Both May Be True

The days after Maeril’s fall acquired a pattern.

At dawn, Sirael waited in the training circle with two plain staves. Mist covered the ground to Rishi’s ankles. The bruise along his temple had faded to yellow; the mark on his neck had not.

Sirael tossed him one staff.

“Keep it slow,” she said.

“Slow,” he agreed.

They began with the throw that had put him on his back.

Sirael placed her staff behind his forward ankle and stopped. Rishi set his shaft across her forearms. Neither applied pressure.

“Watch this knee,” she said.

She tapped his front knee. Too much weight.

Rishi moved his hips back a finger’s width.

Sirael shook her head. She touched the staff to his rear foot, then to the open ground beside it.

“You chase. Let me come.”

He shifted the foot. His stance shortened. When they repeated the entry, his balance remained beneath him.

Sirael turned under his arms and showed him the place where her surrender became leverage. Rishi felt the change through the wood before he saw it. The strain left her shoulders. His own pull carried him toward the hook at his ankle.

He stopped.

They stepped apart and began again.

This became their first language. Strike. Catch. Hold. Sirael repeated a few Elvish calls with the movements until Rishi knew them. When a word failed him, he answered with his staff.

Then Sirael’s eyes brightened.

Her staff came at his shoulder without warning.

Rishi turned it past him. The far end reversed toward his ribs. He caught that too, gave ground, and sent a short strike toward her knee.

Wood cracked against wood.

Their slow lesson broke into speed.

Sirael took the first bruise, a straight touch to the outside of her upper arm. Rishi took the second when her staff slipped under his guard and struck his forearm. Neither blow carried the force of their first bout. When Rishi’s wrist turned too late and left his head open, Sirael checked the next strike before it landed.

The staff stopped beside his ear.

Rishi looked at it. Then at her.

“Thank you.”

Sirael lowered the weapon.

They reset.

One morning, a small shape stood behind a root at the edge of the clearing. Nessari’s cloak hung almost to her boots. The tip of her nose had gone pink in the cold.

When Rishi noticed her, she lifted one hand.

Sirael followed his gaze. Her mouth tightened, though not with anger.

“Once more, Rishi.”

The exchange she chose required more footwork than force. She drove Rishi across the circle, changed direction twice, and made him recover his stance without crossing his feet. Nessari’s breath caught when their staves met near his face.

Sirael glanced toward the root.

The next sequence was faster.

Soon Nessari sat in the open on a flat stone. She kept outside the circle and watched their feet more often than their weapons.

Rishi began to hear Sirael’s corrections before she spoke them. His forward step shortened. Her grip changed sooner when he entered close. They stopped freezing every exchange. A tap or a single word became enough to find the mistake and repeat it.

At the end of each practice, Sirael grounded her staff and touched brow and heart.

Rishi returned the salute.

She still spoke little to him outside the circle. Inside it, they no longer needed an apology to begin.

Maeril’s mornings started later and closer to the ground.

She returned to the same two pebbles with her spellbook open on a root. Both stones were visible. They remained three paces apart.

Rishi waited beyond her right shoulder. Nessari occupied her usual place at the clearing’s edge.

Maeril said, “If the fold moves, I stop. Even if I know why.”

“Yes.”

“You needn’t sound so pleased.”

“Begin when you are ready.”

Maeril looked at the destination. Bare earth. Pebble. A patch of moss no wider than her palm.

She bowed her head and asked Mielikki for leave in the plainest words she knew.

She built half the spell.

The seam appeared. Its edges held straight. Pressure gathered behind her eyes without entering her jaw.

She released it.

The air closed cleanly.

On the second half-cast, one edge wavered.

Maeril dropped her hands at once.

Nothing snapped. Nothing struck her. The clearing remained where it belonged.

She turned to Rishi.

“I disliked that.”

“You stopped.”

“I disliked that too.”

Nessari leaned toward her. “But you promised.”

Maeril looked from her to Rishi. “I see the two of you have formed a tribunal.”

She rested until the ache behind her eyes cleared. Then she tried once more.

The seam held. The ground beyond drew close. Maeril stepped and landed beside the second stone with both feet under her.

