Chapter Text

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"Why are you dragging a goat into the house, woman?"

Grorbar's low voice caught her off guard, and she flinched.

He could have made a little more noise coming up and not startle a respectable Altmer mage in the middle of the night, appearing from behind without a warning.

Even if, at that exact moment, said mage was wrestling a stubborn goat into the house.

The goat was uncooperative and surprisingly strong. Altaeera was panting.

"Grorbar, do me a favor and help instead of narrating," she hissed, struggling to drag the indignantly bleating animal through the doorframe.

The situation called for absolute secrecy. The goat-wrestling was therefore conducted in complete darkness, like a political assassination.

Pitch-dark northern night had pulled the clouds low over their heads, the neighbors had long been asleep, and what exactly Grorbar was doing near her house at this hour was a separate question entirely.

"Have you lost your mind?!" Grorbar, however, dropped his voice, matching her indignant whispers.

He didn't bother pushing the goat. He simply scooped it up, and its plaintive bleating now floated from somewhere above Altaeera's shoulder.

Altaeera stepped inside and briskly lit her lamps, flooding the room with light.

Then Grorbar stepped in after her, the goat in his arms, like one of Sheogorath's chosen envoys, and stared at her with tired acceptance of being dragged into noncence.

Maybe, to start with, it should not have been called a home in the strict sense. Most of the cottage was occupied by a laboratory, an alchemy shop, a receiving room for urgent patients and storage for objects of unclear origin, including one large cooking pot she never got to use.

Her bed shyly hid behind the screen from the neighboring alchemy tools and components, scalpels and immaculately clean surfaces which dominated the space.

Or maybe the bed was shy of being so ordinary compared to everything else.

A collection of herbal tea blends on shelves, each glass jar labeled and sorted by primary ingredient, the same catalog logic as her alchemy?

Her shoes — all 10 pairs in current rotation — arranged on a small open rack by mood, labels ranging from "lovely morning" to "I do hope someone comes asking for nightshade poison today"?

An actual vanity table, and a separate shelf for face masks right beneath the various balms she gave the villagers?

Maybe Grorbar and the goat were not the strangest sight.

The laboratory was the largest part of her house.

She had not even needed to change anything in it after the old alchemist died. By then, Altaeera had already remade it. She could not, simply could not, accept an "it's improvised, but it works" workplace, so the laboratory was the first thing she changed. Barely a week after she joined the old man as the village's second alchemist, they had ordered a proper worktable and far better cauldrons, glassware and equipment. The old Imperial hermit joked that they could now sell tickets to the laboratory, since it had cost roughly more than half the village.

Sadly, there was no one to sell tickets to except snow atronachs, and they were not interested in science.

When she inherited the house after the old hermit's death, she had merely added glow-dust crystal lamps, brought the rest of the space into perfectly structured order, from a hierarchy of towels to a complicated color-code system for components and even introduced a touch of elegance.

Not that she could not live without elegance, especially given that it was she who had — in what was presumably a sound state of mind — traded her home for Skyrim. Altaeera Aurilienne of a Kinline that had produced scholars, Restoration mages and anatomists for many hundreds of years, was now an alchemist and healer in a Nord village.

Well. Complaining about the lack of elegance now would have been a bit absurd.

But ever since her entire life had collapsed, destroyed by her own inability to hold her Kinhouse together, Altaeera had discovered that small, beautiful, unnecessary things were not unnecessary at all.

They were proof of existence.

If that silk scarf exists, I exist in it.

Her little house with bright walls, her systematic order, the air of magic and Altmer-ness that she had never once tried to conceal — all of it had always been out of place in Skyrim.

Her hairpins were out of place, as were her exotic brooches and her habit of doing at least her brows and lips every morning. But civilization must begin somewhere, and eyebrows are as good a start as any.

Her dresses were out of place, as were her silk robes, layered one over the other in winter, like cabbage leaves. The locals, seeing her cabbage-like "rich crazy elf" splendor, had probably developed very strange ideas about Altmer fashion.

And of course, her heels were also wildly out of place.

She never wore heels outside because Skyrim's weather had a long-standing disagreement with her sense of beauty. But inside the house and laboratory, she always wore her comfort footwear.

The foundation of her peace of mind was ox-blood leather, raised on heels long and slender as goblet stems: an excellent pillar of stability while she extracted yet another fishing hook lodged in a patient's buttock.

That fishing trip had surely gone wrong. The strangest part was that the three young Nord boys had not even been drunk, though they never confessed what exactly they had been doing.

But.

Over time, her skill at extracting pigments, along with the Altmer skincare routines refined over centuries — for if one lives for centuries and neglects their skin, they would very soon resemble an old, weathered boot — found a devoted following among the village women.

The Nord women had wonderful hair, thick and heavy, and very fair skin, nearly as white as snow. Before coming to Skyrim, Altaeera had seen humans only a handful of times; Alinor did not permit other races far beyond its outer ports. At first, she had found everything about them strange, just as they had looked at her cheekbones, her golden skin and her eyes as if watching something alien.

But in time, she learned that strange did not mean ugly.

Younger Nord women had taken especially well to her lightly tinted lip oils and to the Altmer way of lining the eyes.

Now, a girl before a date, or a woman in the mood to feel beautiful for no reason, would come to her laboratory and ask what the pigment color was this week.

Now they were a true miracle of Skyrim: Hilde had once worn berry-red lip oil to churn butter and refused to explain herself to anyone.

The old alchemist who had taken her in had done everything in his power to ensure the Nords accepted the Altmer woman rather than string her up on sight. Even so, it had taken many seasons for her to become their Golden Witch.

And still, the faint feeling that nothing here quite belonged returned the moment one stepped into her home.

The locals did not install huge glass windows enchanted against the cold — expensive, impractical things — just to let in more light. If there was one thing Altaeera missed here most, excluding the unfrozen sea and fruits that were not apples, it was the sun.

The sun apparently disliked the Pale, and what they called sunlight was, for approximately seven months of the year, a sad memory of what a bright noon should look like.

The locals did not paint their houses bright colors every summer. Not because they did not know how, but because winter here was very efficient at explaining why one should not bother. Winter here was merciless to paint. Frost peeled it off in layers, the wind finished off whatever remained, and by spring the walls looked as though they had been beaten with ice for months.

Well.

Then I will simply repaint it next spring and look at my bright-walled little house all summer long.

Calcimine is hardly scarce here, any more than a simple color-illusion spell is.

Next summer, I will make it yellow.

After all the yellow-related slurs she had heard when she first came here, a yellow house for the yellow her seemed like quite the right irony.

Altaeera wanted this not-belonging-here to be visible in everything, from her little cottage to her manner of speech.

It beat the same refrain in her temples every time: you are what you are, Altaeera.

A self-imposed exile. A Kinlady of Nowhere. There would be no blending in, no pretending, no trying to hide any of these truths about her.

An indignant goat in the arms of a grinning orc only perfected the absurdist picture.

But life is full of impossible blends, isn't it?

Both of them were outsiders here.

Grorbar had his own history of not belonging. Hers had begun with Winterhold.

The College of Winterhold, her original destination, had meant only one thing to her: away.

Away from everything. Somewhere far enough that she would never have to look back at the ruins of her former self.

But. Her assessment had missed one crucial detail.

The Nords hated her race. That was what she had failed to take into consideration. In her defense, it was quite hard to predict that Altmer could be hated, having lived in Alinor all her life.

Even if the "local unrest," which turned out to be something very close to civil war, was mostly rumor out here in the village, hatred for her kind burned hot enough. As if every Altmer were personally responsible for every evil in the world, including livestock illnesses.

Not mere sideways glances. No. The let the Thalmor bitch die in the snow kind.

After she realized the College was a disaster, not a scholarly heaven, she had written to the old alchemist in this village. He wrote back:

"An Altmer Restoration Master? In Skyrim? A woman? Alone? You're either mad or gifted. Come."

Perhaps she was both: mad and gifted, giftedly mad. So she came. And when the first Nord spat at her feet, she understood what the old man meant.

But it was the middle of autumn, and the roads very quickly became impassable. There was nowhere left for her to retreat.

She had often thought that dying here would not have made hers the most idiotic death of the era. No. That particular medal had been rightfully claimed by the man who had decided that an act of love with a wasp's nest was a perfectly reasonable idea.

Still, among miserable life choices made by supposedly sane people, her decision to choose Skyrim as her destination could at least compete for the audience award.

One mercy: the frozen patch of land where the village stood was of absolutely no interest to anyone. Not to their Stormcloaks, not to the Thalmor, not to the Empire, not even to passing merchants.

Only sabrecats were pleased by the presence of Atmoran descendants here, and only as prospective dinner rather than pleasant company.

Even their own Jarl, it seemed to Altaeera, would probably have been surprised to learn that people actually lived here, with no mines, no port, no nothing around except pines.

In turn, both their Jarl and the Empire were more or less hypothetical concepts to the villagers.

And as for Talos... the locals had never seen a priest of anyone in their lives. The closest thing they had was the midwife, who knew a third of a prayer to Mara word for word and invented the rest. In Altaeera's opinion, it came out no worse than the supposed original. Very poetic.

As for the supposed deity who was driving half the continent to foam at their mouths, the local Nords mostly used his name for curses, toasts and swearing they had not slept with their neighbor's wife.

The practical realities of the cult whose ban was supposed to nearly unravel Creation were clearly unknown to the Dominion's theorists.

Otherwise, the Concordat would have included a ban on marital infidelity and, just to be safe, on neighbors.

Given that Altaeera knew this alleged god mostly through the sheer loudness of his biography and his fixation on annexing her home islands, the patron of Nord adultery seemed a perfectly agreeable post for him.

At least so long as no one expected her to pray to him.

Thankfully, for the Nords, it was enough that she healed their children.

She gave herself one vow, however. When the Empire, holding up by exhausted legions and illusions of its greatness, finally collapsed, she would have a glass of wine.

And when that black-and-gold madness was gone, when those who had hollowed out her faith and culture and worn them like a costume were gone with it, then it would be Nord firebrand wine.

A whole bottle.

By now, she was their Golden Witch, yes.

But their did not mean one of them.

Grorbar had been here for years, too, ever since he had drifted in, as they told it, wounded and half-frozen to death. The old alchemist had saved him, and then Grorbar had stayed, for reasons unknown to anyone.

He was far more respected by the village than Altaeera was. His steady temper, his willingness to help lonely old people and widows with children to feed, his readiness to lend his hands and strength: all of it had been seen, valued, respected.

And still, they called him orc and exile.

That had made them equals from the start.

Strangers among strangers, in the snow that was home to neither of them.

The orc had been one of the few who, even at the very beginning, had never spat at her or called her yellow-skin.

She had arrived in her "winter" coat several degrees of inadequacy away from matching the actual weather, and the locals had nearly suffered a collective stroke upon seeing who their second alchemist and new healer was.

Only Grorbar kept calm.

He had looked at her, in those early days, with an expression that said: let's see which week you die, you absurd creature.

That, in comparison, was perfectly civil.

Weeks passed. Altaeera refused to die, and that, presumably, surprised him.

Perhaps part of him enjoyed the irony of it: here she, not he, was the village's absolute pariah.

An Altmer mage as the near-total social outcast, and an orc greeted by local men with handshakes.

That was new.

As for Altaeera, at the time, she had no energy to spare for contempt.

The old healer had vouched for her, yes, so she was not gone, one way or another, within a week. Even so, she cursed her decision to choose this remote frozen rectum of Tamriel as her place of exile a thousand times over.

Nords and their ways were bizarre. Never mind that Thalmor whore was the mildest thing said behind her back. The irony of it drove her half mad: back home, they had lost much by not being Thalmor enough. Here, she was Thalmor simply because she was Altmer.

The Dominion certainly had a gift for ruining her family's days.

The so-called climate tried to kill her every single day. Cold season was supposed to mean rain and storms, not seven months of frostbite.

That said, she had earned her place here surprisingly quickly.

Not because the work was easy. Because the needs were everywhere. In eight cases out of ten, the problems she faced fell into three categories: injuries, sick children and the accumulated toll of the long winter.

Simple things. And yet the oldest, most reliable killer of people was never Daedric ritual or mythic villainy. It was ordinary winter fever, beginning with wet boots and ending with labored breathing in the dark. It was a crushed limb that meant a lifetime of disability. It was throbbing pain after a simple cut, lungs that survived one winter and failed the second, childbirth turning from hope to blood in an hour.

Before her, they had regarded all of it as inevitable.

Altaeera had many, many years of study and practice behind her. Among the Altmer, apprenticeship lasted a long time, and in her family it had always begun very early. She had been a Senior Restorer in the Infirmarium by the Temple of Syrabane, run on charity and donations, where they treated sailors, craftsmen and the children of merchants.

So nearly everything she faced here was familiar to her. Painfully familiar, often, but familiar.

There were, of course, those she could do almost nothing for.

The girl whose magicka imprint flared chaotically through her head, throwing her body into convulsions or brief absences after which she remembered neither words nor faces.

The young man with a stone lodged in the renal passage.

The older people, for whom she could most often do no more than hold back the pain, ease the breathing, make the leaving quieter.

But in most cases, her arrival in the village meant that scarlet fever stopped being a death sentence, women had more than prayers to Mara on their side in childbirth and a shattered hipbone was no longer a sentence passed on the rest of a life.

Yet even when things warmed somewhat, both in weather and in the sliver of trust she had earned, requests like please heal my cow began to happen.

