Chapter 57: The Road North II

“How much will it cost?,” Kael asked.

“Four copper,” she said. “I’m not charging you for the diagnosis. Just the salve.” She produced a small jar from the shelf behind her. Dark green, the smell of something herbal underneath something sharper. “Apply morning and evening. Don’t skip the evening application, that’s when the tissue tries to repair and the salve supports the process.”

Kael paid four copper and counted what remained in his palm before pocketing it.

Fourteen silver and six copper coins.

Not a comfortable number. Not a dangerous one yet either. Somewhere in the middle where you noticed it without panicking about it.

He pocketed it and picked up the jar.

Mira looked at the jar in his hand when they came back out. “I could have told you most of that.”

“You told me the healer was good,” he said. “You were right.”

She looked at him for a moment with the expression she’d been wearing since the dojo gate. The one that was recalibrating something she hadn’t finished recalibrating yet.

Then she looked at the notice board.

“There’s an inn,” she said. “Cheap. Clean enough. We should stop for the night.”

He looked at the light. Still afternoon. They could cover more ground before dark.

He looked at her posture. At the performing fine that wasn’t fine.

“Yes,” he said.

The inn had four rooms and a common area with a fireplace that the innkeeper had lit early because the evening air at this altitude had opinions about autumn. Kael got two rooms. Three silver total.

He had just eleven silver and six copper remaining.

He noted it and set it aside. Not dangerous yet. Not comfortable either. Work would come when the arm allowed it and not before.

He noted it and set it aside.

They ate in the common area. The food was simple and hot and Mira ate without appearing to taste it, which he recognized as the particular autopilot of someone whose body was maintaining itself while their mind was somewhere else entirely.

He didn’t try to bring her back from wherever she was.

After dinner he built the fire up a little and sat beside it and took out the notebook.

Mira looked at it.

Looked at him.

“What is that,” she said.

“A notebook,” he said.

She waited for more. He opened it to a clean page and picked up the pen.

She kept waiting.

“I write things down,” he said. “Things I’ve been told. So they’re not lost.”

She looked at the notebook. At the pages of small careful writing visible at the edges. At his face. At the ring on his left hand.

She looked back at the fire.

She didn’t ask what things or who told him.

He started writing.

Seradhiel talked that night about the road. Not this road specifically. Roads in general. The ones she’d traveled before the war when travel was still something she did by choice rather than necessity. The eastern road that ran through the territories that were now desert. The mountain passes that no longer existed because the war had reshaped the geology of three different regions. The road to the city with the loud markets where she’d loved being anonymous.

Kael wrote.

Across the fire Mira’s eyes closed. Her breathing evened out with the particular rhythm of someone who had been running on insufficient sleep for three weeks and had finally found a warm enough safe enough place to stop pretending otherwise.

“I’m going to sleep,” she said. Not tiredly. Just as a statement of fact delivered to the fire rather than to Kael.

She went to her room without waiting for a response.

He heard the door of her room close. Not hard. Just closed.

Kael looked at the empty chair across from him. At the half-finished bowl she’d left on the table. At the fire.

Kael kept writing.

“She is exhausted,” Seradhiel said, after a while. Her voice quieter than usual. The quality it took when she was making an observation she hadn’t decided to make until it came out. “Not physically. The other kind.”

“I know,” Kael said quietly.

“She has been holding herself together through forward motion,” Seradhiel said. “The dojo, the fight, the gate, the road. As long as there was something to move toward she moved. Now there is only north and north is not a destination.”

“She’ll find her footing,” he said.

“Yes,” Seradhiel said. “She will. She is a strong mortal. I give her that.” A pause. “I am simply noting that footing takes time to find after certain kinds of loss. And that the people around her would do well to understand that forward motion and recovery are not the same thing.”

Kael set the pen down.

Looked at the fire.

Looked at the notebook in his lap.

“Are you talking about her,” he said quietly, “or about you.”

Seradhiel was quiet for a long moment.

“Both,” she said. “Possibly.”

He closed the notebook.

Set it on the floor beside him.

The fire crackled. The inn was quiet around them. The road north was outside and it would still be north in the morning and that was enough for tonight.

He closed his eyes.

“Kael,” Seradhiel said.

“Yes,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said. “For the road. For not rushing it.”

He didn’t say anything.

He didn’t need to.

_ _

Kael was up before dawn.

The arm had delivered on its promise overnight. What had been a pointed complaint at dinner was now a sustained argument that started at the shoulder and had opinions all the way down to the elbow. He sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and applied the salve with his right hand, working it into the shoulder joint with the particular care of someone who had learned a long time ago that ignoring injury was a strategy with a short shelf life.

The smell of it filled the small room. Herbal underneath something sharper. The healer had been right about the evening application. He could feel the difference from the morning one almost immediately, the tissue responding to whatever was in the salve with a grudging cooperation that suggested it would rather keep complaining but had been overruled.

Your gift is the motivation for my creation. Give me more motivation!