17. Roman Architecture
The canyon walls seemed to close in around me. We did not break into the Second Sentinel for nothing. We had not come all this way for nothing.
We can’t have.
But Iseult was saying we had. There was no secret door to take me home. There was no way to save Gams without letting Ferrin into Keldori.
“I fought you for a dead end?” I asked. “And you let me?”
“Yes.” Iseult refused to meet my eye.
“Did this historian have hair like yours?” Tiernan looked up at Iseult from where he sat on the keep’s front steps.
“I never knew her. She fled Tulyr fifty years ago.” She hesitated, chewing on her lip. “But she was Grandfather’s cousin, and it’s a common hair color among Lyrians, so it’s possible.”
Tiernan’s brow furrowed, and he nodded.
“Why?” Ciarán demanded.
“There’s a citadel in the northern region of the Grand Barony. I’ve heard of a white-haired woman with a large library inside.”
“How far?” I asked. Maybe it was a good thing I’d taken the time to save Tiernan from his jail cell after all.
“A few days, maybe? I’m not sure. I’ve never traveled through this region.”
“It’s better than nothing.” Orla, ever the optimist, looked back at Iseult. “What do you think? Will you come with us? If it really is your historian in the citadel, she might be more likely to help family.”
Iseult grimaced, looked down the length of the canyon, away from the Keep, and then sighed.
“I have nowhere else to go, and while I don’t much care for your friends, I do enjoy your company, Orla. So, fine.” She marched up the steps of the keep with her head held high and proud. “I suppose I’ll go with you to the citadel.”
She reached out towards my spear where it still stuck from the wall and tapped it with the tip of her finger as she passed. It dissolved in a shower of blue sparks, and Iseult disappeared into the keep.
I’d imagined when the day finally came that I created anything other than a flail, I’d feel something more like triumph. Instead, anger, defeat, and frustration roiled inside me as I trudged down the spiral steps to the dungeon bathhouse.
I’d wanted Iseult to have the answer, but instead she only had the next piece of a puzzle. We were operating off of uncertainties and rumors, and Iseult was right to doubt our ability to pull any of this off.
Steam, lightly glowing, wafted up the stairs from the bathhouse, smelling like petrichor with a hint of sulfur thanks to the water’s geothermal origin beneath the mountains.
The floor was still slick from the others’ baths the previous night, and I stepped through the cool puddle at the base of the stairs to turn the corner.
Steaming water swirled in the single basin that took up most of the low-ceilinged chamber.
I couldn’t tell if the slight glow emanating off its cloudy surface was because of the Skal streams that ran through the gutters along the edges of the room or if the light was an artifact of whatever I’d done to my eyes in my fight with Iseult.
I hadn’t figured out how to return them to normal, and after nearly killing Ciarán, I was too embarrassed to ask for help.
Granted, he had been asking for it.
I folded my clothes and tried to stack them where the floor was the driest, wondering vaguely what I was going to use for a towel. I hurried into the water, eager to hide in something more substantial than steam even though there was no one down here to see me.
The hot water elicited a shudder, and I relaxed into the stone bench hiding under the clouded water’s surface.
If I closed my eyes, I could pretend I was in a hotel hot tub, traveling for one of my mother’s many book signings.
Hotel hot tubs didn’t smell like sulfur, of course, but it still helped, imagining I was somewhere that made sense.
Somewhere where volcanoes weren’t going to wipe out my grandma. Somewhere there were no Magicians trying to break through the fabric of reality.
But that’s exactly where I was, and while we had a tentative path forward, everything was falling apart.
I opened my eyes to stare at my reflection in the water, but I didn’t recognize the young woman who stared back.
The water distorted my image a bit, sure, but the last couple of weeks had brought a new sallowness to my cheeks, accented by mirroring crescent cuts left by Orla’s goggles.
I drew my hands from the water to rub across the cuts, half-expecting them to wash away.
When I lowered my hands, however, the cuts remained, bleeding gently into the water I’d left on my face.
And my eyes…
I blinked, trying to figure out how to turn off the garish blue irises and black sclera. It had taken me months to figure out how to make anything other than a flail. What if it took me longer to figure out how to change my eyes back? What if I never did?
“We’re going to rest here a few days.” For a moment, I thought Ciarán was speaking to me in my head, but when he came around the corner at the base of the stairway, I recoiled against the stone at my back.
“It was Iseult’s decision. She says we’ll travel faster if we’re better rested, if that’s alright. ”
“What are you doing?” I hissed.