That was the first time she had even seen a cow. And now she was supposed to somehow know how the anatomy and magicka flow of this horned creature differed from a human's.

Please allow me a moment to accept that cows exist before you ask me to whoosh-heal one with a wave of my yellow palm.

Cows were one early revelation.

Grorbar was another.

There was an orc here?

Of course there was. Why would there not be one?

The first time she saw him, he had come to visit the old hermit, who was his friend. And her first thought was that she might try to steal his boots while he was distracted.

Boots were the problem.

Among the seventeen and a half pairs of shoes she had packed, because only a vile soulless creature would leave her shoes behind in the hour of catastrophe, not one had been fit for walking through snow.

She could probably have bought as many pairs as she liked for the price of one ancestral earring, but there was no shoemaker in this village.

Therefore, no boots.

The old alchemist's boots, which he had lent her, were at least three sizes too small, so her "funny walk" was already a rumor here.

The orc's boots were ugly, but apparently warm and, given that they were nearly matched in height, perhaps not that much larger than her size.

Sadly, she was no master thief.

By the time she tore her gaze from the boots and looked up at Grorbar, the moment for proper racial outrage was already lost.

She had absolutely nothing left to lose and needed to establish the essentials immediately. So she asked whether he happened to have a spare pair of winter boots he did not need.

The orc only blinked.

Raised an eyebrow, slightly.

And said that he did.

"Excellent," Altaeera concluded, settling herself beside the orc and the alchemist at the table where they were playing dice. "I propose to trade your spare boots for: any healing, any potion, jewelry, or my arrogant and cold Altmer soul. In any combination."

"Keep the soul," he said with a guarded smirk. "I don't have a box with a thick enough lid to store it in. And I'm not exactly hoarding boots."

"That would be a rare relic, mind you," she shot back. "A vile, black Altmer soul, should you ever acquire one, deserves a proper place on a dedicated shelf, accompanied by an explanatory plaque."

"And what would the plaque say?" the orc asked, with the faintest hint of amusement.

Oh, splendid. Now she was free entertainment for an Orsimer. Well, if that ended in boots, so be it.

"Altmer Restoration Master, born on Summerset, guilty of one geographical miscalculation." Altaeera paused, then almost smiled for reasons unknown even to herself. "Caution: she bites."

The old alchemist dissolved into laughter, introduced them properly, and by that point Grorbar was already less the orc and more that green man with spare boots my size.

He looked exactly like the sort of hero from those novels Kinladies read when they grew bored of ordinary Altmer marriage and then denied ever having touched. The cover usually featured someone shirtless, and the barbarian with the tender heart was hopelessly in love with the fair maiden.

Naturally, he would not have been cast as the tender green-skinned maiden with tusks.

Reserved, calm but somehow coiled, his appearance confirmed everything she had heard about him. Former mercenary. Did not talk about his past. Did not elaborate on why he was here. Heavy jaw, a nose that had clearly been broken and healed badly, neat small tusks, one chipped, a burn scar on his neck.

Only his gaze was not heavy. It was not the courtesy of withheld judgment. It was more as if he had rejected the concept of judgment altogether.

Though the what even are you, you strange yellow creature was legible enough.

He sat with his back to the wall, a clear line of sight to every window and the door. He tracked her movements, his torso turning toward her automatically by a fraction whenever she shifted.

The spare boots were nearly new, blissfully warm and only slightly too large for her.

He attempted to decline even the examination she offered in exchange for the boots. Unfortunately for him, Altaeera kept her word under all circumstances, and she considered his refusal a logistical error rather than a final answer.

Her catalog of his old injuries included a malunited fracture, scars that restricted range of motion, a malocclusion likely caused by an uncorrected blunt-force injury, a deviated nasal septum, and dense, stagnant nodes in the magicka flow along the lumbar spine.

The last were likely the result of compressive damage and degenerative changes in the vertebral structures, but she needed a more thorough look and a deeper magicka examination to be sure.

The list brought him no visible delight.

And she had not even reached his internal organs yet!

He also did not welcome her recommendations as to what ought to be treated first, even though she recommended neither vivisection nor disembowelment.

Grorbar looked at her with an expression that said, quite clearly: would you kindly fuck off to Oblivion, elf, with that nonsense about my nasal septum.

Ah, yes. The legendary if it has not killed me yet, it will not kill me tomorrow approach.

The hardest part of healing people?

Dealing with people in the process. They, apparently, love inventing ways to sabotage their healers' attempts to keep their bodies alive.

Altaeera sighed.

Then she explained what she could correct right now, with magic and without pain, over the course of a procedure she had performed many times. It would take less than half an hour. A simple reconstruction would stop the snoring, the apneic spells and that constant sense that he could never quite draw a full breath.

She would have preferred to start with the spine. But start small, earn trust and do not rush were better siegecraft.

The old alchemist joined in, because he had long since despaired of persuading his friend to accept treatment and needed an ally.

Altaeera was used to it. Back in Alinor, shipowners had often brought entire crews to the Infirmarium before a voyage: seasoned men and women who had weathered storms and Maormer, all insisting they were in perfect health and had absolutely no need for needles, potions, or, Auri-El forbid, scalpels.

My leg has been aching for fifty years, it will ache for fifty more, no need to fuss over it, Master Altaeera.

The orc did not surrender completely.

"Only this, and nothing else," he said with such finality that she let the argument go.

The nose felt less existentially threatening than the spine, and so was permitted.

It had to be done with magicka alone, though the combination of manual intervention, magic and alchemy was nearly always better for the body.

It allowed the tissues to pass through all the natural stages of healing. Bodies sometimes rejected abrupt changes, responding with fever, hypersensitivity, edema or erratic magicka around the "foreign" tissues.

But had she proposed putting a scalpel or an elevator anywhere near him, he would have fled. Or put it through her. Even with her guarantees of a pain-free procedure.

Sometimes she found herself thinking: how nice it must be for a necromancer. Such calm patients. So wonderfully compliant.

So, since he would not allow manual intervention, she had to do it with magic alone, coaxing the body's magicka imprint to release the stubborn knots of old scar tissue that locked cartilage and bone in their crooked deviation and redirect it to the anatomical midline.

Look, large green man with a stubborn jaw: Restoration magic does not hurt. What a miracle.

There. Notice how much more air gets through. The rest can be fixed, too.

Drink this, it is sweet. And it will spare you the swelling and the sensation of wearing someone else's nose.

So one pair of unprecedentedly ugly but warm winter boots in her size, and a few suspiciously wide breaths from him broke the ice before it had even had time to form, proving the importance of footwear in people's lives.

She did not inquire how his house had come to contain the small details of such a turbulent life: coins from all manner of places, rough clusters of uncut gemstones he kept simply because he liked them and weapons of a quality entirely unlike anything made locally.

She did not ask why his home was this: a simple place, sturdy and well-kept, yet not quite lived in.

Not a place where he had put down roots. More somewhere he had dropped himself and left propped against the wall.

She simply came to that house. First to repay the debt. Then, when he invited her. And then, without being invited.

Once, she brought him rose jam of her own making, and Grorbar, to his credit, swallowed a spoonful and kept silent as Altaeera asked for honest feedback.

"That's... rose," was all he said.

"Yes, I am aware. I made it from rose petals. That is not a description of taste or a quality assessment," Altaeera objected.

"It is," said Grorbar, with the air of a man who had no intention of elaborating further.

She knew it tasted (a bit) like rose soap.

But sweet rose soap, and that was a perfectly respectable start for homemade jam. Besides, given the considerable effort involved in sourcing dried petals out here, the jam was something of a triumph in its own right.

Grorbar appeared to accept this argument and even accepted the jar she gifted him.

She was not entirely certain whether he ate it, used it as a fragrance, polished weapons with it or set it by the door as a ward against ghosts.

Later, he began coming to her place in return, supposedly for coffee, that Elsweyr rarity she loved so dearly. He, however, always refused it, claiming the magic grated on his teeth.

And where exactly would she have found real sugar, cinnamon and coffee in Skyrim?

Illusions, naturally. There was much Altaeera could live without. But not her morning cup of coffee, taken while she touched up her lashes and lips with color.

Never mind that the only witnesses to those lashes would be the goat and the mirror, and the coffee was nothing but warm water wearing a taste illusion.

These were her rituals and her habits. Preserving them meant that no matter what happened, no matter what her life had become, first shattered to pieces and now trying to gather itself back together here in the snow...

There was still an Altaeera in the world.

For him, she made herbal tea blends, taking her own quiet pleasure in the small compositions of summer smells and meadow grass, choosing something new each time.

Each time, Grorbar would interrogate her about this "new" as if he feared discovering a roasted mudcrab in his cup, or something even more exotic.

Each time, Altaeera would say: just try it.

There was a temptation to slip someone's eyeball into his cup one of these days. To make his days less dull.

But she had no stockroom of spare body parts. Alas.

When he had been gone from the village for a while, he usually visited her as soon as he had returned, sometimes even before going to his own home.

But if he went to his own place first, instead of her yellow house...

Then, the moment anyone in the village spotted him back, Altaeera would appear on his doorstep in the full radiance of her Altmer splendor. Because if he had not come straight to her, it meant he had either overloaded his spine on the hunt again, injured something or frostbitten something and was counting on healing quietly before she could get a look at him.

But no, Altaeera had no intention of letting him stoically "heal up" face-down on a mattress.

He only accepted treatment if it was presented as an inevitability.

That, however, Altaeera could manage.

And then, one day, he finally came to her of his own accord with his bad back.

Oh, she had waited such a long time for that enemy's corpse to come floating downriver: his stubborn refusal to see a healer before his legs gave out entirely.

A pity it was considered unethical to chain people — and orcs — down and heal them to one's complete satisfaction.

However, being a stubborn green-skinned mule of a man, he waved off her explanations about structural damage to the spine, the consequences of long-term degeneration and the urgent need to change his habits.

This included replacing his bed with a firmer one, not simply throwing a plank under the mattress and calling it treatment.

He clearly stopped listening at the back exercises. Which was unfortunate, because there were also anti-inflammatory potions to work through and slight corrections to the worn knots in the magicka imprint of his body.

He had quite obviously been hoping the Altmer woman would wave a hand and whoosh, the problem would be solved.

But no.

In theory, she could have attempted a deeper intervention, working through magicka to correct things more directly. In practice, she had no desire to meddle in his spine at this stage, where a mistake of a single millimeter could mean paralysis.

Not while there was still a chance to manage it conservatively.

Restoration is not some peasant discipline of hurling fire at whatever moves. It is a field where it is very easy to make a mistake.

And it is not the healer who has to live with the consequences afterward. It is the patient.

She did consider the so-called specialists of the Destruction school to have chosen the laziest of all disciplines. Making fire does not, strictly speaking, require a functioning brain.

And many of those battle mages, Magnus forgive her, proved it by behaving like people who had heard the word education exactly once, and that in a fleeting dream. After all, their magic amounted to the ability to make things go boom.

Whoever made the biggest boom was considered accomplished.

Very sophisticated indeed.

Restoration is barely a magic school, they say.

And yet one could live an entire life without ever once needing to conjure a Dremora Lord. Every last one of those Archmagi, however, would eventually have to step down from the throne of their imagined greatness and come knocking at her school's door.

And oh, what a surprise: when something hurt, or someone was pregnant, suddenly an experienced Restorer was not not really magic, but would you please come, Master Altaeera.

Take Divayth Fyr: over four thousand years old, embodiment of power. And yet not a single chronicle or legend mentioned how many of those millennia he had likely spent discreetly placing a cushion on his chair before sitting down because of prolapsed hemorrhoids.

Centuries of sedentary habits, magical overexertion, vascular strain and the diet of the powerful, so often short on peasant vulgarities like vegetables and oats, always have consequences.

They can extend life and call themselves mighty.

Having no anatomy whatsoever, if they still insist on being classified as a living creature, is, alas, impossible.

And these mages had the audacity to consider Restoration a priestly art rather than the most demanding of the magical schools. They flattened centuries of painstaking anatomical scholarship, the exhausting practice of intervening in the body through magicka, the years it took to master such work, and equated all of it with semi-literate healers in small towns.

She knew she was ranting.

She had also never met a Restoration mage who was not ranting about having chosen the most thankless field of magic, and then practicing it anyway.

Naturally, she did not say any of this to him. She merely informed him, with an air of authority, which measures they would begin with.

He had no intention whatsoever of beginning with any measures at all.

But he was very much mistaken if he thought that would stop Altaeera, because if someone placed a catastrophically neglected orc back in her care, then she would heal that back, Grorbar's resistance notwithstanding.

She delivered the anti-inflammatory potions and warming balms in person, quite certain that without her supervision he would never drink the "bitter shit."

He repaid her for feeling better by cooking her dinner. It turned out that, unlike her, he could cook extremely well.

She taught him a restorative back exercise routine, while the orc swore because flexibility work defeated him ingloriously.

The man had the build of a structural beam.

Altaeera did not relent. Before long, their sessions on the lawn outside his house had accumulated the most extraordinary rumors. While she counted his breathing in measured tones and walked him through a sequence of lumbar lengthening and strengthening exercises adjusted for his condition, Grorbar sounded as though he were arm-wrestling a snow troll, and the troll was winning.

Besides, tormenting him with phrases like "Open your hips up, Grorbar," was exceptionally entertaining.

Grorbar, who possessed the flexibility of a brick, grumbled that he opened his hips regularly.

That was how he made more orcs.

