Loshis wasn't the season for spectacular sunrises; morning often came as a gradual lightening of the surroundings to a moderately murky shade of grey rather than what one traditionally associated with the dawn. For Jeremiah, who already was the type of man to find the comforts of a bed more alluring than most things the day could hold, it was an absolute battle of wills to get himself up for work. If it weren't for Cai and his never-ceasing need to be doing something, it was quite possible Jer would sleep through the entire rainy season.

This, however, wouldn't do, and so he hauled his still-slumbering body from the warmth of their bed and wandered into the smithy with astonishing regularity. Today was like any other day-- work to be done, with little variety. It suited Jer, certainly. With repetition came certainty, and with certainty there usually came very little trouble.

Somehow Jer found it was difficult to focus on his work. Word had come, as word did, about the events of the previous week. Seventen officers attacking a man... A wick, he reminded himself, firmly and a little nervously. There were times when Jeremiah's strongly human upbringing required him to do so-- this was one of them. He didn't like it, this new and very immediate danger to his person and loved ones. He'd urged his parents to get writs, but whether they had or not he wasn't entirely certain.

It made him edgy.

Warily he glanced at his husband as Cai did whatever it is he was doing. He wasn't quite sure how Cai felt about all that had happened. On edge, surely, but Cai himself had a writ and his family were all safely far away from Vienda.

"Shame," he said, studiously not looking at Cai, focusing instead on what his hands were doing, "'bout that incident in the market." Casual, he needed to sound as casual as possible.

Smoke and coffee grounds. Rain on the tin roof like a dozen little feet. The spur perched sternly in his lips wafted a plume of smoke, as if trying to gently wake the smithy into the world of soot it was going to see today. He’d been smoking a lot lately.

Caiaphas been up an hour already. Coffee grounds submerged in a rolling boil of water, the rich smell of roasting kava and hot metal not doing much to calm his nerves. Only an hour past sunrise, and his feet had already paced the length and breadth of the house. Sharp metal things weighted in his palms, fingers wandering over metal grains and whet streaks as if searching out a place long forgotten on a map too old to read. Naked feet cold in the Loshis morn left prints in the soot. The cold was chased away once the fire got roaring. He propped the door to the kitchen anteroom open with a tea kettle, hoping to coax in some heat.

It wasn’t until the sound of Jer’s slow feet creaking on the stairs that he looked up to the grimy window pane. The red dawn had faded into cream yellow around the chinked edges of the glass. Though Cai knew it wasn’t the sun that called Jer out of bed, but the smell of eggs frying on the stove.

“You mean the brunno who got his blood fried? Brains leakin’ out his ears?”

He didn’t even bother to turn around. Cai settled for breaking open the nacreous membrane of a yolk with his fork, sending the sunny yellow oil bleeding all over the pan. It offered up all the sinister hiss he needed. Cai ripped the lid off the boiling coffee pot and slammed it on the counter. His freed hand snatched up a clay mug and sloshed it beneath the ink black surface of the brewing coffee. He shoved it in Jer’s general direction, the black boiling water dribbling down over his hand, his wrist. Calluses clung to his hands like a leather glove. It took more than that to burn him.

“Mmh. That. Yeah. Damn right shame it is.”

Jer took the mug quietly, mumbling his thanks and shuffling over to a chair. He was only half-awake, but he still had ears to hear and eyes to see. He winced, neither acknowledging nor completely ignoring the tone in Cai's voice.

"Y'know what I meant," he muttered into his coffee. Except Cai probably didn't, because even he wasn't really sure what it was he thought he would accomplish here. The smell of smoke and frying eggs and coffee lay thick over the room. The smoke had started to overpower everything else, lately.

"He lived," he added, though he knew that was the wrong thing to say.

There had been strangeness, restlessness, ever since the 13th and that incident in the square that he was very firmly not going to think too much about. Trouble lay that way, trouble of the Seventen flavour. No good could possibly come of this.

"Makes you start to wonder, though," he said, keeping his voice careful and slow. He made a vague gesture to the house, the smithy, the whole of Vienda. He wasn't very good at this, really, but it was important to him to try.

The quiet clank-clank of the frying pan knocking against the stove, coaxing the eggs unstuck from the bottom. He didn’t want to get angry. The emotion was so quick in him these days, the whole of him wound tight as an over-wrought guitar string. Threatening to snap at the slightest pressure, leaving naught but blood streaked hands and startled eyes in his wake.

He could not get angry over what Jer would never bother to understand.