“Taking a bath? Same as you.”
“I came down here to be alone.”
“It’s just me.” His breathy laugh echoed through the chamber, bouncing off the hot water and the barrel arches of the low ceiling. “Besides, you’re never alone as long as we’re tethered.”
While I knew Ciarán was now a mainstay in my mind, the idea that he was there even during my most vulnerable moments of the day had never occurred to me. The bath was suddenly too hot, and I felt my cheeks flush.
“Have you looked—”
“No!” Ciarán blanched and deflated, reminding me too much of the scared boy in the memory I’d intruded upon. “You know what? It’s fine. You bathe first. I’ll guard the hall and take a turn when you’re done.”
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. Communal baths were normal in Skalterra. I’d found that out several weeks ago. It was only weird if I made it weird, and he was right. Very little privacy existed between us.
Besides. The water was cloudy. I couldn’t even see myself past the surface.
“The thought of you lurking on the stairs is somehow worse. Just take your bath. I’ll be fine.”
“Wren, really, I’ll come back later if you’re uncomfortable.”
“You threw up in my mouth. I think we’ve reached the communal bathing point in our friendship.”
“Friendship?” Ciarán’s grin disappeared behind the folds of his tunic as he pulled it off over his head. The shirt fell to the stone floor with a soft rustle. “You told me we weren’t friends.”
“I was friends with Liam, so I guess I’m kind of friends with you by extension.”
The glow of his eyes caught the edges of his smirk through the steam, and I looked away as his hands moved to his belt.
“Were you really friends?” he asked.
“Yes.” I couldn’t tell if he was making implications about Gams forcing the friendship upon us, or if he somehow knew the way my feelings for Liam had shifted in those final few days with him. Whichever it was, I didn’t want to know.
Ciarán’s trousers, and whatever else he’d taken off with them, fell heavier than his shirt had, landing with the metallic clink of belt buckle against stone. The water rippled as he slid into the basin.
I folded my arms over my chest for extra protection, but I didn’t feel as nervous as I thought I would now that he was in the water.
“So the Grimguards have rules against falling in love with Saergrims, but bathing together is fine?” I forced levity into my tone.
“We are free to fall in love with anyone we like. It’s acting on those feelings that’s forbidden should the object of our affections happen to be a Saergrim.” Ripples played across the surface of the bath as Ciarán sank into the water to my left. “And it’s just a bath. Everyone takes baths.”
I nodded, watching the stone wall rather than look his way.
“When Sorcha was healing my ribs in the kitchen, you just about passed out when you saw my shirt halfway off,” I said. “But this doesn’t bother you?”
“Like I said, everyone takes baths. Besides, you’re completely covered.”
“Until I get out of the water.”
“I’ll close my eyes.”
“Promise?”
“If I don’t look when I’m in your head, what makes you think I’d look here and now?”
I finally turned to meet his eye, expecting to catch him smirking.
His neat frown caught me off guard. He sat with his arms extended on the stones behind him, keeping his upper chest out of the water.
Steam turned to droplets that clung to the ridges of the scars on his skin, and I wondered what his more recent injuries looked like under the water.
“How’s your side?” I asked.
“Oh, you’re worried about my wellbeing?” Ciarán blew a loose strand of dark hair out of his face, but it fell back in his eyes, heavy with steam. “You almost killed me with that javelin.”
“Not really.” I sank in the water up to my chin, letting the heat relax the tension in my neck. “I missed.”
“Then you were trying to kill me?”
“I was trying to shut you up.”
“Job well done, then.” Ciarán winced as he forced his muscles to relax in the hot water.
I rubbed at my eyes again, hoping they might be back to normal. However, two glowing blue eyes continued to leer at me from my murky reflection in the water.
“How’d you know?” I asked, still staring at my reflection.
“How’d I know what?”
“That I’d be able to make anything other than a flail.”
Ciarán’s ensuing laughter was cold, and I wished I could dissolve into the bath water.
“Do you think I meant to goad you into throwing a spear at me?” he asked.
“It’s the sort of thing you would do.”
“True.” He leaned his head back, and the loose hair beneath his bun fell into the water as he closed his eyes.
“But I was being honest. I was sure you couldn’t do it.
Creation magick is finicky. Sure, innate ability is necessary to make it work, but even then it’s only as good as you believe it will be.
Many Magicians lack the imagination to ever properly wield Skal beyond cheap gimmicks. ”