Kingdom Hearts fic: All Strange Wonders - Chapter 4

[mistressofmuses]

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Waking up on a bed, even a fairly narrow one, was an improvement over the chair. Kairi was good company while Sora cooked breakfast, and Riku rattled around the kitchen doing something else.

Then there was a knock on the door. Riku glared at it, as if he could will whomever it was to give up. There was a moment of silence.

Maybe a sorcerer can will that, Sora thought.

Apparently not, as the knocking resumed, more emphatically than before.

“It’s the Radiant Garden door,” Kairi said.

“That’s exactly what I was afraid of.”

Riku crossed to the door, pausing again to fix his hair, before opening it.

The man outside stopped, hand still raised. He then pulled a ribbon-festooned scroll from a pouch at his side, offering it with a flourish to Riku.

Riku took it like he’d been handed a dead rat.

“An order for 100 copies of the speed spell we had commissioned,” the man announced.

“I was told that was a single job, not an attempt to recruit me for more work.”

“Yes, well.” The man cleared his throat. “We wanted to be certain of the quality of your spells. Easiest to judge it fairly this way.”

“And you were satisfied, so now you want more?”

“We’ve been authorized to offer you two hundred crowns for the completion of the job.”

“Two crowns apiece? That’s nothing.”

“A single spell cost two. It seems eminently fair to offer the same price per unit.”

Sora found himself nodding. Usually when a customer wanted to order things in bulk, they planned to pay less per unit, so it did sound more than fair.

“Because you clearly have no idea how magic works,” Riku scoffed. “Upscaling a spell isn’t so simple as increasing the number produced. The higher the quantity, the more difficult they become to create. You are demanding my highly specialized skill set, carefully curated ingredients, and—and—my own energy. Yet you offer me a pathetic two crowns each. Farewell!”

Riku made to close the door, and the man quickly shuffled forward, forcing his foot along the frame so it couldn’t slam shut.

“Three hundred crowns. We can pay you three hundred.”

Sora nearly choked. Three hundred crowns would have been a month’s take at the shop.

Riku paused. “Very well. One hundred paid as a deposit, and the other two upon completion.”

The price agreed upon, the man handed over a bag of coin. Riku nodded, then waited and watched the man go. When he finally shut the door, he did so more firmly than strictly necessary.

“I should have known better,” he lamented. “It’s never just a spell when the king is involved.”

“At least he paid you well,” Kairi said. “Though you might consider putting some of that coin away, and not spending it all.”

“One hundred crowns in advance…” Riku weighed the bag in his hand. “Don’t worry so much, there’s two hundred more on the way. Though I suppose I could have overcharged them even more outrageously.”

Sora bit back an indignant splutter at the fact that Riku’s dramatics had been aimed purely at getting more money, and out of the king of all people. It wouldn’t be his place as a mere assistant to criticize it.

Riku sprawled in the chair next to Kairi, hooking a knee over one of the arms. “Though I don’t know what I’ll do if they keep commissioning me. I suppose magic-users are getting a bit thin on the ground, with Leon and Aerith vanished.”

“They have been coming to you more often because of it,” she agreed.

“You’re in a position to turn down requests from the king?” Sora asked. It seemed like the kind of thing that would be an honor rather than an imposition.

Riku turned toward him. “I’m not, my dear Linus.” He paused, and when Sora didn’t react to the name, he continued, “My dear assistant who-is-not-Linus. I’m not, which is the problem. I have no interest in becoming the next Royal Magician, but they seem to be shoving me into the role. How can I get them not to…” he trailed off.

“Sell them mediocre spells?” Kairi suggested.

“Of course not! I need them to keep commissioning small things from me, and would never damage my reputation with inferior work.”

Sora failed at holding back the incredulous snort this time. What reputation could Riku possibly be concerned with?

Riku ignored him. “Maybe a new rumor? It would have to be something fairly delicate, but just enough to nudge them into believing I can’t be trusted with real responsibility…”

“Yes, I’ve heard how delicate your rumors are.” Kairi laughed, the sound popping and fizzing.

Riku stood up, taking the bag of coins with him. “Well, I certainly have no interest in working on a hundred speed spells right now. I think I’ll go out.”

“Where to?” Kairi asked.

“Hmm… Traverse Town, maybe. There are some worthwhile shops to be found.”

“And a purse you’ll no doubt lighten considerably,” Kairi said, drier than the driest of the wood she could burn.

“That’s the hope! And what of you, assistant? Do you have enough to keep you busy here?”

Sora looked around the still-cluttered room. “I’m sure I do.” It hadn’t sounded like an invitation.

