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“Please take good care of him! Make sure he eats enough! We’ll be back soon!”
“But I-”
The door closes. Essek stares down at the strange creature in his palms. The creature blinks back, then bites him at the juncture between thumb and forefinger hard enough to draw blood. Who can say who yelps louder: Essek, as he instinctively shakes his hand to rid itself of the unexpected pain, or the creature, as it falls from his grasp to the hard stone floor, then skitters around the corner into the next room.
That’s the last he sees of Jester’s weasel for two days.
---
His name’s Sprinkle, and he loves me so very much but Caduceus thinks he needs a break from adventuring for a little while. Please take good care of him!
“Sprinkle,” Essek hisses, down on all fours beside one of the many towering bookcases in his study. There’s nothing to be found in the darkness beneath, save a single ceramic dish that his own robe knocked so carelessly aside as he entered the room. He scoops the spilled contents - dried bits of liver, the best he could do without resorting to laying raw meat on the floor of his house - into his palm, then drops them back into the dish, one by one. Fifteen little clinks: exactly the same number of pieces as he’d added the evening before.
He’s both grateful and perturbed that there’s nobody there to witness his current state. There are documents piling up on his desk, reports he’s yet to sign, and here he is, without another soul in the world to help him sort out this mess. No one to call for aid, because the only ones he feels safe enough to share in his failure are the ones he’s presently accountable to.
He had expected some sort of test from the Nein, on their return to Rosohna. Some way of measuring his loyalty to them. He’d been prepared for a fight, for supplication, for promises of gifts or favours, for his own head on a pike. He hadn’t been prepared to be handed the means of his own destruction, in the form of a beloved pet that seems determined to let itself starve to death rather than accept any of Essek’s offerings.
Treachery and treason, she can apparently forgive. But the loss of her weasel? He suspects that’s a betrayal from which their friendship would never recover.
The creature, he knows, is somewhere within this room - his location spell can narrow his search radius that far - but the thing is so small, and his study so vast, and so full of hiding spaces, that he’s been forced to go on like this for a half hour, left spooled at last in a heap of robes at the center of the room, staring helplessly at the undecorated wall.
On the first day, he’d been sure Sprinkle was merely nervous of the new environment, but that food would draw the creature out. Most animals are capable of reason, presumably, and if Essek offered sustenance, and made no aggressive actions, surely this one would emerge eventually?
Surely?
Add it to the list of things that Essek has been woefully wrong about in this life.
He stares up at the lines of bookcases, filled with tomes meant more for show than for pleasure. They’re a perfect accompaniment to the rest of the house: full of unused rooms and corridors leading to nothing of value, save the architectural aesthetic to match the rest of the wealthy neighbourhood. It’s no wonder that a tiny weasel could evade him so thoroughly in a house with so much empty space, particularly when he scarcely leaves his office or laboratory for more than the length of time required to fetch food from the larder - and he’s been known to forget to do even that.
If there’s anything this experience has taught him - besides humility - it’s that Essek barely knows his own home.
He’s about to admit defeat for yet another day, go off and meditate restlessly while pondering a puzzle with no solution, when he hears the faintest scritching of nails against wood. Essek locks in place, swiveling his head so slowly that not even his jaw can disturb the air.
Peering out from beneath a glass cabinet of atlases, he spies a subtle glint: two beady eyes of black, fixed on the bowl in his lap.
Neither moves as they wait in their stalemate. Essek controls the food, which gives him some power, but Sprinkle is the more dextrous by far. Even if he could manage to get out his components in time, would a hold spell contain such a small creature, or would it slip from his grasp, never to be found again?
With little more than a word and a flick of his fingers, the bowl levitates into the air and floats to a space halfway between himself and the cabinet. The beady eyes disappear, vanished again into the darkness as the dish of liver comes to rest on the floor. Essek folds his hands in his lap, trying his best not to worry the already agitated skin around his nail beds, and waits.
At last, the eyes appear again, and then a nose emerges as well, tiny nostrils twitching in the air as a long body slinks into Essek’s view. He’s never seen an animal quite like this before. A svelte coat, left ragged and burned in places, but sleek around the face and eyes. A brilliant red colour with tufts of white at the paws, and a keen and mistrustful stare to match the trepidation in its slow creep forward.
He cannot hide, trapped as he by Sprinkle’s presence, but he feels compelled to give the creature its privacy all the same, and turns his head away as the creature finally reaches the dish and begins to eat.
