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It rains the day before the Harvest Fair. Rhys wakes before dawn to find the house silent and empty but for his own hushed breaths. Fair enough. He can hardly fault Daeghun for needing a bit of alone time preceding the sudden upheaval of the Fair - he’ll be doing the same as soon as the chores are done.
No point lighting the hearthfire if no one’s going to be home all day; he breaks his fast with day-old bread and a handful of dried plums. There is little that needs to be done in their small cabin. Rhys shakes out his blankets and remakes his narrow bed, drawing the curtain that separates it from the main room, brushes crumbs from the table he sat at to eat and that’s about it. While his friends Bevil and Amie might be kept busy until midday with chickens and house chores and smaller siblings, the Farlongs have no livestock and few possessions to worry over.
It’s a sparse existence, but not one Rhys’ ever had any real cause to regret. Except once - but there’s no need to dig through those old regrets again. He learned his lesson almost a decade ago.
Chores done, he dresses in his foster-father’s old hunting leathers. Daeghun had purchased a new set from Galen a couple seasons back, but they’ve still got a good bit of wear left in them. The jerkin’s a little tight around the shoulders since Rhys’ last infuriating growth spurt. It’s too late in the season to try tracking down a deer at the edges of the Mere - he’d be needed on the Starling farm before long to help bring in the harvest.
He’ll have to see if Galen’s brought some decent leather with him tomorrow. He’s made enough spare coin selling foraged mushrooms and swamp beetle chitin to Tarmas that he should be able to cover it without asking Daeghun for extra. Rhys' skin crawls at the thought of doing so, though Daeghun would hardly begrudge him.
He drapes a tightly woven wool blanket over his head and belts the length of it firmly around his waist as a makeshift rain cloak - Daeghun had taken their only decent oilskin with him, likely assuming that the weather would keep Rhys out of the Mere today. But he needs the quiet of the swamp today, even if there will be no chance of music in the steadily pounding rain. Tomorrow will be a trial in more ways than one.
The sky is slowly lightening into a bleak grey as he checks the snares he’d lain at the edge of the Starlings’ fields. The rabbits are leaner than they should be in this season. It’s unnerving - Rhys glances over at the fields as he guts each one in brisk, efficient motions, his hands needing little direction at the familiar task. The maize doesn’t stand as tall as it should, and the sampag bushes should be laden with thick clusters of purple berries by now. What few he can see seem withered and dull.
He hangs the gutted rabbit carcasses from a blunt hook on the back of his belt, scraping the discarded entrails into a small pile beneath a scraggly tangle of briar and murmurs a few words of thanksgiving to Solonor Thelandira. He might not be especially dedicated to old Keen-Eye, but his foster-father had always spoken the prayers at the close of a successful hunt and it brings a faint pang of nostalgia as they fall from his lips. Besides, it never hurts to be polite.
He plucks an undersized sampag berry as he makes his way back across the fields towards the Harbour. It’s bitter, almost ashy on his tongue and his unease grows.
He hangs the rabbits in a corner of Retta Starling’s covered porch. It is an old ritual, one he will regret putting aside. But some things can’t be helped.
Back in the days of Daeghun’s first fumbling attempts at parenting, his foster-father had once headed out to guide a large hunting party through the labyrinthian waters of the Mere. Rhys had never asked him what his reasoning was, but he had clearly assumed that even a child of less than twelve winters would be able to provide for himself for more than a month. And perhaps a son of the wild elves could have. As it was, Rhys had run through their meagre stores in less than a fortnight, eventually fainting on the village green after three days of bitter hunger.
Retta Starling, only recently arrived in West Harbour with her sons and a small pack of foster children, had been the one who found him and carried him back to his father’s cabin. She’d been appalled to find neither head nor heel of his guardian, nor a scrap of food left in the larder. When Rhys finally woke, she’d coaxed the whole sorry tale out of him and insisted he stay with her family in their larger home near the heart of West Harbour. She’d made him up a pallet in the loft with the rest of the children and fed him bread dipped in chicken broth until his stomach could handle heartier food.
