The Endless Solvent

Doran’s question bothered her. It wasn’t that she didn’t know what to ask of him, it was that she had too much she wanted. If only her father was more responsible. If only her mother had a more tolerant personality. If only she was born male, or if she had an older male sibling. If only the past was even slightly different than it was. How would runes change something like that? Was that even possible?

As she thought of those very questions, Doran assured her that he could. The man could see her unspoken thoughts with his liquid green eyes. She had nowhere to hide her disgraceful thoughts. But even so she refused to voice them, refused to even form full thoughts about them. Besides, runes were forbidden in Kuvan.

When her mother finally awoke, she told Rakel all about the terrifying dream she had. Rakel simply agreed, pointing out the dirtied night dress on Lady Lokah as a result of her stumbling out of bed from the nightmare.

“I will ask the chantry for protection from evil,” Rakel promised. The idea of the house under holy protection seemed to calm her mother and she enjoyed nearly a week of peace and quiet.

Doran’s ribs seemed to heal at an astounding rate. After a handful of days he no longer seemed in pain and was able to stand upright and had full movement of his arms, wincing only when he twisted his torso too rigorously. Although Rakel believed he was a dangerous man who offered dangerous things, she still allowed him to stay in the house. It would be heartless to just abandon him while he was injured, but he had to go as soon as he could. She told him she wasn’t comfortable hosting a rune user (that was at least half true).

When she told him she watched his mouth quirk up again, liquid eyes swimming. She wished he would put on those Parts-damn glasses again but he hadn’t touched them at all after placing them on the pantry shelf.

For days they didn’t directly talk about what he had offered her. Instead, Rakel prodded him to talk about his past and his life.

“It’s simple really,” he said over lunch one day. “My siblings and I travel the world, cleaning up messes.”

“What kind of messes?”

He shrugged. “Political. Social. Financial. My sisters are more traditional, like I said. They fulfill wishes. My brother and I…” he seemed to hesitate, trailing off and staring off at a distance past her shoulder. “We decided we should have more control over the path we take.”

Rakel, of course, had no idea what in Part’s name he was talking about. She suspected his family were involved in some sort of shady business. Although Doran willingly answered her questions, she found she wasn’t able to get a straight answer out of him. However she was interested in how much traveling he did.

“I got those glasses in Sekrelli,” he said at another time, nodding towards the pantry.

“To hide your eyes,” she said.

“Yes and because I always wanted sunglasses,” he said.

“Sun-glasses?” Rakel raised her brows. She never heard of them being called that, although it made sense as it darkened the bright sun when worn.

“Ah, yes, sorry,” Doran chuckled to himself. “I meant tinted glasses. My other brother would have a fit that I said that. Please forget it.”

“It’s forgotten,” she said with a small smile. She liked the sound of his laugh. Nobody laughed in the house anymore.

She began to enjoy lunch the most. Lady Lokah expected her to join her for dinner, of course, so their chats happened at every other meal time. Rakel was only able to offer very conservative meals of bread and stew but not once did Doran complain. He also never seemed to eat very much, even less than what was satisfying for herself and helped her in the kitchen. They had agreed that it was probably best if he didn’t step foot out of that part of the house.

One morning, Rakel found her dirty stove had been cleaned.

“Are there runes for that too?” she asked him.

“Nope, just my strong, manly arms,” he joked.

She served up breakfast, then joined Doran in the pantry to eat. It became their little hiding place, a haven to have hushed conversation of worlds she’ll never see.

“Can you tell me what the Academy is like?” she asked, eating a spoonful of porridge. “How many women are there?”

“Not many, most families send their daughters to the women’s college in the Heart to study,” Doran said. “There are few female students there. But there are women who work as scribes or clerks to professors.”

“Do they get to do research?” Rakel asked. “Are they engaged academically or is it just work for academics?”

Doran’s gaze drifted up over her shoulder again, staring off into space. He frequently did that when she asked a question he didn’t have an immediate answer to. She wondered what he was looking at, if he had some sort of answer sheet she couldn’t see. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll have to observe them the next time I’m there. I’m usually distracted by how beautiful the island is. Elaborate stone structures, tall willowy trees, the expanse of the ocean stretching out to the horizon. I can see why you would want to go there.”

For a few moments, Rakel thought she could see it too. Like a painting forming in her mind but so crisp and detailed she felt like she was there. She could almost see the trees swaying in the ocean breeze - strange because a moment ago she didn’t know what willowy trees looked like. They had long, sweeping tendrils that drape like fabric to the ground with finger length leaves that droop downward along the tendrils. It was a species that Kuvan didn’t have and one that Rakel had never seen, yet she knew that the image in her mind was accurate.

