Where Morning Waited

Elisa knocked before entering.

Maeril had been counting the remaining clean dressings. She looked up with one still in her hand, then forgot what number she had reached.

The woman in the doorway carried a walking staff and wore plain layers beneath Rika’s cloak. A narrow strip of dawn-colored cloth secured the vest at her waist. Her short sword hung where it could be reached without disturbing the small bundle held close against her side.

Her hair had grown enough to soften the shaved shape of her head, scarcely the breadth of a fingernail. There was road dust at the hem of her clothes.

She smiled when she saw them.

Maeril had seen Elisa relieved, exhausted, afraid, determined to be hopeful for someone else. This smile arrived without asking either of them to believe anything on her behalf.

“Well,” Maeril said. “Sigil chewed up a priest and returned a pilgrim.”

Elisa looked down at herself.

“These are easier to walk in.”

“I shall inform every temple.”

Rishi turned carefully from the window.

“Elisa.”

Her smile deepened.

“I came back.”

She stepped inside and closed the door. For a moment that ordinary action held him: her hand on the latch, the staff set against the wall, the choice to remain in the room with them. They had crossed into Sigil to find her. Now she had returned to them under her own power.

He began to rise.

Elisa saw the bandage at his neck.

“Rishishura…”

“Stay there,” Maeril told him.

He settled back onto the edge of the chair.

The loose, plain robes did little to conceal the rest. Dressings showed at his wrists and across his hands. The hem had shifted above one wrapped ankle. His usual clothing lay folded in the pack, waiting for a body that could bear its seams again.

Elisa came closer. Her hand moved toward him, then stopped short of the shoulder.

“What was done?”

“The ward,” he said. “Fell inscribed it.”

She looked at Maeril.

“It holds,” Maeril said. “It also hurts.”

“The skin must settle,” Rishi added.

Elisa drew another chair nearer and sat where he would not need to turn his neck to see her.

“Then tell me where I can help.”

Something in Rishi eased before his body did. “Would you pass the cup?”

She did, placing it within the reach of his palm so his fingers would not have to close hard around it.

They ate what remained of the bread while Maeril finished packing.

Elisa answered the small questions first. She had slept. She had eaten. The road had taken longer than she expected, though she could not have said how much of that had belonged to the road.

She did not offer an account of every place she had passed through.

Rishi watched her listen to Maeril. The old warmth remained. So did the grief, visible for a moment when a name approached the conversation and was allowed to pass without being spoken. But Elisa no longer seemed to be bracing herself against the next truth before it arrived.

“You found what you needed,” he said.

She considered the words.

“Not all of it.”

Her thumb rested on the worn edge of Rika’s cloak.

“Enough to keep walking.”

Maeril tied the pack closed and sat on the bed.

“Was there a dawn?”

“There was a lake. And light beneath it.”

Elisa looked toward the curtained window.

“The morning waited.”

Rishi let her take her time.

“I had wanted to know that I could put things right,” she said. “I kept asking as though being allowed to begin again would tell me what the beginning should be.”

She turned back to them.

“It did not.”

The disappointment he might once have expected was absent from her voice. In its place was something steadier, though it did not make the road ahead less frightening.

“And Lathander?” Maeril asked.

Elisa touched the small dawn-colored strip at her waist.

“Still there.”

She smiled a little. “I had mistaken waiting for being left alone.”

She loosened the bundle beside her and drew out a small bottle.

The glass was thick and plain, its stopper carefully seated. She held it in both hands as though its weight mattered. In the dimness beneath the window, the water caught silver and gold.

It cast no light on her fingers. The brightness seemed to lie at a depth the bottle could not possibly contain.

Maeril leaned nearer without reaching for it.

“From the lake?”

Elisa nodded.

“Water from where morning waited.”

She turned it a little. The silver-gold movement followed slowly, like a sky seen through deep, still water.

Rishi looked at the stopper, at the care with which she kept it sealed.

“Do you know what to do with it?”

“Not yet.”

Her fingers closed more firmly around the glass.

“It is a beginning I am not ready to use.”

Maeril sat back. She understood enough to leave the bottle in Elisa’s hands.

Elisa wrapped it again and secured it close beneath the cloak. The room grew no darker when it disappeared.

There were only three packs to take downstairs.

Elisa noticed the empty place where another voice might have filled the pause.

“They have gone?”

“On purpose,” Maeril said. She checked the knot on the smaller bundle. “Everyone has become very committed to having a road.”

“Naeris and Chime?”

“Together.”

Elisa nodded slowly.

“And Grim?”

“Toward people who understand breakage, by his account.”

Rishi lifted the dark ash staff from beside the chair. His hand found a place below its worn grip where the pressure bothered him less.

“They chose.”

Maeril looked at him, then back at the pack.

“Yes.”

She could still feel Naeris’s arms around her. The memory had no reasonable place among the things that could be packed. She left it where it was and tightened the last strap.

No one came to the door before they left.

On the stairs, Rishi paused at the first turn. Elisa stopped below him without looking upward too quickly. Maeril waited at his side. When he continued, they matched his pace.

The route to the portal was short enough to be manageable and long enough for him to resent it.

Sigil went about its business around them. A laden cart made them wait beneath an overhang. Someone argued over the weight of a sack. Far overhead, a thread of traffic moved along a street whose relation to the ground still offended Maeril whenever she looked at it.

She kept her attention on the route.

“No one,” she said, “is allowed to become more profound until we have eaten something that did not come from Sigil.”

Elisa glanced at the bread bundle under her arm.

“We can make an exception for that,” Maeril said. “It has already been paid for.”

The door stood at the end of a shallow passage beside a closed storeroom.

It was narrower than Maeril would have chosen. The wood had swollen near the bottom, and one hinge carried a stain that ordinary weather might have made in an ordinary city.

She took out the key Pell had arranged for a final price: a folded strip of copper, small enough to lose between two coins.

Elisa examined the door, then the strip.

“That opens it?”

“So I have paid to believe.”

Rishi stood with the staff planted beside his foot. He gathered himself before the next movement, feeling the dressings beneath the loose robes and the deeper answer of the ward beneath them.

Maeril checked his face.

He nodded.

She pressed the copper against the wood and turned the handle.

The door resisted at the swollen edge.

“If this key fails,” she muttered, “I am billing Pell for spiritual damages.”

“Spiritual?” Elisa asked.

“Mine.”

Maeril pulled again.

The edge came free.

Rain touched the air between them.

Rishi smelled wet stone first, then river mud and distant smoke. His lungs opened toward it before he thought to be careful. The bandage at his ribs pulled, but for half a breath he scarcely noticed.

Beyond the threshold lay a gray passage open to a familiar sky. Water ran from a gutter into an uneven channel in the paving. Somewhere farther off, a bell sounded through the rain.

“Home,” he said.

Maeril kept her hand on the door.

“Do not make it sound safe.”

He looked at her. She was watching the passage beyond him, one eye narrowed, the pack against her back and all the work she could no longer carry on paper hidden beneath his clothes.

Elisa adjusted the bottle under Rika’s cloak. Her face had grown serious again. She stepped close enough to offer Rishi an arm if he needed it, and waited for him to decide.

He took it for the threshold.

Maeril held the door while they crossed, then followed with the copper still in her hand.

The smell of rain received them. Beneath his bandages, the new ward burned.

In the city beyond, mercy was already being hunted.