When her eldest son grumbled over the attention she paid to their visitor, already annoyed to be sharing space with the foster children she’d brought with them from Neverwinter, she’d sent him to chop wood behind the house until he understood his mistake. He’d come back in scowling but chastened after a few hours and never said a word against his mother’s generosity again. Rhys sometimes still wonders whether the resentment he could still feel bubbling under the surface of Lorne’s sullen silence had been part of the reason he’d left West Harbour. It bites at him whenever he catches her staring pensively off to the north, clearly longing for the return of her elder son.
For Rhys, the time spent in Retta’s house had been an agony. There was always, always someone talking at him - Bevil had been six or so and inclined to trail after him chattering happily at all hours of the day - and the older children were little better. Raised in the impenetrable sphere of Daeghun’s silence, the constant barrage of questions and inane observations issued by his vociferous shadow had worn on him until Rhys was ready to tear his hair out. Driven past all patience one day, he’d turned to snarl at the younger boy to leave him alone and caught sight of Retta’s face. She’d seemed so worried, so sad that he’d bitten back the hot words and instead forced a smile. His very first mask, crafted in a split second to reassure the kind woman who’d taken him in, half feral as he was.
And then there’d been the matter of food. Tactless as he was, Lorne hadn’t been wrong - Retta had a great many children to provide for, and that first season she hadn’t yet adapted to the self-sufficient lifestyle of the Mere. Her coin had run out over the spring of that first year, spent on chickens and tools and seed for a plot of farmland she hadn’t quite known what to do with. Orlen and his wife had stepped in soon enough, but at that time the Starling family had been scrambling to make ends meet. And yet she fed him no less than she did the other children and never breathed a word of anger at the lack on her own plate.
After Daeghun eventually returned to find his cabin dusty and devoid of the child he’d expected to find there, he had made inquiries in the village and was soon directed to the Starling farm. At the sudden appearance of Daeghun’s hatchet face in her kitchen doorway, Retta had smiled serenely, fingering the knife she’d recently been using to joint a chicken carcass and calmly but firmly sent all the children out to play.
Self imposed duty complete, Rhys finally feels free to relax into the comforting embrace of the Mere. Swamphens call back and forth through the reeds as he swings east, his silent footsteps not enough to disturb them into harsh alarm calls.
He finds deep clawed tracks about a mile east of the village. Concerning. Usually lizardmen stick to the deeper parts of the Mere, where they can swim easily between their cunningly woven dome-houses floating on pads of compacted reeds. He has occasionally tracked the odd scout back to their hidden settlements, seen younglings frolicking in the deep pool between the dome-houses, safe behind a barrier of well knotted nets. There are many dangers in the waters nearer the coast - sharks sometimes swim deeper into the marsh than it feels they have any business to be and narrow eelfish can easily snatch a straying hatchling and leave no trace beyond a sudden froth of churned water.
Once, Rhys had seen a great crane rise out of the reeds with a squalling hatchling hanging from its beak. He’d caught it in the wing with a well aimed slingshot before he could think better of it. When the huge bird reeled away in shock, its grip had faltered and the hatchling had tumbled down into the reeds. Offended, the crane flew huffily away, leaving Rhys with a quivering hatchling cowering at his feet. Resigned, he’d carried it back to the nearest village, enduring tearing bites from already sharp little teeth and the scrabble of clawed feet against his leather tunic for more than a mile. When the smooth curve of a dome-house rose above the reeds, Rhys had set the terrified youngling on its feet, and in the hissing sibilants of its own tongue, told it not to wander so far from the dome-house again. It stared at him, unblinking for a few heartbeats, and then darted away into the reeds.
As soon as Rhys heard the outcry, hissing voices raised in startled relief, he’d slid away into the marsh. Sometimes he wondered what story the hatchling had told its parents about its unlikely rescue. Either way, when he’d wandered out that way a few weeks later, the settlement was gone, dome-houses towed away down hidden waterways to somewhere far away from the threat of warmbloods.
