Chapter 23 Silver
Silver
The trudge back to the Cliff Realm takes most of the rest of the day. Mance probably made it in minutes. I hate that even if she had wanted to take me, I would have slowed her down.
My fear is gone, but a sadness still festers in my chest when I think about all I’ve lost in the last day.
If only I could rid myself of it, like I can my fear.
In this moment, if I had the option, I would pluck up every negative feeling that swarms in my chest and crush them all, one by one, like bugs beneath my heel.
But I guess the magic doesn’t work that way.
It’s not until I get to the Outskirts that I remember I don’t really have anywhere to spend the night.
I’ve been staying in the Forest Realm since this area turned into even more of a wasteland than it was before.
My newly reconstructed home is sunken half into the mud, dirty, broken, and uninhabitable.
I skirt around the edge, painstakingly avoiding the newly dug graves, heading into town instead.
I don’t want to go back to the palace. How pathetic would that be? She’d let me in, but right now, I’d rather sleep in the gutter than show up bedraggled at her door. It’s not like it would be the first time I’ve spent the night on cobblestones.
I do have one friend left in town, though, and my feet know the way before my brain even registers the decision. When I look up, I’m right in front of Vie’s apartment. So I climb the rickety stairs to the back entrance.
Her place is a glorified attic space, crammed above a pub. Probably one of the ones she fights in. But it’s hers, which means it isn’t Mance’s, and that’s pretty much everything I’m looking for in a living space right now.
At my knock, the door whips open then slams shut again, and to my surprise, a dagger comes flying toward my face. I duck reflexively, just in time for the knife to sail over my head and stick in the wall behind me.
“What was that for?” I demand.
The door creaks open, slower this time, and Vie appears in the crack, giving me a flat and unimpressed stare. “You didn’t use the friends’ knock,” she scolds.
I roll my eyes. “You only told it to me one time, months ago.”
“And whose fault is it that you never once visited me in all those months?”
I duck my head, chagrined. “Sorry. What is it?”
She taps a rhythm onto the wood, two short, one long, and then two short again.
“Got it,” I say. “Can I come in?”
“Uh . . .” She looks over her shoulder and has a hushed conversation with someone I can’t see. My shoulders tense. But then she swings the door wide and it’s Rooftop, sitting at her dinner table. My tension evaporates. “Sure,” she says, somewhat unnecessarily, because I’m already halfway inside.
“Did she throw a knife at you?” Rooftop asks as I settle beside him.
“Yeah,” I say. “You too?”
“Of course not; I used the knock.”
Vie sits in the third chair and we all stare at one another, the silence stretching.
I don’t know why this is awkward.
We’ve sat around a table together many, many times before. Most nights that I can remember, in fact. Is it my fault? Have I spent so much time wrapped up in Mance and her problems that I started neglecting my own friends?
“Rooftop and I are seeing each other,” Vie blurts out.
Or it could be that.
Rooftop’s face erupts in a blush, and despite the brashness of her tone, Vie is avoiding my eyes.
“What?!” I ask finally. “Since when?”
“Since he got a fancy new job and the ability to ply me with sweets whenever I want,” Vie answers quickly. “It’s purely transactional.”
“Shut up, Vie; you like me.”
“I do not,” she mumbles into her hand.
“Wow,” I say, unable to think of anything else to fill the silence. “Wow. Okay. Uh, congrats.”
“Try not to pull a muscle jumping up and down in excitement,” Vie says dryly.
I shake my head, trying to get rid of the fog that’s keeping me from being present.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m just surprised.
I am very happy for you both.” And I am!
But I also suddenly feel like a third wheel, and among the people I’ve come to view as family.
It stings a little bit. “Why didn’t you tell me? ”
“Rooftop wanted to,” Vie admits. “But you know I’m not so good with the feelings. I made him jump through a lot of hoops before I was willing to call this what it is.”
“Why tonight, then?”
She gives me a look. “Because you’re in my house and you look like you’re not here for a short visit, and I kept thinking about how I would have to not kiss Rooftop for however long you were staying and that didn’t sound fun at all.”
Rooftop’s blush gets even deeper, but his mouth twists to the side in a lopsided smile.
“So the expressing-your-feelings thing . . . It’s getting better, huh?” I ask wryly.
“I’m working on it. So am I wrong about you staying the night, or do I need to get out another bedroll?”
I hang my head. “No, you’re right. There’s a lot I need to tell you guys.”
Vie gets out some kind of sourdough molasses bread and we chat, tearing off pieces and passing the loaf back and forth.
The bread is much more decadent than our traditional fare, probably something left over from dinner at the castle, but the action at least is familiar, and I start to relax, the weight on my shoulders gradually easing.
I can even ignore the way Vie and Rooftop hold hands under the table, because they’re talking to me like they always have, and whatever awkwardness there was when I came in fades away.
Rooftop is sympathetic and comforting. Vie makes sarcastic comments about how she told me the relationship was doomed anyway and how it’s simply awful that I have godlike magic powers now.
By the time I crawl into Vie’s spare bedroll, hard floor at my back like old times, I feel considerably better.
But I should have known not to get too comfortable.
Because, as they say, every magic has a dark side.
I don’t find out what mine is until the sun sets.