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They went to bed, which was in a small room just by the library. It was a messy little space, and books and candlewax spilled over everything. Crawling along the ceiling and walls, Bochi cleared a space enough for two people on the bed with his long arms. Now that more than just his small body could be fit in, one claw drew the covers back. There was a book in the other.

"Do you read before sleeping, Bochi?"

"There's a spell I want to cast on you."

Raguel stopped taking off his over-shirt, looking up at Bochi with a little suspicion.

"It's a sleeping spell, linked to my being one of the spider-folk," Bochi explained - neither hurried nor defensive. Somehow, he didn't seem to ignore Raguel's trepidation as much as not notice it. "A spider... makes poison in his mouth, and silk in his tail. A scorpion makes no silk, but crushes with his claws and stings with his tail. My beast makes poison with his claws, and silk in his mouth. I believe my web is -- metaphorical. Or otherwise related to the soul, to feelings. I have found that when I talk to someone, uninterrupted, for too long, they will fall asleep, or -- don't laugh!"

"I won't." Raguel would have, if Bochi hadn't said.

"...or into a strange stupor. Hrm. I have used it in self-defence, but never... helpfully. It involves a battle of wills, you see. The harder a fly struggles in a spider's web, the more tangled it gets. It appears to work the same with my voice. The spell will be told through my speaking to you for a while... I want you to fight me, first, and I'll see the effect on you. Then, we'll try it when you don't fight."

"Will I truly sleep, tonight? After all of that?" Raguel stripped down to his braies, and slid into the bed.

"Yes! Yes. I wouldn't take that from you." Bochi squatted on Raguel's chest like a friendly night terror. One hand steadied him, pressing blunt fingertips down into his chest - his claws were gone on that hand, his fingertips now blunt. "I don't want you to leave with any problems you didn't take in with you."

"...And that's all your voice does?" There was no real suspicion in Raguel's voice. His hand absently curled around Bochi's ankle and moved up his shin. Raguel's previous academic fascination with the librarian's strange body was gone, now that they were touching. The sensation of his odd skin - soft, almost waxy, not at all stiff - was no longer fascinating, but simply good. What was important was Bochi himself.

"If I keep talking to my ‘victim’ while they're in the stupor, I can... enable them. Allow them to change their minds about things. It must be willing, though. I explain how they can do it, and if they want to, they will. It's not something I can force."

"So, you could make a killer feel sinless."

"You don't need magic voices for that, Raguel. You don't usually need anything." Bochi tapped Raguel's nose, and his legs bent to the side so that he plopped down to a sitting position from his squat. His other hand, with its big scarlet claws, gingerly caged the covers of his book as he turned to the right page. "I'll read you a story I was told back in the Corps – my ‘Order’. I wrote it down when I first got here, as clearly as I remembered it. Are you comfortable?"

"You're sitting on my chest."

"Then we'll begin."

-

If Raguel were more honest, he'd have admitted to having difficulty following the plot. It started with a Prince, unmarried, whose kingdom was ransacked by a warlord from the North.

His hand stayed curled around Bochi's ankle for a while, before slipping to his side. The Prince sought for any weapon or knowledge to help him, and a series of clues led him to feel he would find such a prize inside a deep cave.

This was the game where Raguel was supposed to struggle against the spell, as it happened to him, but it was difficult to tell where the spell would be. Raguel was usually quite attuned to the efforts of witches. If he could just... focus. But focus came naturally. The cave was very far underground, far away from the heat and oppressive sun of the Prince's kingdom, and it was a cool and welcoming sort of darkness.

Bochi's legs uncrossed, slowly, and the back of his foot rested under Raguel's chin. Raguel's confusion was comfortable. He closed his eyes. At the bottom of the cave were ten small goblets.

Raguel loved this feeling, so it must have been the spell. He screwed his face up in concentration: he tried to find something to think about other than the story. He opened his eyes, and grimaced, but his grimace melted away. The drink in the tenth goblet was salty.

Raguel's breathing was slow, and deep, partly to accommodate the librarian on his chest. Number nine was a little less salty, and a little more sweet.

He was quite grateful to Cern for bringing him here. A sort of warm mud was caking the back of Raguel's mind, as though washed down from above. Number eight was clearer still.

The Prince grew tired. Number seven was clearer still.

Number six was clearer still.

-

The Prince, after everything, left the cave.

"Wake up," Bochi said.

"Mm," Raguel replied, softly, eyes closed. "I'm awake, Brother."

"It's Bochi," said Bochi, flexing his ankle under Raguel's chin so the back of his foot pushed the knight's cheek. "Are you sure you're awake?"

"Bochi," said Raguel, smiling very widely.

"We're going to try the soul-web again, but you're not fighting it now. Let it happen. Are you ready?"

"Yes, please...."

