Chapter 100: Stay a Little Longer

Chapter 100: Stay a Little Longer

The spiced flatbread came from a stall by the east gate that didn’t deliver.

Silas knew this because he had checked the delivery list first, then walked across campus in the cold to queue behind three fourth-years arguing about a duel. He told himself it was because the delivery flatbread was dry. That was true. It was also true that Elyra had eaten three pieces of the good kind last time and ignored everything else on the table, and he had noticed.

He bought a pot of lentil stew from the same stall, because a person couldn’t live on bread, and carried the whole lot back wrapped in paper. Then he unwrapped it and put it in his own dishes, so it would look as though it had simply arrived.

At seven, Elyra knocked.

She stepped in, and the reading came and waited behind his eyes. He dismissed it and reached for her coat.

She looked tired. Her hair was coming loose, and she kept rubbing at an ink stain on the side of her hand. She stopped just inside the door, sniffed, and turned toward the table.

"That’s the east gate stall," she said.

"It’s flatbread," Silas said.

"It’s their flatbread. They put fennel in it. Nobody else does." She lifted the cloth over the basket and looked at him. "They don’t deliver."

"Don’t they?" Silas asked.

"Silas," Elyra said.

"I was passing," he said, which was a lie so bad that she laughed out loud, and some of the tiredness went out of her face.

Then she saw the trays.

She crouched beside them without asking, still in her coat, and looked at the two shallow trays of dark wet substrate in the corner. The pale visitor was sitting on the rim of the nearer one again, glowing faintly.

"You’ve bought dirt," Elyra said.

"I’ve bought very old dirt," Silas said.

"Why?" Elyra asked.

"There might be a cultivation ingredient in it. A moss. It’s used in incense, if a refiner prepares it properly." He crouched beside her. "Most of what’s in there is dead. Some of it might only be dormant. I’m testing whether any of it wakes up."

"In a puddle," Elyra said.

"In shade and moisture. It grows near water," Silas said.

She looked at the trays a little longer, then at the visitor on the rim. "It likes sitting there."

"I noticed," Silas said.

"Don’t read anything into that." Elyra stood and left her coat and boots by the door. "Little ones like damp edges the way cats like warm laundry. It doesn’t mean your moss is alive, or valuable, or anything except that it’s damp."

"I wasn’t going to," Silas said.

"You were a bit," Elyra said, and went to wash her hands.

***

They ate at the table. She tore the flatbread the way she always did, crust first, working around the edge and leaving the soft middle in a little pile on her plate as though it were the part you threw away.

"That’s the best part," Silas said, unable to stand it.

"It’s the boring part. It’s just bread," Elyra said.

"It’s all just bread," Silas said.

"The edge has the fennel. The middle is a pillow." She pushed the pile toward him. "You can have the pillows."

He ate them. Nim, who had been watching from the end of the bench, climbed up onto the table, walked past the bread entirely, and settled himself on the cloth that had covered the basket.

"That’s for the bread," Silas said.

"It’s warm," Nim said, and closed his eyes.

Elyra laughed, and Silas gave up on the cloth.

"Tell me about the stupid day," he said.

She made a face and pushed her stew around with her spoon.

"Applied spirit taxonomy," she said. "It’s a seminar. We had to write a paper ranking twenty common spirits by usefulness to a practitioner. Most useful first."

"And you didn’t," Silas said.

"I wrote that the question was wrong." Her spoon stopped moving. "You can’t rank them like tools. A wind spirit that’ll carry a message for you isn’t useful the way a lamp is useful. It’s choosing to. If you write it down as a tool, people start treating it as one, and then they’re surprised when it leaves. So I wrote that, with examples, and I ranked nothing."

"What did you get?" Silas asked.

"Answer the question asked, Thale." She did a dry, nasal voice that was clearly the instructor’s. "And a mark I’m not going to tell you."

"That bad?" Silas asked.

"Worse than I’ve had all year." She glared at the stew. "And the worst part is that I care. I know I’m right. I’d write it again. But I also wanted the mark. I like being good at things, and I don’t like being told I’m not, even by someone who’s wrong."

His first impulse was to suggest giving the instructor the list and putting her objection underneath. He’d spent enough of his old working life arranging answers to suit people. She’d probably considered that already, and he wanted to hear the answer she’d refused to give.

"What would you have written," he asked instead, "if you’d answered it?"

Elyra blinked. Then she thought about it properly.

"Lilt would be last," she said. "Absolutely last. It’s useless. It steals hats. Once it spent a whole afternoon blowing one leaf around a courtyard because it liked the noise." A smile broke through, small and fond. "It’s useless and I love it. That’s why the question’s wrong."

"Then you’d have failed either way," Silas said.

"I would, wouldn’t I." She picked up her spoon again.

She reached up to retie her hair, both hands behind her head, the loose copper strands falling over her wrists, and for a second the lamplight caught the side of her face and the bare line of her neck. Silas forgot what he’d been about to say. He looked down at his bowl and found he’d been holding his spoon in midair for no reason at all.

Eat your stew, he told himself. Like a normal person.

"Your knee’s torn," Elyra said.

He looked down. The scuff from the east yard had become a small split in the cloth.

"I fell over in a practical," Silas said.

"Give them to me sometime and I’ll mend it." She said it as if it were nothing. "I mend everything. My own things, mostly. I like it."

Silas looked at her ink-stained fingers, trying to picture a needle in them.

"You mend?" Silas asked.

"Why does everyone say it like that?" She looked faintly offended. "I learned when I was small, because I hated waiting for someone else to fix my things. Now I just like it. You put something back the way it should be, and you can see it’s done." She shrugged. "It’s the only thing I do that nobody expects."

***

It was nearly ten when she pushed her chair back and reached for her boots.

"I should go," she said. "I have to rewrite the paper I’m not going to rewrite."

Silas watched her pull the first boot on. He wanted another hour, though he had no excuse for asking.

"Stay a bit longer," he said. "If you want."

Elyra stopped with the second boot in her hand.

"Why?" she asked. It wasn’t suspicious. It was a real question.

He set his cup down.

"No reason," he said. "I’d like you to."

She looked at him for a moment. Then she put the boot down, pulled the first one back off, and tucked her feet up under her in the guest chair again.

"Then give me your trousers," she said. "The torn ones. I’ve got thread in my bag."

He fetched a spare pair and changed in the bathroom. When he came out, he handed her the torn trousers, uncomfortably aware that he had just asked her to stay and immediately given her his laundry. Elyra had already threaded her needle. She spread the cloth beneath the lamp and began making small, neat stitches.

Silas took the dart out of its case and cleaned the groove, which didn’t need cleaning. Nim slept on the warm cloth. The visitor drifted from the tray rim to the windowsill and stayed there. He listened to the quiet pull of thread through cloth.

When she bit off the thread and held up the trousers, the split was gone. He ran a finger beside the neat seam before folding them over his knee.

"Done," Elyra said, pleased.

She left near midnight. Nim said goodbye from the cloth without opening his eyes.

While drying the bowls, Silas remembered his unanswered question about telling faint from far. He could ask another evening. For now he put the bowls away, picked up the mended trousers, and hung them where he could find them in the morning.