"Want to see the Orc Warrior exercise routine?" he muttered, looking like a pile of defeated orc pride, though with a lengthened spine. "First one's called Decapitation. Second's Loot the Corpse. Very relaxing."

He hated the "elven shit."

The elven shit helped his back, though. Not to mention that Altaeera was sure he was very pointedly not staring at her rear every time.

It was... nice, actually.

Dragging a not-quite-resisting orc out of bed because it was good for his poor neglected body. Teasing him with that coaxing tone. Smiling at his grumblings. Looking up at the rare northern sun in the brief Skyrim summer, and then having breakfast at his house afterward.

These exercises always brought back her childhood. They were her mother's legacy, practices gathered from who-knows-where and passed on to her daughters. Because her mother had believed that burying oneself in nothing but the Infirmarium and laboratories was bad for one's health, one's posture and one's state of mind.

Strange, that Grorbar, who so hated all her Altmer nonsense, always had something tasty waiting for her after stretching.

By then, the villagers had stopped asking what exactly that mad Elf Witch was doing to the orc that made him arch his back and groan like that.

One old woman once insisted that after that, Grorbar ought to marry her.

Then she thought it over and added that perhaps the man had got lucky after all, if Altaeera did the same sort of things in bed.

Then, of course, it was the mattress's turn.

She had been watching Grorbar wake from that Skyrim-standard sack of torture, straw, horsehair, might as well have been stones, with his spine cracking every morning like a frost atronach breaking apart.

Besides, this was Grorbar. She knew perfectly well that if nothing were done, he would go on suffering and limping forever.

Because the idea of actually living, rather than dragging his old injuries around day after day, was far too radical a concept for him.

And so came the three-hour war of Altaeera Aurilienne against one mattress.

The idea was simple and brilliant: a constant low-level Alteration field that would adjust the firmness, gently support the correct spinal curve and a faint Restoration warmth to relax the muscles.

Altaeera was moderately proud of her own brilliance.

But since no sensible mage had ever thought to apply Alteration theory to mattresses, and since Altaeera only knew the fundamentals of Alteration, she did what any responsible scholar would do.

She consulted several anatomists who studied the spine and joints. She gathered three scrolls' worth of formulas, proper symbolic notation, and spell structures from colleagues in Alteration. She assembled references, including a detailed sketch of Grorbar lying horizontally with the correct lordotic curve.

In the end, she did not need anything unprecedented. Only one small permanent field, no more complicated than levitation.

She arrived at his house expecting a crushing victory over the piece of furniture, armed with an entire bag of components and glowing like a living illustration of a true scholar. The embodiment of the pursuit of Knowledge, what Altmeri ancestry had once been before it turned into an insult to its own beliefs.

Well.

That did not go as expected.

It started with Grorbar, who had apparently made it his personal mission to drive her to the edge of her patience while she worked.

Because, of course, he was having the time of his life.

First, by distracting her from her work with questions about how long she intended to stare at his ass, and if she wanted him horizontal, she could have just asked.

He deliberately misunderstood every request she made for him to imitate natural movements.

She meant sleep.

Perhaps those movements were also natural.

But no! That was not what she meant!

He flexed.

By Auri-El!

That olive-green menace attempted lumbar vertebrae flirtation when she tried to get an accurate measurement!

Behaving like an adolescent whenever she mentioned pelvic measurements or when he looked at the diagrams of his lordosis was also entirely unnecessary.

Lordosis, Grorbar.

Lordosis!

She was tempted to fill the spare soul gem with his soul.

Second, physics and Alteration refused to cooperate.

All right, maybe she overcomplicated the design, but she figured it was better to do it properly once than to recalibrate it later.

And then there was the matter of pride. As if a piece of furniture could defeat her.

If she was going to make this mattress, it would be — no exaggeration — perfect. The kind of achievement one could put on display as an example of the Craft at that miserable College of Winterhold.

But no.

The main problem was not conjuring the Alteration field itself, but the calibration.

She burned through half her emergency component reserves, including void salts.

She spent an hour and a half lying under the bedframe, surrounded by dust, drawing runes by hand.

The mattress kept going either completely rigid or bouncing back with alarming enthusiasm, practically trying to wrap itself around Grorbar.

And while accidentally inventing a cuddling charm was a charming discovery, it was not the effect she needed.

She cursed the idiot who had written these formulas, and Grorbar helpfully reminded her that the idiot in question had been her.

The moment calibration was finally won, the stabilization matrices decided it was their turn.

"First time in my life I've seen a woman lose a fight with my bed. Need a sword?" Grorbar asked as Altaeera burned through her third soul gem to finally stabilize the field.

"Can you please stop commenting?!"

"Woman, you're sweating, swearing, there's dust in your hair, and my bed looks like your attempt to summon something ominous. Looks like warfare to me."

In the end, after three hours, he lay down.

Sighed in obvious comfort.

Stretched.

Altaeera smiled, congratulating herself on victory.

"What's next? More pelvic measurements?"

"You test it with sleep, you barbarian. Nothing vigorous for at least twelve hours."

The morning stiffness that had been radiating down his leg cleared up within just a few days.

He never stopped teasing her about what experiments she was planning for his bed next, even after Altaeera promised that next time she would weave pain into the runes instead of Warmth.

The orc called that kinky and grinned.

She had the stupidity to ask what that word meant.

And then he explained, until she was forced to threaten him with bodily harm, literally and in detail, to make him stop explaining.

Grorbar often came by in the evenings to play a Summerset game, though 'play' was a strong word, since he refused to learn the rules.

In turn, he taught her a Khajiiti game: Liar's Dice.

It was simple, unpretentious and utterly addictive. Altaeera kept dreaming of catching him cheating. She never managed it and lost every time with the kind of frustration he found funny.

He insisted that he knew how to play and was insufferably smug about it.

They did not speak of the past or the future.

Did not pry.

But they often spent evenings together when Grorbar was in the village.

And when he was not there, away on hunting trips, occasionally accompanying the smith to the city or off on some "old favors" from his past, her evenings were far lonelier than she had become used to.

Only then did she notice how rare those lonely evenings had become lately.

Or rather, how much she wanted them to stay rare.

She would catch herself brewing two cups of tea and then stand there, feeling ridiculous.

The orc had an occasionally maddening habit of being a grinning, insufferable bastard.

Altaeera gave as good as she got.

So they got along about as well as a cat and a dog might.

The cat hissed. The dog grumbled now and then, without any real bite.

And at the end of the day, they both came back to the same fire.

It was warmer that way.

Strange or awkward? No. Neither of those.

What could possibly be strange or awkward anymore for Altaeera, who had exiled herself from the very heart of a noble, wealthy life and spent the last several years in a Nordic village?

After treating goats, cows, sheep, pigs and chickens? After discovering that healing Nords was usually an exercise in convincing people to actually drink what you gave them and not dilute it with whatever they had by hand?

Her friendship with Grorbar was warm, even if it was never wordy.

It warmed her house simply, without demands, with a kind of quiet steadiness, like the grog he had taught her to brew.

Once, he had made it so well that she drank enough to start teaching him to dance.

Rich.

Bitter at the edges.

Fragrant.

The kind of thing you tasted without feeling the strength of it until it was already in you.

Somehow, he was the one in whose company she was always warm.

"Put the goat down, Grorbar. Right here, on the blankets," Altaeera announced, with the calm of someone whose plan had always included exactly this.

Grorbar snorted, but put the goat down.

"Are you going to explain what any of this means? Did you steal a goat while I was gone?"

Altaeera noticed the pack set neatly by her threshold. The mud on his boots. The slight wrongness in how he was standing, like he was favoring one shoulder.

Oh, if you are injured again—

"I was gifted one," Altaeera corrected, pulling on her gloves and reaching for the pitcher. "While you were away, the headman's eldest daughter nearly died — partial placental abruption, often fatal. I spent a week reattaching it with Restoration spells. It requires an insane level of concentration on the layer-by-layer implantation..." She paused. "Anyway. She and the child survived, and the headman gave me a dairy goat."

"That does not explain what, by Malacath's hairy arse, you are doing."

"Saving the animal from mastitis," she sighed.

And saving herself from a blow to her Altmeri pride, but that part she kept to herself.

Chapter Text

***

She had grown accustomed to life in the back end of Skyrim's back end. Or accustomed enough that the strangeness of it still caught her off guard now and then, but she could exist in it.

Grorbar had fixed the roof. She had furnished and renovated the house, selling off a few of her simpler pieces of jewelry and thoroughly baffling the locals with a furniture order from town.

A neighbor had provided her with a generous supply of firewood in payment for treating a very delicate problem his young wife had complained about. Though it quickly became clear that her definition of generous supply had been somewhat optimistic.

Skyrim, it turned out, required an unreasonable amount of firewood.

After that, firewood became something of a local currency to pay her with: split logs, buckets of water hauled from the well, useful things instead of coins she did not need.

She had even learned to use the tiled stove. At first, the wretched thing with a rather lovely facade had filled her home with black smoke until she worked out the logic of the dampers.

The narrow Breton-style tiled stove had opinions about the kind of wood it preferred, and lighting it was a religious ritual, one in which even the smallest misstep was punished.

The Daedric thing in tiles still had a habit of belching smoke into the house if Altaeera displeased it, but most of the time, her house was warm now.

The soot on her ceiling was a proud reminder of her victory over a device that was not even supposed to be that complicated.

The locals quickly took to paying her in food, and with time, to Altaeera's considerable relief, stopped bringing it raw.

At first, they had deposited:

A sack of dried beans. Altaeera had attempted to sleep on it, half-remembering something about grain pillows and their restorative properties. Beans, apparently, possessed no such magic. It was an awful experience.

Potatoes. These she had naturally boiled whole, skin-on, in her alchemical cauldron, because she was not about to spend time peeling potatoes. Cooking was only acceptable if it involved one ingredient and took very little time. She had been exhausted and hungry enough that it had actually made a very good dinner.

Then came millet, oats, flour...

When her home had begun to resemble a grain warehouse, Altaeera reached her limit. She told the mother of a child she was examining: beans are only accepted in cooked form.

They all took the hint, and now Altaeera retreated to the potatoes-in-the-cauldron plan B only rarely.

The evolution of the food was, perhaps, the most visible marker of her relationship with the village.

At first, while the alchemist was still alive, they went to him and accepted her help only with suspicion. They paid him in food, but he, blessed man, knew how to turn flour into bread.

She missed him for more than the bread. She missed the way he squinted at people before deciding whether they were lying, which they usually were. The old hermit had such a sharp eye and such an un-cruel heart that it would have been impossible not to miss him.

Then he worsened and became practically bedridden. When his kidneys began to fail, Altaeera was nearly filtering his bloodstream with magic, sustaining him as long as she could.

The villagers brought food for him, but there was enough for two.

The food catastrophe unfolded when he was gone. By that point, people had grown accustomed enough to her to come with serious troubles. But...

In the Infirmarium, there had been priests, Restorers and physicians under her responsibility, with dozens of lives and deaths passing before her eyes every day.

Here, she saw three people a day.

It was during the half-raw-bean period, when she could not, for the life of her, work out how to make it soft, that she decided: if patients would not come to her, she would come to them.

Check on an arthritis case.

See how Bjorn's shoulder was doing.

Flush out a child's blocked nose.

She took on anything.

She also began keeping meticulous, extensive patient records for everyone in the village, from the number of ear infections per child to the state of the adults' joints.

Once people saw that her unannounced visits were literally healing, they started feeding her when she came by.

And so she won her daily bread by wading through snowdrifts to other people's arthritic joints, because the alternative was going mad with boredom and, worse, beans.

She had decided, for the record, that this was not a step down in her Art, but an opportunity to deepen her knowledge by observing illnesses not as isolated cases brought through an Infirmarium door, but as patterns unfolding across an entire village.

Secondly, one's value system ought to be calibrated to one's circumstances.

In her current circumstances, bread was a tangible result.

And then, eventually, her shop-laboratory-home was filled with visitors every day.

Among them:

One came to ask whether it was normal for their knee to make a suspicious cracking sound when twisted like this. The suggestion not to twist it like that was received as a personal affront.

One wanted to know whether it was all right to take her potion with tea, just not twice a day, not in the morning and not on an empty stomach. Because her instructions were surely decorative.

One reported that he had not actually taken the potion she had given him. Well, he had for two days, then stopped, but his stomach still hurt, which obviously meant her medicine was not working.

One arrived as living proof that when she said no alcohol and no fats, washing down a boar shank with ale was a bad idea.

Aunt Liv found life insufficiently eventful and therefore "died" of a new invisible illness with no discernible symptoms every few days. So Altaeera also became a dream-reader, because she had to professionally answer whether seeing a draugr in a dream was a bad omen.

A young woman asked which days it was impossible to get pregnant, obviously asking for a friend.

Two of the visitors actually had problems that needed treatment.

And one should have been there a week ago. But coming in promptly, rather than waiting until the neglect alone was enough to make a healer weep, was apparently not the Nord way.

It was then that she felt she had, at last, fully sorted out her steady food supply chain.

One brought milk. One brought soup. One brought cheese and salted fish.

They had apparently accepted that their Golden Witch could reconstruct a shattered hip joint, but beans, no.

So they started making sure she would not starve while she kept them alive.

Well.

In leaving behind a world of life and death, she had arrived in a world of life and life.

An entirely new layer of what it meant to be a Restoration practitioner.

The trouble began when, in gratitude for four children who had survived measles, the Spotted Death as they called it here, and an epidemic that never quite materialized, she was gifted a rooster and two hens.