Her stomach lurched. Her knees did not.

“Better,” Rishi said.

“My bones were confused for less than half a breath.”

“Better,” he repeated.

Maeril closed the spellbook.

“Enough.”

The word cost her more than the spell.

Over the next mornings, she increased the distance one pace at a time. Every destination remained in sight. Some folds failed to align; she released them. Some opened cleanly; she crossed once or twice, then stopped while her hands were still steady.

Nessari watched whenever her chores allowed. Wonder gave way to attention.

“You held your breath longer,” she said after one crossing. “The edge grew thick.”

Maeril wrote both observations in the margin.

“If I ever teach at a college, I will cite you as my most ruthless examiner.”

“What is a college?”

“A place where many people pay to be told their margins are too narrow.”

Nessari considered this and looked relieved that she did not attend one.

One afternoon, Maeril took the Divination scroll to the outer dining hollow. Thiarel sat alone at its far edge, a cup between her hands.

Maeril loosened the tie and showed her the heading.

“I thought I might ask Mielikki whether we should stay.”

Thiarel looked from the scroll to her.

“Do not call to be comforted. Call only if you can bear being answered.”

Maeril drew the vellum back before its edge touched the cup. She had imagined being told there was a place for them here. She had given very little thought to any other answer.

Back at the lodge, she laid the scroll open and read it again. The instructions fixed the offering and the time of asking. Farther down, deliberate spaces opened inside the formula, room for an answer she could neither shape nor command.

Her spellbook stayed closed beside it.

The carved stag watched from the niche. A braid of dried grass joined the leaf and Mosstone stone beneath it. Later, Nessari brought a grey feather and asked if Mielikki would object.

“I hope not. You found it in the forest. That gives her an excellent chance of recognising it.”

They set the feather beside the stag.

Nessari looked from the feather to the open scroll.

“Have you chosen your question?”

Maeril lifted her hand from the scroll. Her finger had come to rest beside the place where the question belonged.

“I thought reading it again would help me choose one.”

“Did it?”

“No.” She looked down at the page. “Thiarel warned me about asking for comfort. I think that is what I wanted. I had better leave this alone for now.”

Maeril rolled the Divination scroll, tied it, and set it down beside its case.

“There is something else I want to learn. How to become an animal.”

Nessari sat straighter.

“Like my sister?”

“Yes, like Thiarel.”

For a moment she remembered claws, and Rishi beneath them. Nessari was watching her with open delight. Maeril let the memory pass before she continued.

“I’ll have to work out the spell myself. Polymorph.”

“Which animal?”

“One that can stand up without falling over. I intend to be very demanding.”

Nessari laughed.

Maeril wrapped the incense and returned it to the case with the scroll. The spell would keep. In the niche, the stag stood beside Nessari’s feather.

She cleared a space on the table and laid out a fresh sheet. Shape, weight, balance. She wrote each down, then began sketching how a spell might hold them together through a change of body.

Nessari found reasons to pass their lodge twice most days. A basket of herbs needed delivery. Kindling had to be brought to the hearth. Lirae had sent fruit, thread, or a question that took one sentence to answer and half an hour to carry.

She watched Rishi breathe through a sequence after training.

“Do you always do that? Slow, then fast, then slow?”

Rishi lowered his hands. “I try.”

“It sounds like the forest.”

He listened to the stream and the leaves above them.

“Then the forest is a good teacher.”

Nessari brought the same attention to Maeril’s spells.

“Does every magic feel wrong inside?”

“No. Light is polite. A shield feels like remembering a wall just before you need it. Fire is rude, but honest.”

“And the goddess?”

Maeril glanced at the stag and the grey feather.

“I hope that feels like listening.”

One afternoon, Nessari came with empty hands.

“The bowls are washed. Lirae says she won’t need me until supper.”

Her gaze rose to Maeril’s brow.

Maeril pushed her transmutation notes aside. “Then come here.”

She worked the circlet free of her hair. Her fingers lingered on the familiar braid of gold before she laid it across Nessari’s waiting palms. Nessari held it with both hands, turning it enough to see the back of the green stone.

