Not Yet

Elisa broke the bread after Naeris could hold a cup without spilling it.

She made no announcement. She cleared the table, placed food within reach, and brought the two chairs side by side. Naeris sat in one with her staff beside her knee. Her face was swollen from crying. Maeril took the other, close enough that their sleeves touched.

Rishi moved a low stool from beneath the table and sat opposite Elisa.

“Tell me,” he said.

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she sat on the table’s unoccupied edge, where she could see all three of them without making Naeris look up.

“She did not take me.”

Maeril watched her across the food.

“Chime told us.”

“I need to tell you myself.”

The priestess’s hands lay flat against the wood. Her nails were short, one broken close to the quick. Whatever care she had given in Sigil had been done with the same hands that worked over beds in Lantern Hall.

“I met her after we arrived. Chime knew enough to keep me from making every possible mistake. Naeris knew less about the city than I did.”

Naeris kept her eyes on the cup.

“So I stayed with her. Then she stayed with me. We found food and somewhere to sleep. Chime helped us understand what people meant when they asked questions.”

Grim, beside the ordinary door, gave a short nod.

“Naeris began telling me what frightened her. A little at first. More when I believed the little.”

Elisa took a breath that moved the cloak at her shoulders.

“And I chose to hide.”

Maeril’s jaw tightened. “From us.”

“Yes.”

“You let us think we had lost you.”

“I know.”

“That is not a small thing to know.”

Elisa received the anger without defending herself from it. Rishi waited. His hands remained open between his knees, but nothing else about him had relaxed.

“When Firemind pushed me through that door,” Elisa said, “I thought only of getting back. I could still feel his hand. I kept turning because some part of me expected the passage to be there if I looked quickly enough.”

Chime’s light lowered.

“There was no way back,” they said.

“No.” Elisa looked at them. “You told me. Many times.”

She turned to Rishi again.

“Tell me what you left under the Blackstaff’s care.”

He glanced at Maeril. She gave him the smallest nod.

“We found his stone body. Broken.”

Elisa’s fingers dug against the table edge. She had feared enough to ask the question, but hearing it from him changed her face.

“How badly?”

“We brought what we could to Blackstaff Tower,” Rishi said. “Mages and temple workers are fitting the pieces together. They’re being careful where his clothes meet what was flesh. When we left, there was no safe way to bring him back.”

Elisa bowed her head.

Maeril waited until she could look up again. “He does not know how long it has been. There is no awareness in the stone.”

“You are certain?”

“About that.”

Elisa heard it and pressed her lips together until the first force of grief passed.

“I want to go to him,” she said.

No one answered too quickly.

“If you opened a door now, I would follow you. If someone put a spell in my hands and said it might give him back, I would begin looking for a reason to believe them.”

Maeril’s gaze dropped to her own hands. Gray dust had lodged beneath those nails while she helped turn a man back into a shape that might one day hold his life. She understood the desire well enough to distrust easy judgments about it.

“There is no spell waiting,” she said.

“I understand. That does not make me less willing to take the first one offered.”

Elisa turned one hand palm upward.

“He is my friend. We built the Beacon together. I have already mourned him once. We promised each other no more ghosts, and then he saved me by becoming the one person I could not reach.”

Naeris’s hand trembled against the cup. Maeril steadied its base until she could lower it onto the table.

“What has that to do with Manshoon?” Rishi asked.

Elisa looked at Naeris, then answered for herself.

“We do not know exactly.”

The room held still around the admission.

“Naeris knows consequences. She knows enough of what followed his death to fear the way we would come home. She cannot give me a list of steps that proves what restoring Firemind would do.”

“I cannot,” Naeris said. Her voice was raw. “I know what it becomes. I don’t know every thing that makes it happen.”

Maeril leaned forward. “Then we must be careful what we claim.”

“Yes,” Elisa said. “I cannot show you a spell connecting him to Manshoon. I will not pretend otherwise.”

Rishi listened closely.

“I am saying we cannot treat returning him as the last act of a victory we already understand.”

She looked down at her open hand.

“We have made that mistake before. After I killed Rika’s old boss, we thought his death would free us. The people left behind did not stop being dangerous. Rika paid for what followed.”

Her fingers closed.

“I do not know that this is the same danger. I know enough to stop calling the next restoration safe merely because I want it.”

Rishi’s attention moved briefly to Grim at the door. The former enforcer did not look away. He knew the structures a dead master left behind.

“A delay,” Rishi said.

“A chance to learn. For him as well as everyone else.”

“Not abandonment.”

Elisa’s eyes filled. “Never.”

Maeril took a piece of bread and placed it on the cloth beside her. She did not eat it.

“You could have told us this.”

“I was afraid you would save me.”

The answer hurt more for the warmth still inside it.

“We came to do exactly that,” Maeril said.

“I know. And I would have let you. I trusted you to find a way, and I did not trust myself to stand at the end of it and say I needed to wait.”

Rishi looked at the priestess who had taught frightened people to return to the same small tasks until living became possible again. Here she was, trying to make herself wait through something for which she had no useful task yet.

“You can say it now,” he told her.

Elisa drew a breath.

“Not yet.”

Maeril looked at Naeris. The young woman sat with her hands around an empty cup, receiving the decision with relief that offered nobody proof. Maeril would have to live with that distinction until they knew more.

“Then we learn what we can,” she said. “And you tell us the next difficult thing before we have to buy it from three strangers.”

Elisa nodded. “I will.”

The hurt remained. So did the food between them, and the ordinary need to eat before asking another question.

Rishi took a piece of bread. After a moment Elisa did the same. Maeril turned the cup in Naeris’s hands and filled it again, watching until the younger woman had managed a drink.

No one reached for a portal key.