For a week, she kept them in a cordoned-off corner of the laboratory, thereby establishing that birds have a smell, and that this smell does not dissipate regardless of how many candles and how much perfume one deploys against it.

One day, Altaeera stood ankle-deep in mud, a chicken on her head, woodsmoke from the stove in her nose and found herself seriously considering going back to her mother.

If only for a while.

If only for cheese that did not smell of chicken and despair.

But firstly, going back was by now physically impossible.

Besides, it would mean seeing not only her mother, but her husband.

And secondly, Altaeera, defeated by a chicken?

So she picked up the chicken, went back inside, and informed the birds that they could no longer live together and needed urgent separation.

Then the hunter, who owed her considerably for the fact that he still had both arms, knocked together a small lean-to that closely resembled an outhouse, but served as a chicken coop.

The outhouse-coop offended every aesthetic instinct she possessed, and she intended to build her chickens a proper home.

What was the word?

A henhouse?

White, with a neat little pediment.

She had already sketched several designs she was quite pleased with, and was confident her chickens would be too.

Her hens were wonderful, if smelly, birds and had earned the honor of being named after Altmeri poetesses.

The rooster, Tiber Septim, embodied the illusion of grandeur and constantly pecked everything in reach: shins, boots, hands if you made the mistake of bending down.

Nothing was safe.

This was, incidentally, very. Very. Painful.

She never, of course, shared the name with the Nords.

Yet it fit exceptionally well, as she was reminded every time history deployed its beak against her or her patients again.

Loud, arrogant, and absolutely certain he ruled the world.

According to his own understanding of imperial grandeur, Tiber Septim governed the entire yard, as well as commanded the sunrise, judging by his habit of crowing at whatever hour he personally deemed appropriate.

The feathered Emperor mostly left his harem of phlegmatic, introverted poetesses unharmed.

He regularly reminded them, though, with a full spread of plumage exactly who the domestic tyrant was.

They endured him with the stoic composure of those long accustomed to laying eggs under any regime. Occasionally, they pecked him in the backside when their exceptionally amorous Emperor pushed them past their considerable patience.

He mostly ignored Altaeera once he had established that she was the one who brought food.

This did not prevent him from attempting, on one occasion, to mate with her shoe.

She acknowledged that he had excellent taste and that these were very beautiful shoes, but informed him that he would have to confine his attentions to his poetesses.

In the future henhouse, he had been allocated a corner, elevated as befitted his station and as uncomfortable as possible.

Then the birds reproduced.

She knew that living creatures did this sort of thing.

But what was she supposed to do with chicks?

It had happened rather suddenly: first one of her hens went missing, then turned up in a dark corner where she sat and refused to emerge for several weeks. Altaeera thought she was sick.

Then, all at once, Altaeera had an entire flock of chicks appear from nowhere.

"Let them grow, then make soup," said the neighbor, the same mother of four. "Don't you make soup on those islands of yours?"

Of course, there were soups on Summerset.

The method was as follows: take one servant, get one soup.

She picked up the knife several times. Several times, she contemplated what to do with the body afterward. One could hardly boil it with the feathers on.

The feathers, somehow, seemed the strangest part. She was a Restorer. She could dissect. She was not squeamish in principle.

But defeathering a corpse struck her as a peculiarly strange business.

That is to say, first, she would have to pick up the bird. Anesthetize it with magic, because she simply could not butcher it without that.

And then what?

She would be left standing over a blood-soaked, feather-covered—

Gods.

And the feathers.

Did these have to be plucked out one by one?

Or in clumps?

With her bare hands?

The neighbors then told her about scalding, which made it considerably worse: apparently, she was supposed to boil the feathered carcass first, then boil it after de-feathering again to make the broth.

Too many steps!

Besides, she had already named the chicks.

Overall, the soup was an enormous time investment for the wrong kind of task.

Soups had a right to exist only when their production required none of her time.

And none of her involvement with feathers.

The chicks were cute little yellow creatures, and Altaeera decided they were not destined for soup. It was also genuinely fascinating to observe how the hens managed parenthood.

By autumn, she distributed the chicks among the neighbors.

Fortunately, the birds did not reproduce every other week, and boiled eggs were the ideal meal, quick above all else.

There was a temptation to donate the menace of her rooster to someone's pot. But letting Nord hands boil Tiber Septim felt slightly in poor taste.

Besides, she had assumed he played some structural role in egg production, which made him a necessary architectural element.

She later learned that a rooster was, in fact, entirely unnecessary for eggs, only for chicks, which meant Tiber Septim was simply a loud decorative tyrant.

She, however, did not revoke the diplomatic immunity.

Grorbar, observing her ongoing struggles with the chickens, laughed himself half to pieces.

Then offered to help turn the birds into carcasses.

Altaeera informed him that the answer was obviously no.

What exactly was he picturing, that she invited him over only to butcher her poor poetesses?

"So you can't kill a chicken," he said, not with contempt, but in the tone of someone who had no framework for her existence in Skyrim and found it quietly delightful.

"I have seen more open bodies than the average necromancer can imagine," Altaeera replied, with dignity. "I simply consider chicken soup ethically, aesthetically and procedurally unacceptable as food."

Shortly after, one of the hunters arrived with an enormous smoked boar shank.

Grorbar had asked him to drop it off, he said.

Old debt.

After that, when Grorbar came by in the evenings, he rarely arrived empty-handed: sometimes firewood, sometimes a rabbit that, by all evidence, he had cooked himself.

He had an instinct for it, arriving precisely when she had not eaten all day. Then he would somehow get her to sit down and have supper with him through relentless teasing.

The rabbits, however, came with a mild complication.

Once, while she was harvesting white birch bark (anti-inflammatory, febrifuge, a magnificent plant), stripping the poor local birches like some deranged hare, Grorbar had shown her a rabbit warren.

With the rabbits.

The creatures were undeniably charming. She naturally pretended she had not tried to coax them closer with the almonds she happened to have in her pocket.

Rabbit stew was, logically, a somewhat less charming gesture after that.

She consoled herself with the thought that rabbits had a well-established reputation for reproducing at considerable speed, meaning the world still contained more small pretty creatures with strong opinions about imported nuts than she had eaten.

But yes.

Grorbar could, without question, turn cute into tasty.

And she had not eaten anything hot in two days because: child fever season.

Food was not the only thing he understood better than she did.

He also had some secret arrangement with her tiled stove.

The thing was monstrously temperamental. When the flue ran too cold, it followed some logic known to no one alive, and any attempt to light the stove would cause the smoke to reconsider its direction and flow back into the room.

Why?

Because the stove had decided to kill you today, Altaeera.

Grorbar possessed some magical talent for arriving, nudging one damper, then another and making the smoke clear.

The truly maddening part was that she repeatedly asked him to tell her how to manage the Daedric contraption.

"Just look where the draft is going," Grorbar would say. "Maybe the flue is cold, or the draw is going the wrong way."

Just look sounded like pure mockery.

When the moons are full, hop three times on one leg, crow like a rooster, and only then will the stove obey you.

But almost every time she found herself at war with the stove, Grorbar somehow happened to be nearby and decided to stop in.

They did not keep score between them.

But the goat.

The goat was, unfortunately, a dairy goat.

And if she left it unmilked, it could develop mastitis: congestion first, then inflammation and then infection.

She had asked the neighbors whether anyone had a goat with a kid who might take the milk, but found no one and was forced to manage the situation herself.

Preventing engorgement and infection by her own hand.

At night, so the neighbors would not see and laugh more than was strictly necessary.

Sighing, Altaeera settled down beside the goat.

She examined her carefully, hands and magicka both: the udder was firm but even, no focal hardening, no heat. She simply needed to be relieved of the milk as soon as possible.

Leave it, and what followed was predictable and unpleasant: severe pain, fever, the expenditure of her most valuable and complicated potions, and, if it progressed to abscess, incision, drainage, then magical reknitting of the tissue.

All of this complicated by the fact that animals responded to magic and alchemy rather differently than people did.

Poor creature.

"Have you ever milked a goat in your life, mighty Master Altaeera?" Grorbar drawled with his usual unhurried mockery.

"Obviously not," she replied. "How exactly do you imagine the life of an Altmeri Kinlady? But there is nothing complicated about the process. Theoretically."

"And that is why you are doing it at night, in the dark, so the neighbors do not have the pleasure of watching you torment yourself and the animal," he concluded with undisguised satisfaction.

"Your commentary is exactly what was missing from this situation. What are you even doing here?"

"Maybe I wanted to see you," said Grorbar. "Missed you."

He said it the way he always said things, with that lazy edge of mockery.

But Altaeera caught herself, somewhere in the middle of it, wanting...

Wanting those words to be more than a joke.

Oh, for the love of, Altaeera.

Get yourself together.

And then get the goat together.

"Oh, of course you did," she snapped. "Let me deal with the goat, and then I'll look at your back. Can you describe the type of pain?"

"It shoots down my leg," the orc admitted reluctantly.

"Will you ever, ever start taking care of yourself? Don't even open your mouth. I can perfectly well imagine how this latest small job of yours went and how many nights you spent sleeping in some snowdrift. Can I at the very least hope you are not injured?"

"No," said Grorbar with too much confidence.

The Altmer looked up at him.

"Grorbar. I do not know where you got the idea that you should not see a healer while a spear fragment in your back is only moderately inconveniencing, but if I need to immobilize you to get a proper look, do not think for a moment I won't. Did anyone treat this with magic, or did some butcher sew you up?"

"Stitched," Grorbar sighed. "Nearly healed already."

Altaeera stared at him with undisguised fury.

For the record: as his healer, she periodically hated him.

Right.

Fine.

The goat bleated, reminding her that the mastitis threat needed to be addressed urgently.

She tugged carefully at the udder.

The goat made a plaintive sound.

Nothing else happened.

What exactly was she supposed to do?

For the first time in her life, Altaeera desperately wished the goat had come with some manner of instruction scroll.

It seemed straightforward in theory: a mammary gland was a natural milk-delivery mechanism, designed precisely for this purpose, and extracting milk from it ought to be simple.

If a goat kid could manage it, it should not be a problem for an educated, intelligent woman.

The milk was not coming out.

Evidently, goat kids had some protocols unavailable to Altaeera.

"You clearly don't know much about teats. Don't pull. Close the teat first, then press down," the orc offered, visibly enjoying the situation. "Why are you wearing those gloves?"

The small black lace gloves on her hands were, indeed, a somewhat unusual accessory for goat milking.

"I am hardly going to touch it with bare hands," said Altaeera, with a degree of uncertainty that undermined the statement.

It was completely unreasonable, and she knew it.

But touching a goat's udder with bare hands was simply beyond her.

Her work gloves, the ones she used for alchemy and patients were a protected strategic reserve not to be squandered on livestock.

So, for the goat, she had excavated these from a trunk of belongings from her previous life, a life where silk and lace had been entirely appropriate.

The lace ones.

She pulled a little more firmly.

Not a single drop emerged from the full udder.

"Oh, for—" Altaeera muttered, trying to work out how she was supposed to extract milk from the creature.

"Move," said Grorbar. "Have you never milked an animal in your life?"

He crouched down beside the goat, folding himself nearly in half to manage it, with a tightness around his mouth she pretended not to see until the goat was dealt with.

"Have you?" Altaeera asked.

She had seen a goat once.

She and her husband, who was by now her former husband by virtue of her absence from Alinor, had taken a short holiday and there had been goats.

Several of them.

Grazing on a hillside.

"Of course," rumbled Grorbar. "Easiest thing in the world."

The goat bleated once as Grorbar, with surprising dexterity for his size, completed the task with calm efficiency.

The bucket filled quickly, topped with a small layer of foam.

Where the foam came from and why it was here, Altaeera had no idea, but she decanted the milk into a pitcher and set it aside.

Then gave the order:

"Jacket off. Shirt too, please. Where exactly did these latest butchers stitch you? I swear, one day I will leave it as it is, to teach you a lesson."

Grorbar laughed at her, always the soul of compassion, Altaeera, then sat down on the stool by the lamp with his back to her and let her look at it.

The seam on his shoulder was crooked, uneven, clearly closed over contamination, stitched in a single layer despite muscle tissue involvement.

Appalling.

Chapter Text

***

"Grorbar!" She said it with renewed indignation, because there was dead space beneath the stitched wound and she did not like the condition of it. "I hope you are ashamed to show up to me with this running half of your back."

"I got used to not paying attention," Grorbar shrugged.

And then he added, with a note in his voice she would rather not examine too closely, "You're the only one who bothers to tell me off about the state of my hide."

"Clearly, I do not do it often enough, since you keep turning up like this," Altaeera sighed. "I am going to numb the area. You may still feel pressure and tension. If you feel actual pain, tell me."

"Bit hard for you to hurt me badly enough that I'd notice," Grorbar snorted.

And Altaeera thought, suddenly, that it sounded—

Sad.

Every time she saw those scars, those badly stitched wounds, something tightened in her chest.

Not because they were marks of violence. Because of the way he accepted them, as though that was simply all he was permitted: pain and silence about it.

He was not truly a mercenary anymore. But there were old favors, now and then. Long hunting trips. Each time, he left as though it would be no loss to anyone if he simply did not come back. Each time, he returned and dragged himself to that half-empty house of his like it was a cold den to crawl into, as though he were something to be stored there rather than someone who was waited for.

And who could understand him better than Altaeera, who had run from everything and abandoned everything? She, too, had nothing left in any meaningful sense but herself and her work.