“Fine. But remember what I said—confine your efforts to this end of the stairs. Nothing needs to be moved around in my room, thank you.”

Sora nodded. The main floor, such as it was, would probably provide weeks of work.

Riku gave him another of those odd, through-and-through looks, and then swept his way out the door, set to blue for Traverse Town.

Sora meant to go fill the bucket and start on a new section of the room, but as he passed the base of the stairs, he paused. Riku had said he didn’t want anything in his room to be moved. So if Sora didn’t actually move anything…

He knew he shouldn’t. But it had always been true that the more he was told not to do something, the more he wanted to do it. Roxas and Xion had been the same, and the three of them had gotten into trouble more times than he could count because of it.

Not enough trouble to remove the temptation, obviously.

“Don’t do it,” Kairi cautioned.

“Just a look,” Sora said, and climbed the stairs.

There was only one door up above, just past a landing that provided barely enough space to stand. As soon as Sora touched the door handle, it swung inwards.

Riku was standing there.

Sora jerked his hand back as if burned. “I—” He had nothing to say, no excuse he could give. But… “You left.”

Riku raised one delicate silver eyebrow. “I did. But I am a sorcerer. You should probably remember that. How did I guess you’d stick your nose in exactly the place I told you not to?”

Sora thought of the black-set door too, but certainly didn’t want to admit to that as well. “You should know the more you tell someone not to do something the more they’ll want to do it.” As childish as the excuse had sounded in his head, it sounded even more so when spoken aloud.

“Lucky for you, I’m no Bluebeard.”

Sora had no idea what Riku meant by that. He didn’t even have a beard.

Riku must have recognized his confusion, because he gave an exasperated sigh. “Never mind.”

“Is that where you hide your stolen hearts?” Sora foolishly pressed, craning to get a better look around Riku’s shoulders. “I didn’t find them in the junk down below, so…”

He couldn’t see much of Riku’s room. There was an impression of clutter, even less organized than everything downstairs. Though maybe with less dust.

“Stolen hearts?” Riku looked briefly surprised. Or maybe it was guilt. “You must have come through Twilight Town. I’m sorry to disappoint, but I don’t have even a single heart, hidden in my room or elsewhere.”

“So you aren’t actually the Heartless Sorcerer, stealing souls and hearts and doing all sorts of wickedness?” He somehow didn’t wince at how much he sounded like the village gossips, clutching their pearls at the scandal of it all. ‘Wickedness,’ really? Ridiculous.

Riku leaned closer, looming over Sora. If either of them moved the wrong way, they’d bump heads. “You have no idea how heartless I am.” His voice was low.

Sora took an involuntary step back, only to find no ground under his heel. His arms pinwheeled, but he couldn’t catch his balance.

Riku stalked forward, hand flashing out to grasp Sora’s upper arm before he could actually fall down the stairs. His grip was firm, and held Sora easily in place. As soon as Sora got his feet under him, Riku released Sora’s arm, then pulled his bedroom door closed behind him.

The menacing tone was completely gone when he spoke again. “Now. Like I said, I do not want anything in my room moved. I am perfectly happy with it the way it is, so your cleaning assistance will not be required up here. With that understood, I would like to finally be on my way.”

Sora let himself be herded down the stairs. Vaguely he was aware that he might have just had another escape, from something far worse than a tumble down the stairs. And it may have been even more narrow than when he’d dodged Riku on the equinox.

Riku didn’t immediately head back through the door. “If you’re so determined to make yourself”—he glanced around the fractionally-cleaned room—“useful, you can go gather up some ingredients for me. Maybe it will keep you out of trouble.”

“O-of course,” Sora agreed, trying not to sound like he’d just been scared half to death. Then he had to also try very hard not to picture the kinds of gruesome things he could be tasked with finding. Fresh-plucked newt’s eyes, bat blood, snake tongues…

But when Riku handed him the admittedly extensive list, there was nothing he recognized as particularly horrifying. Not that he recognized much of it at all. He thought most of it was probably plants, since he saw some helpful parenthetical asides like “(flowers only)” and “(young leaves)”.

Sora stared down at the list.

“Problem?” Riku asked after the silence stretched too long. “Is gathering my list of necessary materials beneath you as my assistant?”

“No, but I…” Sora swallowed. “I don’t think I know what all of these are.” Or most of them.

Riku sighed, then crossed the room to one of the piles Sora had left only half-sorted. Apparently not finding whatever he was digging for, he sighed again, far louder, clearly making a statement. Ultimately he found what he’d been looking for on the bookshelf, a slim volume of folded and stitched pages. This he held out to Sora.

