Chapter 37
“I’m thinking Bardsbane might be a good name. It’s maybe a little more subtle than Bridgewrecker, but . . . bane. Bane.” Breadlee’s voice was wistful. “Do you think I could have two titles?”
“I’ll just point out that bards might not look kindly on it,” said Fern. “I mean, if you want your legend to spread.”
“You make a fair point, but also, I do hate music. I’m conflicted.”
“It’s not the role of the blade to be the subject of the tales—merely the instrument of their creation,” declared Nigel. Astryx had given him a bare inch of steel so that he could say his piece about the Staysha affair, which had taken a solid half hour.
While he’d rambled, Fern had been thinking about the many pages it would take to cover the last few days. An idea was forming in the back of her mind.
She rode on Persimmon with Zyll napping against her back. Since the pony had no saddle, Astryx led her by halter and knotted lead from astride Bucket. Persimmon was a well-behaved mare and seemed relieved that nothing interesting was happening anymore, placidly clopping beside the larger horse.
Night had stolen across the prairie, but a waxing moon glowed high on the rumpled black velvet of the sky like a clipped silver coin. Grassy hillocks and streams gleamed beneath it, preternaturally bright. Fall crickets trilled endlessly in unearthly chorus.
Astryx had insisted they ride farther after nightfall so that there’d be no chance of an unexpected visit from Staysha on foot while they slept.
Neither of them had brought up the argument that sparked the day’s events. In fact, both were at great pains to pretend nothing had happened. To Fern, it felt like they were balancing a rotten egg on a plate. Nobody wanted to be the one to let it roll off and break.
Instead, Fern completed her abridged narration of Ten Links in the Chain. There wasn’t much left to tell.
“‘. . . and with a last look at the port all in flames, Madger sailed mournfully into the west, less a sword hand and the finest partner she’d ever known.’”
Cricket-song joined the hoofbeats to fill the space left behind by her narration.
“It was a good story,” said Astryx after several moments, with great solemnity. “Thank you.”
Fern thought that would be it for the evening, then. She was certainly all talked out.
Astryx wasn’t, though.
“Your old friend, Viv. When you told us the tale of meeting her in Murk, and everything that happened after, you said she saved you in more than one way. What was the other way?”
The question was so unexpected that Fern had no defense and could only answer immediately. “She made me see what it was that I cared about. The thing I forgot when I was only going through the motions.”
“Viv sounds like a worthy friend.” Astryx nodded, then asked with gentle interest, “What was the thing you forgot?”
In recent weeks, Fern had thought about this more than was healthy, so the answer was easy. “That books are a weapon against loneliness. Putting them in the right hands lets people see one another. It makes us . . . better to one another. I think that’s a worthy thing to do.”
“But.” It wasn’t a question.
“But. That’s not enough for me anymore, and I don’t know why.
I still believe it. Still know it. But I’m not content with it.
Which is apparently why I’m in the middle of nowhere, atop a pony I can’t ride, with a goblin on my back, explaining this to the most famous person I’ve ever met. Still . . .”
The Oathmaiden offered her a wordless glance that prompted for more.
“I wonder if I misjudged what was happening all those years ago,” said Fern, sighing.
“Maybe it wasn’t a fix. Maybe it was just a small piece of something bigger, and I fooled myself into believing it was the whole thing.
Or maybe that sort of realization is like food.
It fills you for a while, but eventually, you have to eat again. ”
“Do you feel hungry now?” asked Astryx. She fingered her ruined ear again.
Fern reached for what would surely be an obvious answer, except she couldn’t find it. “I . . . don’t know.”
Her stomach growled, loudly and inconveniently.
“Or I can’t tell over the sound of myself.”
“Give me your socks,” said Fern.
Astryx stared at her, arrested in the act of stripping the soggy woolen things from her pale and wrinkled toes. “There aren’t any stones to dry them on,” she said.
“Come on, toss them over.”
They had finally stopped between the two largest swells of earth they’d come across on the prairie, which formed a shallow bowl. It wasn’t much, but it kept the meager fire Fern had built of ox pats from whipping around too badly.
