Vadh
On the sixteenth morning, she sits on my stone.
Mine. There is only one stone now. I have been eating on this stone for five years. She has been here fifteen days. The stone is hers. I do not understand how this happened, and I do not want it back.
Her bedroll is beside my coils. I do not know when she moved it from the corridor. She brought hers over at some point during the night. I did not hear her do it. But both stones are side by side at the base of the steps, and she sits on the one that is warm from my coils and eats her breakfast.
She leans against the loop of me that rests beside the stone. Her shoulder blade against the scales. Her weight settling in while she chews. There is nothing performative about this. She is leaning because the coil is there and she wants to lean.
She puts her hand on my coil while she eats. Casual. No intent. Her palm resting on the scales as it would on a table or a knee. Neither of us mentions it.
The stew is for the evening, but I start the preparation early because the dried meat needs soaking and the root needs cutting. She comes into the anteroom while I am cutting.
She picks up the second knife and starts on the root. She cuts it small. She has been cutting it small since the first time.
We work side by side at the counter, her sleeves rolled to the elbow. The teal runs along the inside of both forearms, following the veins. She does not comment on it. She may not know how far it has spread.
Her arm is near my coil, a breath of space between us. The anteroom is warm from the banked fire pit. The dried meat soaks in the bowl between us.
“What did your mother cook?” she asks.
She is not asking about the seal. Not about the channels or the venom or the duty. She is asking about my mother. The person.
I have not talked about my mother in that way for five years. I have thought about her as the previous keeper. The one who held the system alone. The duty before mine.
“She made a grain dish with the river fish,” I say. “She would wrap the fish in leaves from the garden and set them over the fire pit. The leaves would char and the fish would steam inside. The smell would carry through the main hall. I would know she was cooking before I reached the corridor.”
“Sounds amazing.”
“It was. I have not made it. I do not have the fish. The river trader brings dried meat and grain and root vegetables. He does not bring fish.”
“Could you ask him?”
The question is simple. It has not occurred to me. The trader comes. The trader brings what the trader brings. I pay. He leaves. I have not asked for anything specific because I stopped thinking of food as something I could want things from.
“I could ask him,” I say.
She nods, puts the cut root in the pot, and adds water. The right amount.
“What about your mother?” I say.
She tears the herb. Drops it in. “Reka didn’t cook. She burned everything she attempted. She used to joke that she could navigate a mountain range but couldn’t boil water without setting the pot on fire.”
“What did you eat?”
“We’d go to the stall on the corner of our street, and she’d buy skewers. We’d eat them walking. Every time. She’d buy four. Two for her, two for me. She always ate hers first and then looked at mine like she was surprised I was still eating.”
She is smiling. A different expression from the grin in the anteroom. Smaller. Private. Directed at the memory, not at me.
“She told me once that the reason she became an adventurer was because adventurers eat out,” Bryn says. “She said it with a straight face. I believed her for years.”
“When did you stop believing her?”
“When I got old enough to notice. She bought pots everywhere we went. Every town. Every job. Each one was going to be the place she finally learned to cook. She never used a single one.”
The smile is still there. Smaller now. It leaves and does not come back.
We eat the stew in the anteroom instead of the hall. She sits on the counter with her legs hanging over the edge. I coil near the door. The room is small. We are closer than we would be in the hall.
After the meal, I check the channels. She goes to her corridor to continue clearing debris. I hear the scrape of her work from two rooms away.
“Still alive in there?” Her voice carries down the corridor.
“Yes.”
“Just checking. It got quiet.”
The scrape resumes. The building holds both sounds, her work and mine, and the silence between them is not empty anymore.
I go to the lower hall for the afternoon check. The pour from this morning ran through the full collection point protocol. The channels are responding. The distribution feels different. Fuller. The way the architecture moves the venom when it has a proper input.
My pour this morning was the clearest it has been. The liquid was nearly transparent. The amber at the edges is gone. The faint tint that remains is so slight the stone shows through it.
That evening she takes her paper into the corridor outside my chamber, away from the stone beside my coils where she sleeps now.
She sits against the wall with a sheet on her knee and charcoal in her hand.
She is drawing in quick, concentrated strokes.
Her hand moves with the kind of speed that means she is drawing something she can see clearly. Seeing something and putting it down.
I come around the corner. She turns the paper over. Flat. Face down on her knee. Her hand covers it.
“Private,” she says.
“All right.”
“You’re still standing there.”
“I am cataloguing the corridor.”
“Catalogue it from your chamber.”
I go. Behind me she laughs, low, almost soundless.
I coil in my chamber. Through the doorway the charcoal starts again. Quick strokes. Certain. She draws something she does not want me to see. The sound of the charcoal is faster than the sound she makes when she sketches the corridors. That work is careful. This is something else.