Chapter 60: Mira Talks II

“My mother made rice porridge on cold mornings,” Mira said. “With dried fruit and something sweet I never learned the name of because I always just called it the sweet thing and she always knew what I meant.” She turned the cup in her hands without lifting it. “She made it every cold morning for as long as I can remember. When I left for my first posting I was more worried about not having the porridge than about the job.” A pause. “That sounds stupid.”

“It doesn’t,” Kael said.

She glanced at him. Quick. Then back at the cup.

“My father checked my spear grip every time I left,” she said. “Every single time. For three years after I’d been doing it professionally. Every time I left for a job he would put his hand on the shaft just below mine and adjust it by about two millimeters and say nothing and then let go.” Her thumb moved along the shaft of the spear leaning against the table beside her. “I used to find it annoying. I used to think.. I know how to hold a spear. I’ve been doing this longer than some of your hunters have been cultivating.” She stopped. “The last time I left for a job he did it and I almost said something about it. I didn’t. I just let him adjust it by two millimeters and said nothing.” Another pause. “I’m glad I didn’t say anything.”

Kael looked at the fire.

He didn’t say I’m sorry. He didn’t say they sound wonderful or they would be proud or any of the things that were true and insufficient. He just sat there with the weight of what she’d said and let it be the weight it was without trying to make it lighter.

Mira looked at the fire too.

“Sela would have found something funny about all of this,” she said. “The ring. The sect. The fact that I got ambushed on a road I’ve run a hundred times and ended up in a courtyard for three weeks because I couldn’t figure out how to not betray someone I’d known for four days.” She almost smiled. It didn’t make it. Came close. “She would have laughed at that. The inappropriate kind. Before I finished explaining.”

“She sounds like she was right about most things,” Kael said.

Mira looked at him.

Something moved in her expression. Not the recalibrating look, something underneath it. The layer that the recalibrating look sat on top of.

“She was,” Mira said. “Annoyingly often.”

She picked up the cup. Drank what was left of it even though it had gone cold. Set it back down.

“I’m going to sleep,” she said. The same way she’d said it the night before. To the fire rather than to him, a statement rather than a farewell. But different from last night. The leaving felt less like escape and more like a conclusion.

She picked up her spear. Stood up.

Stopped.

“Thank you,” she said. Still not looking at him. “For not saying anything useful.”

He looked at her.

“The useful things are true,” he said. “They just don’t fit yet.”

She held that for a moment.

Then she went upstairs.

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

He sat with the fire for a while after that. Not opening the notebook immediately. Just sitting. The weight of what she’d said still in the room — not heavy, not light, just present in the way things were present when they’d been given somewhere to be.

After a while he opened the notebook.

He didn’t write anything for a long moment.

Then he wrote: Sela. Seventeen. Laughed before the joke was finished.

He wrote the porridge. The sweet thing with no name. The two millimeter grip adjustment that happened every time without comment for three years.

He wrote it all down so it existed somewhere outside the person who was carrying it.

“Kael,” Seradhiel said. Quietly. The quality her voice took in the dark after something had happened that she hadn’t expected to affect her and had.

“Yes,” he said.

“She gave you those names,” she said. “To hold.”

“Yes,” he said.

“That is,” she said, and stopped. Started again. “I have spoken to you every night for weeks. I have told you about the mountain and the general and the river and the city with the loud markets and the morning on the ridge before the valley.” A pause. “I told you those things because you asked. Because you opened the notebook and held the pen and waited.” Another pause, longer. “I did not understand until tonight what that waiting actually cost you. What it required of a person to hold that much of someone else without putting it down.”

Kael looked at what he’d written. At Sela’s name in small careful script.

“It doesn’t cost anything,” he said. “That’s the point of it.”

“Yes,” Seradhiel said. “That is exactly the point of it.” A beat of silence. “And that is why it is the hardest thing there is.”

He closed the notebook.

Set it on the table.

The fire had burned low. The inn was completely quiet now. The road outside dark and still.

He sat there for a long time after that.

Not thinking about anything in particular.

Just sitting with the names.

_ _

The pre-dawn conversation that morning was about food.

Specifically about the difference between the food available in Valdenmoor and the food Kael had access to in his previous life, which Seradhiel had been curious about since the notebook session where he’d mentioned convenience store sandwiches in passing and she’d asked what a convenience store was and the explanation had taken longer than either of them expected.

“So the food was available at any hour,” she said.

“Most of it,” Kael said quietly, the salve jar open on the bed beside him, working it into the shoulder with his right hand in the dark. “The good places are closed. The convenient ones stayed open.”

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