What Remains

On the fifth morning after the Vault, Maeril cleared her desk in Blackstaff Tower. She kept only the broken wand and the drawing she had made of the city beyond it.

The drawing was inadequate. She had known that when she made it. Three days of finding incompatible versions of the same city in reputable books had not improved her opinion.

She lowered her fingers beside the longer piece. A faint pull tightened behind her blind eye. She moved her hand away, waited, and tried again from the other side.

The pull returned.

At least the wood was consistent.

Vajra’s borrowed study had shelves along two walls, a warded desk against the third, and a window looking over roofs under repair. Maeril had covered the remaining space with charts. The books occupied four piles, whose distinctions she had explained when Rishi first brought their things upstairs.

Useful. Wrong but interesting. Wrong and offensive. Never seen by her if anyone asked.

He had left every pile where it was.

Their visits to the council, the towers, and Erik’s family had ended here, with another page read before bed. The notes she had begun on the day they recovered the wand now reached across the wall above the desk. Nothing in them could yet be followed through a door.

Rishi arrived carrying the mirror she had requested from the stores. He set it on the cleared end of the desk. “Can Vajra put it together?”

“She could join the wood. Whatever once made it choose and open a passage broke with it.”

She laid a finger on her drawing. “But this is still there when I touch it. We need to know whether it is pointing anywhere, or merely remembering.”

“And whether they reached that place.”

Maeril looked at the mirror. “I would like to ask them.”

She had spent the previous evenings working through the chapters on scrying. Now she propped the silvered glass where her good eye could see it without turning her head and began the working.

By afternoon, the surface would hold an image beyond the study. Rishi waited in the courtyard as they had arranged. She saw his hand lift a cup from the well’s rim, then his face as he looked toward the tower windows. The picture thinned when she moved to write down the correction that had steadied it.

When she called for Elisa, nothing replaced her own reflection.

She tried Chime. She remembered their tilt above the table, the little changes of tone that had made Firemind look up from his drawings. The mirror remained silver.

Rishi found her sitting before it after the courtyard lamps had been lit. “Did you see either of them?”

“No.”

He sat on the bench beside the desk. She kept her hands against the mirror’s frame until he looked at them.

“It does not tell us why,” Maeril said. “Distance between planes, wards, a working I have only just learned—there is more than one way to fail to see someone.”

“Then put that in the notes too.”

She looked at him.

“Tomorrow you will read them when you are tired,” he added.

Maeril released the frame. She wrote beneath Elisa’s name, and then beneath Chime’s: No conclusion.

She turned the mirror aside and drew the wrapped pieces of the wand closer to her notes.

Rishi put a cup and a plate beside her.

She smelled tea before drinking. “Is this kindness?”

“You missed supper.”

“Careful. It may become a habit.”

He pushed the plate toward her as well.

On the eighth day, the restorers had Firemind’s left hand assembled beneath a supporting frame. Maeril could follow the long fingers from knuckle to tip. A sliver of pale linen showed where the base of the thumb should meet the palm.

The written report lay beside it. They had found the matching surfaces. They had not yet found enough sound material to trust the join when stone became flesh.

Maeril stood with her own hand open beside the table. She had seen those fingers fit a spring no wider than a grain of rice.

Upstairs, Rishi read the report while she changed the bandage on the small cut she had acquired handling a fragment.

“They could not place it yesterday,” Rishi said.

“They cannot restore it today.”

He laid the paper where she could see it. “I will go down this afternoon. They may need another pair of hands.”

She left the report where he had put it and opened her notes on the wand beside it.

In the pauses between examinations of the wand, Maeril studied the cold she had once drawn from the staff. She knew the shape it had taken down the street, the widening edge she had held clear of Rishi and the unicorn. Now she worked through the spell in a borrowed book, setting her own notes beside its diagrams.

Her attempts froze an inkstone, whitened the edge of the desk, and left her fingers too numb to hold a quill. She took the inkstone down to Rishi, who warmed it between his palms while she described the part that had failed.

Later, in the chamber Vajra permitted her to use for the attempt, Maeril set her feet, shaped the release herself, and sent a widening rush of cold across bare stone. Frost climbed the far wall. The force left her bending over her injured leg, breath catching as though she had run up every stair in the tower.

