Vadh
The silence is not what I expected.
We have been moving since we left the market grounds, and the road held for the first two hours before it narrowed into a trail. Root-broken, half-reclaimed by the jungle. For her that means stepping over what I push through.
She walks beside me where the trail allows it and behind me where it doesn’t.
Dessa filled the silence with small talk that ran out by the second hour. Maret measured her words the way you test ground in the dark. Bryn is quiet the way a cat is quiet. She moves through the jungle as she stood on the block. Present. Watching. A mystery.
We come to the river.
It is running hard. The rains have been heavy upstream, and I know this ford. It is not crossable on foot by a human today. The water would be over her head, and the current would take her.
I stop at the bank and she stops beside me. Looks at the water. Looks at me.
“Right,” she says. “So…”
“I’ll carry you across.”
She nods. Her eyes go to the far bank, already choosing where to land.
I reach for the oilcloth I carry in my travel roll and shake it out. It is large enough to cover her from shoulder to knee.
“Wrap yourself in this. All of you. As much skin covered as you can manage.”
I pause. “If any skin makes contact, watch the color. Gray means damage. Tell me immediately.”
She takes it. She heard what I told her in the settlement room. She wraps the cloth around herself, tucking the edges, pulling it over her shoulders and across her chest. Graceless. Practical.
“Ready.”
I lift her, one arm behind her back, one under her knees. She is lighter than I expected, and steadier. Her arms go around my neck, the oilcloth between her skin and my scales at every point.
Her weight settles against my chest. The shape of her body is clear against mine. The cloth is between us, and I can still feel the warmth of her through it, the give of her ribs when she breathes.
I slide into the river.
The crossing takes longer than I want it to. The current is stronger at the center channel, and I lose my grip once on a smooth stone and have to brace with my tail. She tightens her grip on my neck. She does not make a sound.
The lurch shifts the cloth. A fold gaps at her wrist, and for a few seconds the inside of her forearm lies flat against the scales of my neck.
Bare skin. The secretion starts before I can will it down.
I get the cloth back between us and watch the place her arm touched me, counting, waiting for the gray to come up the way I have watched it come up before.
No gray. A faint warmth blooms where her skin met mine, there under the wet cloth, and that is all. She does not cry out. She does not pull her arm away. Her grip on my neck does not change.
I am aware, the rest of the way, of every other place the cloth might shift. Every fold that could slip. Every gap where skin might find scales.
We reach the far bank, and I set her down. She finds her footing, unwraps the cloth, shakes it out, folds it. She hands it back to me.
“Thank you.”
Her face is flushed from cold and effort.
She pushes her sleeves up to adjust her pack, and the skin of her forearm is unmarked.
No gray. Her fingers find the place anyway, where the warmth still sits.
She presses it once, the way you touch a spot that has gone warm for no reason.
Then she lets it go. Whatever she felt, she has already put it down to the cold.
I take the cloth and put it away, and we keep moving as the trail rises and the canopy thins.
A strangler fig has swallowed a dead tree at the bend, its roots wrapped around the trunk in a living cage. An hour passes. The jungle closes and opens around us.
And then the temple appears.
It lifts out of the jungle the way a wreck lifts out of a shallow sea. Not all of itself. The tallest ridges. Moss over stone, vines over carving. The arch of the main entrance with its serpent jambs, the stepped platforms descending into green, the roof of the main hall gone black with centuries.
Late afternoon light falls gold across it, and mist rises off the wet stone.
The building spreads across the ridge in three uneven levels.
The jungle half-swallows the lowest portion, roots lifting the foundation stones, vines embedded in the mortar until the wall and the green are one structure.
The middle level is intact but weathered, the carved window frames dark with centuries of rain.
The upper level has lost its roof in two places.
Open sky where wood and stone used to be.
The courtyard at the base of the steps is cracked and tilted where roots have pushed through from below. The jungle presses against the perimeter walls on three sides, canopy branches resting on the upper stonework like arms draped across a sleeping body.
My home.
I have been the only one inside it for years. Before that, just my mother and me for as long as I can remember.
She stops on the trail, standing on the rugged path with her pack on her shoulder and her hands at her sides, staring at the temple.
I look at her. She is not afraid of it the way a sensible person would be.
She is hungry for it. It is in the way she has gone still, the stillness of a hunter, everything in her pointed at the stone like she has spent her whole life trying to stand exactly here.
I bought a woman who looks at my dying home the way I have never let myself look at it. Like it is worth wanting.
“Come,” I say. “I’ll show you where you can sleep.”
She nods.
She ascends the steps ahead of me, her hands finding the carvings immediately. Her fingers trace the serpent jambs, reading the stone with her palms, and I let her go ahead so she is not looking at me for a while.
I need a while.
I follow her up the steps, my coils taking the stone behind her, and I do not think about her weight in my arms at the river.