“It’s warm.”

“I’ve had it on all morning.”

Nessari lifted it awkwardly. Maeril reached to help, drawing the plait back over her shoulder and settling the band above her brow. She checked that no hair had caught beneath the metal before lowering her hands.

Nessari sat very straight.

After a moment, her forehead creased.

“I don’t feel anything.”

“Give it time. Close your eyes, if that helps. Let your attention settle where it touches you.”

“Do I think about the spell?”

“We’ll come to that afterward. Just the circlet for now.”

Maeril drew her cushion beside Nessari’s and took up a loose seam in her sleeve. For more than an hour, the small scrape of her needle and the stream beyond the wall filled the lodge. Light moved across the reed mat. Nessari stayed quiet, her hands resting open in her lap.

At last, silver lines stirred across the band. A soft green light passed over Nessari’s forehead and faded beneath her skin.

Her eyes opened. She reached up, then stopped with her fingers just below the stone.

Maeril set her sewing aside.

“Shall we try the page?”

She found the drawing from their first lesson: the little figure, the arrow, the place it meant to reach. Nessari leaned over it while Maeril went through the signs again. Then Maeril covered the drawing and asked her to hold it in mind.

“I can still see where everything goes.”

“Keep that one. Now imagine the figure turning.”

Nessari looked down at the blank paper Maeril had placed before her.

“The first one stays too.” She looked up. “Is that what it’s like for you?”

Maeril smiled. “Yes.”

Nessari took the quill. She drew the turned figure and its arrow, then hesitated over the sign beneath it.

“I remember this. I still don’t know which bit to change.”

“Here.”

Maeril uncovered the first drawing and pointed to the little stroke that fixed the facing. She waited while Nessari compared them, then showed her what that stroke would do if it remained where it was.

Nessari bent so close that her plait fell across Maeril’s wrist. Maeril moved the ink bottle clear of the loose end and leaned closer to the page.

They changed the distance next. Nessari drew both arrangements and asked why one sign could not serve them equally well. Maeril began to answer, stopped, and reached for another sheet. By the time she had found an explanation that satisfied them both, Nessari was grinning.

“Can we do another?”

“We have time.”

The drawings spread over her unfinished notes.

When the household began carrying pots toward the cooking fires, Nessari laid down the quill. She touched the circlet once before lifting it off.

“Will I forget?”

“What you’ve learned is yours. You may need to look back at the page more often. I do.”

Nessari placed the band in Maeril’s hands, then looked down at her last drawing. She traced the arrow once and reached for the quill to finish its sign.

Maeril waited until she had set it down.

“Take the pages with you.”

“Could I bring them back tomorrow?”

“I’d like that.”

Nessari gathered them carefully, keeping the damp ink uppermost. At the drape she turned back, smiling, then hurried down toward the fires.

Maeril put the circlet on. The metal rested against her skin without its familiar answer. After supper she sat with her book closed for an hour and more, giving it the quiet attention she had asked of Nessari. When the clarity returned, she opened her notes to the place where they had stopped. A little ink figure peered from the edge of her work on Polymorph. She left it there and wrote beside it.

Caereth came less often and stayed longer.

He brought small pieces of the homestead with him: a hunting party had returned, two neighbouring houses had settled an argument over foraging ground, a dryad had been heard singing far to the east. He also explained silences no one else thought to translate.

He showed them the difference between lowered eyes as respect and lowered eyes as discomfort: the set of the shoulders, the hands, the direction the body faced. A silence after a question could ask for patience rather than end the conversation.

“They are watching you,” he said one afternoon in the outer dining hollow.

Maeril stopped chewing a piece of roasted root.

“Comforting.”

“Some want you gone. Fewer than before. Some want you to stay and do not yet know how to say so.”

Rishi set down his bowl. “And the others?”

“They wait.” Caereth looked across the hollow, where two elves had begun a conversation only after choosing seats with their backs to the humans. “Waiting is not refusal. Here, it can be the work before an answer.”

On his way back from the stream, Rishi passed Lirae’s work alcove. A loom filled the wall behind her. Green, brown, and pale gold thread crossed beneath her hands, becoming branches over running water.