“This should help. Honestly, they just don’t make assistants like they used to.”

Sora thought Riku was teasing. Maybe.

“And if something isn’t in there, ask Kairi. She probably knows.”

Sora’s glance toward her probably betrayed his skepticism, but Riku didn’t take notice. Instead, he turned back toward the door and spun the dial around to green.

“Kairi, I’ve changed my mind on where I’m going. I have business in the hills instead. Might take me all day, so if you’d be so kind as to bring the castle back around by evening?”

He didn’t wait for an answer, but stepped down from the moving doorway with a dramatic flare of his jacket.

“I did warn you not to go up there,” said Kairi, after the door had closed.

“I didn’t know he was still here,” Sora hissed.

“Which is why I warned you.”

Sora hated that he’d been shaken up by the confrontation at the top of the stairs. But maybe this time he would learn his lesson about poking around in places he wasn’t supposed to. “Is he actually gone this time?”

Kairi just sighed.

The thin book—more of a pamphlet, really—was a guide of sorts, with intricately detailed drawings of various plants. Handwritten notes surrounded the drawings, noting sizes and where and when the plants could be found. Some had notes on uses, or warnings about them.

“Well, that’s… a start.” He glanced from the list to the pamphlet and back, relieved when he discovered that several things did show up on both.

“Read me the list?” Kairi asked.

“Uh… five-point cinquefoil, greater jewelweed, rosemary, false-rock rind, funerary bells, wren’s claws, four-leafed common clover…”

He was only about halfway through the list, but Kairi cut him off. “I’ll take us up toward the mountains, then. Most of those grow near there.”

“Wait, you move the castle?” Now that she mentioned ‘taking’ them somewhere, he remembered that Riku had said something about it, too, asking her to come back in the evening.

She ‘nodded’, or at least the flames of her head and hair bobbed up and down. “I keep it moving, or go faster or slower if I have to. I can circle this part of the valley twice in a day, and get us back to where we started this morning.”

“And how do you keep from running into anything?” Sora had the sudden terrible vision of the moving castle rampaging through a farmhouse, or through a livestock pen, sending cows and sheep scattering.

“I can’t see much,” she admitted. “But I can sense some things from out of the top of the chimney. It’s enough that I won’t hit anything too big. And anything smaller usually gets out of the way.”

“But somehow this sense tells you where… plants grow?” Sora couldn’t imagine any context in which a sentient fire would need to know about botany.

“I wasn’t born confined to a hearth,” she said. “I used to get to see just about everything. Most of those grow—or can grow—in the rocky part of the hills just leading up to the mountains. Some prefer deep shade, but the mountains are closer than the forest, and I already have to be back here to pick Riku up.” She sounded annoyed, or at least a bit exasperated.

“Sorry,” he said, though he wasn’t sure for what.

“Break my contract and you won’t have to be sorry. Then I’ll get to go see whatever I want.” Her voice was a little biting, but he thought he recognized a bit of teasing in it, too.

It didn’t take her long to get them near the foothills. Sora had seen them in the distance the day he’d left home, rising in increasingly rocky slopes up to the breathtakingly enormous mountains themselves. It would have taken him the better part of a day at least to reach them, but the castle was evidently a far more efficient mode of transportation.

Though, Sora noted, even at the speed they must have been going, there was no sense of motion within the castle. It was only when he looked back outside the door that he discovered how far they’d gone.

He took his bag with him, in case he succeeded and needed something to carry supplies in. He also grabbed a small shovel that he’d found while cleaning. It was an ordinary shovel, like the kind he’d used in the garden at home, except the blade appeared to be genuine, solid silver.

“Good luck!” Kairi said cheerfully, as he stepped through the door. “Don’t get eaten by anything!”

He hoped that was a joke.

It was colder and windier on the rocky hills, though the exertion of the climb over the rocks kept him warm, along with the bright sun. He kept a tight hold on the pamphlet and the list so as not to lose them in the breeze, and did his best to follow the directions given for where to look.

The false-rock rind was the first he managed. It really did look like stone, though it was slightly too smooth and uniformly grey to blend in all the way. It seemed to be some sort of melon, maybe? Encouraging protection, and armor against exploitation, said the notes.

The cinquefoil (various uses, mundane and arcane) wasn’t too difficult to spot, since it looked similar to some plants he’d seen grown in gardens in Twilight Town.