Sometimes she thought that was exactly what she wanted.

Not a single familiar face or name. No one who knew what Aurilienne meant. No longer anyone's daughter and no longer anyone's wife.

And sometimes it sounded a little sad.

Because she, too, occasionally thought that not a living soul would know or care if she walked into the local woods one day and did not come back.

After all, if things had gone the way she had written to her mother, she was officially dead by now.

And her sister was Kinlady Aurilienne.

She straightened his shoulders, settled beside him for a better angle and nudged his head slightly with a touch to his neck.

Grorbar shifted easily to meet her hands, and in passing, Altaeera noted how well she had come to know the shades of his skin.

When she first encountered him, green-skinned and unfamiliar, he seemed foreign to her. But over the long months and turning seasons of their friendship, she learned that his skin held many shades.

Slightly lighter patches near the collarbones. Darker across his face, weathered by the sun. Dark scars. A small scatter of pigmentation on his shoulder: freckles.

His colors no longer seemed strange.

Not because she was fascinated with orcs.

But because this was Grorbar.

She liked looking at him.

Liked noticing the details.

And sometimes she caught herself wondering whether she seemed just as strange and alien to him.

She finished the work, left his shoulder clean and properly closed and took five minutes to rest before the magicka assessment of his spine.

And only then did Altaeera notice what, exactly, she had been noticing.

It had crept up on her gradually. Somewhere in the long process of growing accustomed to him, she started occasionally observing what should not have been observed.

She liked his colors. She liked the muscle beneath his skin, that quality of strength that was not performative, simply present, living warmth she could feel under her palm.

She liked his ease with her: as though in this place, beside her, while she moved around him with spells and alchemical vials, he was somewhere he could sit, drop his shoulder down and stop holding himself up.

Somewhere he did not need to be the strong threatening orc.

This calmness always struck her as oddly moving.

His stillness. The solidity of him. The kind some part of her wanted to lean her cheek against while drawing one slow, long exhale. His scent, the shift of muscle beneath skin, the lines of him: all of it made warmth settle low and heavy inside her, made her feel his proximity the way wind moves across the surface of the sea, sending ripples across it, and—

And that was always when she reminded herself to get hold of herself.

You don't need to learn your lesson twice, Altaeera.

Every corner, every inch of this small house built on the ruins of her entire life and wrested from Skyrim's cold — it had all cost too much. She refused to risk it for the sake of a little borrowed warmth that was, in truth, simply the cry of loneliness.

She straightened. Wiped her hands. Ran through the steps of the next procedure in her head.

Professionalism settled over her like a familiar garment: well-worn, a little heavy, and necessary.

Some things were safest kept without names.

Grorbar drew a slow, deep breath, as though taking in the slightly bitter medical smell that permeated the house, her sleeves, her hands.

"Altaeera," he said, studying the lace gloves lying on the table with some interest. "There's supposed to be a dress that goes with those, isn't there?"

"A black day dress, a coat and shoes to match," she replied. "With appropriate lace and an onyx brooch to complete the set. I had that ensemble commissioned for an important funeral, Grorbar."

Altaeera, cursing herself for forgetting about the goat, manhandled the animal back outside and tied her in the yard, while it was still warm enough.

Naturally, the wretched creature had eaten through another set of Altaeera's notes while she was busy with Grorbar's wound. As always, the creature bit through the parchment with particular precision: she had gone straight for the diagrams, leaving only the margins.

"What are you planning to do with the goat now, by the way?" Grorbar asked when Altaeera came back in.

"Build her some kind of shelter before the cold sets in." Altaeera rubbed her forehead. "I can't leave her to freeze in the yard now that I have been gifted this horned abomination. She has already eaten all my tulips. She made an attempt on my silk scarf. She adores sneaking into the house to chew on parchment. And that is without mentioning that when I tie her up in the yard, she screams as though she is being murdered. She is possessed by some Daedric spirit, I am certain of it. I once found her on the neighbor's barn roof. She is a goat! Where does this unnatural compulsion to climb things and chew parchment come from?"

"A shed," he said, raising an eyebrow. "You meant you need a shed now, Altaeera."

Then he added, with studied casualness, "Right. I'll build you a shed before the cold, then."

He said it simply, the way he said everything: not a drop of poetry in it.

And yet it was one of those things that made something behind her shoulder blades hum with quiet unease, as though she understood the words not with her mind, but somewhere deeper and understood them correctly.

This was not an oath. Not pressure. Not any kind of promise.

But such words, such actions placed him inside her life: not pushed into its corners, not waiting politely outside the circle of loneliness she had drawn around herself, but standing within it.

The way a tree stands, putting down roots, while she failed to notice how deep they had gone.

Sometimes she wanted to repay him formally, in any currency.

For food. For firewood. For being there whenever she found herself at war with the stove.

She wanted him to accept jewelry, coins, something, anything, rather than leaving her to feel the shape of his presence in her home and (be honest, Altaeera, have the decency not to lie to yourself) in her life.

Part of her wanted it to be an exchange of services. A practical, mutually beneficial arrangement.

But it had long since stopped being an exchange of anything that could be measured in coin.

She went to the worktable to occupy herself, to give her hands something to do, to have a task.

To stop thinking.

"Will it taste like I'm drinking soap again?" Grorbar asked.

"No flower notes for you, you ass," Altaeera said with a snort, still not turning around. "It's a soft summer sunset somewhere near the coast. Citrus, rooibos, dried fruits."

My home I no longer have, she almost said and made herself bite her tongue.

He leaned in to smell it with suspicion, because the last floral blend had not been to his taste, or maybe to check whether this one was too elven. Then he settled deeper into the chair, took a careful sip and sighed with visible tiredness.

He did not say whether he liked it. He only took a second sip.

"Where did you take the boy?" Altaeera asked, without looking up.

"Whiterun," he said shortly. "I have an old contact in the guard. He's short on recruits. They always are, guards are the worst-paid armed men in Skyrim. He agreed to take the boy."

Whiterun was not a short journey, Altaeera thought. Through autumn Skyrim. Through bandits and bears and everything else the locals referred to cheerfully as wildlife.

And all of it for a boy who was nothing to him.

The boy, though by Nord standards his nearly seventeen years made him close enough to a grown man, was a lonely woman's child. The kind of ghost that existed in every village: a weather-worn woman who had probably been beautiful and bright once, before she became that silent figure by the well no one quite talked to.

Twice, she had trusted the same man, who made her a great many promises and then disappeared, leaving her with two children.

The kinder ones pitied her, though always with an undertone of thank the gods that is not me.

The crueler tongues, well. Whore's bastards was the mildest thing her children heard.

She did not starve, but she did not prosper either. People helped her, and she sewed in return, looked after the elderly and cooked for the widower down the road. But the boundary was drawn clearly: she, and most likely her daughter after her, belonged to the community only insofar as they were useful to it.

The girl, the younger child, was pale and quiet, already old enough to understand that with her mother's story trailing behind her, she had little hope of a normal life or a happy marriage unless someone took her out of pity.

Altaeera would have offered help. But the bitter mother hated the Golden Witch and would accept nothing from her.

The boy, though...

"That was one angry young man," Altaeera said, raising an eyebrow. "Are you certain that beating people with sticks, or whatever it is guards train with, is an adequate solution?"

The boy hated Altaeera. Spat when he saw the Thalmor bitch. Swore he would kill her one day. He never acted on it, not after the whole village understood what a healer with a magical gift was worth. But the threats and slurs were always there, every time he saw her.

Grorbar often helped that family, without making some grand noble act of it.

He mentioned once that the boy constantly asked about his mercenary days and his years in warbands.

Then one day, Grorbar left with only a short note for Altaeera.

The boy disappeared with him.

Somehow, Altaeera never doubted for a moment that Grorbar had not led him to a mercenary recruiter.

"Better sticks and order than putting sharp metal through people," Grorbar answered. "He was angry, yes. At his mother. At the father he never knew. At Altmers, and the Empire, and the jarl. At himself, but it takes years to understand that truth about your own anger."

Altaeera held her silence, occupied with tea gone cold.

"Does this anger ever fade, eventually?" she said. She was not sure if that was overstepping and her tone was careful.

"Eventually," Grorbar echoed. He sighed, a slow, heavy sound, and sipped tea that tasted like evenings very far away, on islands that had once been called her home. "Then you learn there's always been a void beneath all that fury."

Her palm brushed his fingers.

He did not pull his hand away.

"Good thing there was a green philanthropist nearby to save him from dying stupidly before twenty."

"Green philanthropist? That's new."

"A violent one, with a poor sense of self-preservation." She could not quite help the smile. "Since I am your healer, you answer to me personally for keeping all your blood on the inside from now on. Understood?"

The stove hummed warmly. He smiled, just slightly.

"The citrus thing is better than that liquid perfume you made last time. You put perfume on your dresses, you drink it — you elves love your floral shit far too much."

"I am pleased to inform you," Altaeera said with great dignity, "that the byproducts of Aldmeri digestion come exclusively in the form of butterflies. Magical ones, naturally, given the legacy."

She lifted the jar from the shelf and held it out to him. "Take this one home. I am allergic to citrus anyway."

Chapter Text

***

The thick white autumn fog settled around the houses in a low haze. The village smelled of woodsmoke, waking slowly in the half-dark of predawn as women stepped outside, yawning, to feed the livestock.

He had left a stack of firewood by the woodpile and then knocked, quietly, the way he always did.

She had no livestock, but she was already awake. A single candle in a tin holder burned on the table.

She listened to the news about her son without interrupting, wiping the tears that kept coming. Her hands trembled, as though she herself did not know what she most wanted to ask.

Would he be fed there?

Would they pay him, and, the Nine willing, might he be able to send something home?

Would he write?

"He'll write to you," Grorbar said, answering the question she had not spoken aloud. "At first, out of anger. Then, when enough time has passed, without it. The captain of the Whiterun guard is a decent man. Knows how to knock sense into young shits without breaking them."

"Thank you," she said without lifting her gaze from the candle. "You've done more for us than his father ever did."

The girl on the bed beside her stirred in her sleep, smiling at some fleeting dawn dream. Her mother's mouth curled bitterly.

There was not much to smile about in her life.

She lifted her gaze to the orc, heavy and sad, but the eyes themselves were still bright. That sapphire blue of hers had never faded, whatever else had. Her palm slid to his forearm, not gripping, just resting there.

With desperation, not with hope.

"You could stay, you know. You've done enough for him. For us." Her voice was low and careful. "I'd do anything for you. Not like her, she only takes from you, everyone sees it. You bring her furs, and she looks at you like you're her servant. I would never take you for granted. I'd keep you warm. You would never be lonely with me."

He did not pull away. Did not flinch.

His face stayed unreadable.

"Don't waste yourself on gratitude. It's not the same as warmth."

He had taken warmth before, when it was offered freely and asked nothing beyond the night. It had its mercy. It had its limits, because mornings knew the difference.

It was not what made the quiet stop. Grorbar learned that only later, when something else crept into his life, into his house and then had the audacity to parade through both on high heels.

The candle flame shifted after her sharp, quiet exhale.

"I am long past wasting what little I have," there was no self-pity in her voice, only exhaustion. "For once, I'd have some warmth back, Grorbar."

She bit down on her lip. Tipped her head back, holding back tears or maybe simply staring into the dark above her.

"All those silks of hers," the woman's bitterness was not hidden anymore. "That's not power or pride. That is what a woman looks like when she has been scorched badly enough. I would know, the look that bleeds. It will never heal. Whatever you bring her, however long you wait, it will still bleed."

Grorbar stood. He inclined his head, not angry, simply tired.

"Take care of yourself and the girl."

A cold, miserable autumn rain had started.

Byrna's husband nodded to him on the way to the well. Hildra raised a hand as she passed.

How many seasons had he been here?

Enough that people said settled, and however many more there were yet, not enough that they would stop seeing an outsider.

Which was entirely understandable. An orc whose whole bearing, the figure, the manner, all of it, screamed bad blood, ash and the sound of steel.

Past the seething days of his youth. Not old enough yet to seem the toothless old wolf age turns into a dog.

The invisible line between him and the village was subtle, imperceptible at times, but always there. Grorbar had never sought to erase it, nor felt humiliated by it.

Perhaps because he also knew the difference between choosing to stay and having no reason or fire to keep going.

He had not chosen the place. Not really. He had stumbled into it half-frozen and leaking blood, and the old alchemist had patched him together with curses, broth and more stubbornness than any sane man had a right to have.

By the time Grorbar could stand without the room tilting, the worst of winter had closed the roads. By the time the roads opened again, the old hunter was dead, and there was a house no one much wanted.

He took it because it had a roof.

Stayed because leaving required a reason, and he had misplaced all of his.

When the noise stops, you hear yourself.

And it stops, eventually. It always does.

The days burn and blur, and you are the king of the fucking world, and the blood runs hot. You can have everything. Money. Women. The fights you win because you are better than the next bastard in line.

Turns out you just keep moving, so you do not have to sit still.

And then one day, you realise you do not remember names. It creeps up slowly, until it simply hits you: you do not remember.

That time. The other time. This woman's face, or the next.

The rush fades.

You chase it harder.

It does not come back.

You can escalate. You can drink.

Yet, at some point, you discover there is a big patch of void underneath all of it.

And that void has your name on it.

At first, the work was only something to do. Roofs, fences, split wood, heavy things to be carried from one place to another.

