Key and Rain

Hi y’all,

What is it about relationships, that they are so hard to get right, that it is so hard to choose right, and I mean both the Other (the capital O Other!) and, again and again during the relationship, remember that we need to chose for our own selves and to our selves be true (sorry Old Will, I am butchering you here), at such high cost often, and how can at the same time my core conviction remain still, that all of that ought to have levity and be kind of easy, when all is said and done?

What I endlessly enjoy about Rebecca Thorne’s Tomes & Tea series (so many things) is that she always offers her characters a way out of the messes of their own making and sustains that levity. They are allowed to keep their training wheels on and learn, learn, learn with each other, and no-one is running away just because their love interest still needs to grow as a person (as any person will anyway, all their life). I love that they are allowed to have their hangups, their annoying habits, and piss their partners off a little, but that they do so always within the framework of the loving and caring relationship. I recently got into a long convoluted text exchange wherein my friend vehemently affirmed that yes, inside a secure relationship, of course people are allowed to come home aggravated and vent about work in an unduly pissed-off and way too grumpy manner, or do some other not a hundred percent ideal, stupid thing like take the wrong tone just because you’re angry and stressed. Of course, my mate said, people are allowed to grow and learn inside a partnership. You don’t need to be perfect first in order to have one. (Newsflash, none of us will ever be anyway, of course.)

I have been asking myself whether I am more of a Reyna or a Kianthe! I’ve deduced, right now in life, I am definitely more intimately familiar with the way Kianthe reacts to shock and worry by spiralling. While Reyna is structured, organised and, after careful deliberation, utterly calm inside the crisis, gets shit done, Kianthe first needs to find a way to compartmentalise and sort her huge feelings out. Aw girl. Can I ever relate. What I personally have managed to avoid though, is taking on a mob of dragons all by myself… (A flock? A murder? A gaggle? A pride? A parliament? I am pretty sure I am at liberty to choose here as it’s mythology…)

The first part of Rebecca Thorne’s Tomes & Tea series, Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea, sees Kianthe and Reyna’s chosen hometown of Tawny be almost burned to the ground by a slew of aggravated dragons. Kianthe can only avert the loss of their newly found friends, home and business there by using up all of the magic the Stone of Seeing grants her, and at great danger to her own life. But before she collapses from magic drain in an unconscious heap in the snow, where Reyna has to find her as a huge dragon looms over her helpless partner, she manages to talk with the dragons. She finds out the reason for the attacks. There is residual magic in the area which lingers behind after someone stole three dragon eggs years ago. They were apparently briefly stored in the Tawny environs, before being moved. And that magical echo draws the dragons in search of their lost offspring. No-one knows where the eggs have been taken to. So Kianthe promises to find out, if the dragons in their turn leave Tawny be. During Kianthe’s arduous and slow recovery from magic drain, Reyna does have to say a thing or two about risking one’s life and scaring one’s girlfriend half to death in the process. So Reyna does not keep her feelings from her partner. I was moved by this, as I find it describes the dilemma of weighing what really needs to be hashed out with someone against any given minor or major crisis they might have to deal with at the time. How often do we come across this thought, ‘Now is not the time!’ Well then, but when is? Life does not wait for us to finish dealing with one thing before throwing up another. That may be hard and often inconvenient, but when has delaying or ignoring anything ever improved the matter at hand? Life happens, all at once. It needs to be possible to allow one’s friends, family, partner to approach us with something that weighs on them. Work does not wait for us to be well, either, before it demands our attention with one nuisance or the other. And it is expected that we simply get on with it. Is it not completely fucking insane, that we pull ourselves together for a job, but then demand from people close to us to refrain from bothering us with their concerns? Oh, so backbreaking and stressful work environments are acceptable and a matter of course to sort out, but some relevant emotional labour which only serves to better our understanding of one another is too much?

Why should a partner have to censor their own self, if they have relevant matters to say or discuss? And yet I personally have been doing this many, many times, and still find it incredibly hard to approach someone when I need us to clear the air but know they are busy, or preoccupied.

Reyna and Kianthe both grappling with their worries about each other, whilst having very healthy limits and notions about the legitimate and more inward-focused fear of losing their own happiness, is so carefully balanced and explored by Thorne. Reyna, controlled and effective despite her fears, as long as she has one mystery or another to niggle away at, deserves to give her partner a piece of her mind post-draconic-nigh-annihilation. While it is Kianthe’s decision to take on ‘at least six (...), maybe closer to eight’ (chapter 20, I am reading the e-book) dragons alone, it is likewise true that this decision has repercussions far beyond herself. In this, the situation is mirroring an earlier crisis in this first book of the series: Reyna falls off the roof she is fixing, unconscious with fever, after not taking time to heal from a wound properly, which has gotten infected. Then, it is Kianthe’s turn to panic.

Each of them gets to have their, at times, hefty but fair say.

