Chapter 249: Leaving the Garden [BONUS]

"Will you come back?" Sera asked.

She asked it on the second evening, while she was helping Hanne carry the supper things to the kitchen. She stopped in his doorway with a stack of bowls in her arms and asked it the way she asked about birds and bread, plainly, as if it were a simple question with a simple answer.

Encrid had been dreading it all day.

"I’d like to," he said.

"That isn’t the same thing."

Encrid smiled. He had noticed this before but the girl was too mature for her age.

Sera put the bowls down on the table by the door and came in. Pudding was riding on her shoulder again. It looked at Encrid with several of its eyes and then turned its whole furry body away from him, as though it had decided he was in trouble.

"Father told me you’re going north," Sera said. "To where the people from the Wall are."

"Yes."

"And he’s going with you."

"Yes. I’m sorry about that part. I know he doesn’t like to leave you."

"He’s never liked it." She sat on the stool. "But he always goes anyway, when it’s important. I used to be angry about it, when I was small. I’d lie in bed being cold and think that if he loved me, he wouldn’t go." She smoothed her skirt with both hands.

"Then one winter, Crescent told me that every time he left, he came back with a new doctor or a new medicine or a new book about Stars. He wasn’t leaving me. He was looking for a way out for me."

She looked at Encrid.

"So I’m not angry anymore. But I want you to tell me you’ll come back. Because you’re the one who found the way out. And I want to show you."

"Show me what?"

"Everything," Sera said simply. "The plum tree when it flowers. Me running. I’ve never run before. The Sage says I can try in spring."

He thought of Gus on the bridge, holding the lamp. Of Wren, at the end of the Span, asking him to promise he would come back alive. Of Arthur’s letter, folded in Gus’s coat, ending with the same three words.

’I keep making promises to children,’ he thought. ’One of these days, I’m going to break one.’

He made it anyway.

"I’ll come back," he said. "I want to see you run."

Sera smiled. Then she picked up her bowls and went down the hall, and he heard her tell Hanne that the stew had been too salty, and Hanne telling her it was not, and the two of them arguing about it all the way to the kitchen.

? ? ?

They left before dawn on the third morning.

The Reaper had found a small strongbox in the storeroom, the kind merchants used for carrying coin on the road. It had thick iron walls and a lid that locked with a key. He lined it with folded wool so that it would not rattle, and set the Pillow inside it, wrapped in a heavy cloth.

He left a gap at one corner of the lid, no wider than a finger.

"So it can breathe," he said, when Encrid looked at it.

Encrid did not ask what he meant. He was fairly sure the Reaper did not know himself. He had simply noticed that the scorch marks always stopped at the windowsill, and he had decided that whatever was taking care of them should be allowed to keep doing it.

The Reaper did not ask questions he did not need answered. It was one of the things Encrid liked best about him.

The strongbox went into a peddler’s carrying frame, and the Reaper settled the frame on his own back without a word. Encrid carried a small pack with the Sage’s medicines, his coat, and Winter Oath in its plain scabbard. He could feel the sword’s weight on his shoulder. He did not mind it. It was the first thing he had carried in a month.

The night before, the Reaper had spoken with five people.

Encrid had not been there. He had not asked who they were, and the Reaper had not offered their names. But in the morning, when they met in the kitchen, the Reaper had said only one thing.

"It is done. Five doors. Five roads."

? ? ?

The Sage met them at the gate with his arms folded and a cloth bag hanging from his wrist.

"Thirty days of the green one," he said, and shoved the bag into Encrid’s hands. "There’s a paper inside with every rule I told you. Read it every morning. If you’ve forgotten one, start again from the top."

"I will."

"And come back with all your pieces. I’ve spent too long sewing them together to have some fool on the road undo my work."

"I’ll do my best."

"Your best is how you ended up in my garden." The old man turned to the Reaper. "And you. If he dies, don’t bring him back here. I don’t want to see it."

"I will not bring him back dead," the Reaper said. "I will bring him back alive."

"See that you do."

Sera came out last, wrapped in her thick shawl, with her breath making small clouds in the cold air. She did not give Encrid anything. She had already given him the bread. She only came close and hugged him around the middle, carefully, the way the Sage had taught her, keeping well away from the side where his stitches were.

It lasted only a moment.

Then she stepped back and hugged her father, and that lasted much longer.

When it was over, the Reaper turned his face toward the road, and he did not turn it back.

They walked out through the gate.

The road beyond it was narrow and frozen, running between bare fields toward a line of dark hills. Encrid’s legs ached before they had gone a hundred paces. He did not stop. He counted his steps, as he had done in the garden, and when he reached two hundred, he started again.

Behind them, in the grey light, the moss on top of the garden wall slowly lifted, as if something long and heavy had finally left it.

{ At last. }

The voice in his mind was tired, but there was something in it that might almost have been relief.

{ That garden was very boring. }

"You ate everything in it."

{ I ate what was offered by the house. That is different. }

Encrid did not argue.

He walked on, with the Reaper beside him and a strongbox full of fire on the Reaper’s back. Above them, somewhere he could not see, something with one healing wing kept pace with them, slowly, against the morning wind.

? ? ?

Thank you for the magic castle, @Stingdragon ~