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ehlnofay · 7 months ago

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A woman pauses over the wares sold by the Khajiiti merchants camped outside Danstrar to ask with no small amount of perturbation, “Whose children are those?”

Efri glances up to check she’s talking about them – as if there’s a whole host of other children around she might be referring to. The woman is standing over the rug Tsradaro’s laid out their most intriguing trinkets on – she has one clawed hand on the lid of a little palm-sized casket, one of the boxes of pretty-smelling oils. (If the strange woman is getting to buy one, then Efri’s jealous. She doesn’t have any money, and she’s not allowed to use those sorts of things for free, no matter how nice the perfume smells. Normally she doesn’t care about rules like that, but the caravan is being very nice and the things they sell are their livelihood, so she follows them without much complaining.)

The woman is looking at her and Sissel, clustered with Khasir around the firepit. Efri and Sissel are hunched over the steaming-hot fish on a dish, away from the pan of spitting butter. Efri says brightly, “We’re our own children.”

“We found them in the wilderness,” Taz puts in quietly, fingers running up and down the handle of the axe laying at eir side on the blanket, and Efri nods in agreement. (She likes Taz, even if ey talks barely more than Kazari or Shirri-la. A lot less if you count all the things Kazari and Shirri-la say that the others translate for her. Ey’s calm and quiet and has let Efri touch eir axe, so ey’s good in her books.)

“Exactly,” she says. The woman looks no less perplexed or concerned. Efri squints and tells her, “I like your beads.”

(She does. The woman’s got a string of them, pretty coloured glass, stretched across her breast between her hangerok brooches. Most of them are a fiery orange-red, the same colour as her hair.)

The woman looks down at the beads she wears as if she forgot about them. “Oh,” she says. “Thank you.”

Efri abandons the fish – not like she can do anything with it, it’s too hot to touch still – to shuffle across the laid-out rugs and join Tsradaro at her display. “Are you going to buy any fabrics?” she asks the woman, and then before there’s really time to answer she turns to Tsradaro. “Did you show her them? We’ve got some really pretty silks and things. Nice patterns. I wanted to make a dress with them but Tsradaro said no, they’re for selling.”

The woman’s eyebrows – bright-bead-red – meet in the middle of her forehead. “Do you… help sell things here?”

“She is a born patterer, that one,” Tsradaro says smoothly. Her whiskers twitch. “And yes, they’re for selling – and yes, Tsradaro already gave you money for the dress you have, she isn’t going to give you fabric for a new one. She is not quite so open-handed.”

Efri curls up her fingers to rub the stitching of her sleeve. “Fair enough,” she acknowledges. “And it’s nice. But that green one is so pretty.”

“Hm.” Tsradaro is grinning with her eyes a bit; she hides it fiddling with the display of the wares on the rug in front of her. “If there is a bolt-end left over, you can have it for a scarf. Now shoo. You are distracting the customers.”

“And you’ve abandoned the fish!” Khasir calls. When he grins, it’s with all his teeth, sharp-edged and sparkling. “This one cannot do it all on their own.”

There’s only one customer, and the fish is still steaming, but Efri gets the hint, so she blinks her thanks and hurries back over to the fire.

“We’re doing all three?” she checks, looking at the numerous pots and pans Khasir’s rigged up over the flames. (She bought three cod with the money they gave her for dinner. That’s certainly not a fish she and Sissel and Kazari ever caught from their tundra creek – they’re so much bigger than she could have imagined, and it took all her strength to haul them back to the camp. She had to carry one of them in her arms because it didn’t all fit in the little sack she brought.)

“Yes,” they say emphatically, poking at something in one of the pots. “So hurry up.”