Wren’s claws, he was relieved to discover, did not require taking the toes off of innocent birds. It was also a plant, a strange, prickly vine with curved, thorn-like leaves that maybe did resemble their namesake. (Tenacity.)

Fairy-fires (used primarily in illusions), the pamphlet suggested, wouldn’t bloom until summer, and Jewelweed (medicinal, topically soothing) was probably one of the ones that he’d have to go into the forest for. He also didn’t see any rosemary (useful in spells and charms relating to memory), which was one of the few plants he was actually familiar with. He wasn’t sure if it was something that even grew wild.

The shadows lengthened as Sora made his way back down over the rocks toward where the castle was idling. Periodically a puff of white smoke would drift out of the chimney, forming delicate rings. That had to be Kairi’s doing. Sora smiled.

On the way back down, he even found one more thing on the list: a vast patch of clover (unsurprisingly, a key component to many luck charms. The rarer four-leafed variants have more potent effect.) He only found a few four-leaf clovers, but he plucked them and added them to his bag of ingredients.

Climbing back up to the door, Sora felt a sense of accomplishment, a happiness that he’d done something useful or helpful. But as he crossed the threshold, he shook the feeling away. He wasn’t actually here to be Riku’s assistant. He needed to find out more about Kairi’s contract, and being sent out of the castle wasn’t going to help him do that.

Riku had already beaten him back to the castle, but he seemed pleased with what Sora had found off of the list, and took everything into the kitchen area to do who knew what with it. Sora hoped that meant that Riku had forgiven him for intruding upstairs.

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The next day, Riku headed straight to the bathroom, slamming the door shut behind him.

Sora wasn’t certain what that meant for him, so he resumed sorting through things. The kitchen sink was too full to use, and with the bathroom occupied he couldn’t fill the bucket to do any real cleaning, but at least he could try to dismantle another pile. He wished he could just throw most of it out the door, and watch it vanish behind them on the hills.

It was over an hour later when Riku opened the door, accompanied by wafts of scented steam. It smelled at once spicy and floral, actually very pleasant. Riku looked lovelier than ever, back in the steel grey and aquamarine jacket that Sora had seen him in on the equinox. His hair was perfect.

“I’m sure I’ll be away for most of the day again,” he said to Kairi, barely even glancing at Sora. “I’ll meet you around the same spot in the evening.”

“Of course.” She sounded a bit annoyed, but Riku didn’t seem to care.

“And Zephyr?”

Sora looked at him with a raised eyebrow.

“Or whatever your name is. I think there’s still plenty on that list that you could go look for. If you need something to occupy your time.”

Sora nodded. He couldn’t tell if Riku had forgiven him or not, and that seemed like a fairly pointed suggestion.

Once Riku had exited onto the hills, Kairi took the castle nearer to the forest, so he could look for the things that preferred shade.

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It took days for him to find the majority of the items Riku had asked for. Some were hopelessly out of season, but Sora thought it was a minor miracle that he’d found as many as he had, with it being so early in the spring.

That did seem to finally work him out of the proverbial doghouse. Riku was back to at least coolly friendly, if not exactly warm. Though Sora still caught Riku staring at him sometimes, like he was trying to figure something out about him.

Maybe still trying to guess his name. (Riku had also now tried “Bartholomew,” “Alabaster,” “Hendrick,” and “Apollo,” among others, obviously to no avail.)

On day five after Sora had been given the list, he had resigned himself to going back to the rocky hills and just collecting more of what he could find, because he and Kairi had exhausted their ideas for everything else.

But instead of heading out onto the hills and telling Sora to make himself busy with ingredient hunting, Riku grudgingly started work on the spells he’d been commissioned to do.

And once again, he had Sora help him to mix ingredients together.

“I really was telling the messenger the truth when I said he was asking me to do something more difficult than he realized,” Riku explained. “The speed spell ingredients are… volatile to put it lightly. Trying to mix them in a batch larger than a single use could ruin the entire mixture. The longer it sits, not packaged up, the longer it has to spoil.”

“So you really do have to make them individually?” Sora asked.

“Exactly. It’s exhausting, and worse, it’s extremely boring. I feel like the Warlock of the Wasteland has the right of it in that regard at least; I can’t imagine he ever has to do this kind of inane busywork for a client. I’m not convinced he has clients; didn’t seem to when I met him, at least.”

“You knew the Warlock of the Wasteland?” Sora squeaked.

“Keep holding that bowl. Yes. Though ‘knew’ might be an overstatement; we’ve met. And if he has his way, he’ll force me to meet him again. He really is a brilliant magic-user in some regards. Not so wonderful in others. Now please keep stirring that before it starts to separate.”

