Chapter 114: All of It

Chapter 114: All of It

Silas opened the door and stood in the doorway for a moment with the collection box in his hands.

His reserve began replenishing at the room’s doubled pace. He was still tired, and he badly wanted to get out of his dusty clothes, but there was nobody waiting for him to lift another tray. The air smelled of his own soap and the faint mineral damp from the windowsill.

Home, he thought, and didn’t feel at all silly about it.

The pocket at his hip shimmered. Nim tumbled out onto the floor, shook himself all over, and went straight to the pillow, where he turned around three times and then, very seriously, began to check his belongings. The bell came out of his little space, then the bead, then the two feathers, and finally the bent spoon, which he examined from every side.

"Did you think something would get lost?" Silas asked.

"I was checking," Nim said. "Harrowglass smelled like a place that steals spoons."

He put everything back except the bell and lay down with it under his chin.

Silas went to the windowsill.

The original moss was still alive on its slate. The three strands had grown a little longer, and the fourth had come up properly. Nothing spectacular had happened while he was gone. It had simply kept going.

He opened Pell’s box beside it.

Three hand-sized pads of thick silver growth on their thin stone backing caught the evening light all at once. Next to them, his windowsill patch looked like four stray hairs.

He settled the pads on the shaded end of the sill, on stones, apart from each other, where the draft from the frame could reach them and the sun couldn’t. He set the little cloth bundle on the desk, separate, and wrote on a scrap of paper beside it: Assessment. Corwen’s. Leander’s introduction.

Then he washed off two days of dust, changed, and sat on the edge of the bed with his communicator before he could think about it too long.

I’m back, he wrote to Elyra. Everyone’s in one piece. I have a story, if you still want to hear it.

Her reply came so fast she must have been holding the device.

Yes. Now? I can be there in a quarter of an hour.

Now, he wrote.

***

She arrived in twelve minutes, slightly out of breath, with a paper bag in one hand.

She stepped in and looked at him before she looked at anything else. He realized he had been rubbing his eyes and lowered his hand.

"You look exhausted," Elyra said.

"It was a busy two days," Silas said.

"And you haven’t eaten." She held up the bag. "Bread rolls from the refectory. They were closing. I took the last six." She looked at him again. "You haven’t, have you?"

He’d eaten on the coach at midday. Since then he’d unpacked, washed, and written to her.

"No," he admitted.

"I knew it." She put the bag on the table and opened it. "Sit."

He sat. She sat in the guest chair and kicked her boots off without thinking about it, and he moved the cushion off the bed beside him so there was room, and after a moment she moved from the chair to sit there instead, on the edge of the bed, with the bag between them. He tore the first roll open and gave her the crust end without asking.

She looked at it, then at him, and smiled.

"So," she said. "All of it."

***

He told her.

He told her about the coach and Nim complaining that he was sitting on his ceiling, which made her laugh, and Nim lifted his head from the pillow to say, "He was," and put it down again. Then he admitted what had happened when they reached the court.

"I’d dragged Alden and Dagna across half the conservatory," he said. "In their free hour. And I had to stand there in front of them with a handful of dust."

"What did you do?" Elyra asked.

"Wanted to sink into the floor, mostly," Silas said. "The spot had dried out. We found a better one farther along, under a vent. I made them both lie on the paving to look."

She had stopped eating. She was watching him tell it, chin on her hand, as if she could see the court.

He told her about the galleries, too. He’d meant to tell that part lightly, the skitter and the rattle and the tray. But when he got to the glassback running up the frame, and the pane coming loose, and Dagna’s shield going up over Alden’s head just in time, Elyra went very quiet.

"The glass fell on you?" Elyra asked.

"On the shield," Silas said. "Dagna caught it. It broke on the shield and slid off." He paused. "It was close. I didn’t like it."

She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she nodded slowly, and her shoulders loosened, and she picked her roll back up.

He told her how they had trapped the skitter, finishing with Alden sitting on the crate while it scratched furiously beneath him. By the time he got to Dagna ordering Alden to pick glass out of her braid, Elyra was laughing again.

"And under the vent," Silas said, "there was something else. Small. Living right in the middle of the moss. I couldn’t see it. I don’t know what it was. When I reached for the center, it went tight, like a hand closing. When I worked the edges, it didn’t mind at all." He shrugged. "So I left the center."

Elyra looked at him for a long moment.

"I can’t tell you what it was," she said. "Not from that. It could be a dozen things. Little ones like damp stone. Some of them guard what they live in." She tilted her head. "But you didn’t push it."

"You told me not to," Silas said.

"I told you not to shout. I didn’t think you’d remember it in the middle of a ruin with something you wanted right in front of you." She smiled at him. "You remembered."

He didn’t know what to say to that, so he ate a roll.

After a while Elyra asked, "Have you told everyone this already?"

"Alden and Dagna were there," Silas said.

"I know," Elyra said. "I mean the story. Like this."

"No," Silas said. "You’re the first one I wanted to sit down and tell."

Her smile faltered for a moment, and she looked down at her hands. Silas wished he hadn’t answered quite so readily, then decided he was glad he had.

"Good," she said, very quietly.

Then she reached over and took his right hand and turned it palm up.

She examined his palm, turning it toward the lamp. There was nothing left of the little scrapes he’d collected at Harrowglass; regeneration had dealt with those long before the coach ride.

"All there," Silas said, trying to sound casual.

"I can see that," Elyra said. Her thumb brushed across his fingers.

She finished looking, but kept his hand. He could have taken it back easily. Instead he shifted a little closer so neither of them had to reach.

He became extremely aware of his own pulse, and of her knee beside his. He had been about to tell her what Leander had offered. It no longer seemed urgent.

"Your mother," Elyra said, after a while, still holding his hand. "Two days?"

"Two days," Silas said.

"I’m going to eat the middle of the bread," she said seriously.

He laughed. "I know."

"I mean it. I’m going to practice." She looked at the bag. "I’ll start tomorrow."

She’s nervous, he thought, and found it unexpectedly touching. He didn’t tell her Mara would love her. He didn’t know that. He only knew she wanted to do it properly.

"Come by tomorrow evening," he said. "I’ve got to take the sample to a broker in the morning. Come after that, and we’ll eat something. Not bread."

Elyra looked at him, and the smile came back.

"Tomorrow," she said. "After your broker."

She let go of his hand, finally, when she stood to put her boots on. He felt the absence of it more than he should have.

On the windowsill, the three pads of Harrowglass silver caught the lamplight beside his four small strands, and Nim, asleep on the pillow, did not wake up to say goodbye.