Because she’s helpful, Efri does. She squats down next to Sissel, next to the dish, and takes up the knife. She cuts off the head – it takes a fair bit of hacking – and the tail, because Sissel hates that bit, and cuts the fins out as well. She cracks some of the bones there by accident; Sissel picks them out with her fingers. Then, sticking her tongue out in concentration, she runs the knife right down the middle, jerking the blade through the bones. It isn’t going right through the bottom like it did with the fish they learned to butcher from the stream, but she more or less gets it eventually; cuts away the chunks of bone, and is left with two beautiful fillets.

Well. Beautiful might be a bit generous. But they’re edible – surely that’s the most important thing.

“Told you I knew how to debone a fish,” Efri says triumphantly.

Khasir glances up over the flour they’re tipping into a hanging pan. “You do,” he agrees amiably, and for a moment Efri thinks he’s being nice, but then he cracks another smug little grin. “But not well. The pin bones are still in.”

Efri frowns. She can’t see any bones. It’s filleted fine.

“Let me,” Sissel says, and peels the knife out of her hand. Efri frowns again, harder, but lets her.

Her irritation is only compounded when Khasir finds nothing to tease about in the way Sissel carefully slices the bones away and strips the skin of with a few neat, if unpractised, cuts. “That’s not fair,” she complains, mulish. “Sissel’s basically a genius, of course she’ll get it right.”

“I’m not a genius,” Sissel says, “I’m just better at this than you,” and she smiles when Efri giggles despite herself, a quick flash of teeth.

Khasir has Sissel do the rest of the fillets. They let Efri watch the way they fry up the batter – just flour in a pan of spitting butter and sizzling herbs, a little bit of egg put in to help it all bond. When it’s cooked all golden, smelling delicious, he levers it quick as a wink off the flat pan and into the covered dish he’s keeping them warm in while they wait for the rest of it all to be done. Efri asks to cook a griddle-cake herself; Khasir laughs at her.

They’re a bit of a bastard.

They do let her stir the sauce for the fish, though – hung a little bit higher than everything else so it can simmer with lower heat. It smells nice too. Sissel’s almost done with the third fish by this time. (She’s a lot faster than Efri was; it’s probably for the best that she do most of the filleting.)

Efri looks up and across the camp. There’s two different people now at Tsradaro’s display – one standing, one kneeling to get a better look at all the things. Shirri-la has come out of the tent, and she’s sitting with her tail curled around her feet on her cushion next to the wares. Kazari’s still in the tent, Efri thinks. They’re tired – helped carry most things as they travelled this last stretch of journey to Danstrar in order to give the nag a break, so now they’re resting. It’s only fair. In a week or so they’ll all split off from the caravan, strike out across the frozen terrain for Winterhold, and they’ll really need the energy then.

Just a bit further away, the red-haired woman is standing. Efri’s not sure if she bought something or not; she doesn’t look like she’s looking to buy anything now.

“That lady’s looking at us,” Efri tells Khasir, her brow furrowing.

Khasir glances over so quick Efri’s not even sure if she saw it right; they make a guttural tutting sound over the batter in the pan. Tch. “People do that,” he replies, deliberately nonchalant.

Efri bites her tongue. “They shouldn’t,” she complains. It’s uncomfortable, to be stared at. It’s rude, to stare.

(She feels a bit bad, even though she didn’t do anything wrong; because the woman seemed uncomfortable with Efri and Sissel being with the caravan, and maybe if they weren’t, Khasir wouldn’t have to be stared at while they cook dinner.)

“Perhaps,” Khasir says. He flips the batter. “But they do.”

“Done,” Sissel says, holding up a dish full of neatly filleted fish.

(Efri says, “How.” Both Khasir and Sissel ignore her.)

“Chop it up small,” Khasir tells her. The jewellery in his nose glitters as he shifts over the fire. “Then – Efri, mix it in with the sauce. No, not – smaller than that, dran khrassa! So all can eat.”

Sissel slices the fish into little bits. (Efri would have cut them into tiny strips, to get back at Khasir for being bossy, but Sissel is more forgiving.) Efri takes the dish, tips it into the saucepan, begins to stir.