-

The next morning, they woke, but remained in bed for a while. Bochi had curled himself onto Raguel's side, soaking up his heat. Raguel now saw that there were no windows in this little room, not even up towards the ceiling. He only knew it was morning by the white outline of the door.

"You should have a bath before you go," Bochi said, without malice.

"I should, yes," Raguel said, looking down to him. He slid his fingers into Bochi's hair, and pulled his friend a little closer. "You seem to want for human company, Bochi."

"I found yours, didn't I?" The little warlock tapped one hand's claws on Raguel's chest one at a time. "Hold me a while more."

"What am I, your father, now?" He gripped Bochi's hair a little more tightly. Bochi wasn't going to be lonely while he was here.

"If you like... well, not really. I'll charge you after breakfast."

-

"Payment is in service," Bochi said, with one of his smaller smiles. They were in the middle of the tavern, with the window-shutters closed and bolted. The town was still completely silent outside.

"Service? You don't want me to fight for you, do you?" Raguel nearly dropped his fruit. "I have to get to Aran. I have to continue my mission. It's important."

"Yes, it is. You're also here a week early, thanks to Cern," Bochi explained, peeling his breakfast with his claws, "and Aran sent word he would like another day or two to prepare. The Spiders' fortress isn't always habitable for humans. They had to prepare silk bridges for me when I was an initiate."

"I can climb..." but Raguel had resigned himself to this fate. "Do you want me to serve you for a day?"

"Oh, Raguel, I could use those arms for the rest of my life," Bochi said, obviously referring to his strength. Raguel had noticed when Bochi sat on him that he was a little bit lighter than a human being would be... he had lost his strength from lack of use, perhaps? "No, you're not going to fight for me. I wouldn't let you. You have the education to read and translate Latin into our local tongue here. I want you to do that for me with this bestiary. It's no grimoire, there's nothing soul-threatening here... and then, after that, you'll man the tavern."

"What does that involve?"

"Serve whoever comes in with whatever food or drink is necessary, but remember that some of the job is social. If Marishka comes in, she won't just want payment for the supplies she brings. She expects gossip. She'll forgive you for not having any, though, if you receive hers graciously. Onward to the book."

Breakfast done, Bochi wrapped his legs around Raguel's neck and they walked like this to the bar, where the book and translation notes waited for Raguel. Bochi had taken up this practice from the morning onward, delighting in using Raguel for transport. He unwrapped himself from his new servant and walked up the wall to the ceiling, where a trapdoor waited to let him into the library. "Call me down when you're done, young Raguel."

Raguel looked away, and paused. After getting back to his senses, he picked up the quill in front of him, and dutifully began to translate the life history of the Catoblepas.

Oh, it laid eggs.

-

"I have a new neighbour this month," continued Marishka, as she finished her wine. Raguel had tried not to just stare at her since she detailed 'the great big mass', as the stocky woman had described the estrangement with her husband (or, perhaps, her husband). There had been a ring of bizarre honesty in her voice as she had described that, and now Raguel was prepared to believe anything. Even possessed people didn't talk like this. "Ivet. Her husband died of something-or-other and she expected his sister to call her a witch, so she moved here."

"Sensible," said Raguel, cleaning a mug.

"So, she hires a couple of boys to till the land, and she starts setting everything up. Clever lass. Used to servants, obviously, but she knew what would grow here." Marishka fiddled with her necklace - there was a complicated pendant on it, with multiple small stones, but the light was mainly from behind her, so Raguel couldn't tell what kind they were. "She comes over to my place, the night after she gets here."

"Mmhm."

"She comes over to my place, and she's got some sort of cake with her, and she asks me... And this was the first conversation, the one that started with 'I just got here'. She says...." There was long, deliberate pause.

Raguel's eyebrow raised. Outside, dogs barked. The town seemed to finally move, now that Raguel had been here for more than a day. He could hear the general chat outside, the horses, the small child looking in the window.

Oh, the things that child had heard.

Finally, Marishka spoke:

"She asks me how to pick up younger men."

"She could start with hay, and work her way up to -- oh." Oh.

"'Oh'. I can't for the love of the Lord remember what I told her, and you know the worst thing about that?" This was a song she'd clearly sung before, and she was good at it.

"What is?"

"She's getting them now. Two a week."

"Two a week?! The -- the same two, every week?" Raguel clutched the mug as though it were Christ himself.

"Not the same two." Marishka emphasised each syllable with a rap of her knuckle on the bar.

"Oh, no."

"A. New. Two."

"No."

"She'd better tell me what I told her, or God help me, I'm breaking in an hour after the next one goes in her home, and I'm lifting him up, and I'm saying 'WHAT DID SHE SAY TO YOU'."

-

Once Marishka was gone - and her goods loaded into the pottage for the evening and the larder for the week - the odd customer wandered in, drank, and wandered out. They were lazily curious as to who Raguel was, but not in the least bit suspicious. They had no fear of strangers here.

