They reach the factory as the sky turns the color of watered milk.
FILANTROPE CANNING looms: rust-red letters the size of doors, chimneys like sleeping titans, old trees gone feral around the walls, vines blocking the windows.
One lamp burns in the watchman’s tower.
Osgar opens the big iron door.
Leather apron: KISS THE COOK OR THE BISON GETS IT in cracked white paint.
Beard white as new snow, eyes sharp as new knives.
He and Arkion collide in a rough, wordless hug—old pirates recognizing old pirates.
Arkion slips an arm around Eysin’s shoulders.
“Osgar… My bride.”
He watches her reaction.
She has a crooked grin, flush, “Eysin.”
Osgar’s eyes soften in a way that makes entire winters forgive themselves.
“Welcome, Eysin. Heard someone by that name tried to hijack a drone off Vinu’s observatory. Bold. Stupid. My kind of woman.”
Eysin bows her head, not to escape the spontaneous hug.
“Not exactly accurate information, but I’ll take it.”
Arkion grins wider. “Keep that up and they’ll print your face on wanted posters.”
He pushes her forward, they’re going to the kitchen.
Osgar pours three dented mugs of his own cider—dark, sharp, tasting of smoke and paradise—and hands out dried apple rings that crunch like laughter.
“Yours went up last week, boy. You just had to play your bells in Reval, didn’t you?”
“We brought some people over. Had to break a few things in the process.”
Arkion steps out to the privy.
While he’s gone, she whispers to Osgar, “What bells?”
Osgar chuckles low, combing his beard with thick fingers. “Some of the Baltikons’ techniques are so forceful they come with their own warning—tolls, shrieks, whistles, screams. Sounds so big they take over the entire field.”
He stands with a grin, motioning her over. “Come, take a look at this—”
Eysin joins him by the wall covered in old photos.
She spots familiar faces—and, for the first time, a Kraken.
Twenty wild young Baltikons stand in front of the titanic nightmare Kraken Scorpio, arms slung around each other, grinning like they stole the sea.
“Which one’s you?” she asks.
Osgar taps a younger self once, then young Arkion.
“Ask him about the Black Sea sometime, sister. The world out there is mind-blowing.”
The three talk for an hour straight:
Bison futures, mystery-steel prices, who still owes whom a life, Reval, Warsaw, the best way to poach apples without waking the trees.
The sky turns rose.
Crows croak instead of a rooster.
Osgar shoulders his rifle, tips an imaginary hat, and heads to patrol the tunnels.
Arkion and Eysin are left alone in the quiet.
They climb the narrow ladder to the watchman’s loft, past the old hammocks strung absurdly high—at this exhaustion level, every rung feels personal.
Getting into one without looking like an idiot turns out to be its own small war. Eysin misjudges the swing, ends up wrong-way-round, boots skyward, hissing at canvas that won’t cooperate. Arkion, three feet over, fares no better and refuses to admit it—commits to a running start he immediately regrets, saves himself with one hand on the frame, dignity intact only because nobody kept score.
They both land right-side up eventually. Small victories.
The space between the nests is vast. Polite. Almost insulting in its courtesy.
They settle in—the trained efficiency of people who know sleepless nights make you mean, that rest is sacred, that you don’t impose touch or talk on someone who’s walked hours in wet boots.
Even when every cell screams to just—
But they don’t. Arkion reaches for a joke instead.
“You know what they say,” he mumbles, already half under, “about a hammock strung this high—”
He doesn’t finish it. Doesn’t need to. Whatever the rest of that sentence was going to be, it was never really about the hammock.
The last thing either of them remembers being awake for—her, grinning at half a joke; him, grinning at having made her grin.
They sleep four and a half hours.
Arkion’s dreams are deep.
Eysin’s are not.
She dreams of the weight of a body she knows too well from sparring, from offering her some foothold in the Orb’s tub while waiting for the poison to clear. The herbal smell he carries. The good-bye kiss she returned to every night since then.
Tonight the weight in her dreams never felt like this.
She wakes once, just long enough to hear him breathing—slow, even, close enough to reach if she dared.
She doesn’t.
She turns over, presses her face into the bag, and forces herself back under.
The orchard outside ripens in secret.
From the rafters a single lace curtain droops like a sleepy, smug cat, gives the reader a slow, knowing wink, and whispers:
Two veils left, my sweet disasters.
Next time: marzipan apples so sweet they should be banned in twelve religions, one ancient bench, and venting at an innocent deer because eye contact could suddenly be a war crime.*
Don’t touch that dial, darlings. The fruit is ripening… and so are they.
Continue reading:
Eysin: The Giggling Curtain | Ch. 6 - The Orchard
Noon. Sun high, not a cloud. Marzipan apples glow like pink lanterns.
E-pub/book: Aiming for 2026 February.
I make jewellery at my desk and show them on my beautiful gift shop - males, females, or anything you want to show up on the ballroom (some of the pieces are even suitable for cats!)
Original shelf: https://sskosmos.ee/eysin-ace-trilogy/ch-5-breathing-the-same-damp-air-between-heartbeats/