Rishi stopped outside the alcove.

Lirae finished a pass of the shuttle, then looked over her shoulder.

“Rishi.”

“It is beautiful.”

“It is old. My mother’s mother knew this pattern.”

The shuttle passed through the warp. Lirae pressed the new line into place.

“It remembers the stream when it ran wider.”

Rishi shifted the water vessel against his hip. “I have done simpler work.”

Lirae looked at his fingers where they curled around the handle.

“I would like to learn,” he said. “If it is permitted.”

She returned her attention to the loom. Three passes of the shuttle crossed before she answered.

“On the gathering day, the looms rest. Come after the morning meal. I will show you the beginnings.”

Rishi bowed. “Thank you.”

When he passed her with kindling, she lifted one hand from the warp.

“After the morning meal,” she repeated.

“I will come.”

Caereth came to their lodge after the evening meal. He did not sit.

“The family has chosen. You are invited to our gathering meal inside the Root-House.”

Maeril’s hand stopped above an ink bottle.

Rishi became still beside the hearth.

“Inside?” Maeril asked.

“Inside. With the family. A few elders from neighbouring houses may attend.”

In the grove, Maeril had faced this family with spells ready beneath her tongue. Even now, she could see Rishi’s blood on Thiarel’s claws.

“This is not done lightly,” Caereth said.

Rishi bowed his head. “We are honoured. We will come.”

Maeril tried to wet her mouth. “Do we bring food, a dowry, or written proof that we have learned where the doors are?”

“Food,” Caereth said. “Ask Lirae for guidance.”

“And if I want guidance with reckless enthusiasm?”

“Ask Nessari.”

Maeril nodded. “A sound division of expertise.”

After Caereth left, she sat at the table without opening her book.

The invitation changed the days around it.

At the outer meals, Faelar began asking them questions. He offered a story first—a child who had tricked a fox, wolves driven close during a hard winter—then turned the subject toward them. How did Baldur’s Gate feed itself when snow closed the roads? How did people keep the river wind out of narrow houses?

Maeril told him about fish markets on frozen mornings, where one careless step could send a person under a table. Rishi described rags pressed beneath doors and neighbours carrying braziers up narrow stairs. Faelar listened without interrupting.

Other voices joined his.

Laughter remained scarce, but the silence no longer fell every time Maeril reached for a bowl.

Thiarel sat at the far edge of the hollow. She did not address Rishi or meet his eyes. Her hand still tightened around her cup when he spoke, but her knuckles no longer blanched.

Rishi noticed because he was trying not to watch her.

On the eve of the gathering, the spellbook stayed closed.

Maeril lay on her platform with both hands behind her head. Her transmutation notes waited beneath the book, crowded with sketches and corrections. She had spent an hour trying to account for the balance of a body with four feet. She could have spent another.

Instead she planned food.

“Grain. Roasted roots. Nuts. Dried fruit, but not enough to make it sweet.”

Across the lodge, Rishi stretched one leg and then the other. “That sounds good.”

“You say that about boiled bark.”

“Some bark is useful.”

“Your standards are no help.”

Tomorrow there would be no morning exchange with Sirael. The gathering had shifted the household’s work. Hunts were timed around it. Fires had been laid. The loom would stand quiet while Lirae showed Rishi what came before cloth.

Maeril rolled onto one elbow.

“In Baldur’s Gate, a dinner invitation means someone wants a favour, wants to impress you, or wants to poison you.”

“Which is this?”

She considered the Root-House and the faces around the outer hollow.

“They are willing to sit in one room with us and see what happens.”

“That is good.”

“It is terrifying.”

“Both may be true.”

Maeril lay back.

“If I begin explaining spell theory at the table, stop me.”

“I will nudge you.”

The Root-House quieted beyond their wall. One voice called goodnight. Another answered from higher among the branches.

Rishi closed his eyes with his mind still following the line of Lirae’s thread. Maeril counted ingredients until the list lost its edges.

For the first time since entering the grove, what waited at the end of the next day was a place at a table.