Astryx wadded the socks together and lobbed them, her expression bemused.
Fern snagged them out of the air, unrolling them again.
She’d cut a pair of sturdy bulrush stems at a marshy spot over the hill, and now she planted each at an angle in the soft earth near the fire.
She topped them with socks and dug them deep to stabilize them.
The wet wool began to steam almost at once.
“Dry socks,” declared Fern, with a small smile. “You said they were the only thing that stayed exciting after ten centuries.”
“I may have exaggerated slightly,” allowed Astryx, with an echo of Fern’s amusement. “But not by much.” A regal nod. “Thank you, Li—. . . Squire.”
Fern could still sense the rotten egg on the plate, but they were both doing their best not to tip it off the edge.
Zyll made a sound of disgust and stuck out her pointed tongue. Seated with her coat rucked up to her knobby green knees, she wiggled her toes close to the heat of the flames. “Socks-es is like hat-lings on horseys.” The bracelet on her wrist winked in the flickering light.
The Oathmaiden extended her own pruned toes toward the fire and flexed them. “We should be in Amberlin in another three days.”
“That soon,” said Fern. It wasn’t really a question.
Astryx cleared her throat. “I wanted to say. You were very impressive, with Staysha and the wagon.”
“Yeah, we really were, weren’t we?” chirped Breadlee, extra loudly.
Everyone pretended he hadn’t said anything.
“Oh,” replied Fern. “Um. Thanks.” She fidgeted with one of the stems holding the socks, for no reason whatsoever.
“I have . . . liked having you along. Surprisingly.”
Fern gave her a look.
“I mean that I’m surprised. Not that it’s surprising that someone would like to have your company.”
“Okay,” said Fern, carefully.
“Afterward,” said Astryx, as though stepping delicately from stone to stone, “if you find you’re still . . . hungry. Perhaps you’d like to continue onward. With me.”
Fern was seized by several different emotions at once—gratification, relief, fear . . . Excitement and trepidation in equal measure. And all with the sour aftertaste of her anger from earlier in the day. In other words, a real fucking mess.
“Afterward?” she said, more archly than she’d intended.
Astryx glanced at Zyll, who stared back at her with that savage smile and what Fern had no doubt was absolute comprehension.
To her credit, the elf maintained eye contact as she said, “After the bounty is delivered.”
And the rotten egg rolled off the plate.
“Why do we have to do this?” demanded Fern.
Astryx frowned. “I’ve already told you, I—”
“Yeah, yeah. You keep your covenants, you do what must be done,” said Fern, unable to keep the exasperation from her voice. “That’s shit. That’s a slogan. What would it cost you to forget all that just this once? What changes?”
“Everything changes! My life is built on principle because it has to be. It’s the only thing that keeps it stable after all these years.
Every chip in that foundation leads to another, and another, and soon it’s cracked in two, and everything falls down around you.
” The elf was trying hard to keep the heat from her voice and only just succeeding.
“People come and go. Moments like this come and go. Live to five hundred, and then you’ll understand. ”
Fern leaned forward over her crossed knees and planted her paws on the ground. “Bullshit. We’re not Tarimites. There’s no mad god that’s going to descend and consume the world if your principles get a little bent for a good reason.”
“And the alternative is what? Tossing everything aside because I don’t feel perfectly fulfilled at every moment? How is that working for you?”
The fire suddenly seemed overwarm.
“I guess well enough that you want me to stick around,” retorted Fern.
They gazed balefully at one another across the fire as the air between them distorted with the heat.
Zyll abruptly stood, letting her pocket-coat fall back to cover her shins and interrupting their staring match.
She glanced between them, mouth closed, annoyance glittering in her crimson eyes.
“Tua shunkata,” she declared, then marched away from the fire.
Before Astryx could ask, Fern sighed and explained, “She said we’re both fuckheads.”
Later, as she lay with her back to the fire and her eyes open, bruised and aching from Staysha’s battering, Fern realized she hadn’t answered Astryx’s question.
She wondered what the answer would have been.