pushed up onto his forehead, looking at the half-finished rune and not really seeing it.

"It's going well, you know," Adom said.

"Genuinely. You have steady hands, good eye, and you haven't flinched once. If I'd had to do this on someone else, I'd have wanted you holding the needle." Sam's mouth twitched, but it didn't reach a smile.

"... You think it'll actually work?"

"I think it's got a real chance. Which is more than she's had in a long while." Sam nodded slowly, turning the cup in his hands.

"She's never seen me grown," he said.

"Not really. I was a kid, last time she properly looked at me. Skinny little thing. And Elena was barely up to my waist." He gave a weak smile, but it didn't quite hold.

"You know, I've been thinking." He turned the cup in his hands.

"It's been so many years with her like that. And the closer we get with this thing, the more I keep thinking… what if it doesn't work? What then?" He shook his head, smiling weakly.

"Maybe I shouldn't hope too much. Just so it doesn't gut me if it goes wrong." Adom didn't say anything.

"I… I think I've made my peace with it. However it lands." Sam was looking at the half-finished rune now, though not really seeing it.

"That's what she'd have wanted. I do my best, and I take whatever comes after." Adom decided not to feed that.

"So when she wakes up," he said.

"How do you reckon she takes it? First look at you?" Sam huffed softly, let himself be pulled along.

"Honestly? I don't know." He gave that weak smile again.

"Two strangers over the bed, one of them with a beard coming in, the other taller than she is. Her just lying there going — who are these people?"

"I think she takes one look at you," Adom said, "and goes, who's that nerd?" That got a laugh out of him.

"God, I hope not." He dropped his head back against the chair.

"I've decided I don't want to be a nerd anymore, Adom. Girls don't like nerds." Adom raised an eyebrow.

"Why does your mind always circle straight back to girls? Every single time, girls, girls, girls. We're cutting a dead language into my arm at this hour and you're thinking about girls." Sam lobbed a cushion at him, which Adom let hit him square in the chest.

"Because, unlike some people in this room, the rest of us are actual teenagers, who think about actual teenage things." He jabbed a finger.

"And I'm self-aware about it, thank you. I know full well most people our age have got exactly one thing on their minds, and I am no exception to that. Most people get to enjoy it, even." His hands dropped.

"But alas, I'm cursed."

"... What do you mean, you're cursed?"

"Okay. So." Sam set his tea down and turned to face him properly.

"The other day. Me and Karion go down to the beach, yeah? And there's this girl. Sitting on her own near the water. An elf. Gorgeous. Wildly out of my league, obviously. And I like her, straight away. And Karion — you know Karion — he's all, go on, go talk to her, what's the worst that happens, the worst she can say is no. Hypes me right up. Walks me half the way there and pretty much shoves me the rest." Sam took a breath.

"You want to know what she said? When I got there and said hello?"

"... No?" Adom said." Eww." Sam looked him dead in the eye.

"She said eww. That was it. That was the entire interaction. Eww." Adom burst out laughing. It came up out of him before he had a prayer of stopping it, and Sam just sat there and took it, deeply and profoundly undignified, watching his friend fall apart at his expense.

"Sorry—" Adom managed, "sorry, I'm sorry, that was uncalled for, I can see that you're hurt—" He wiped at his eyes.

"But hang on. Hang on. What did you say to her? For her to open with eww?"

"That's the worst part." Sam shook his head.

"I don't even know. I said hello. That's all I got out. Hello. And she looked at me, said her piece, got up, and walked off." He stared into the middle distance, reliving it.

"So you see the problem. You can't fix a thing when you don't even know what the thing is. I'm cursed. It's the only theory that holds."

"It really isn't—""It's the only one that holds, Adom. Look at Karion." Sam leaned in.

"Karion pulls. Constantly and effortlessly. And the man walks around with that… thing on his face he insists on calling a mustache, and it has never once slowed him down."" Thank God." Adom set his cup down.

"I thought I was the only one who saw it. I genuinely thought I was losing my mind. That everyone else was just being too polite to say anything."

"It's bad, Adom."

"It's so bad. Should we say something? Sit him down, stage an intervention? A few chairs, someone he trusts, gentle lighting—""No, that's the thing, he doesn't need one." Sam was almost reverent about it.

"The mustache doesn't stop him. If anything you have to respect it. The man is succeeding in spite of a serious self-inflicted handicap. That takes a kind of power." He paused.

"And it's not just Karion. Even Damus has a girlfriend. Damus." Adom snorted.

"Damus does not have a girlfriend."

"He does."

"Damus has a training regimen, and does sword forms at dawn for fun. I think he was bluffing."

"He was not bluffing." Sam went suddenly serious.