Sora refocused on the mixture he was grinding back into powder. It wasn’t like the revelation helped him any. So what if Riku had met the most powerful evil magic-user of the century? That didn’t mean he’d have any better luck recognizing or breaking Sora’s curse. He hadn’t yet.

Riku prepared the paper on the small space that had been cleared on the counter, and Sora poured the silver powder out.

Immediately, Riku started to measure for the next one. Sora wondered how many of these spells they had the ingredients to make. One hundred seemed to be pushing it for the jar of powder or bottle of oil.

Sora would once have said he didn’t think magic could ever be boring. Now, Riku had convinced him: that really was the worst part of this. This was only the tenth of the packets, and Sora was already tired of the repetition. Even the miraculous changes of color and texture had lost their appeal.

Evidently Riku agreed, because after he finished marking the looping sigil on the outside of the current packet, he set down his strange, smooth ink pen.

“That’s enough of that.” Riku stretched and headed toward the bathroom.

Sora glared in the direction of the closed bathroom door, and started trying to shift things around on the counters. If he could get the kitchen cleaned up enough to use the sink, at least Riku’s hours in the bathroom wouldn’t force him to put everything else on hold to wait for the water.

Riku’s steam-drenched morning ritual didn’t seem to take any less time for having been delayed, and by the time he’d come back into the main room Sora had managed to clear a spot large enough to start pulling slimy dishes out of the sink

Riku still didn’t task him with anything, simply wishing both Sora and Kairi a pleasant day, and taking his leave out onto the hills.

Sora knew he should turn his attention back to searching for clues to Kairi’s contract, but he really wanted to get the kitchen into useable shape first. Then he could at least stop the low-key dread that some horrid spell component had contaminated their food.

“I can’t believe Riku just quit for the day,” Sora complained to Kairi. He could, actually. The charms had been boring; he just didn’t want to admit Riku had an excuse.

“I’m more surprised that he made that many. He has a hard time doing anything that feels too much like work, and that’s more than he’s put in for days.”

That much was true. Sora tried not to gag as he scraped a particularly large chunk of something off a plate.

“He probably already spent the advance,” she complained, voice sharp. It was clear this was a long-standing frustration. “That’s the only thing I can think of that would suddenly motivate him.”

“So that’s a problem with him, then?” That was possibly the least shocking thing Sora could imagine.

“Every time! He’ll go buy something pretty and useless. And then we’ll wind up short on food until he sells more spells.”

“Well, he admitted he was overcharging, so I can’t imagine you’re that low on money.” Sora looked at her over the low wall that separated the kitchen from the rest of the room.

Kairi rolled her eyes, or at least moved the purple flecks of flame in a way that indicated the same. Her face was remarkably expressive. “Except he undercharges half of them. If someone can’t afford a spell that he judges is really going to help them, he practically gives them away.”

That was far more difficult to believe. Sora snorted, and turned back to the sink.

He opened the kitchen window for some fresh air. It was odd to look out at Traverse Town, a place he’d never been, and yet could literally reach his hand out the window and touch. Maybe sometime he’d go through the door when it was set to blue.

He’d gotten the worst of the filth off the dishes, and made room to actually run water into the sink, when he heard a distant bell chime a brief tune, followed by the tolling marking the hour. Two o’clock.

This was the first time he’d heard it, but it came through the open window clearly.

Twilight Town’s bell sounded different than this one, a bit higher pitched, and lacking the little lead-in tune, but he’d heard that one every hour almost every day of his life. He hadn’t even realized he missed it. The tears that suddenly burned against his cheeks took him by surprise, and he scrubbed them away fiercely.

“Are you all right in there?” Kairi called.

“Yeah!” he said, voice cracking a bit on the word. How had she even known? “Just splashed myself is all.”

After that, he focused as methodically as possible on cleaning and putting things away in the mostly-empty cabinets. He couldn’t think about home, or about his siblings, or his mom, or the shop… it wouldn’t do him any good.

Sora had finished the kitchen and returned to sorting through another of the floor piles (and he was not thinking about the time Roxas had declared the floor simply to be the biggest shelf in his room) when Riku returned.

He glanced into the freshly cleaned kitchen, still very visible in the fading afternoon light. He raised his eyebrows. “Ambitious today.”

Sora wasn’t sure if that was praise or a criticism. “You’ll have more space if you ever finish that commission,” he said.

“I certainly will.”

It still wasn’t clear how he meant it, but Sora did notice that he washed his plate off that night after dinner, rather than just leaving it in the sink.

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