The cold metal prongs scraped at the charring edges of the eggs, coaxing them off onto an earthen plate. Cai wouldn’t touch a morsel. He hadn’t been eating much in weeks. The haggard look about him, all cobwebs beneath the eyes and dust in the mouth, spoke as much. A flick of the hand towards the plate, a silent dismissal.

For you, the gesture said. It said it in a dreary, sanctimonious way without saying anything at all.

He turned to face Jer, leaning heavy against the counter. He snuffed his spur out on the edge of an unused plate. Not in delicate taps, but in one decisive grind into the clay.

“Been wonderin’ about a lot of things,” he growled. Ever so silently, the hackles were raised. “Oes, darlin’. I wonder, I really wonder –“

His throat tightened, adam’s apple skipping. Eyes closed, jaw stiffened.

“I...I know what’cha meant. Don’ ‘cha go worryin’ about me. Just because I can’t curl up like a turtle in the sheets when somethin’ nasty is going down don’t mean I’m gonna do nothing clockin’ mung.” He slowly slipped his eyes open, giving Jer what he hoped looked like a reassuring glance. Then he shook his head violently as if chasing some further thought away, thick black shag sticking up like a rumpled bird’s feathers.

“Get your yats afore they get cold, now. I ent gonna take no whinging t’ make fresh ‘uns.” A smile as tight as that little guitar string he was empathizing with so much.

He spent a long moment just looking. Looking at the ground-out spur, at Cai, at how he hadn't made anything for himself, just for Jer. Just because he said he wasn't going to do something didn't mean it was true. His gaze dropped to his eggs, and he started to eat without saying much of anything.

For a long time he let silence stretch between them, as was his habit. It was easier not to say anything. More comfortable, more familiar than his clumsy attempts at having a conversation he wasn't even really sure he wanted to have. It didn't pass his notice, the little dig at him, and honestly he knew how he was. He was forty-three years old, for Alioe's sake, he knew himself by now.

It didn't mean he liked hearing it said like that, from him.

"'M not doin'--" He sighed, frustrated. Shoved another bite of egg in his mouth, chewed it slowly while he thought about what to say next. "You should eat something," was all he came up with.

He finished his eggs, sipped slowly at his coffee. There was no move made to stand; this conversation wasn't over, really, he just wasn't sure how to continue.

To say that Viator had been in a semi-constant state of drunk and disorderly over the last few weeks would be false, slanderous and cruel. After all, the statement didn't cover the times he was hung over, or on his way to being drunk, or any combination of the above. Quite the difference of feeling between the three, as only someone spending the last weeks in such a state could tell you. If you could force anything of real sense out of them.

This morning, Viator was stuck somewhere in the bottom of the cycle, and it showed. Vest undone so as not to be buttoned incorrectly, collar haphazardly tied with a ratty bit of what once could have passed as a necktie, he reeked of liquor and sweat. It disturbed him that even he could smell the disgusting pallor of his breath, yet the thought, like all others, was fleeting at best. From his corner out back of some seedy bar on the outskirts of town, he felt nothing but the pounding of his head and the grumbling of his gut.

Tossing the ragged mane of brownish-gold hair out of his foggy eyes, Viator struggled to sit up, pressing his hand that wasn't cradling the alcohol on the dirty ground and bracing his back against whatever solid thing was behind him. Only to discover it wasn't nearly as solid as previously assumed.

"Clock--!" Tumbling down, he released the bottle of precious liquid, cringing as he heard the shatter, followed by more grimacing, moaning and overall disgruntledness at trying to stand. Why was the world tipping so? He should be happier about it, it should remind him of being on the water, but somehow it only made him spit up bile. Swallowing it back with a cough, he managed to stand finally and eke a passage out of the alleyway, and dragging along the brick to keep him steady.

Sunlight bled through his upraised hand, making his eyes burn. "Ah, goddess damnit all--" He turned back to look for his seabag, which was right where it had been chucked the night previous by another barkeep, tired of the snappish sailor and his dead eyes. Going to fetch the damn thing, Viator wracked his brain for any memory of the last few days, anything at all. Everything was muzzy; a fight with an idiot over a drink, lifting alcohol after stirring up a barfight in the corner... nothing of any real meaning.