Then he noticed that a repaired gate stayed repaired. That wood split in the morning was warmth by night. That one day could differ from the next, and leave a trail from today to tomorrow.

It was a poor kind of answer, maybe, but it was the first one he had found that did not vanish when the blood cooled.

It was something with a shape.

Then she came to the village.

Not that it changed anything at first, except for the bet he made on how long she would last.

He lost a good axe on that.

But later, when he learned he could find himself at her door at some unreadable hour because his own house had a silence far too loud, and somehow the shape stopped being so bare.

She takes you for granted.

That was the common opinion. By Nord reckoning, coming to her door like that, never empty-handed, fixing her roof, hauling her cauldrons, turning up on her threshold past midnight when she had stayed up cataloging the properties of yet another miserable Skyrim plant, all of it pointed to one possible purpose.

And could have only one meaning.

The question was how desperate a man must have been to do that, season after season.

And if she accepted, when would he call in the debt?

The Golden Witch and the orc were interesting to everyone, objects of rumor and guesswork. No one said a word of it to either of them. Nobody was stupid enough to ask such questions of the orc merc, and a single raised eyebrow from Altaeera had a way of killing conversations off.

But of course, everyone whispered.

He was perfectly aware of how it looked.

How it read.

But.

He did not care now.

And what did he get back for what he gave?

Her scolding for every scar. Her balms for his back, stinking up his house and his skin.

Tea that tasted and smelled even through a sealed jar like summer somewhere in the south.

The woman's sharp tongue and her laugh that stuck in the ribs.

Her stories of Alinor, a closed city, especially now, paradoxically both a port with ships from half of Tamriel and a place that did not let even Bosmer past the foreigners' quarter, let alone the likes of him.

Yet she never spoke of the spires more beautiful than anything built by men, or of the Crystal Tower's history.

She told him of exotic flowers whose names he never managed to hold onto. And of a statue of Syrabane - not the grand one, where Syrabane-the-Champion stood tall, but a small, in one of the gardens: Syrabane sitting with an open book.

There was a tradition of apprentices in the first year and the last. At the start, they wiped down the book and asked for help, and Syrabane would favor their studies. At the end, they brought a piece of their own parchment, wrote some palindrome in an old dialect and left it tucked under the amulet around the statue's neck. So, the apprentice exam would go smoothly, and they would finally get to change your robe.

But more often than not, that was simply where the apprentices of the grand city of magic and scholarship gathered. Poor Syrabane tried to read while around him the arguments raged, heated in every sense: political, ideological, the kind that ended anywhere from a new school of philosophy or a treatise on planetary motion to a denunciation delivered to the nearest Thalmor bureaucrat.

The arguments only youth could have, before settling into the measured disputes of archmagi.

And in the evenings, wine spilled across the pages of his book, and sometimes, right there at his shoulder, someone kissed for the first time in their life.

But the Patron of Apprenticeship, as they believed back at her home, welcomed all of it.

Grorbar sometimes tried to imagine it, youth that meant books and arguments and gardens. Failed. But listened to her anyway.

She told him that elves ate all manner of weird shit: pink sea-cockroaches, salted seaweed, dried fruits. Their oil came not from milk, as in any sensible part of the world, but from fish or seeds.

Her stories were never predictable, those evenings when he pretended to be interested in the rules of her overcomplicated elven game — hospital anecdotes, legends that sounded like horrors or fairy tales, depending on his luck.

Songs from somewhere else, slow melodies, crystalline, the kind she hummed in the mornings when she was digging out the path from her door to the road to the well.

The way she lost at dice: furious, laughing, insisting he was cheating. He was, but she was far too funny for him to ever admit that.

A bed that hummed when he lay down, enchanted only because she had decided his sleep was worth her "rare components."

He had long since made his peace with a bad back.

The bed disagreed that he should have to.

A reason to cook the venison properly, to find a taste in it beyond the bare fact of eating.

It was the kind of good he had learned not to look at too hard.

Because the last few times he had looked hard at something good, he had found the exact dimensions of how much it would cost to lose it.

The smell of her potions in his house, because she carried it everywhere she went. Ointments and perfume that shifted, apparently, with the weather or her mood.

Autumn, that always were flowers. Winter, fruit, as though she made a personal decision to argue with reality on principle.

Underneath it, woven through everything else: the alchemy. That never left her, no matter where she went, braided into all the rest. Wax for hands washed too many times. Bitter roots.

He had noticed it at some point without deciding to notice, the way you learn the creak of a particular floorboard in a house you have lived in long enough.

He had not examined the moment when her house became a house whose sounds he knew.

He was not going to examine it tonight either.

And beneath all of that, where memory lived instead of logic: her skin.

Always with the trace of her skincare, how one woman could accumulate that many little jars, he had never been able to work out.

More distinct when she was flustered, caught mid-failure in one of her wilder experiments.

Or when she leaned in, more often lately.

His breath deepened without permission when she passed close, taking in that smell.

He was aware of it.

He was aware of being aware of it, which was worse.

He usually shifted slightly to give her more room and told himself it was practical.

Absurd, brave, bright golden fool.

And him, the fool who kept standing at her door.

Her voice reached him before he got to her door, carrying, as always, the tone of someone addressing minor nobility at a reception.

"Lady Fillorina, you are extraordinarily fortunate that I do not grow nightshade here. Mind you, you are a herbivorous animal, which by definition means eating grass. So what forces, pray tell, are driving you to eat medicinal plants? Which are, I should point out, entirely useless to consume directly. These are for respiratory infusions, since you apparently need to know that. And explain to me why it is always this bed. This one. The only one that has not dropped its leaves yet. You are a goat. You are not supposed to have aesthetic preferences, you are supposed to love grass!"

Lady Fillorina bleated and continued chewing, communicating with perfect clarity that her goat mind was entirely indifferent to lectures.

He stopped at the nearby fence and watched, because there were sights in this world a man did not interrupt without cause.

The goat was trampling Altaeera's apothecary beds while Altaeera attempted to remove her, indignant but careful not to pull too hard on the "poor animal." The goat planted all four hooves, would not budge, and outmuscled her without effort.

There was no point speculating who would win the argument in the end. Obviously, the Altmer: she had enough stubbornness for a dozen goats.

She had this bone-deep grace, the kind she likely never thought about. Grorbar had known his share of noblewomen, had been thrown out of at least one Breton bedroom without his trousers. But Altaeera was something else.

The way she held her head.

The back, always perfectly straight. The walk. The way she stood or sat: years of gilded halls and ancestral judgment etched into the bone.

Even here, ankle-deep in mud, tugging at a goat, voice rising with frustration, she moved like a woman carved from old dynasty marble.

She did not belong to this landscape.

But the goat, the snow, the crooked fence, the frost-bitten herbs — she made it all belong to her.

The goat finally consented to leave the herb beds, and Altaeera, still delivering her verdict on the animal's character, steered her toward the far side of the lawn.

She was not golden-yellow. She was the color of sunlight on white bone, a shade that did not exist in dye or paint, something that gave off its own strange light rather than warmth.

Tall for a Nord, not for her kind. Smaller than him, yet level with most of the men in the village.

A willow-like grace of long arms and legs. Eyes the color of amber, the kind that could smolder or catch light.

Usually, when she was talking about the properties of some leaf, throwing around words like magicka responsivity curve or transmutational characteristics.

He had no idea what half of it meant.

He listened anyway.

Theren, her apprentice, was already hurrying toward her house before dawn. Straw hair going in every direction. Pockets full of rare mould collected for Master Altaeera. A half-frozen frog of unusual color, various weeds gathered from the undergrowth and a bowl of stewed beans in his hands.

Master Altaeera, his living breathing deity, taught the strange boy the village mocked to read and write. Taught him to memorise anatomical atlases that looked like manuals for malicious necromancy and the properties of alchemical components.

She was currently telling him off for putting invaluable moss in a dirty pocket. Her voice drifted across the village, melodic and merciless:

"Today you will be copying The Tome of Alchemy Basics, pages eighty to one hundred and four. Compile the primary extractor types into a table. Write your own questions."

The boy glowed as though he had been invited to Sovngarde.

Altaeera, who always scolded him for the dirt under his nails and made him wash his hands before touching anything, took the bowl of beans and examined his latest bruise with an expression that made it clear: she would deal with the goat first and then, naturally, see to his perpetually battered elbows.

She paid Theren herself, despite the custom that a Master took payment from an apprentice.

But Theren was an orphan: his parents had been gone several years, leaving only his grandmother.

Altaeera had shrugged at the time and said, "In that case, at least take all those raw dried beans out of my house, since you are my apprentice now."

Theren's grandmother, a sharp-tongued, quick-witted woman, did not argue and took the grain and whatever else people occasionally brought Altaeera.

Now Theren arrived every morning with a bowl of something hot.

That world she built in scraps, arrived here with nothing, called every slur the village knew, misplaced in every last part of herself, and still she made it all from dirt and mud and ash.

Still misplaced.

Still present.

Grorbar took a long breath.

Yeah. The shed should be built now. A couple more weeks before the real cold.

He was bad at building.

Bad at staying.

Bad at not destroying.

He had fucked up badly enough to know there was no clean way back. Nobody to blame for burning his life down to this point except the man who had done it and no point in finding blame at all.

But the shed was simple enough.

Timber, nails, beams.

He started back through the fog toward home, a quiet tune under his breath.

First, the timber.

Chapter Text

***

A few days later, Grorbar stacked a considerable pile of timber in her yard. The logs were of slightly uneven thickness, with bark still on some of them. He stripped the bark right there in the yard, swearing at the dull drawknife, the ends roughly sawn rather than cleanly cut. But he stacked them on stones to keep them out of the mud.

Local. Improvised. Functional.

Not systematic, neat or aesthetically appealing.

Typically his.

On the first day, he discovered that building something from scratch was not the same as fixing up a house when it had more or less accidentally become his.

He swore at the beams because they would not stand straight and because everything had looked level until he walked around to the other side.

Altaeera suggested measurements instead of eyeballing everything.

Grorbar rejected measuring tools with the expression of a man who found them insulting to his perfectly adequate eye.

The irony of the situation was that while he was working on the shed, he made an exceptionally convenient target for Lady Fillorina's attentions.

Altaeera had long since given up trying to understand the mind of the Daedric spawn. The goat had clearly made it a point of principle to bite, if not outright eat, everything Altaeera valued, sampling each item with the air of a food critic.

And yet she had turned out to be an unexpectedly social creature: she often followed Altaeera around, submitted cheerfully to being scratched between the horns and slipped into the house at every available opportunity to use something as a snack, obviously.

But Grorbar—

The furred assassin loved headbutting him from behind, especially in those rare quiet moments when there were no sharp sounds.

He would be just about to drive a wooden dowel home, and then, thud, a goat skull would connect with his backside. He would turn around to find Lady Fillorina standing there, regarding him with her strange horizontal pupils, her playful expression conveying complete incomprehension of what he could be upset about.

To her, this was possibly a fun game.

Headbutting an orc was about as productive as headbutting a brick wall. But the hammer would still miss, and Grorbar would swear and promise that one day he would cook her and tell Altaeera it was mutton.

Lady Fillorina stared at him as though she saw him for the first time in her life.

And then did it again.

Once, he shifted deliberately out of the way at the last moment, so that her skull hit the wood instead with nearly the same unyielding thud. She assessed the plank thoughtfully, then turned around and headbutted him again half an hour later, as though the detour had simply been an interesting experiment.

By the middle of the following day, the contours of the shed were undeniably visible.

Not a beautiful building.

Not a complicated one.

Just enough for her goat: a simple, solid, warm structure standing in her yard.

Without armor, in a shirt and a jacket too light for the weather, he worked with wooden dowels clenched between his teeth, spitting them one by one into his palm as he drove the wall together. His tools leaned against the wall of her house as though they had always belonged there.

And more sharply than ever before, he seemed not an addition but a fixed point: in her home and in her life both; present, reliable, inalienable.

And yet thinking it, even only to herself, stirred some depths she had no intention of examining.

She was restless. She found herself at the window far more often than necessary, listening to his creative variations on damn and fuck as he discovered the wall he had just framed was a good hand wider than the one it was supposed to meet.

Naturally, he did not rebuild the wall.

He kicked it with his boot until the gap became "acceptable," then filled it with a scrap of plank.

Time and again, she wanted to take another peek at him working or, on the contrary, to turn away, not look, not want to look and finally focus on something else.

As though the shed was a letter written in rough wooden dowels and unfinished planks, and she could not unread the words now that she had seen them.

Despite everything, she of course brought him something to eat in the afternoon.

He sat down on the bench beside her with a sigh and regarded the pie with open suspicion.

"That's not your cooking, is it?"

Altaeera was tempted to hit him.

"Hildra made it," she answered royally.

"Good," he said, biting into it with enthusiasm. "She's the best with meat pies."

That mule!

Her cooking was not that terrible. Even if it was occasionally that terrible, he could at least have not commented.

She gave him a look. Grorbar ignored it entirely and waved away a wood shaving drifting past on the wind.

"You know those couriers with the letters keep starting up the spy-witch talk again, elf?" he asked around a mouthful of pie.

"Yes, I regularly report to my political patrons on the number of sheep and the growth of the local cattle population. For free, unfortunately." Altaeera rolled her eyes. "Nords forgive it as long as their children have stopped dying."

Though she made a particular point of meeting couriers in the yard, so that the College of Winterhold rang out loud enough for everyone in earshot. While the roads were passable, at least. Later in the season, those letters arrived by other means.