Daeghun never, ever spoke of what Retta Starling had said to him in the stronghold of her kitchen, soup stock bubbling on the hearth and a razor sharp boning knife held tight in her trembling fist. But soon after Rhys had returned to their quiet cabin, Daeghun had taught him how to lay a rabbit snare.
Their mornings became dedicated to short expeditions into the marshland surrounding West Harbour. Over the length of that summer, as Retta Starling spent long hours in the fields under Orlen’s watchful eye, Daeghun patiently, if impassively, instructed Rhys on the art of foraging and hunting small game. Whether or not he felt any shame for not having already taught his foster-son the skills his own mother had imparted to him when he was younger even than this strange, quiet child he had been left with - that was Daeghun’s business and without Shayla to tease words from his silence, he kept such things to himself.
Rhys worked hard - the memory of mingled gratitude and shame at Retta’s half empty plate was etched indelibly in his mind. He never wanted to make of himself such a burden ever again - no matter how willingly someone might seem to shoulder it. The very first morning he’d found a limp rabbit in his own carefully laid snare, he’d gutted and cleaned it and hung it from Retta’s back porch for her to find when she stepped out to drink her tea at dawn.
The rain lessens somewhat around midday. Rhys climbs to the crest of a ruined wall and settles there, devouring strips of spiced dry meat as he gazes out across the green and grey haze of the marsh. One of the Mere’s few gnarled trees hangs over his perch, shielding him from at least a piece of the weather. To the west, he can see a hazy patch of blue sky. Maybe the storm will blow over in time for the Harvest Fair, after all. He hopes so, if grudgingly - Amie’s been jittery enough about the Tourney that an extra day's delay might shake her out of her skin completely. Probably best to make sure.
He washes down his meal with a few gulps from his flask. Then, after carefully checking his surroundings for any unwelcome spectators, he clears his throat, hums a couple of soft bars and then starts to sing.
A brace of rabbits every week or so, or a clutch of eggs from a swamphen’s nest, the first sampag berries of the season in a rough basket woven from reeds - it had seemed to Rhys like paltry repayment for Retta’s newly greying hair, her thinning cheeks in those long weeks before Daeghun’s return. When he’d racked his brains for something else he could give her, he’d remembered her relieved smile when he’d drawn back from tearing into Bevil and mimicked her kindness instead.
Rhys had known even at eleven that he couldn’t make himself care for people the way Retta had seemed to - the babble of their voices cut into him and his skin would itch when they stood too close. But after a season of Daeghun’s lessons, he could mimic the call of a swamphen well enough that the wary birds would come toddling out of the reeds to investigate the stranger in their flock. Surely, he’d thought, learning how to pretend he was comfortable meeting his neighbours eyes would be easier than capturing that jagged trill at the back of his throat.
He’d been wrong. It had taken him nearly three years to perfect his mask, cheerful and friendly, outgoing and gregarious - the perfect antithesis to his true awkward reticence. He’d taken note of how the people of West Harbour reacted to his new persona. Unable to tell fakery from truth, they’d warmed to him as the years passed and Bevil turned from an irritating shadow trailing him about the town to a genuine friend and playmate.
When Amie lost her parents to one of the Mere’s brief but vicious epidemics and came to live with Tarmas in the village, she’d been an immediate target for the Mossfeld boys. Grimly aware that Retta would not approve of leaving the girl to be bullied, Rhys had faced down Wyl Mossfeld one bleak morning in early spring. The boy was taller and heavier than he was, well used to scrapping with his brothers. But after dodging the first few jabs, Wyl’s wild punch connected sharply with Rhys' nose. A sharp click rang through his head and just like that, he’d had enough. Rhys straightened up, blood running down his face and let his mask slip just enough for the other boy to see the bubbling rage tucked behind his vicious smile. Wyl had rapidly lost his appetite for petty cruelty and left, throwing bewildered, fearful glances back at the half elven boy as he retreated. Amie had fussed over his broken nose and dragged him off to Tarmas for a healing charm - tucked behind his back during the fight, she hadn’t seen the sudden surge of savage bloodlust Wyl had.