However, slinging the shoulder-bag over his throbbing head, he sudden;y straightened. "Ah! Clockers, my knife--" Fishing around in his bad, he pulled up the remains of his once favorite dagger. Cursing to himself, he managed to pick himself up and move back out into the daylight. If memory served him, which it may not, he could almost visualize the smithy he'd passed while bar-crawling. In his still mostly-inebriated state, having a knife he still had spares for fixed seemed the most important order of business, hunger, cleanliness and the world be damned. Wobbling forward, he got something of his balance back, and made a beeline for the shop.

He made it as far as the door without vomiting up the previous night's revelry, but not any farther. Luckily, it was outside the shop, but he doubted the smithy'd be happy to have it there nevertheless. Wiping his moth on the back of one filthy hand, he pushed open the door and blinked into the darkness.

"Thisa smivvy?" Even he heard the slurr in his words, and so he tried again after a cough. "Uh, meant't say thissa smithy?"

Caiphas turned back to the coffee, still bubbling black and sluggish on the stove. He scraped the bottom of the pot with a spoon, coaxing up whatever had singed to the bottom.

It was a quiet morning; he had no desire to string a long this thread of thought Jer brought up. He wouldn’t be so fool as to say it was sudden. Jer had surely been stewing away at this for weeks, since after the riots, waiting for all his thoughts to distill into something whole. Was it fair to brush him off so quickly, after all the silent preparation it must have taken for him to even speak this far? No, it wasn’t. But nothing etched in the mesh of Cai’s blood lines suggested that his kind were very fair.

“I been fed for an hour or more. I was makin’ a second brekkist for you, ya lazy old bear.” The warm chuckle called up from his cinder-painted throat did well to hide the falsehood there.

Cai wasn’t going to eat, not now and not for awhile. A strange penance, maybe. A sacrament for those dead tekaa bodies washed ashore in the recent flood, for every writless butcher now operating half-formed, all gnarled limbs and drooling mouth forever more. Going on living and doing alive people things felt wrong to him, with so many others of his kin hurting and dying. What was keeping him from the multitude?

Your silence, a soft voice in him said, and he tried his damnedest to ignore it. Cai was sick to death of ignoring things.

“Ya worry for me to much, y’kn—“

A wet retching from not too far off cleaved his words in two, almondine eyes sliding towards the doorway, flinty and bored.

The Dives held a world of unpleasant sounds, but some of these weren’t so common in the morning. The hollow crack of a withered voice wormed its way into the walls of the smithy, mingling with the soft growls of the forge.

Caiaphas snorted, fingers curling threatening around his coffee cup. Breathe in, breathe out. He never had the fuse to deal with drunkards, certainly not so early. Jer, however, had a fuse so unfathomably long it could burn for years without a spark. That was the blessed duality of them. He nodded to Jer, then flicked his hand towards the main room.

“Ya’ll ent done nothin’ all mornin’, right? Go out an’ deal with tha’ moony natt flounderin’ away on our doorstep.”

The roguish hint of a smile, forced to dance across his lips like a wooden puppet set to strings.

He stood without overmuch protest, though in truth he was disappointed. This conversation couldn't be over-- he needed it to not be over. They had to talk about this. Thousands of things could remain unsaid between them but Jer didn't want this to be one of them, because this was important. This kept him up sometimes, had worry gnawing in his belly and not for something so broad as the entire wick race, no. Jer was worried for his parents and he was worried for Cai; no one beyond them concerned him overmuch.

Was gonna get himself killed, that one. Jer felt it in his bones, felt it and feared it.

"We ent--" Jer shook his head. Shrugged his shoulders. He'd try again, maybe. Not now, but later. Maybe.

He padded slowly to the door. He knew a dismissal when he heard one, smile or no. Drink-soaked louts weren't his favorite, either, but he dealt with them when he was asked to. It wasn't like he hadn't before.

Yellow eyes stared down at the little man at the smithy door, his expression closed, unreadable. Whatever business he thought he had here, he could take it elsewhere. There was vomit at their doorway, Jer noted with no little element of distaste. Just what they needed. He said nothing, just watched.

Well, thasa grand impression. Smacking his lips, running his thick, heavy tongue to dislodge any remaining bile. Rubbing at his scratchy eyes, he turned his gaze to the door once again. Suddenly there was a man, possibly a decade or two older than himself, and why was he here again...? Staggering to stand, he leaned in the doorway, panting lightly. Looking from man to his detritus, Viator tried to make a heartfelt apology.