“If we were in Elsweyr, Khajiit would stare at you,” Khasir says. He takes the flat-cake off the pan. “They would say, who let these bald children run around unsupervised?”

Efri chuckles, but she feels pensive. Her face screws up. “But if we were in Elsweyr,” she says, “even if they stared at us, they’d still let us buy from their shops and all.”

Khasir sighs, long and low. They lift the lid off the dish. “Efri,” they say, with unexpected patience; “This one understands that you are a child who has just discovered injustice. This is new to you. It is not new to us. Khasir knew before he travelled here that he would be treated poorly.”

“But it’s not fair,” Efri replies, agitated, her fingers bony and twitching on the handle of her spoon. “It’s not fair to do both. They can keep you out or they can stare, they can’t keep you where they can’t even see you and then still come to look anyway.” She keeps looking, without quite meaning to, in the direction of the red-haired woman. She keeps glaring. She hopes it scares her off.

“Mm,” Khasir says, unimpressed – but faintly amused, she thinks, which is kind of annoying but also kind of good? “Well, you can tell the people who make the laws so, have them forbid wrongful staring.”

Efri, mixing, considers this. “Sissel,” she asks, “can you write a message to a jarl?”

Khasir cackles. Sissel scrunches up her face. “Well, you can. I doubt they’d read it.”

That’s one idea gone, Efri supposes. She’ll have to keep thinking.

Khasir does not allow her time to keep thinking. “Another few minutes and that will be perfect,” they say, nodding to the pot she’s stirring, and they take their griddle-pan off the fire. Then they pause, look at Efri out of the edges of their bright greeny-gold eyes. “This one will own, it has been much easier with you as companions. We did not have to wait for the grocers and fishmongers to come out to trade on their own time, or forage for ourselves if they did not.”

“You just don’t want to do your job,” Efri says. Tsradaro said Khasir hunted but he’s barely hunted at all while they’ve known him, only just at the beginning.

Khasir barks a laugh, tipping his head in acknowledgement. With the air of one conferring a great and shameful secret, he replies, “This one does not like deer stalking in the snow.”

Fair enough; Efri nods seriously. She’s never hunted deer but it’s probably difficult, especially in the snow. She stirs the sauce, the lumps of fish buffeted by the flat of her spoon, the smell making her mouth water.

She glances up at the cloud-blanketed sky. She asks, “When we’re in Winterhold, can we write a message to you?”

Khasir tilts their head further. “You can try,” they say. “But Khajiit may be too fast for the couriers. It may never arrive.”

“We’ll try,” Efri decides; when she glances as Sissel, she sees her nod. “We’ll figure out a way. I want to hear about where you go after!”

“About what other strays we find on the road?” Khasir jokes, but his smile is wide and shiny, nose scrunched up with it so whiskers flicker over his eyes. He leans over, takes Efri’s pot off the fire. “Good.”

Efri grins, even though they’re not looking and can’t see it.

“Go get Kazari,” they command, lifting the lid of the dish and moving one of the still-hot flat-cakes to a plate with their fingers. “This one will get a plate ready. He has to take over for Tsradaro, so he’ll eat quickly.”

Efri salutes (a habit she picked up from an Imperial courier they traded with on the road – she thinks it’s funny) and marches towards the tent.

(The food, when they eat it, is delicious.)

#I wrote this one a while ago... I like it. I like khasir and I like writing about efri's time with the caravan #area man has to explain inequality to a child when he'd really rather just cook his dinner: more at 11 #he says Ponder the gulf between our experiences some other time white baby. pay attention you are burning the fucking sauce #oc tag #my writing #fay writes #efri #sissel #kazari #should I tag all of them. does the entire caravan even appear in this piece #whatever I need to start posting all my side character guys I think it's funny #tsradaro #taz & j'matha #khasir #shirri-la #the elder scrolls #tes #skyrim

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