Chapter 29
“Remarkable,” whispered Burdock, delicately probing Astryx’s ribs on either side of her wound, while the elf hiked her shirt up to give him access.
The flesh still looked fierce and red to Fern, the stitches ugly and stark against the elf’s pale skin; however, she couldn’t deny that the Oathmaiden seemed much more herself. Her eyes were clear and bright, and she’d declined the sleeping tincture the monk had urged upon her.
Now, she sat on the pushed-together beds while the black-furred physician examined her under the frosted morning light.
“I’d normally advocate rest for at least another few days, but I suppose a bit of walking about would be all right. As long as you’re careful of the stitching. Not that I could make you stay put if I wanted to,” he grumbled.
Fern, seated on the stool with Ten Links in her lap, didn’t miss the amused quirk of Astryx’s lips.
“My thanks, Burdock,” she said, dropping her shirt back into place. “I promise to go easy.”
The rattkin rolled his eyes. “Tarim’s patience.” Then he muttered his way out of the tiny infirmary, closing the door behind him.
“So,” said Fern. “No reading today?”
Astryx glanced around the room with obvious distaste, then eased herself off the beds.
She shrugged carefully, massaging the back of her neck.
The motion pulled the skin along her ribs, and she hissed through bared teeth.
Letting her hands fall back, she said, “Let’s get out of this gods-damned room. How’s Bucket?”
“Why don’t I show you?” replied Fern, tucking the book back under one arm.
Astryx sketched a glance over Nigel, propped in the corner, but left him behind.
Out in the hallway, she ran a hand through her tangle of silver hair, now in need of a trim. The Tarimites had built at a generous scale for rattkin, but that still meant that her head nearly brushed the ceiling.
The monks they encountered stared in awe at the elf as they passed, but she didn’t appear to care. She moved more slowly than normal, wincing each time she had to duck under any lintel too short for her height.
When they emerged into the cold outdoors, Astryx breathed a long sigh of relief, closing her eyes and turning her face up to the wan light that found its way through the cloud cover. Errant flakes melted on her cheeks.
As they approached the stable, the elf spotted Staysha’s wagon off to the side.
At her questioning glance, Fern gave her the rundown on the Silver Sparrow, who, unsurprisingly, Astryx had never heard of.
Fern was glad that they hadn’t run into the dwarf along the way.
There was something satisfying about being the one showing Astryx around an unfamiliar place.
It was nice to be the person who knew what she was doing for once.
Inside the stable, the Oathmaiden spent a long while reassuring Bucket as he whuffled at her hair and uttered distressed whinnies. She ran her hands slowly along his neck and let him lip her fingers, murmuring into his ears.
Fern felt a bit like a voyeur, so she found a seat at a bench beside the tack-mending table and flipped idly through the book while she waited.
She glanced up when Astryx cleared her throat.
The elf leaned against Bucket’s stable door with her left arm curled up under his chin, scratching his cheek. In her other hand, she held a sheet of paper that appeared to have been folded and refolded. She looked . . . embarrassed. Shy? It was an unfamiliar expression on the Blademistress’s face.
“I, um.” Color rose in the elf’s cheeks. “I didn’t mean to take this.”
It dawned on Fern why the page looked so familiar. That was her crabbed writing on it.
At the no-doubt horrified expression on Fern’s face, Astryx hurried to explain, “It caught on my leg, back at the waystation. I guess I stuffed it into my pocket. I’m not sure what I was thinking.”
“Oh, gods,” muttered Fern. “You read it, then? How ashamed do I need to be?”
Astryx gave her a confused look, then turned her attention to the page.
Swallowing, she read, “I’d seen her fight before, and I don’t know how else to put it—she’d always been flawless, like she’d experienced the battle already a thousand times before and knew every beat.
But against Tullah? It felt like a first. Like the layers of a legend were peeled back, and I saw the person underneath, the instinct and impulses that make her who she is.
The sound of her voice when she saw what was happening to Bucket?
I felt it in my heart. At the edge of what she could handle, caught between two disasters, hurting inside and out, I think I finally understood why people still tell stories about her. She was beautiful.”
It was very quiet in the stable, and Astryx kept her eyes on the page.
Finally the elf broke the silence, her voice wobbly. “Is this really what you see?”
“Yes. I mean. Sometimes. I don’t know.” Fern massaged her eyes with her paws. “I’m sure I’m not the only one,” she said in a small voice.