“What kind of research did you want to do there?” Doran asked softly.

“Botany,” Rakel said. She watched the trees sway gently, mesmerized by how beautiful and graceful the tendril branches were. They almost seemed to coax the answers out of her. “I want to… I want to improve Kuvanian medicine. Many other kingdoms use runes to heal but of course we don’t do that here. I believe herbology could be useful for illnesses like my mother’s.”

She shook her head and the illusion disappeared. The pantry reappeared around her, including Doran with his liquid eyes sitting on the floor across from her.

“Maybe I just want to be sure I’m using the right medicine,” Rakel admitted. “I dislike feeling ignorant.”

“You can still go,” Doran said. “It’s not too late.”

“I already told you I won’t abandon my mother.”

“You would reserve your nobility to this one woman who doesn’t even appreciate you?” Doran pressed. “Think of how many people you can help if you do go study medicine.”

“What use will it be if I can’t even help one woman,” Rakel said, rising agitatedly.

“History will judge you to be in the right.”

“And I will judge myself to be a monster that left her mother to die.” Rakel burst into tears. “Don’t you think I want to go? I had everything I wanted, Doran, and for some reason it’s all gone now. My mother was once a beautiful, happy, wonderful person and I lost that too. It’s not fair. Don’t you think I want to make it fair?” She was pacing the small pantry now, sobbing, her bowl of porridge forgotten on the floor.

“And you accept suffering for this transgression of fairness for someone so undeserving?” Doran asked, liquid green eyes nearly burning bright.

Rakel remembered when she was a child her mother would do her hair every morning despite having maids and servants to do that for her. She would comb the dark strands herself, braid and style it while patting her cheek. My little lady, her mother used to call her. She would let her wear her ‘grown up’ dresses which would end up being trailing fabric around her childish body, and dab a little bit of rouge on her cheeks because Rakel wanted to wear make-up too. At banquets, Lady Lokah would covertly let her sneak sips of wine, then wink when Lord Lokah or guests walked by, hastily hiding the wine behind her back.

You’re the most wonderful thing that’s happened to me, her mother once said, hugging her.

“Undeserving?” Rakel said, wiping her face. “Perhaps. But I love her. So this is just the way it’ll have to be.”

“I see,” Doran looked strangely stoic as if he was forcing himself to not to have any expression. But even with his effort to seem neutral, he sounded disappointed. “Then you have no desire to make it fair.”

“Why do you have this fixation around my mother?” Rakel asked. “Did she… do something to you?”

“Lady Lokah? No,” Doran smiled bitterly. “It’s just that you remind me of myself.”

“Do you have someone you need to take care of?”

“In a way, yes.”

“Do you think they’re undeserving?”

Doran’s eyes glowed bright. “I know it.”

Rakel didn’t know what to say for a long time. Then: “Do you love them?”

The man in her pantry with liquid green eyes sat and stared at nothing for a long time, as if desperately searching for an answer. She wondered who this person was, and how complicated their relationship was for him to think of the answer for so long. Finally he sighed, his eyes growing dim. “Yes,” he admitted. “I must love them.”

—

“I have a proposition.”

It had been over a week since Doran took shelter in her kitchen pantry. He was completely recovered, able to lift bags of grain in and out of storage and scrub the kitchen floor clean. Rakel was no expert but she was sure regular people didn’t have ribs that healed that quickly.

Of course, Doran wasn’t a regular person.

“If it includes your exit from my kitchen, I’m willing to listen,” Rakel said but with a half smile. Despite everything, she enjoyed him there - but of course he couldn’t stay. She had resolved herself to that fact nights ago, so the least she could do is pretend she didn't want him there.

“You wound me, woman,” Doran said, miming clutching his ribs again. “More than those brutes that beat me. In fact I feel so bruised I... I think I need to stay - ”

“What is your proposition?” Rakel rolled her eyes and returned to chopping vegetables.

“I understand you’re resolved to stay here,” Doran said. “I can see that it’s what you want. I can at least make life more bearable on you by curing… whatever ailment your mother has.”

Rakel froze halfway through cutting through a carrot. If her mother was cured, there would be no more medicinal expenses from that quack. Maybe her mood would improve as well - no more plates thrown, no more food wasted when she has a tantrum.

“You would still need to take care of her,” he said carefully. “But perhaps life would be a little easier.”

“That is very thoughtful of you,” Rakel said. “Thank you.”