As for letters from Alinor, those had never been delivered by courier from the beginning.

"My former mentor," she said, as if the subject were simple, "sent me more than commentary on my white birch bark observations this time. Do not look at me like that. Of course, I maintain an active scholarly correspondence. But this time, he told me a story about one of my ancestors. Imagine that."

Grorbar turned his head slightly. Chewed slower.

She never told family stories. She never mentioned her family, her past, her origins. Anything.

"We are an ancient Kinhouse, Grorbar. Old, but not powerful anymore, not in the way you would imagine. We are Old Summerset, from back when purity meant discipline, not dominion: knowledge, restraint and the memory of lineage."

"So not Thalmor," he said, looking at her sideways. "Just pricks with older words for the same shit."

"I suppose that is how you all see it. We called it preservation of our legacy," she did not argue. "But that is not what matters. Even marble cracks, apparently. This ancestor of mine left Summerset at some point, I don't even know how long ago that was. He went to Elsweyr, wandered among tribes that barely exist now as a traveling healer. Studied their lunar rites and local healing traditions. Fathered, by rumor, a remarkable number of children with whiskers that no respectable archive has ever dared quantify. He came back decades later, covered in tattoos, half his speech in Ta'agra. He would appear at lectures and gatherings of respectful mages and refer to himself in the third person. You can imagine the faces around him."

She looked down at the paper.

"Wiped from every Kinhouse record. And yet footnoted in nearly every treatise on Restoration, because what he concluded about birth was beyond invaluable."

"So madness runs in the family," he said with a low laugh.

But there was something in the way he said it. Not mocking. Not quite. More like recognition.

"We call it eccentricity or miserable life choices. And, of course, never mention such eccentrics, only footnote them without mentioning the Kinhouse."

Her fingers moved absently along the edge of the paper in her lap. The wind pulled a loose strand of her hair toward him. She did not notice.

She sighed.

This letter…

She had memorized their house and lineage, of course. Every branch, every sideline — but there was no trace of this ancestor's name.

And yet she knew his research by heart, without ever having known whose work it was.

She understood immediately why.

You may study the foreign.

You may not become it.

Their understanding of lineage differed from the Thalmor's. Not in its mercy, it had none, but in its direction. Thalmor purity turned outward: it sought to cleanse the world. The old purity turned inward, unforgiving as any system that dictates right and wrong, but its blade was aimed at their own blood, their own kin, their own house.

This ancestor's greatest sin was not consorting with the foreign. It was abandoning the proper form of his life, and by extension, of himself.

It was never about the Khajiit.

It was about returning without remembering how to be Altmer.

Yet, thinking about it, his fate had perhaps been kinder than hers. The tattooed man had returned to Summerset and been cast out, ostracised, yes, but not purged, not formally exiled, not killed.

Her?

Her husband had once needed her name. Now, He was probably trying to wash it out of himself because of the scandal.

The ones willing to read her letters, let alone reply, were very few. Her mentor was an old friend of her father, and even from him she had never expected a reply, let alone the lively correspondence that had eventually formed between them and then extended to Winterhold College.

The College had presumably concluded she was some one-eyed village witch with an unhealthy fixation on horker fat composition, which she found endlessly amusing.

But no one who had surrounded her at home would mention her name now.

And yet, she had not been the first.

Somewhere back in the dark of centuries, there had been another one, even in her old, impeccable, proper Kinhouse.

An eccentric who had risked making a different choice.

A madman who abandoned everything Altmer are.

The fall, the fallen mer who traded everything they are for 'this one has delved deeply in the dependencies between moons phases and women cycles, and..."

Naturally, his family had preferred not to remember him.

But that did not mean his choice had not existed.

Or that his life could not be called a life.

His work had survived. Perhaps somewhere in Khajiiti lands there lived, in one form or another, a trace of an Altmer who had earned the name Pale Flame among them.

And a life, a life is not a refuge, not a statement, not a proof of concept, it can continue, whether it had been erased somewhere far away or not.

It can be chosen.

Recognised.

Claimed.

Why did that word make her shiver under the harsh autumn wind?

"But just think about it, Grorbar," she said, waving a hand. "I could have chosen warm furs, stylish tattoos and a mysterious air of rebellion. And what did I end up with? Frostbite and a goat."

"From where I'm standing, your ancestor sounds like a man who figured out that if he called it field research, he could spend thirty years getting high and waking up in a pile of warm fur. Woman, he was in Elsweyr. He probably spent a decade vibrating and wrote down whatever he remembered between hangovers. I have no idea how he convinced you lot his three-decade bender was a treatise on Restoration."

"Well. At least it proves that even a genius remains a genius, despite the, um, circumstances," Altaeera said, albeit uncertainly. "But you are wrong, their lunar medical traditions are quite complex and severely understudied by mer... Why are you laughing?"

"Just imagining you in there. Trust me, there's usually a messy morning after. Your goat doesn't try to sell you your boots back, stick with that."

She made a face at him. And for just a heartbeat, he saw the corners of her mouth tremble, like she might smile or say something else entirely.

But she only shoved his shoulder lightly.

Naturally, Grorbar had reframed her genius ancestor as someone who had lived a far more entertaining life than any traveling scholar had a right to.

The laugh stayed in his face a moment longer, then thinned.

"A lot of effort for a footnote," he said. "And none of these letters are from people who should actually give a damn?"

The words hung in the cold air.

Altaeera looked at the half-finished shed and turned the question over. No, not even the question itself, but its implications.

The shed rising in her yard said this was for someone who would stay.

Letters from family would have said they were addressed to someone who would eventually tire of the strange snow-covered novelty.

And go back.

She turned to him and raised an eyebrow.

"If I ever decide to kill my mother by heart attack, I will, of course, inform her of my whereabouts and tell her what I have named my hens. Until then, it seems not quite in keeping with filial duty and somewhat premature," her tone was perfectly even. "No. My correspondence is scholarly in nature. We exchange research on local alchemical components unique to this region that have never been studied thoroughly enough. Perhaps because Skyrim tends to kill off scholars."

He did not answer at once.

He frowned, not in confusion, not in displeasure, but the way one runs a thumb along a wound to check how deep it really goes.

"You don't leave doors half-open," he said quietly.

She did not flinch.

"No," she said. "I slammed it loudly enough that no one could pretend it had been left ajar."

Something shifted in his expression: approval, maybe. Or pain. Or both.

"Strongholds don't send letters," he said. "You're either dead, or you're proving something. Talking doesn't count as proof."

He looked back at the shed.

"I left saying I owed them nothing. That serving the clan was just another word for being owned, and for what? A dying wall, an empty winter, a chief I wanted to split open from throat to balls."

He exhaled through his nose, slow and controlled, as if pulling the heat of old rage back under his ribs before it could rise.

"There's no clean road back from that. Maybe the stronghold is dead now. Probably is. It wasn't a big place, not Orsinium to be rebuilt if destroyed. Wasn't much proof of strength left in us by then. Just enough code to tell everyone how to die properly, not enough sense to keep anyone alive."

Altaeera said nothing.

Evening had come early, autumn-cold and grey, and she moved a little closer to his shoulder.

Brushing against him long enough for the gesture to be felt, not long enough to presume anything of him.

"You wanted another life?" she asked carefully. "When you left."

"Wanted one that was mine."

He was quiet for a moment.

"Money. Fights. Women. Roads. The kind of noise that makes you think you've outrun whatever's behind you. When you're young enough and angry enough, that feels like freedom."

His mouth twisted.

"For a while, it even felt like that was it. That was what I wanted. That was the life."

"And then?"

He looked away.

"Then I was left near enough to die. Merc life isn't some holy order carrying its fallen home like knights in bard songs. If you're a burden, you're a burden, and nobody risks their hide for yours. The old man took me in. Bad back, lame leg, half a year before I could stand without wanting to put my own head through a wall.

"Ran out of freedom after that."

"Do you regret it?"

"No."

The answer came too quickly to be simple.

"I live with the consequences, it's not the same thing. There's what I did, and what came after."

She sat quietly and watched the evening settle in: the grey coming down, the village moving through its end-of-day routines, and from her laboratory, Theren's voice carrying through the window he had cracked open to let out the steam as he narrated his attempt at the simple decoction she had set him to brew.

Life is a strange thing.

You see, you know your path — to leave or to stay, duty bred in your very bones or whatever freedom you managed to claim for yourself.

And then, from wherever you have ended up, you think: perhaps the ones who chose differently are not better, not holier, but maybe they at least don't end up in the same bottom as you have.

Maybe the opposite road does not lead to the same ruins.

But then you look into the mirror of your choice, and in that mirror all the sides are reversed, everything is the opposite of what you have done — and yet it had led someone else to the exact same point.

Freedom and duty, loyalty and roads sat beside each other and looked up at the grey autumn sky.

Against the wall of the same house, in the harsh land that was alien to both.

"Perhaps you were right, in some way," she said after a long silence. "That loyalty can be another name for ownership. Maybe it is far worse when this, being loyal, carries something sacred."

He did not move, the stillness that meant he heard everything.

Did he want to know what the mirror of his choice looked like? Or was he simply listening to Altaeera?

Why had all these memories come now, next to him, as though they had been waiting for exactly this chance to finally break loose, to be said to someone?

Heard by someone.

He knew the truth of leaving and its consequences.

She knew the road of staying, under a kind of ownership that, at the time, came dressed in so many beautiful words.

Chapter Text

***

"Perhaps you were right, in some way," she said after a long silence. "That loyalty can be another name for ownership. Maybe it is far worse when this, being loyal, carries something sacred."

He did not move, the stillness that meant he heard everything.

Did he want to know what the mirror of his choice looked like? Or was he simply listening to Altaeera?

Why had all these memories come now, next to him, as though they had been waiting for exactly this chance to finally break loose, to be said to someone?

Heard by someone.

He knew the truth of leaving and its consequences.

She knew the road of staying, under a kind of ownership that, at the time, came dressed in so many beautiful words.

"You left when the choice was loyalty to something already crumbling or leaving," she said at last. "I stayed. My family set an example, choosing to remain in Alinor when many of our circle fled."

She looked at the unfinished shed without seeing it.

"When the Thalmor forced everyone to choose, we chose what had been our motto for many hundreds of years. Discipline. Knowledge. Lineage.

My grandmother was a great Restoration Master. A name people knew, a star of her time, before stars became dangerous things to be.

You probably do not even know about the purges, do you? You all see the fanatics, the war, the Justiciars. But inside, when it all started, there were countless committees, offices, commissions for literally everything, as if all of Alinor had suddenly broken out in tumors."

Theren's voice lost its certainty as he narrated whatever he was doing, then rang with relief when he found the right answer.

Yrse was arguing loudly with her husband near the well.

The twilight was beautiful, as it can be only in autumn, when dark grey and lilac merge slowly somewhere above the clouds.

"When the royal dynasty 'abdicated' then disappeared and everyone understood why, it was ugly. People rose very quickly if they could manufacture accusations convincing enough to ruin those above them. My grandmother was famous, Father was young, not yet useful enough to be protected by our name. So she had to choose, and quickly, whether to join or face the risk of accusations that we were not loyal enough. She became, very convincingly, an old ruin. She retired from public life, let her research gather dust and played the mad old relic at gatherings until they stopped inviting her. Father retreated to the charity Infirmarium in the craftsmen's quarter: unfashionable work, useful but beneath notice."

Altaeera paused.

"It saved us. Mostly. We lost money, patronage and most of our property. A great many friends, as well. But unlike many others, we were alive."

Altaeera always loved her home.

She loved little figurines of crystal, jasper or precious woods. Alinor had no shortage of statues, but these small pieces were considered a statement of taste.

She had sold most of theirs off at a certain point.

She loved the way the white rooftops and streets were washed with seawater every morning, so that walking through the city at dawn meant the smell of soap and salt and the voices of servants in that particular quiet of a city only just waking.

She loved how the silver chime of the bells at the Temple of Auri-El was carried to every corner of the city at sunset.

She loved, in her apprenticeship years, the sorting of the catch: not at the great harbor with its big ships, but at the fishing port. Before dawn, while it was still dark, she and her alchemy mentor would make their way there, while the fishermen sorted the catch from Alteration-enchanted nets. Everything unsellable was thrown away, and it was in that discard pile that the two of them found the most remarkable things, which they would then spend days studying in the laboratory.

Deep-water fish and cuttlefish, strange mollusks, weirdest creatures with no names in any catalog.

Her mentor used to say: the scholar's eye can find wonders anywhere, even, or especially, in what people discard.

Their fisherman looked baffled at first, seeing two mages ready to buy discarded monsters nobody needed. But later, he had started setting stranger creatures aside for them: misshapen fish, jellyfish of unusual geometry, mollusks of frankly questionable shape.

The yard smelled of wet timber and goat.

Alinor, in her memory, smelled of salt, sweet grapes and sun.

But there was another city within the city she had grown up in.

Black and gold.

She had been born under Thalmor rule, after everything had settled into place, and she had never known the Alinor her grandmother remembered.

Outsiders hear Thalmor and imagine agents, armies, assassins, fanatics.

What she remembered was mostly the black-and-gold patrols: armed sons of fishermen and merchants who accepted the colors to feel superior to the rest of the world. And the grand ceremonies, loud enough to sound as though they believed they had the right to shout at the Sun.

Even the faith her grandmother and father had passed down to her in stories felt like something left behind in another age.

Under a sky that was supposed to be home, they spoke to the King of Aldmeris and the rest of Tamriel in an entirely different voice.