She heard the elf approach, and the paper crackled as she laid the page down on the tack table. “I’m sorry I kept it.”
Fern sighed. “In your defense, you’ve been asleep most of the time.”
“Still.”
Astryx carefully lowered herself to sit beside Fern on the rattkin-sized bench, her knees awkwardly high. She looked endearingly ridiculous.
A long pause ensued.
“Thank you,” said the elf. “For saving Bucket.” Her gaze remained carefully fixed on her horse, instead of Fern.
“Oh,” mumbled Fern, bemused. “Um. Sure.”
“Little squire,” added Astryx, with a faint smile. “Maybe you missed your calling?”
“I’m not sure I like the ‘little’ part,” said Fern. “Makes me sound cute.”
“Mm.”
“Tullah’s not going to give up, is she?” asked Fern.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I didn’t get a chance to tell you, what with all the”—Fern gestured broadly—“everything. I’ve seen Tullah before, I’m sure of it. Hells, she nearly knocked me down in Bycross, and I swear I saw her in Turnbuckle. She’s been following us for a long time now.”
Astryx shifted, searching for comfort she wouldn’t find. “Then I’m certain I’ll see her again.”
Fern glanced at the elf out of the corner of her eye. “How do you think that will go?” she asked, carefully.
“I didn’t live this long on accident, you know.”
Reaching out, Fern tapped the wire bracelet on Astryx’s wrist. Even as she did it, she was mildly shocked at the familiarity of her own gesture. “So, you can feel that Zyll is close with this thing?”
Pointing in the direction of the abbey, the elf adjusted her aim while squinting as though sighting down a bow. “There. Like little tugs on a piece of thread tied between us. It gets tighter the farther away she gets, and past a certain point, there’s a pain that keeps increasing.”
“Are you surprised she’s still here? I know I am.”
Astryx thought about that. “I suppose I should be. But I think I’ve given up expecting anything rational from Zyll.”
Fern worried at her lip. “What if you just let her go?”
The elf turned to look at her, brow creased. “I—”
But the bookseller hurriedly continued, “She saved all of us back at the bridge. We’d be dead now without her, right?
Okay, none of this would have happened without her, either, but that’s beside the point.
Is it really worth it to keep on? If she goes her own way, Tullah has no reason to find you. Us.”
“Setting aside everything else,” said Astryx, “you were worried Zyll would wander into a hazferou’s belly on her own. Tullah’s a great deal more dangerous. I think it’s clear that orc means to end her.”
Fern considered the bracelet falling from Astryx’s wrist back at the waystation, its reappearance the following morning, and who exactly might have replaced it.
Ignoring that for the time being, she forged onward. “Maybe. But I’d bet anything she’s a lot harder to find by herself. What’s to say that whoever’s paying to have you haul her in doesn’t have the same fate in mind? What if they’re no better than Tullah?”
Astryx chewed her lip, but then shook her head. “What happens after is always unknowable. Good or ill, you’ll go mad trying to anticipate it. There was a time when I tried . . . But I learned to forego such things long ago. I can’t turn away.”
“Why not?” cried Fern. “What do you get out of it? You keep going on and on, but for what? For who? You saved me back in that swamp, and I was very grateful, but to you it was probably not even worth remembering. You didn’t even stick around to be appreciated, already off to the next thing.”
“Because that’s part of it. Part of being who I am. I see things to their end. I keep my covenants. I do what must be done.”
To Fern, those sounded like old words repeated so often they’d lost all meaning, and she felt her ire rise. But she remembered their argument outside Turnbuckle and was determined not to repeat it. The abbess’s words from the library echoed back to her.
“Penance to your hungry god,” she muttered to herself.
“What’s that?”
“You’re worried about what will fall apart if you don’t keep doing what you’re doing,” said Fern.
Astryx tried to link thoughts to words she’d probably never articulated before, not in a thousand years.
It took her several long moments. “I . . . It’s like walking a straight road when night falls.
You know it goes on and on, even though it’s too dark to see.
You don’t stray in the night, you keep moving straight, so that when the sun rises, you’ll still be on the path. ”
Her ghostlight gaze was fierce. “I still believe that when morning comes, the road will be under my feet. So, I keep walking straight.”
Fern winced at a feeling of painful familiarity and refrained from saying things like, Well, maybe you should just stop for the night, or I’ve never seen a road that straight in my life, what are you talking about? Because it felt like bad form to abuse somebody else’s metaphor.