Rishi waited by the door, clear of the spell’s reach. When she straightened, he came beside her. She could not have done it again immediately. She wrote that in her notebook before leaning against the wall to let her breathing settle.

“You’re more certain of what you can do,” Rishi said. “Even when there is no time to prepare.”

Maeril lifted her chin. “I am. I suppose the villains of the Realms will have to learn to fear the Green Witch of Wyrm’s Crossing.”

“That is a long name to shout while running.”

“Then they should begin learning it now.”

She held his gaze for a moment, smiling, before looking back at the frost. “I would be considerably more alarming if I still had that staff.”

Rishi followed her glance. “Was that the spell you used in the street?”

“Cone of Cold. When I killed Nar’l, I used the working already held inside the wood. I knew how to release it. I could not have cast it on my own.”

She closed the notebook against her hip. “It was a Staff of Power, Rish. An artifact out of legend, and I had it in my hands. It would have made me immensely powerful.”

Rishi leaned beside her, his shoulder against the wall. “Is that something you really want?”

Maeril considered the question. “No. Not really. That would also attract a lot of trouble.”

Over the following days, Maeril worked through the references Vajra had brought her. Some passages described an opening by its destination. Others described the threshold crossed to reach it. She set those beside her records of the wand’s pull.

Vajra had forbidden any attempt to draw more power from it until they understood what remained. Maeril obeyed, with an ill grace made worse by the fact that she agreed. She measured the small response it gave without coaxing, turning each piece separately, changing the distance between them.

Near the end of the second week, she brought the broken ends together. The pull frayed into crossing pressures, sharp enough to make her withdraw her hand. She eased the pieces apart again. It steadied.

She marked that distance on the linen. Turning the longer piece did not turn the pull with it. It persisted beyond the broken end, where none of the old bindings remained.

Maeril looked at her diagram. She had followed the ruined spell as far as the break and left a space for what she could no longer find. Yet the pull went on past it.

She set the diagram aside and laid her hand beside the wood again. This time she followed the tug beyond the bindings, letting it lead her where it would.

One end of the wand lifted. Beyond it, the straight edge of the linen bent upward in her sight. She could still see the cloth lying flat on the desk.

Maeril withdrew at once. The edge straightened as the wood settled.

She waited until the ache behind her eye faded, then tried again. The air distorted above the wand, but the shape shivered apart before she could hold it steady.

She sent for Vajra.

Vajra arrived carrying the Blackstaff. Rishi followed her and stopped by the door.

Maeril showed them the marks on the linen. “I have been looking in the wrong place. There is still something of Firemind’s passage here. Watch above the wood.”

She followed the pull. The broken end lifted, and the edge of the cloth bent in her sight again.

Vajra lowered the Blackstaff beside the desk. The ward beneath the linen brightened. Maeril felt the strain shift away from her fingers.

“Hold there,” Vajra said.

Maeril kept her fingers still. The distortion held. She could feel it straining against the boundary Vajra supplied, but it no longer slipped away from her.

“Now release it.”

The wood fell softly onto the linen. Rishi came beside Maeril, looking at the place where the air had bent.

“Can it carry us?” Rishi asked.

“I could not hold it that long alone.” Maeril looked at Vajra. “If you can hold a wider boundary, I can try to enlarge it.”

“There is enough here to attempt that,” Vajra said. “We will need room to lay out the working. This desk will not do.”

“Into Sigil?”

“That is where the trace leads. I cannot choose where we arrive in the city. But we would be there to look for Elisa and Chime.”

She smiled at him.

Vajra lifted the longer piece through its wrapping and examined the darkened grain. “One attempt. Widening it will consume what remains.”

“And returning?”

Vajra laid the piece down. “You would need to find another way. I cannot promise to reach you once this is spent.”

Outside the window, someone called the hour. Maeril had not heard the previous one. She looked at Rishi, then at the two pieces she had carried from the aquarium floor.

“Will you help us try?” Maeril asked.

Vajra drew the diagram closer. “I will help prepare it. You must decide whether to cross.”

Maeril drew a fresh sheet toward her and copied the distances marked on the linen. Vajra took the quill when she offered it and began the outer boundary.