Chapter 59: Mira Talks

They both stood at the edge of the market and ate and watched the town move around them and didn’t say anything for a while and that was fine.

Every day since that morning had been something. Gate beasts. Errands. A compression point that wouldn’t hold past five seconds. A class C ambush predator on a ceiling. Remnants on a mountain pass. A dojo courtyard with a post in the center of it.

One thing after another without a gap between them long enough to actually notice the previous thing had happened.

He ate his honey pastry.

Watched the dog in the sunlight shift position without waking up.

‘This,’ he thought. ‘This is what I was trying to have when I took the logistics desk.’

He hadn’t found it there either. But at least here the chaos was interesting.

That evening at the inn Mira sat across from him at the table and didn’t excuse herself early.

That was new.

She didn’t say much. Neither did he. The fire was going and the common area had three other guests who were having their own conversations and the noise of them filled the space between Kael and Mira in a way that didn’t require either of them to fill it themselves.

At some point she said, “The monitoring job paid eight copper.”

“Yes,” he said.

“You could pick up the livestock problem tomorrow,” she said. “Class F. Probably two hours to locate and clear. Pays better than monitoring.”

“How much better,” he said.

“Bounty board said fifteen copper,” she said. “Plus the farmer will feed you.”

He looked at her.

She was looking at the fire with the expression of someone who had been doing a lot of thinking recently and had apparently directed some of it toward practical matters.

“You’ve been planning this,” he said.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “There’s a difference.”

He almost smiled. She’d used the same distinction he’d used about the healer that morning and either hadn’t noticed or had noticed and didn’t care.

“Fifteen copper,” he said. “Plus a meal.”

“Plus a meal,” she confirmed.

He looked at the fire.

“Alright,” he said.

She looked at him then. Quick. The recalibrating expression that had been there since the dojo and was slowly becoming something else. Not finished yet, still in process, but moving in a direction.

Then she looked back at the fire.

They sat there until the other guests left and the innkeeper started putting out the lamps and neither of them moved to go upstairs for a while after that.

_ _

The farmer’s name was Aldous and he talked almost as much as Dorin.

The difference was Dorin talked to fill silence and Aldous talked because he was so relieved to have someone to talk to that the words came out in the particular rush of someone who had been holding them back for two weeks while a Gate beast took his livestock one at a time and there was nothing he could do about it.

Kael cleared the beast in forty minutes. Class F, operating solo, the kind of creature that was genuinely dangerous to unawakened farmers and genuinely unremarkable to a Bronze Realm cultivator with a new sword and a Void pathway running clean. One Void Compression Strike at close range. The beast dropped. The Gate it had come through had already closed. It had been operating on stored Essence, cut off from its source, which explained why it had been taking livestock rather than ranging further.

Aldous fed him something hot that turned out to be a meat stew with root vegetables that was significantly better than anything the inn had produced. He pressed fifteen copper into Kael’s hand with both of his, the grip of someone who meant the transaction to convey more than the currency could carry.

“Thank you,” he said. Simply. The word doing the work it was built to do.

Kael pocketed the copper and walked back to town.

Nine silver and twenty-seven copper total. He noted it without stopping.

Mira was at the table when he got back.

She’d been there a while from the look of it. A cup of something in front of her that had gone from hot to warm to whatever came after warm, the fire lower than it had been when he left that morning, the common area empty except for her.

She looked up when he came in.

Looked at him. At the sword. At his arm.

“How’s the arm,” she said.

“Better than this morning,” he said. Which was true. The salve was doing what the healer said it would do. Worse before getting better, but the worse had peaked somewhere around midday and the trajectory since had been cautiously encouraging.

He sat across from her.

She looked at her cup.

He looked at the fire.

The inn was quiet around them. The innkeeper had gone to the back. The other guests weren’t down yet. Just the two of them and the fire and the particular quality of an evening that hadn’t decided what it was going to be yet.

Mira said, “My youngest sibling used to laugh at everything.”

Kael looked at her.

She was still looking at her cup. Not at him. The words coming out the way words came out sometimes when a person had been carrying them long enough that they stopped being something held and started being something that needed somewhere to go.

“Not politely,” she said. “Not the kind of laugh you do when something is funny enough to warrant it. The kind that just… happened. Like her body decided something was funny before she did and the laugh was already out before she could evaluate whether it was appropriate.” A small pause. “She laughed at things that weren’t funny. She laughed at things that were. She laughed at her own jokes before she finished telling them which meant you could never tell if the joke was actually funny or if you were just laughing because she was.”

Kael said nothing.

“Her name was Sela,” Mira said. “She was seventeen.”

The fire crackled once. Settled.

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