I have not had that experience directly, but I witnessed something like this as a bystander. One of my friends had gravely injured herself in what can perhaps be described as an act of contemporary suspended better judgement. I felt the worry, maybe something like anger, in her partner, even if I not once got to witness a conflict directly. What I did get to see from the sidelines was the superseding, if sometimes maybe a little exasperated, care. (Exasperate fondness is one of my favourite tropes anyway.) I also observed the response to that tending. Being cared for is also not always the easiest thing, especially if it is precipitated by an entirely avoidable injury. So there was, at least I thought so, also demonstrative regret at causing worry. An interchange of surely difficult, at times conflicting needs, to perhaps receive assurances for this being a one-off, to make amends, and to simply need help to get through the day. All that is what stuck with me. It made a profound impression. That is what I was reminded of by Reyna’s fall off the roof, by Kianthe’s, in hindsight, perhaps necessary, but still completely overdone act of going it alone.

So, teaching moment for all of us: One may tell one’s partner if she is in utter hubris, totally overestimating herself, and pushing the limits of a relationship’s strength by scaring their girl seven ways from Sunday. We may tell a partner if they are doing this. We may tell a friend, a family member. It is allowed, perhaps essential. Because, newsflash, reckless behaviour to oneself will impact our interactions with others. There are limits to everything. One boundary of a relationship may be a partner’s very dangerous occupation, habits, or constant not-here-ness, literally or metaphorically. (And when that rope of attachment is stretched beyond endurance by fear of losing our partner and the enormous pain that would bring, the switch will flip, and the rope needs to be and will be severed, before both tumble into an abyss.)

Reyna and Kianthe do not have an all-roses start. Yes, they have immediate chemistry. Of course! This is a sapphic cosy romance novel, with dragons! But for its first seasons, their relationship needs to be kept secret due to Reyna’s job and official affiliation with evil Queen Tilaine. It is long-distance on top. Kianthe is the arcandor, the mage of ages. Her task is to travel all of the realm and the countries beyond to help wherever her aid is needed. She is also the first of the two to propose a way out—but Reyna is not ready. This is alluded to again and again in the series, as Reyna’s occupation is at the root of her hesitation. Reyna’s employer is a cruel tyrant of a queen who would never stand for her vassals, or her guard, which Reyna is, to up and seek other gainful employment. Reyna has been raised to be loyal and dutiful. Quitting the job as Queensguard is simply treason. And the punishment is death.

Kianthe makes clear early on that she is convinced beautiful, kind, intelligent Reyna is simply in the wrongest of places and wasted as a Queensguard. Sexy competence at it notwithstanding. But it takes Reyna’s own experiences to open her eyes and it needs her own decisive move to leave to make her decision both right for her and sustainable.

I found myself asking: Could I do what Kianthe does? If needed to? Could I wait and endure and live my life while hoping, not knowing, and in all honesty needing someone else to move towards me, covering way more mileage towards my needs than maybe her own conviction and job situation allow for? Could I, likewise, step up and ask a partner to decide? After all, of course our character does not know what we, reading, do. Even if Reyna would agree to meet Kianthe more than halfway, would Kianthe not wonder if she could compensate her for it down the line? Are we allowed to want such a thing, to ask someone to change their life for the only benefit of increasing the probability of being ours, us being theirs? The hardened wizened feminist in me (who may operate on some completely bollocks code of conduct! Just because it is labelled ‘feminism’ it does not mean it is exempt from needing to be improved upon or being simply constituted of or warped by some psychologically completely incorrect, incomplete, received notions) wants to chide me for even daring to think to discuss this. After all, would that not constitute Putting on Pressure? Is this not Demanding, an Ultimatum, Limiting Someone Else’s Growth or whatever? The realist-romantic in me looks at me (yes from inside me, somehow, she’s an allegory, not the point y’all!) with her wise, crinkled eyes, and shrugs. ‘No such thing as a stasis and permanent equilibrium, love. You win some, you lose some. That is a relationship. It is always in flux.’

I have learned a new phrase these past few weeks. ‘Dynamic stability.’

It describes a system’s capacity to return to steady-state condition after an externally generated disturbance.

In my mind, it makes me see the sequence of plucking or bowing a string instrument. The oscillations of the string. Its return to silence. And its renewed humming and vibrating when I move my fingers again. I see the notes adding upp. This is how music emerges. From the notes and the pauses in between. I see a morphing and moving shape in many colours, shifting, and returning again and again to the same distinct silhouette in between fluctuations. The core, clarity, consistency, steady-state.

‘Dynamic stability.’

It’s technical.

It’s poetic.

It’s one of the most beautiful phrases I want to apply to human good romantic relationships in that I have ever heard.

I was obsessed with it. Maybe you can tell. (My phycisist friends will laugh at this… oh ye philistines!)

I come from a school of thought which investigates dominant and submissive, antagonistic and cooperative behaviour. I sometimes however forget my teachings. There is a legitimate take-away from them: we are allowed to growl and stand up for ourselves and tell our girl she needs to be shot of her shit job, get a shift on and open a tea and book shoop with us, to learn to look after herself better when she gets wounded by a bandit and not get an infection, or please, for [insert deity’s name of choice] on a shingle, stop overexerting herself and maybe limit herself to taking on six dragons or less at a time. Arguments, and working things out, together—dynamic stability.

Key and Rain: you are one of my all-time, favourite couples. I love you for being wonderful, and safe, and reliable, and a home to each other, trustworthy, dependable, adventurous and secure.

And all of you out there, jaded or no, single or not, I think you will find heart and comfort by reading (or listening to) Rebecca Thorne’s immensely pleasurable work.