If there was any part of those long years, spent struggling to make himself the kind of person West Harbour would accept, Rhys was truly proud of, it was this: Bevil and Amie had never had the slightest idea of what he really was. Just like the rest of West Harbour, they saw only his smiling mask, rationalised his frequent trips into the Mere as an affinity for hunting inherited from his incomprehensible foster-father, rather than the desperate escapes they truly were.
Rhys sings wordlessly of clear skies and the sun pouring down buttery light on the village green tomorrow morning. He sings of Amie flushed with triumph as she takes the Tourney by storm, Bevil cool headed as he faces off against the Mossfelds in the Brawl, of the harvest growing in thick and lush in the Starlings’ withered field, of his own hands steady on the bowstring under his foster-father’s eyes.
Heat builds in his throat almost to searing as he sings, but he doesn’t let the song falter. If he pays for this spell with a rasping voice and aching joints tomorrow then so be it.
This is the last Harvest Fair he’ll compete in after all. By the time autumn rolls around again, he plans to be long gone.
Daeghun presented him with the flute on his fourteenth nameday. His well wishes were terse and it is only several weeks later that he explains in as few words as he can manage that the gift once belonged to Rhys' mother. He learned her name then, a few sparse details of her life before Daeghun lapsed once more into a pointed silence. Rhys considered the matter briefly, then let it pass. He had enough to handle as it was, with his daily performances in the village, Amie and Bevil’s chatter and Retta insisting on hosting him for dinner at least twice in a tenday.
Later in the safety of the Mere, he turned the flute over and over in his hands and then carefully blew his first note.
He didn’t understand at first why his music felt like something to keep hidden. There was, after all, a smattering of musically inclined amongst the Harbourmen. It would have been considerably easier to beg lessons from one or the other than learn the way he had, through persistent trial and error, far out in the Mere where no one could hear him. Eventually he had realised that he needed to have something just for himself - some part of him that was not another part of the performance, but still not a shameful secret tucked away out of fear. He got better, his fingers quicker on the smooth bone of the flute, breath steady and controlled as he played.
When the music he made began to do a great deal more than simply soothe the jagged edges of his temper, when certain patterns of sound began to set the mist to dancing, or call birds and beasts out of the reeds, it hadn’t felt like a surprise. It had warranted a couple of carefully framed questions to Tarmas, sure, which resulted in a great deal of reading when the sharp-tempered wizard had loaded him down with dusty accounts of bardic magic, but it hadn’t surprised him. Words were just another kind of music after all, and he’d been weaving a spell over everyone he spoke to for years.
Rhys' a sweaty mess by the time the clouds roll fully back, his makeshift rain cloak steaming faintly in the building heat. He struggles out of the sodden mass of it, leaves it draped over the ancient stones to dry. When he tests his voice, it emerges like the croak of a particularly ill tempered raven. He sighs, resigned to the ill-effects of his fairly ambitious working.
As parting gifts go, helping his friends win the long sought after Harvest Cup seems a little paltry. But at this stage, it's all he has left to offer them.
He can’t stay in West Harbour much longer. His private outbursts - the shaking and the sweating, the troubling absences from his own body - they’ve been coming more and more frequently the last few years. And with their increase has come a tense coiling hunger, a rage he struggles to keep at bay. Just last week he’d only barely restrained himself from clawing into Wyl Mossfeld over a passing slight.
Rhys is becoming dangerous. Of late, his rictus-smile feels less like a lie than it does a baring of teeth. A few more years of this and he won’t be able to hold the mask in place. With every passing moment, every word and gesture, he runs the risk of snapping and dredging up old memories best left forgotten. Better to leave on a good note, he thinks. He’d rather slip away quietly than be run out of town like a monster.
In his sixteenth year, just as he was finally starting to feel like he had a handle on his neverending performance - it helped that Amie was engrossed with her studies with Tarmas and Bevil had recently joined the village militia, leaving Rhys with a measure of free time he hasn’t enjoyed in years - everything fell apart.
