I Have You

Maeril counted three possible exits before she had crossed the room’s only ordinary door.

An arch opened onto darkness at the far wall. Beside a narrow cupboard, a seam ran from floor to ceiling without following the joints of the plaster. A table stood between them, its two chairs placed so neither occupant would have to turn away from the entrance.

She disliked whoever had chosen the room for being right about it.

Then Elisa rose from one of the chairs.

Maeril stopped counting.

The priestess wore dark travel clothes beneath a worn cloak. Fine new hair covered her shaved scalp. Her hands were empty, and there was no restraint at her wrists, no guarded glance asking permission to move.

“Rishi.”

His name reached him across the room. Maeril felt the movement begin in his body beside her: weight forward, breath drawn, the long readiness to find Elisa becoming almost an embrace.

Naeris stepped between them.

Rishi stopped.

The engraved staff stood upright in the young woman’s hand. She had left the food on the table. One of the packets had split, showing the edge of a loaf. Such an ordinary thing to have carried through the market, through pursuit, into a room arranged for escape.

Maeril looked from it to Elisa.

“Come here.”

Elisa’s face tightened. “Maeril—”

“We have spent two weeks trying to reach you.”

“I know.”

“Then come here.”

Naeris’s hand closed harder around the staff.

Rishi watched her thumb press into the engraved wood. In the Bazaar her grip had been exact. Here it was too tight, the fingers doing work the rest of her body no longer trusted itself to do. Her forward foot remained planted. Her other heel had lifted as though retreat might still be possible.

Her eyes kept returning to Maeril.

“Move,” Maeril told her.

“Please,” Elisa said. “Not like this.”

Chime hovered near the table. Their pink light touched the torn food packet and faded again.

Grim closed the ordinary door behind them. He stayed beside it, watching the young elf’s staff and the other openings in the room. His hand rested near his sword.

Naeris drew a careful breath.

Rishi knew the attempt. Find the ground. Release the shoulder. Let the next breath be longer. It was a useful discipline until the body began using it to keep a sob from happening.

She drew the next breath too soon.

“Maeril.”

Maeril looked at him, saw the change in his attention, and shook her head once.

“Do not make that face at me. She used my spell on you.”

“I know.”

Naeris set the staff against the table.

The sound was small. Rishi heard the wood settle securely before she moved.

Maeril saw only the movement.

She lifted her free hand. A ward began to gather along her palm, its edge turning outward. Rishi shifted across her left side, ready to catch a striking arm. Behind them, Grim swore.

Naeris crossed the space too quickly for any of them to finish.

Her hands were empty.

She struck Maeril with the whole weight of an embrace.

Maeril’s back foot slid. Her staff knocked against the doorframe, and Rishi caught her upper arm long enough to keep both women standing. Naeris had buried her face against Maeril’s shoulder. Her fingers clenched in the green traveling cloth.

The unfinished ward shivered around them.

“Master.”

It came through the cloth, broken by a breath that would not become another word.

Maeril’s hand stayed raised beside the stranger’s head.

She could feel the heat of her. The hard pressure of the arms. A braid caught against Maeril’s collar, rough where it had been tied in haste. None of it belonged to the little voice that memory placed beneath the word.

“No,” she said.

Naeris held tighter.

“No. Absolutely not. We are not doing emotionally specific assassinations.”

The joke left Maeril’s mouth without finding anywhere to land.

Grim’s weapon hand lowered. He looked at Rishi, found no explanation there, and stayed silent.

Naeris tried to breathe. One hand loosened from Maeril’s robe and reached backward toward where the staff ought to have been. It found air. The fingers closed again in the cloth, and the whole effort to remain disciplined folded around that empty reach.

Rishi knew it then.

He did not know how the woman had come into this room or what had made the years sit wrongly on her face. He knew the child’s way of trying to be ready while frightened. He knew the training beneath it, and the particular failure of that training when someone she trusted finally stood within reach.

“Maeril.”

She looked at him over the young woman’s head.

“Do not,” she whispered.

He said nothing more.

Maeril brought her raised hand down onto Naeris’s shoulder. The ward faded. Her other hand left the staff and found the second shoulder, and she pushed the woman back just far enough to see her face.

Naeris let her.

Tears had already reached her chin. She tried to swallow them, tried to make her mouth firm, and failed in a way Maeril could not bear to recognize.

“Who are you?”

The answer caught.

Maeril’s hands tightened. “That is not a word strangers get to use.”

Naeris looked directly at her.

“I’m Nessari.”

“No.”

She flinched.

“Nessari is in the Moonglade. Nessari is a child.”

“I know.”

“Then you know why you cannot say that to me.”

