A Familiar Turn

The woman in the mirror passed the green lantern before they reached it.

Maeril adjusted her grip on the silver frame. A customer crossed between her and Rishi with a tray balanced on both hands; she stopped long enough to let it pass, and the image showed the young elf accepting another packet farther along the row.

“Left after the lantern.”

Rishi nodded and eased through the crowd.

Maeril called her hawk. Its pale outline gathered above her shoulder and lifted between the awnings. She gave it the shape of their three moving bodies, the need to keep each one in sight, and let it climb until it could travel over the narrow gaps.

Grim stayed at her back. He watched every opening that offered an easy departure from the main row.

In the glass, Chime hovered near the young woman’s shoulder. They turned to examine something on a counter. She waited, head inclined, while a vendor wrapped food in brown paper.

They were shopping.

Rishi looked back at Maeril. She lifted the mirror enough for him to see the pink light still free beside the woman’s face.

He lowered his voice. “Stay near.”

A pair of laborers carried a rolled carpet across their path. Rishi went around its leading end while Maeril checked the movement in the glass. The young woman had finished paying. Her staff shifted from one hand to the other as she turned away from the stall.

“She’s coming—”

Rishi nearly collided with her at the end of the carpet.

“Sorry.”

He drew back to give her room. The lower end of her staff passed within a hand’s breadth of his knee, controlled with a small adjustment of her fingers. Fine marks ran through the worn wood. The grip was neither ornamental nor cautious; she knew where the weight would be before it arrived there.

His eyes followed the adjustment.

She saw him notice.

For one breath, the crowd fell outside the narrow space between their hands. Her face had turned toward his, but Rishi’s attention remained on the shoulder behind the staff, on the heel already becoming light against the paving.

She moved first.

The shaft struck low across his, binding it toward his left hip. Rishi rolled his wrist and turned his shoulder to free the lower end. Her weight had already gone backward. A short retreating sweep checked his lead leg without taking it from beneath him, and the space opened.

Three movements. The crack of wood reached the nearest vendor as they finished.

Rishi had answered before thought. Now his body waited for the next movement in a sequence it knew.

The young elf’s eyes widened.

Maeril saw the exchange from two places at once: through the mirror, where Rishi had entered the stranger’s world, and over its edge, where the stranger was backing into the crowd.

Maeril released the scrying.

Her own face flashed in the darkened glass. She pressed it against her chest and spoke the binding, directing the spell with a sharp movement of her staff.

The young woman had room for one more step. Maeril closed the space around it, caught the living pattern, and felt the spell settle.

Then the engraved fighting staff turned.

It was a small motion, timed inside the closing of the ward: a change of angle, a pressure taken and given elsewhere. Maeril felt no break. Her spell still held.

Rishi stopped with his weight between steps.

His fingers would not open.

He tried to turn his head and found that nothing obeyed. Breath caught shallow in his chest. The stranger’s staff had passed through the shape of Maeril’s working and left the working around him.

He had never felt anything like it.

“No.”

Maeril tore her own spell apart.

His foot struck the paving. He took the weight and pushed forward at once, but the young woman had already moved behind a broad-backed customer. Her dark sleeve disappeared beneath hanging cloth.

Rishi followed through the opening she had used.

Someone shouted at him. He turned sideways to miss a tray, put one hand against a post, and swung around it. The young elf crossed the next gap without looking behind her. A cart began to move between them.

He could have jumped it. The driver stood where he would land.

Rishi went around.

Above him, the hawk cried. He caught the direction, saw dark hair beyond a rack of cooking pots, and moved toward it. Maeril followed close enough that he heard the butt of her staff strike stone.

A door opened in a recess ahead. Two people emerged arguing, blocking his sight for less than a breath.

When they separated, the young woman was gone.

Rishi reached the recess. The door had closed. The lane beside it forked left and right, with empty baskets piled at the junction. He looked down each branch. No dark coat moved in either.

The hawk circled over the baskets and called again, uncertain.

Maeril stopped beside Rishi. She held the mirror low now, its glass reflecting only a slice of damp wall.

“I had her.”

Rishi looked at his hand. It had begun to ache where he had forced it uselessly against the binding.

“You had me.”

“I know.”

The words came sharp with the hurt of it. She put the mirror into its wrapping, checked the edge for damage with a touch, and tucked it securely into her pack.

“She turned it,” Maeril said. “She did not break it. She knew where to put her hand.”

Rishi shifted his staff.

Low bind. He let the remembered pressure guide his wrist. Shoulder turn. The next motion came into place, exact as a correction made beside him on a forest training ground.

“Sirael’s.”

Maeril looked up. “What?”

“The bind. That turn.” He made the retreating sweep slowly, stopping before the staff touched her boot. “Sirael taught it.”

She watched the movement.

“Many people use a staff.”

“Not that way. Sirael corrected my shoulder and my foot for months. Made me repeat that withdrawal until I could retreat without giving up control.”

Rishi could name the bruise a badly placed hand would have earned him.

Maeril looked toward the closed door. “Rish. This city is making you hear things in sticks.”

He let the staff come to rest.

She turned back to him, less sharply. “Sirael is in the Moonglade.”

“I know.”

“And we have been here for—” She stopped. Whatever measure she gave the time would not make his certainty more reasonable.

The hawk dropped toward the entrance to the lane.

Grim appeared beneath it with an expression of laboriously restrained satisfaction. Pink light moved beside his shoulder, bobbing angrily at each step.

Rishi lowered his staff all the way.

“Chime.”

“While you two chased the stick,” Grim said, “I spoke to the mimir.”

“Grim stood in Chime’s way and used several unnecessary threats.”

“None directed at you.”

“Chime noticed the general atmosphere.”

Maeril took one step toward them. The pearlescent casing caught the hawk’s pale light. Chime looked whole, alive in their strange fashion, and far less pleased to see them than she had imagined during the weeks of preparation.

“We came to find you,” she said.

Chime hovered higher. Their voice rang bright against the close walls.

“Then please stop striking the young one.”