"Oes... sorry mate, ye know howit goes..." He coughed again, feeling more acid shoot up, but he forced it back. One thing to vomit on the stoop, quite another to do it on someone shoes. Tossing his head, flipping ragged hair out of his eyes, he tried to tell which of the blondish wicks he was talking to. Oh. Only one. Well, maybe... three? "Eh, I needsa... I needsa smivvy. Broke m'knife inna bar fiii--"

Suddenly, the world tipped, and he found himself looking up at the wick from a vastly greater height. And his back hurt. There was a distinct smell... oh Alioe. He'd slipped in his own vomit. It was possibly the worst moment of his already ill-spent week.

"Eh, fuck meh." He groaned into his shoulder, trying to avoid sunlight, vomit, man and everything altogether. "Jus wan'ed m'knife fix'd. Ah..." The world grew dusky and grimy. He'd only woken up with alcohol poisoning once, but for the life of him he couldn't remember if this was anything like that time...

Jer's brow creased in a frown when the man fell. Right before he's started to say something about a knife, and a bar fight maybe? Ah, trouble written on every stinking inch of him. He was guttered, hard to understand even around his incomprehensible accent.

"Shove off then, kov. Ent want none of yer trouble." Just where was this guy from, anyway? He was too small to be human, no field to be a wick. Jer supposed he didn't rightly care as long as he went away, quietly. He could be from one of the moons for all the concern Jeremiah had for it. He didn't want his business and if he was dyin' he could do it on someone else's doorstep.

"Ent... ent any trouble, jus' wanna fix m'sticker, balach." He Stuggled to sit up, bracing himself in his own vomit to look the man in the eyes. He'd never really liked asking for help, but currently standing seemed beyond him, and if he was to do anything other than rot in his own liquids. "Ent here t'ruin... nuffin. Ahh, mate, ye gotter 'least help a bloke up." He tried smiling, but Viator's expression was something far more pathetic than that.

From his place on the cobbles, the sailor was suddenly struck by his own futility these last few weeks. He didn't know what he was doing anymore, in anything. Since he'd left Wendy... well. Things had broken down, he only worked long enough to get coins to drink himself to death, managing only to survive by some divine joke.

This was his second chance, goddess damn it. This wasn't his life, this was what he managed to make out of broken pieces of a past. The thoughts whorled in his head, yet he couldn't catch them fast enough. It should have been an epiphany; as it was, it was a moan. "S'arrite, ye gotter point... eh, could ye spare s'water fer a sailor? Gotsa pow'ful thirst..." Anything to get out of the cursed street, away from the burning sun.

A sigh pushed its way through Jeremiah's chest and over his lips. The man was a pathetic wretch, worthy of his pity if nothing else. There was nothing for it, he supposed. It didn't seem like he was going to go quietly, anyway. Maybe if Jer let him inside, fixed his lousy knife, he'd go away without much of a fuss.

"C'mon." He jerked his head towards the inside the smithy. It was quite possible he'd come to regret this decision, but, well. Nothing to be done for it he supposed. He turned to go back inside without casting so much as a backward glance to the drunkard on the steps.

He couldn't help but run a protective hand over everything as he passed. He thought about what was really only moments ago, his miserable attempt at conversation. The patterns and pathways his mind had been taking as of late upset him in so many ways, even beyond what Caiaphas might say or do. This was his home, had been for going on twenty years now. For all that he was a wick and wandering surely was in is blood, Jer wasn't much for it.

They couldn't stay, him and Cai, they had to get out and away. There were Seventen officers assaulting innocent men on the streets, maiming them only because they were just barely stopped from killing. Dangerous, unsettled times, and Jer wasn't any sort of hero. Heroes died.

It was quite possible that Cai wanted to be a hero.

Jer shook himself, remembering he'd shown someone in. "Sit there," he said, making a vague gesture at the stool. He cast a wary eye towards the house. Was he still up there, stewing and slamming things around and pretending nothing was wrong? If he was, Jer didn't know if he wanted to face him. Still, that's where the cups were and he had to at least give this poor bastard water.

The empty fry pan was submerged into a bucket of tepid water, soaking away the clinging remnants. Silence there, except for sharp clatter of metal. Shuffling feet were cold on the stone kitchen floor. Nothing else to do but linger in the doorway, peering out into their home. He was quiet, for once, just content to roll the hard bite of black coffee in his mouth and watch Jer move.

A dirty jackknife of a man, all slurring words and stumbling gestures. He was barely in the room, just hovering on the outskirts, and still the acidic reek of vomit and the cloud of alcohol bristled across his senses. Nothing new.