Naeris’s mouth moved around another attempt. She glanced toward Rishi and back, as though afraid that looking away might cost her what little time Maeril would permit.

“You told me smaller burns cleaner.”

Maeril stopped.

“The first day,” Naeris said. “It was raining. Everything in the lodge was damp, and I wanted the bricks hot enough to warm the whole room at once.”

Her gaze dropped to Maeril’s hands.

“You made me use less.”

Maeril remembered the impatient little working. Heat made too large because the child wanted usefulness to arrive all at once. She remembered wet cloth, the smell of the lodge, Nessari’s fierce attention when a small change succeeded.

“The stove,” Naeris said. “I said it was alive.”

The room seemed to narrow around the sound of her voice.

“You said magic was for making life livable. I wanted something splendid. You gave me a warm brick.”

A laugh tried to escape her and became a sob instead.

Maeril’s thumb moved against Naeris’s shoulder without her permission. She remembered smoothing the child’s cuff away from the working. She had done it so Nessari could see where her hand was, a small practical correction swallowed by an ordinary day.

This woman remembered being on the other side of it.

“No,” Maeril said again.

There was no force left in the word.

Naeris turned enough to see Rishi.

“And you caught me.”

His hand opened at his side.

“I was falling. I thought the spider had me. I thought I would fall all the way.”

He remembered the weight, the child’s terror moving through his bruised body when she had run to him afterward. The clearing had smelled of blood and torn leaves. Mud marked her cheek. Her hands had caught his robe exactly as these hands had caught Maeril’s.

“Nessari.”

The name was scarcely louder than breath.

Maeril heard it and closed her eye.

Naeris drew back against the hands still holding her shoulders. “I tried to stay away. I thought if you did not see me—”

She could not finish. Elisa moved a little nearer, then stopped when Naeris shook her head.

“Why?” Maeril asked.

Naeris looked at the food on the table.

“He died.”

Grim’s attention sharpened.

“Manshoon,” she said. “And it still wasn’t over.”

Maeril’s fingers grew cold against her shoulders.

“His death set things moving. People reaching for what he left. Doors that were supposed to stay shut. Things made to wait for someone to think they had won.”

She shook her head quickly, frustrated by her own words.

“I do not know every piece. I don’t know which hand moves which one. But I know what it becomes. I know what it does to the people who try to put everything back.”

Rishi remained beside Maeril. He had no movement with which to answer that.

Naeris looked at him, and the last of her practiced authority went out of her face.

“I couldn’t leave you there.”

Maeril’s throat tightened. “Where?”

“Where the road goes if nothing changes.”

She looked from one to the other. “That is why I reached for you. I love you. It got so bad, and I still—”

Her breath failed. She pressed one fist against her mouth until she could lower it again.

“She is still there.”

Maeril waited.

“The child. You were right. Nessari is still in the Moonglade.”

“What have you done to her?”

“Nothing.” The answer came with sudden force. “I did not take her. I did not take anything from her.”

Rishi watched Maeril hear it.

Naeris’s hands opened between them, empty and shaking.

“She has Lirae. Elenya. Sirael. Thiarel. She has Seamwarden and the paths and the house.”

Each name cost more than the one before it.

“She can go home and complain about supper. She can wake up and decide what she wants to learn. That life is hers.”

Maeril’s hands had become the only thing keeping the young woman still.

“But I remember it,” Naeris whispered. “I remember how it feels to be expected.”

The words reached Maeril without any magic around them.

An occupied place at a table. Someone who would notice when you had not come in from the rain. The right to enter your own home without making a child move aside.

“If I go back as her, I break it. If I stay away, I lose it.”

Naeris tried to make another sentence and could not. Her face folded. Her body bent forward inside Maeril’s hands, no longer attempting to hide what the telling had done to it.

Maeril drew her close. She placed one hand between Naeris’s shoulder blades and brought the other to the back of her head, protecting the face pressed against her neck.

“I don’t understand.”

Her own voice broke on the admission.

Naeris clutched her robe.

“I don’t understand any of this.” Maeril held her more firmly. “But I have you.”

The first tear reached the old burn along Maeril’s cheek. She let it run. Naeris’s sobbing shook them both, and Maeril adjusted her feet so she could bear the movement without asking it to stop.

Rishi moved the fallen end of Maeril’s staff clear of their boots. He leaned it against the wall and stayed near.

Elisa covered her mouth. Chime sank until their light rested beneath the table’s edge. At the door, Grim turned his face toward the passage outside and found no reason to speak.

Maeril kept her hand at the back of Naeris’s head. When the next broken breath came, she was still there to receive it.