It’s distracted. He could take out his components now. Perhaps even a gravitation spell, if it would not injure Sprinkle too greatly…
He flicks his eyes back, and finds Sprinkle’s eyes on him, cheeks are full to the brim with food, but ever vigilant of the threat in the room. He can see now the way the body crouching over the bowl trembles fitfully, miniscule shivers of terror running up and down its spine.
His hand, which had wandered to his wrist, curls into a fist and drops into his lap.
“I won’t hurt you,” he says, almost startled at the sound of his own voice, as soft as it is. He doesn’t often speak aloud when at home. There’s rarely anyone to talk to. “Please… eat.”
The weasel sniffs the air a single time, then takes the last of dried bits into its mouth, flees beneath the furniture once more, out of Essek’s reach.
Essek wonders, as he wanders off to meditate with his heart only mildly relieved, if he made the right choice. He could have taken the creature by force, trapped it in a cage, and the anxiety of the past two days would be at an end.
But some instinct compels him to wait. To be more delicate, if he can. Trust is hard to build, easy to shatter. He will not offer a gift in one hand while the other holds a chain, and return Jester’s pet more broken than before.
He’s caused her more than enough harm for one lifetime.
---
Essek sees neither hide nor tail of Sprinkle for the next few days, but the dishes he sets out are left empty by morning, and he calls that a success. Still, the worry won’t leave him be, lingering in the back of his mind through dull meetings and over political discussions, wondering at the fate of his reclusive houseguest. He can’t help but dread that the creature will be injured somehow in his absence, or worse, escape into the street and be trampled by a passing orcish footfall or the wheels of a cart.
It’s enough to send him racing home by the end of the fifth night, a locate spell already primed on his fingers when he’s less than a block away, and only able to breathe properly when he feels the gentle ping at the back of his mind, leading him home.
The reports have piled high enough now that he cannot simply continue to ignore them, so he drops the spell and heads reluctantly to his office, mentally preparing himself for a night of carrying the leaden weight of his own procrastination fixed around his neck.
After less than an hour, his head is pounding. When his vision begins to blur as well, Essek lets his head drop into his hands, willing the swimming letters to quiet. The workload feels impossibly heavy tonight, and he knows that’s his own fault for letting it get away from him, he knows, but-
Sniff.
Slowly, Essek’s head turns towards the slightly ajar door to his office. There, framed in the pale strip of light emanating from the hallway, sits a crimson weasel.
Essek almost believes it's a hallucination, for the first few moments. The weasel waits perfectly still in the doorway, unblinking and unmoving, like a taxidermied specimen on display, and he holds himself just as quietly. This is the longest he’s ever gotten to observe Sprinkle, and he tries to catalogue what he can, while he can.
Still harried looking, but the coat is a little sleeker than it was the last time he saw it. Bare patches of fur have begun to fill in, and the weasel’s previously gaunt torso now rounds a little near the hips, as though its belly is full for the first time in months. No shudders run down its spine.
It looks, in a phrase, not much worse for wear for its sojourn from the world.
Why then, he wonders, is it here?
“Are you hungry again?” he asks, heedless now to the ridiculousness of talking aloud to an animal that can’t understand him. His fascination is too great for embarrassment to pierce. The weasel doesn’t respond, obviously, but it takes a little step into the room, nudging curiously at the rug by the door. He falls silent again, waiting to see what Sprinkle’s next move will be.
At last, the weasel slips fully into the room, ignoring Essek now in favour of finding a dark spot beneath a chair and curling up into a ball. It’s about as physically far removed as it can get from Essek, while still being within the confines of the same four walls. But still, the creature chose to enter. Chose to share the same space, when it had a whole house at its disposal to hide. When it clearly still mistrusts him, but not enough to stay away.
“Are you lonely, little one?” he murmurs to no one.
They pass the rest of the night away in silence, but for once, it’s a companionable sort.
---
“Did he give you any trouble?”
“Not much,” Essek says, as Yasha eyes him dubiously, “but I think it would be better if Jester retrieved him. He doesn’t quite trust me yet, I’m afraid.”
“I would be surprised if he did,” Caleb says, as Jester rushes off to his office to collect her pet. “He doesn’t let any of us near him. I don’t think he’d let Jester either, if she wasn’t so… persistent.”
“Still,” says Essek, “we did make some progress over the week. Perhaps with a little time, and patience, there might be hope for a creature like that.”
Caleb’s lips turn up at the edges.
“You might be right.”