“I have also considered your financial problems,” Doran said, leaning against the stone wall thoughtfully. “The most successful houses gain wealth through active trade and business - something I’m afraid I can’t help with. I could draw runes to give you an endless source of gold but I would require a large amount of space that’s preferably hidden - ”

Rakel raised a hand to stop him. “No, that will not be necessary,” she said. “If anyone finds an enchantment spitting out gold in my house, they’ll behead me on the spot. Also it’ll look suspicious if I suddenly use that much money.”

“I see.”

She studied his liquid green eyes. “If you help my mother with her health issues, that… that would be most generous already.”

“I’m afraid I’ll also have to use runes for this as well,” Doran pointed out. “But it’ll be a one time enchantment. I only need a few hours of drawing time.”

It was, of course, blasphemous. Lady Lokah would probably prefer to die in a coughing fit than have someone cure her with an enchantment. But Rakel wanted her mother to be well again.

The plan was simple. She only needed to get a few innocent ingredients that afternoon. One was the leaf of Eye’s Sorrow, an herb that will cause sleepiness. They already used it often when Lady Lokah coughed too much to sleep properly. This was sprinkled into that night’s stew, the broken up leaves looking like regular herbs.

Rakel then found an old stick of charcoal in the study. It was broken with ratty paper wrapped at one end of it, but it was able to write smoothly and very pigmented.

As planned, Lady Lokah fell asleep sooner than planned. Rakel didn’t even need to check - Doran simply stared through the stone walls and announced when her mother was unconscious. They remained quiet and used only one lantern as light as he set to work with his charcoal.

Rakel was admittedly nervous - runes were demonized to be the work of evil in Kuvan. The Chantry would tell all sorts of stories of how people who used runes for their own selfish gain were turned into monsters and lived in agony for all eternity. But those in the Academy and in foreign countries regularly use runes with no such side effects. Besides it was too late to debate the morals of using runes - Doran was drawing them with amazing speed and intricacy on the smoothed stone floor around Lady Lokah.

They honestly looked like meaningless scribbles to Rakel. A few perhaps looked similar to Kuvan letters, but others were simply long strands and squiggles, punctuated with simple shapes. A few were straight lines sharply cutting through the design, another a long curved line to encircle a group of runes. It was mesmerizing watching him freehand it on the ground with a stick of charcoal.

Before she knew it, the second half of the runes were taking shape and she realized they were an exact reflection of the first half, but Doran didn’t look at the previous drawing to ensure it was the same. He seemed to instinctively know what marking went where.

Doran got up from the floor after two hours of drawing. Her mother remained asleep on the bed in the middle of the rune circle. He slowly paced around, liquid eyes checking the runes, then bent to add a few quick strokes and the charcoal markings glowed a soft blue. The glowing scribbles seemed to come alive, like hundreds of glowing worms gathering to her mother on the bed, crawling over the sheets and settling on her face. Alarmed, Rakel moved to her mother but Doran stopped her.

“It’s working,” he said.

The glow coalesced at her mother’s head and slowly faded. When the blue completely disappeared, she approached her mother with the lantern and inspected her sleeping face. Perhaps she was biased but she thought Lady Lokah looked much better. The lantern next shone on the floor to reveal the markings were also gone. She met Doran’s liquid green eyes in the dim light.

“I suppose we’ll see how she fared in the morning,” Rakel whispered. “But thank you ahead of time.”

He gave her a strange look, perhaps an expression mutated by the flickering light of the lantern. “No need,” he said. “It is… my attempt to make things right.”

They left Lady Lokah’s room and Rakel was going to escort him back to the pantry, but instead he made a turn towards the front door. “Are you leaving now?” she asked, startled.

“I believe I’ve long overstayed my welcome,” Doran said with a quirk of his lips. “I’ve recovered, have I not? And now your mother is… better.”

“Yes… yes thank you,” Rakel said. It was silly for her to think he would stay a while longer. There was no reason for him to do so. Still, she felt disturbed at how suddenly he was leaving.

“Do you think you’re doing the right thing?” he suddenly asked. He didn’t sound probing or accusatory - it was a genuine question. He opened the front door and looked up at the sky. It was clear with the half moon shining down on them, casting a silvery light over the world.

“I don’t know,” Rakel said.

“If you decide to leave, nobody would fault you,” he said.

“I know.”

Doran looked strangely disappointed again, but the expression was fleeting. He bowed, turned, and left. She locked the door behind him.

Rakel realized two important things the next morning.

First was that he left his tinted glasses behind in the pantry. As a man that could seemingly see through walls and see emotions and thoughts, Doran probably left it behind purposely. However Rakel could not fathom why he would do such a thing.

Second was that she discovered her mother in the morning with a healthy glow to her cheeks and not a cough could be heard. However Lady Lokah could do nothing but open and close her eyes.

Rakel’s mother awoke but could no longer respond to anything around her.