Sorrow cares for an injured Vren, and lets slip an infernii pet-name for him.
Someone was singing to him. The voice drifted in and out, bright lines of a tune dancing through the black. Not in Mohaadi but with a similar lilting cadence, the snap of syllables like wood popping in the fire. Infernal.
Sorrow.
Vren blinked awake with a groan. His entire body ached, and his ankle throbbed painfully—there was something wrapped tight around it, holding it immobile. Firelight flickered over the craggy wall of an unfamiliar cave, cold rock dug into his hips, and his head lay in Sorrow’s lap. He started up, made it halfway before a firm hand on his chest stopped him.
“Lie still. The enchantment needs time to work.”
“Enchantment?”
“The one healing your broken ankle.”
It came back in a rush: undead on their heels, rotten muscle hauling the desiccated things after them at an unnatural pace. Racing up a narrow incline, the mountains of the Wilds huge and dark around them—Sorrow in the lead, infernii eyesight better in the dark, Vren stumbling and cursing and catching his foot on something unseen. Falling. Hard impact, a starburst of pain and then black.
“Lie still,” Sorrow insisted, pushing at him. He hurt too much to argue. He lay back down, and Sorrow quietly resumed his song. It looped over on itself, an endless, twining rhyme that lulled Vren’s senses. Sorrow’s fingers stroked through his hair, almost absently—how he managed it without getting his rings or his claws caught in the thick, dark tangles was a mystery.
Vren shifted slightly, and his ankle flared in protest. He winced; enchantment or not, broken was broken.
“What’re you singing?” he asked, wanting a distraction.
“Oh, a bit of my language you don’t know, clever ghost?” Sorrow chuckled at his sour expression. “You’d call it a lullaby, I think. The song for when children are restless.”
“I’m not a child.”
“No, but you are injured, tzeji1, and that makes you restless. Hush and let the magic do as it needs.”
“Tzeji?”
Sorrow’s hand stilled. The hard point of his tail tapped against the rocky floor, staccato and rhythmless. “I don’t know your word for it,” he said eventually. He was staring rather deliberately at the cave entrance, as if entranced by the dark beyond. Vren huffed.
“I hate it when you play stupid.”
“That’s all I do, is it not?”
“Then I’m going to assume it’s an insult, and an infernii custom to insult their children.”
Sorrow glared at him. “You are a wretched little man. It’s not an insult, it…” He sighed, returning his gaze to the cavemouth. The firelight glittered off the golden caps on his broken horns, burnishing the jagged edges. “It’s for one you care about. The closest you have is ‘sweetheart’, though that misses the nuance. As your human tongues often do.”
An ache took up in Vren’s heart, as if he’d bruised that in his tumble down the mountainside too. He found himself taking Sorrow’s hand.
“Then explain it to me, il’rahsin.”2
A soft laugh. “Your turn to throw insults now?”
“Only the same way you insulted me.” The fingers in his tightened. “Tell me.”
And Sorrow did.