"Me and Karion followed him for a full day all across the city."

"... You followed him?"

"And he really does have someone. Saw her myself." Sam nodded, vindicated.

"Pretty. Bit older than him, maybe. Works with her hands, not a mage, nor a noble, nothing you'd ever expect for Damus. Just an ordinary girl. And he looks at her like—" He stopped.

"... Anyway. He's got someone. They've all got someone." Adom was staring at him.

"You tracked him for an entire day?" He shook his head slowly.

"Do you people have jobs? Are you employed? What is wrong with you?"

"We took sick leave for it, by the way," Sam added.

"Me and Karion. Both put in for the day." Adom set down the piece of food halfway to his mouth.

"You do realize that I am a magus at the Magisterium, right? I am, in a real and technical sense, your boss." He said it slowly.

"And you're telling me you call in sick to go surveil your friends' love lives?"

"Okay, don't say it like that." Sam shifted in the chair.

"You make it sound deranged. You make me sound like a weirdo."

"You are a weirdo." Sam opened his mouth to argue, found nothing there, and closed it again.

"Look." Adom leaned back, and the joking went out of him."You want the real reason it keeps going wrong? It's that you walk up to them already sure it's going to fail, and they can feel that from across a beach. You're asking them to disprove the thing you've already decided about yourself, and that's not a fair thing to hand a stranger." He held Sam's eye.

"So stop trying to win them. Just be curious about who they actually are, and let that be the whole of it. The rest mostly sorts itself out, once you quit strangling it." Sam went quiet, seeming to genuinely turn it over. Then his eyes narrowed.

"... Hang on, remind me of something." He set his cup down.

"All those decades of your past life, you never had anyone, did you? And this one neither?"

"The mass destruction bombings and wars rather narrowed the field of candidates," Adom said mildly.

"And the apocalypse afterward kept the opportunities thin on the ground."

"That is not the point." Sam pointed at him, vindicated all over again.

"I mean, what you just said was genuinely solid advice, but I've decided to take exactly none of it, purely on the grounds of who it's coming from. You cannot sell me love advice, dude. You've never bought a scrap of it yourself." For the better part of a minute, the two of them laughed until they were crying. It would die down, and then their eyes would meet and it would take them both over again, helpless, until there was nothing left to give it.

Adom's stomach ached, while Sam wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist. Then it was quiet.

"Welp," Adom said. And that, by long and mutual understanding, was the sign to get back to work. They worked the rest of it through. Five more hours, give or take, the morning aging into afternoon beyond the windows. Then the last stroke went down, and Sam set the needle aside, and it was finished. The two of them sat looking at it: a heart, lines radiating outward like veins, scored clean into the reddened skin of Adom's forearm.

"... What do you think?" Sam said. He was trying for casual and missing it by a mile. Adom didn't answer. Instead, he reached over, poured a measure from the pot into one of the cups, and drank. Lukewarm now, hours gone cold and tepid. Faintly floral, a little bitter under it. He then set two fingers into the cup, and pulled mana down into the rune. It lit.

The whole shape of it surfaced bright against his skin, and along with the light came a strange, vivid awareness of every needle-track Sam had laid — every line, suddenly there, alive and humming with the mana running through them. Adom held it a moment, then lifted his hand clear and drank again.

"... So?" Sam was leaning forward.

"Did it—" It hit Adom before he could finish. The tea did what tea was for, and then some. The tiredness went out of Adom all at once, the long sleepless day burning off him like fog in the sun. He was now awake, sharp, and humming, every edge of him gone clean and bright. More than that. There was a faint thing in the leaves, a mild compound that gave a lift like this only in enormous doses, doses no one ever drank. And he'd had half a cup. But it was rolling through him anyway, high and almost giddy.

Then the System spoke. New Rune acquired: [Rune of Enhancement]. Oh… oh this was good.

"... Adom?" Sam was watching his face.

"Adom, what's wrong?" Adom looked up at him. Whatever was on his face, it stopped Sam's question dead.

"Hey, let's go see what your mother makes of you," Adom said, "when she wakes up. How about it?" For a second Sam didn't move at all. Then his face crumpled and he suddenly turned it away, jaw working, and breath going ragged. He scrubbed a wrist hard across his eyes while sniffing, and a hitch ran through his shoulders he couldn't stop.

"... Okay," he finally said, nodding to himself. It was a stunned emotional collapse, Adom supposed, as he smiled and observed quietly. The whole of Sam buckling, holding together by force, almost like his mind couldn't process the offer.

"I thought you'd made your peace," Adom teased gently. Sam shook his head.

"I-I didn't mean any of that." His voice was shaky, yet he laughed at the tease.

"That's just something you say."