He wandered back into the kitchen and snatched up the wash bucket, transferring the wet dishes onto the counter. And so he wandered out into the front room. Cai wordlessly handed off his coffee mug to Jer, flinty scowl chiseled across his face. It was a bit of a front painted on for the drunkard. He was covered in nerves and wanted to keep everyone and everything at an arm's length.

“The faucet is cockin' up. Th' water keeps runnin' dark. You'll hafta boil it first,” he interjected over his shoulder, brushing past the drunkard all stiff shoulders and swagger.

Then he disappeared beyond the doorway, out shirtless and bucket-wielding into the damp grey light of the Loshis dawn. He upended the bucket on their wooden stoop, lye-laced waters washing over the contents of the stranger's stomach. Soap suds and vomit. Coffee and smoke.

Empty bucket swinging from his hand, he leaned heavily against the doorframe. Liquid black eyes flickered over the stranger the way someone would look at some injured dog. Whoever he was, Vienda had put him through the cog metal grind. Left him something that was simply less than, the sum of who's parts didn't add up to what it once was.

A callused hand was offered, unfurled to full flower.

“Lemme get a lookit yer knife, natt.”

All it took was the slightest inclination of consent to get Via to stand up shakily and attempt to enter the shop. It felt awful to move, but it seemed more horrible to wait in the slowly brightening light of the sun. His eyes already protested greatly, and so with faltering steps he pawed his way along the shop wall and into it's blessedly dark, smoky interior.

If he'd had a mind for it, he may have noted how the interiors of smithys seemed greatly like the interiors of steamships, of forges and furnaces of all kinds. It brought back places that shouldn't have been, memories that were not belonging to the drunken, topsy-turvy sailor. However, Viator's thoughts were already a stew of misplaces ages and forgotten faces, so nothing truly made it's way past the pounding headache. It was a smithy, he had a broken knife, an by goddess why did he insist on drinking from unlabeled jugs bought for half the selling price of the cheapest beer?

As he was directed to a stool, he nodded to the best of his ability, looking more like his head wasn't fully screwed on than anything else. He waited patiently, like a child, for someone to come attend to him. The voices of the two in the room came to him clearly, though he'd have sworn that normally it hurt less to hear voices. When the bigger of the two men approached him, his knife was off his mind already.

"Ye know, I useteh work on th'plumbin' o'vessels, gotta bit o'sense when it comes t'pipes an' whatnah." He reached down into his seabag, searching for the knife, indigo eyes vaguely more focused than when he'd first been let into the shop. "if'n it ent t'city's water thas all... brown an' goopy, I could take-a lookit it." Via's hand closed on the blade of the knife, and without a though grabbed on and pulled it out. The rusty thing was dull enough that it only cut his palm a little, and as he handed it to the smithy, some blood lingered on the blade.

Jer made a noise in the back of his throat, the barest acknowledgement of what Cai had said. Turning on the faucet he saw it was true-- the water was thick as sludge, barely water at all. Ah, well, it was was good enough he supposed. A mess like that, he couldn't have too high standards to start with. A little silt wouldn't kill him. Probably.

Jer contemplated his next move as he pulled down a small pot from its hook on the wall. He'd give the man water, kick him out. But then what? Maybe Cai would work on the knife, that was possible too.

Why was it so hard to talk to someone he'd been married to for going on two decades now?

The sound of the pot rattling against the stove, the water finally boiled, dragged his attention from the rather larger problem of how to approach Caiaphas without having it all go wrong somewhere. For now, he would concern himself with the man in the other room. Everything else could wait.

Slow footsteps carried him back to where the man sat, hand bleeding. He'd divested himself of his knife, Jer noted. Cai must have offered to look at it after all. He only caught the tail end of the offer to fix the pipes, but it didn't matter. Jer had done his part; the rest was for Cai to deal with. He shoved the cup roughly in the stranger's direction, indicating he should take it with a tilt of his chin.

Via took the cup with his injured hand, small, pitiful smile playing about parchment-cracked lips. He took a drink, eyes closed against the brightness of the outside world and the fact he wasn't sure he could keep his balance if he kept them open. The water was a balm to mind, body and soul; it was hot, just warm enough for him to drink painlessly, but it felt as refreshing as bathing in mountain snow.

As his dehydrated cells writhed in pleasure with the water seeping into them, Via looked at the managers of the shop, one receding, the other still close. He and Hava'd once thought about setting up shop. They were going to be an apothecary, Via would run all the errands, collecting things, selling things, because he was the one the sailors respected. Hava was good with plants. He made them do magic, though no golly'd ever call it that.