It began with a dull ache in his jaw. He chewed his supper carefully that night, faintly worried about the possibility of an infected tooth. Daeghun was gone on an overnight trek into the Mere, so there was no one to witness him wincing over his food, at least. But without a healer, such infections could kill and he sourly resolved to go see Brother Merring, the newly arrived priest of Lathander, in the morning. Annoyed at the prospect of losing his planned morning of solitude, he rinsed out his dishes and crawled into bed for an early night.
The pain woke him some time after midnight. Biting back a scream as agony lanced through his mouth, Rhys shot bolt upright in bed and clutched at his burning face. He could taste the bright copper of blood flooding across his tongue and there was an immense grinding pressure on either side of his upper jaw. The pain came in waves, crashing into him over and over, twisting him into a tight knot of groaning misery in his narrow bed. And then just as the awful, searing agony became so intense that Rhys honestly feared he would scream after all, there came an odd popping sensation and the pressure abruptly vanished.
Shaking, sweating, Rhys reeled back against the headboard. He could feel something hard rolling on his tongue. He fumbled in the dark for the candlestick at his bedside and pressed his fingertips into the etched rune at its base. Light bloomed as Amie’s carefully crafted charm ignited the wick. Rhys hunched over his palm, dribbling out a disgusting mess of blood. And teeth.
He was never sure afterwards how long he sat there, huddled up against the headboard, blood drooling from his mouth as he stared blankly at the bloodied teeth cradled in the palm of his hand. Slowly, cringingly, he ran his tongue around his mouth searching for the empty sockets. Pain flared again and a fresh wave of blood flooded his mouth. There weren’t any empty sockets in there. Instead, on either side of his upper jaw, just back from his front teeth, there were what felt like enormous fangs, a pair on each side, set one after the other. They were terribly sharp, slicing smoothly into his tongue when he licked over them.
With building horror, Rhys counted the slick teeth rolling in his now-trembling palm. Four of them, he concluded - the sharper ones from the top, the dogteeth, and presumably the two that came after them on each side. The taste of bile rose in his abused mouth and he heaved once before stubbornly clamping down on the impulse. He felt he was in very real danger of accidentally severing his tongue if he threw up now.
Shaking, he set the teeth - the teeth his body had somehow shed to make way for these new monstrosities - on the table beside him and carefully slid his aching body out from under the covers.
Rinsing his mouth out with warm water and a pinch of their precious reserve of salt was a miserable task. He leaned over a basin, rinsed and spat over and over until the bleeding finally stopped. It almost felt like the cuts on his tongue were closing already, another unsettling change - Rhys had never noticed his body healing particularly quickly before, and the cuts had felt deep.
When the water he carefully swirled around his mouth looked clear as he spat, Rhys busied himself scrubbing out the bowl. Then changing his bloodied shirt and washing out the stains as best he could. He remade his bed, sharpened his belt knife to a razor’s edge, caught up on the primers Tarmas had assigned him that week. Anything to keep moving, to avoid thinking.
Daeghun returned around midday, but by then it was too late. Amie had already stopped by, breezing into the cabin with her nose buried in a book. She’d glanced up, seen Rhys slumped over the freshly scrubbed table with blood crusted around the edges of his half-open mouth and immediately bolted for Merring. She’d meant well, assuming her friend was somehow injured. But Georg had followed after Merring out of yet more well-meaning concern, and well, if Georg discovered a secret it would become a matter of public knowledge in far less time than it took Daeghun to hike the last few miles into West Harbour.
When the blanket is more damp than sodden, and the sun is beginning to creep down in the west, Rhys slings it over his shoulder and begins threading his way back through the marsh. West Harbour had been a decent enough place to grow up in, he reflects, skirting around another of the Mere’s many ruins. But there’s an entire world out there, forests and mountains and deserts. Wide open spaces he can lose himself in, new songs of tree and stone and the wind whispering over sand.
Rhys stops on a hillock overlooking the village. There is a faint hum of activity below, final preparations for the Fair tomorrow, now the Harbourmen were sure the weather wouldn’t put the whole event off.