The patrols were officially there to keep order. These were young men, mostly of undistinguished birth, who took the black-and-gold because it explained why they were higher beings than the rest of the world.

She had recognized one of them once, among a patrol of five. The son of a clockmaker — his father, whose joints she healed in her apprenticeship years, was a very kind, very quiet man. The son, wearing his black and gold like his personal blessing and his personal crown, said nothing to the patrol about who she was.

He didn't try to stop them as they examined her pockets and bag.

Perhaps because he also knew he was a clockmaker's son.

And Altaeera was Aurilienne.

They did not even want anything particular from her. The Infirmarium sat close to the port and the craftsmen's quarters, not far from the foreigners' district, and patrols liked to stop those who looked suspicious.

That was the power the uniform gave them, and they loved tasting it, loved how the feeling filled them as they casually stopped anyone they wanted right on the streets.

Naturally, they casually 'dropped' her bag of components onto the cobblestones, forcing her to gather the jars and herbs from the ground, looking up at them, tall as Divines themselves before her.

Not because there was any reason to.

No, just because they could. The clockmaker's son looked down at her with that particular gaze that enjoyed every moment of it as she gathered her components from the ground, her back perfectly straight, strung taut as a wire.

Altaeera looked him calmly in the eye as they finally let her go, and said:

"Good evening."

Smiling in a way that showed every century of her inheritance sealed into that smile.

Because you put on that black-and-gold so you could feel entitled to be half-divine.

And I am from those who carried this burden, this duty, this gift, for many hundreds of years before you received a chance to look down on me.

They had all been fortunate that her grandmother had managed to keep them seen as sufficiently loyal. Her family had gotten off lightly by many measures when the new power colored its banners with blood.

The naive might think that mages and scholars, at least, would stay above the uglier currents.

No.

Oh, no.

Any mediocrity could rise through loyalty. All at once, there was a way to take everything from a rival, from someone who argued with you and had the audacity to be right — a quick, effective, almost effortless way. Laboratories, schools, money, patronage, all of it available without decades of work.

One could become fashionable, brilliant and wealthy, harvesting the fruit of someone else's labor.

One could make a name at the cost of another's.

The respected Masters of the Art, who by their own accounts stood so far above the petty concerns of the world, spent the years of the Thalmor's consolidation tearing their world and each other apart for exactly those petty concerns.

In the fifty years after the coup, more than a third of the Sapiarchs were replaced.

For Altmeri mages, fifty years was not a generation.

It was barely enough time to finish a serious argument properly.

Restoration, though considered a field of jeweler's precision, had never occupied many seats in the College.

What happened to Restoration came later and took a different shape.

The Division — what was the number? She preferred not to remember. It had formed decades before the Great War, during the long, quiet years of the Thalmor's buildup. Few even knew it existed, and once, it had cost her grandmother dearly not to join when her closest peers formed it, drunk on the freedom the new power gave them in what they dared to call 'Restoration experiments'.

Testing healing alchemy and poisons on living subjects. Anatomy studies on non-mer. On paper, they were not called prisoners or even living creatures.

They were subjects. Material. Cases.

Anything, any experiment, was allowed for as long as it promised results, twisting the very meaning of healing.

They also developed and taught interrogation methods. Restoration has its darker applications, given that it is precisely the school of magic that allows a skilled practitioner to reach every nerve in the body.

And then a prisoner would beg for an ordinary torturer pulling out fingernails, rather than see what Restoration could become in the hands of those who had the skill, but had taken no vows on how to use it.

The Division produced a few very promising findings.

The price at which those findings were reached...

If the Division, its findings and its methods were discussed at home, then only in whispers and when Mother was not around.

Outsiders imagined the Justiciars.

That was only the visible hand.

The quieter one wore scholar's robes and asked for bodies.

"I was a Restoration apprentice since I was twelve. Then the Infirmary. Later, over the years, that became... well, not enough. We were not fashionable anymore. The Infirmary ran on charity. Wealthy patients drifted away because fashion means more than mastery in our society. My father and grandmother chose spirit over the stones of our house. But our Kinhouse had no means of sustaining itself other than Restoration mastery. We are not craftsmen, not merchants, Grorbar. We are scholars. Restorers. At some point, I had to choose and I chose my mother and sisters over our motto. They were not mages, so it was up to me to keep us afloat."

His gaze was still locked on her face, and for some reason, she nearly felt its weight, its texture, its warmth. As if it could touch her or trace the line of her jaw, the sharpness of her cheekbones, the proud height of her neck.

She felt tempted to bite her lower lip, which she, of course, resisted, because that would have been the precise opposite of holding form.

Her grandmother had spent years managing her father's illness. He had been born with the worst of the hereditary conditions that often ran in mage families: Flow Autophagy. In Flow Autophagy, magicka and the body fail to recognize each other, they reject one another, and magicka begins to attack the flesh. Her father had inherited one of the most complex forms: his own magicka structure destroyed his blood.

While Mordvaine Aurilienne was alive, the trace of his magicka had been literally doubled: his own, unstable, volatile, destructive, and alongside it, her grandmother's signature, clean and steady and bright, stabilizing both his body and his magicka.

Which also meant that when Mordvaine was gone, and she had lived to nearly four hundred, he followed quickly.

Altaeera was the last mage of the line.

Her mother and both her sisters were weakly gifted, their magicka faint and unstable.

And then Altaeera stepped out of the cocoon of her world, turning to the stones and faces of her home instead of her laboratory and her patients.

Ellien, the middle sister, three years younger than Altaeera, said out loud what their father, atypically firm for him, had never permitted to be spoken of at home:

What comes next?

We can repeat as many times as we like that we have been here so much longer than these not even two hundred years of black-and-gold, that the new power will fall eventually, as all temporary madness does. But reality has to be acknowledged. We cannot bury ourselves in alchemy jars and the cool walls of the Infirmarium and pretend the world does not exist.

Will Altaeera continue spending her days with her patients and her alchemy bench, carrying on as their father had?

The family's remaining money is finite. Their shares in the maritime trading houses, nearly all their property, all of it is gone.

What comes next?

Sell off what remains of the family jewelry and relics? Sell their books and scrolls?

Leave?

To where, exactly?

No one is waiting for them anywhere. To everyone else, they will be Thalmor bastards, and to the Thalmor themselves, traitors.

What will happen to their mother? To Ellien? To Irri, who is not yet fifteen, who has no gift either, but wants to become an alchemist, and that costs money?

They did not want to spend their lives calculating how much longer they could go on before selling what was left of the Aurilienne legacy.

They wanted the luxury of a future.

They wanted to live.

And the second duty — Knowledge, Discipline, Lineage — belonged to Altaeera alone.

When her magicka stabilized in her early teens, her grandmother took her as an apprentice, and from that moment on, she knew who she was and who she would become.

Since then, she had known the shape of her life without a doubt. Its milestones. Its outlines and shores.

She knew she was Mordvaine Aurilienne's granddaughter, that first, and only then Altaeera.

Mordvaine Aurilienne's cheekbones, Mordvaine Aurilienne's bearing, magicka strong enough to nearly match Mordvaine Aurilienne's and the ability to keep standing, to keep carrying, as the bar of her apprenticeship was raised higher and higher still.

The last vessel into which Mordvaine Aurilienne had poured centuries of her legacy.

The last one, built and shaped to carry it all.

She was not given her Duty, her Lineage, her Knowledge and her Discipline.

She was her Duty and her Lineage.

Not a burden.

Her pride. And a gift she had been entrusted with.

Yet, Kinhouse Aurilienne had never been only blood. It was a school.

But a school could not survive without a name.

And a name could not survive without someone to carry it.

If Altaeera were married, both she and her children would lose the name of her Kinhouse.

She had known her second duty, her true Duty, since she became her grandmother's apprentice. She needed an Altmeri apprentice, and, most importantly, an Altmer man with a gift for Restoration, whom she or her mother could adopt into the house, or formally receive into the lineage, perhaps by marrying him to one of her sisters.

That was how Aurilienne, the school and the name preserved their Restorers without the line breaking through the male side.

She had failed to work out how to reconcile these two duties: how to continue the Kinhouse in its true sense while also providing for her mother and sisters, here and now.

She, Altaeera, failed.

When it was her turn to choose, spirit or stones, faces of the present or voices of the past, she made her choice.

And she always knew Mordvaine would despise her for failing what was truly worth saving.

She did not blame circumstances, she had chosen it herself, with her own hands and her own mind — the lesser evil, for herself and for those she was responsible for.

Her grandmother would have told her she had chosen wrong.

Her mother cried and hugged her and told her she would have taken it upon herself if she could, but she was not young by Altmeri measure and, worse, not a mage, only the widow of a healer who had practiced in a charity Infirmary.

Altaeera was young. A mage. A Senior Restorer of a line no longer powerful or fashionable, but old, with many famous names in it. And standing there, looking at those cheekbones, those eyes, the shape of her face and hands and shoulders, all of it whispering hundreds of years of lineage, she assessed them as though through a stranger's eyes, weighing her own value on the scales with a cold, clear head.

The simple deal.

The simple choice.

She chose to sell their greatest treasure, which happened to come attached to her arms and her cheekbones and her neck: an ancient name, impeccable Altmeri heritage and blood and one particular womb that could carry a substantial magical gift into her offspring, and buy them all a better life.

It was, at the very least, honest.

Women get married every day.

Nothing exactly awful in that.

Altaeera lifted her chin.

She was not going to complain. Or sound as though the world had wronged her so badly that she had crawled into this gods-forsaken corner of Tamriel to lick her wounds.

She had chosen it all herself, with her eyes open.

"Later, after I — let us say, corrected our difficulties — I had everything I could have wanted. I could have snapped my fingers, and a plate of fruit with every pit removed by hand would have materialized before me. But being loyal and honest to the conditions I had accepted meant living a certain type of life. Knowing the people I needed to know. Maintaining the connections I needed to maintain. Being present at every dinner that mattered. There was a long list of how I should look, walk, behave, how and with whom I should speak. I chose loyalty to my family and to my h—

To those I loved. Which also meant that burying myself among illnesses, as my father had, or in the laboratory was no longer possible. I could not practice Restoration for several years before I came here."

She held his gaze, directly, steadily, lips pressed together.

She was not going to tell him how spectacularly, how painfully that loyalty broke because that would mean admitting the full extent of her own stupidity, since it had been she who was the idiot. She, who had genuinely believed in a love story she had invented for herself.

Her own private, idiotic fairytale.

She had built herself a little castle of clouds and then, lulled by the sweetness of it, convinced herself that everything she was doing was the duty of love, rather than simply what he had needed from her all along.

And what was she left with?

Her mother and sisters secure, Irri's tuition paid, her duty to Aurilienne failed, and the wreckage of her own life, with all its illusions, shattered on the floor.

"When I came here, I stood in Winterhold, where I had first arrived, in a wool coat that was somewhat inadequate for the weather and thought: I would either die here stupidly, crawl back, or prove to myself that there was some Altaeera left in the world. Or there was nothing left anymore, and I was now simply that emptiness wrapped in a pretty coat."

"Some me," she exhaled into the thick, wind-scoured air.

"And what did you find?"

That gaze again, as though there was some answer of his own to this question he addressed to her, and it lived in his eyes but stayed silent on his tongue.

She already regretted saying any of it, regretted remembering — because it hurt.

It should not have hurt. She had learned her lesson. She was fine.

And yet, apparently, not quite, because somewhere deep inside her, behind the anterior wall of her abdomen, something contracted and released in an anxious rhythm, the way a heart beats when it loses coordination.

He shifted closer, just slightly, enough that she could feel the warmth of him, if she chose to.

She wanted to.

And not.

"I don't know," she said, honestly. "I do not have time for excessive introspection. And you perhaps underestimate how little time for self-examination is left to you by heal my frostbite, my son has measles and also, my calves have scours general practice. But in the end, I have my duties here, my notes on local fungi, the days when my goat does not break in and eat them. And... a shed in my yard, now."

"You left your notes where the goat can reach them again?" Grorbar said, standing and brushing off his hands.

"I left them on the table, where notes belong!" Altaeera answered. "She is a herbivore! My parchment is not supposed to be her favorite treat. I swear she just loves destruction."

"Keep everything higher up," the orc said with a slight smile. "Your shed will be ready in a day or two."

"Not mine," she corrected. "My goat's. After all, given that you are the one who is regularly milking her, you owe her that much. In fact, by rights, you ought to marry her."

"If we are choosing by stubbornness," said Grorbar, "then not her, but her owner."

He said it calmly, without a tremor in his voice and without pressure, and yet in a way that suggested he had not quite decided himself whether he wanted her to take it as another joke, or not.

"I hope that is a compliment," she said with a snort.

"Altaeera!"

Hildra's voice came from around the corner of the house, and Altaeera turned, grateful not only for the voice itself but for the simple fact of having somewhere to turn.

"Are you coming? To the springs."

"Yes, thank you."

She stepped lightly into the laboratory doorway and glanced at Theren's notes. Not bad at all, especially given that the text and the potion she had assigned him were far from simple.

Then she took her towel and her bag, components replaced today with scrubs and scented soap for herself and the others, and walked out of the house with the practiced, near-dancing step that had been taught deep into her very bones.

She did not look back at Grorbar as she went with Hildra toward the bathhouse.

She felt like a startled bird, wings beating anxiously, scattered by something she could not name.

He placed his hand flat against one of the beams.

Held it there just for a second.

Then went back to work.