"Mmm thenkee, mate. Doesa laddie good t'get sum liquids. Other th'n th'trash I been gettin', anyhow." He felt much more alert, and looked with some horror at his cut hand. "Eh! Now wassis? Sticker done an' got me, m'own blade too." He tutted, and finally looked at the big, silent wick. "Tha' blade's wights been off since I fixed th'handle m'self, an' I ent t'sure th'blades stable. Fell apart las' I stired t'use it." He wished it had been to defent himself. Sadly, the blade broke when he tried to use it to lever off the cork from some cheap gin.

“Really?” Ineffectual, a gruff pairing of syllables that meant, ultimately, nothing.

Whatever the ragged man had been saying, it reached Cai through a dark pall. He was somewhere else entirely, buried in the ragged grain of the dagger. Poor metal, something copper, warped and awful. It lay in his broad, dark palms like the spine of a twisted baby. A grim line creased his brow, lips jerking down into a scowl.

“It’s ugly.”

Simple enough, that.

“The weight’s off. The handle is worn down too damn much. You might as well be tryin’ to clench a handful of butter." A pause, caterpillar brows hitching.

"An’ you kin hurt by anythin’, no matter how much it might be yers if ye ent handlin’ it right.”

You don’t go around clutching your favorite dagger by the blade and expect it not to cut. You don’t tear a meatbone from your best hunting hound’s maw without getting a finger snapped off. The world just worked this way, though some may be sentimental enough to think otherwise. His gaze flickered to Jer for a moment, the faintest slivering of his eyes pinning the words into the other man.

“Jus’ be more careful. Mind yerself.”

Caiaphas was a solitary thing, holing off into corners of chemicals and gunmetal, undisturbed by even his precious fami. Having someone nose around in his private thoughts and motivations was completely alien, even now. Jer had no business knowing his anger, for it would be beyond his perception, the idea of kinship outside ones own house. They were tekaa. Their blood was his blood was in every tattooed heart, one way or another. When one was lost, bits of himself were lost. Like stones tumbling down a mountain face. It was still there, but was irrevocably less.

Clouded eyes drew themselves away from the blade, leveling on the sailor-thing the rains had blown onto their doorstep. “There’s no use fixing it,” he held it out stiffly, offering it back as if he didn’t want to dirty his hands with the thing, “you might as well scrap it and start fresh.”

He gestured to the wall behind the man, bristling with metal edges.

“A new riff fer the work of fixin’ the pipes,” he grumbled at last. As an after thought, he glanced wearily over to Jer, gaze flat and brittle. “Quit bein’ a bump in the metal an’ go get my spurs, would ye now?”

No hurt flickered across his features, no glance was spared, but Jer heard and Jer understood and Jer felt that prick in his breastbone. Worth examination it wouldn't get, a sliver of pain wending its way through his ears and settling heavy in his heart, stirring him to some sort of slow, languid anger. He'd been trying, so hard, to talk about this without hurting him-- either of them. Truly trying, mulling endlessly over his very careful words.

And it didn't matter. He was no closer to understanding Caiaphas than he was the day they'd met. He might as well be a stranger, for all the good it did him. Jeremiah would never, could never, understand his strange nobility. Jer felt no kin to those dead bodies, any more than he would were they golly or human or entirely foreign. Jer was a man with no kin but what he claimed for himself, nothing beyond his fami. Not much of a wick, not a human either, for Jer there was only his parents, there was only Cai. Even his bright spoke cousins were too far from him, for all that he saw them more now than when Elijah had been alive.

Or at least he had. Before all this. The riots. The writs. That poor, crippled butcher man. Could have been Cai, could have been his father, could have been him. While such thoughts might stir other men to thoughts of action, they prodded this wick into nothing so much as a strong desire to run away.

Jer nodded stiffly, doing as he was asked. He always did. A tension started to hang over the smithy, thick and palpable. It was a wonder he could breathe at all.

Bedraggled natt, he thought, a curse. If he hadn't washed up on their doorstep... Ah, no, but that was no good. He hunted around for the spurs, trying to remember where he'd seen them last. It wasn't like Caiaphas was going to do the sensible thing and leave with him, no matter what he did or didn't say. Ah-- there they were.

"It'd be good t'have the pipes fixed." He handed the spurs to Cai. For a moment he stood there, wondering if there was something he was missing, something he could do to fix everything. Then the moment passed and Jer just shook his head. He had other things to do than wait for his husband's head to soften enough for sense to filter through. Like his job.