Once it was time to close the Tavern, the near-untouched stew was left to the voracious appetites of Bochi and Raguel. They talked a lot, once the bestiary was translated (who knew Yuxa had a venomous barb?). Bochi ate up Marishka's gossip like a man starved, and the little glimmer of mischief in his pink eyes from just knowing such information was worth the likely sin of relaying it.

Raguel was forming a habit of quickly becoming very close to strange men he would often, in other contexts, have been ordered to kill. Of course, they had to have posed some serious threat first, to warrant sending an exorcist-knight from the main fortresses, but all the same. Heretics, he had been taught, were heretics, and wilfully so, in the face of Christ's obvious supremacy.

Obvious - but it would not have been obvious to anyone outside Christ's lands. The Order taught them that all sins committed in Christ's name could not possibly be sins, from death on the battlefield to the 'fun' they all knew the Order's troops engaged in with the last crusade. It turned Raguel's stomach to think of it, but it -

Perhaps this was Bochi's influence, he thought. Leading him from thoughts Bochi judged as harmful, for his own good.

"Do you know Marishka's husband?"

"What, Danijel, the priest? He's dead, Raguel."

"What? She killed him?"

"No, we hanged him."

"Why?"

"He moved here after being accused of witchcraft, then accused one of ours of witchcraft and killed him, so..."

Bochi was probably not changing his mind on anything, because while the warlock found this very funny, Raguel somehow couldn't. If Bochi was introducing heresies to Raguel's mind, he'd have felt them accelerate while here, rather than their growing at the same rate as they were back when he was in the Order's territory. Raguel remembered the faces of witches he'd been called in to exorcise.

Bochi poked his cheek.

"What's on your mind, Raguel?"

"The worm-plague killed my bride-to-be," he lied, looking into his stew. No pheasant, this time.

"Did you get time to grieve before leaving?" Bochi's hand closed around Raguel's forearm, claw-less.

"There was a funeral. I am told I was undignified." Raguel meant to put his hand over Bochi's, but didn't move.

"I'm not sure I follow, Raguel. Undignified?" Bochi sat closer.

"I cried. They could hear me. It was not expected of someone of my station, they explained, but I didn't understand, being one of the rabble, you know. A foundling."

"Crying at the funeral of your lover, like some common lover. How could you, Raguel?" Bochi's index finger stretched and poked its sharp tip into Raguel's cheek. His voice was honeyed silver. "You can cry over the deaths of those you love, you know, without doing anything wrong. There was no sin there."

"Are you..." Raguel choked off his own reply. He clenched his fists on the table. "Don't use your web like this."

"No, no, I'll tell you if I want to do it, and ask you beforehand, unless we arrange otherwise. Raguel." Bochi moved to stand behind Raguel's stool, and wrapped his arms around the man's shoulders. "I'm just telling you the truth. If you feel it, you must already agree with me."

He discussed Magdalene for a while, eventually resuming the meal. The strange, warm intimacy he felt with Bochi faded a little for the duration of the conversation, as though it had no place there. He trusted Bochi, of course, but he didn't want to complicate --

He needed to leave the next day.

-

"You did well, little Raguel," Bochi said, having skimmed over Raguel's translation. It was late evening, and the two were behind the bar, close together for warmth. Raguel looked down. "I'll have to correct some of it, but the bull's work is done... now, what's the matter?"

"Nothing, Bochi." The light was leaving the library rapidly again this evening. Raguel busied himself with lighting candles, which meant he had his back to Bochi.

"Little Raguel?"

This was shameful. Raguel went from looking down to looking to the side. Bochi's largest smile just happened, Raguel was fairly sure, because he knew he was doing something.

"Do you like it when I call you things like that? Little one."

Raguel sighed out a small hiss.

"Boy."

He clutched the candlestick, and turned around. He would have to stand up to him, now.

"Can we not..." but Bochi had climbed him again, wrapped around him from behind, and he was right next to Raguel's ear, and whispering:

"My Raguel. My boy."

"Bochi," Raguel keened, and clutched his hand into Bochi's hair, pushing the librarian's face down onto him, unsure of himself, of what was happening, of how he felt. "Stop - tickling me. This is ridiculous."

"No," Bochi said, his smooth chitinous legs firmly wrapped around Raguel's waist in a grip he had no hope of removing, "No, I won't stop. I think this is important. Little... helpless... Raguel."

Raguel's knees gave out, from the tingling of being whispered to, and from emotion. A smile broke out on his face, then, and Bochi was right - it was a very helpless, very instinctive thing. Bochi laughed at him, but somehow, that was good.

"I suppose this makes you the father, after all," Raguel murmured.

"Not really," Bochi said. "Time for bed, boy. You've paid me in full, and you can leave tomorrow, but... I'm going to talk to you before you sleep again."

"Another experiment?"

"No, for pleasure. You'll like it."

"All right."