As he stares down at the village he’s known his entire life, Rhys finally admits to himself at least, the deepest reason for his coming departure.
Out there, there’s no one to expect anything of me at all. A complete and total lack of anyone I feel obligated to not act like an antisocial, bloodthirsty maniac in front of… Sounds amazing, really.
He huffs a soft laugh, lifts a hand to tug at the wooden pendant Daeghun had given him years before and makes his way down the hill.
Scarcely a day after Rhys' new teeth made their abrupt and horrifying arrival, Daeghun informed him that he’d be away for some time. His foster-father had never seen the need to announce his trips before, and the sheer incongruity of such an announcement was enough to raise Rhys' eyes from their listless perusal of the floorboards. Daeghun haltingly reassured him that it was a matter of some urgency, and he’d return as soon as he could.
Rhys hadn’t the heart to pick apart the odd emphasis in Daeghun’s tone and simply nodded. He could barely speak without lisping around the fangs, often cutting himself when he tried. He can hardly see the point anyway.
Daeghun left before dawn, leaving his foster-son huddled in blankets and misery in his curtained alcove. Despite his hurried pace, the journey to Neverwinter and back was far, far too long.
Six weeks of suspicion and sidelong glances had been more than enough to drive Rhys from the only home he’d ever known. He’d packed a bag, tucked his mother’s flute under a loose floorboard, caught up his bow and vanished into the Mere. When Daeghun came home from his urgent errand to the north, he was met for the second time with a silent, dusty cabin. But this time, a quick walk to Retta Starling’s farm was not enough to turn up his missing ward.
It would be a long six months before Drystan Farlong returned to West Harbour.
When he finally emerges from the Mere, dripping swamp muck, bowless and haggard, Daeghun meets him at the edge of the village. There is a new, bitter edge to his stare, and the sharp smile on his lips when he catches sight of his foster-father is just a whisker away from a snarl.
If there are words for a time like this, Daeghun didn’t know them. Instead, he passed Esmerelle’s only son the amulet he’d raced to Neverwinter to obtain, paid for with the last of the spellbooks written in Shayla’s spidery scrawl.
Grudgingly, Rhys looped the cord around his neck and tucked the heavy wooden pendant down his shirt to rest against his skin as Daeghun instructed him. He frowned, bitterness melting into confusion as he tried to puzzle out the strange shift in the air.
“It is for your teeth,” Daeghun intoned, subtle as a mace to the gut. Rhys' eyes widened, then narrowed abruptly as he ran his tongue around his mouth.
“They’re still there,” he snapped, harsh and cold as Daeghun had never heard from him. He raised an eyebrow at the sullen tone.
“It is not for your benefit,” he remarked, and saw bitter understanding creep across his foster-son’s muddy face. “I have mentioned to Georg that the changes were likely the effects of an old curse picked up from the ruins out in the Mere. He seemed eager enough to take it on faith that you had set out to find yourself a cleric. No doubt the tale has made the rounds by now - it should serve well to smooth your return.”
Rhys swallowed hard, biting back his first furious response out of atrophied reflex. It had been half a year since he’d last had to mind his tongue - he wasn’t at all sure he could slip back into his old role as easily as Daeghun seemed to assume he would. But the world outside the Mere had not been at all what he’d expected. Left with little other option, Rhys nodded slowly, put aside his rage and followed his foster-father back home.
Covering up the truth of what he is can not be enacted merely by the application of a few cunning illusions. Rhys knows that now, just as he knows that the disastrous mistakes made on his first ill-advised flight from the Mere were almost unavoidable. It’s a risk, stepping away from the only safety he’s ever had. But it’s a risk Rhys - a decade older and at least a bit wiser than the scared child he’d been - is willing to take.
He’ll win Amie and Bevil the cup, then help the Starlings get their harvest in. Just two more hurdles to pass and then he’ll be gone.
Humming softly under his breath, Rhys trips the latch of his father’s cabin and steps easily over the threshold.