Chapter 19 Sage
Sage
One by one, they all drift away from the fire.
First Bramble to relieve themself, then Araphi, with some half-hearted excuse that Sage can’t challenge in the presence of the party without exposing her overly keen interest in the bard’s affairs.
Then Remy stumbles outdoors to pack his pipe, so that it’s only Sage and Nura around the campfire.
Soon, Sage too grows restless, and leaves the girl in charge of the fire with a promise to return before the last of their smoked sausages carried in from Briarwall have done heating on their pokers.
Outside the temple, Remy sits on the steps beyond the stone columns, blowing rings of pipe smoke that merge with the misty vapor of his breath in the frozen night. Somehow, it’s colder than it’s been yet in the Northlands.
Sage welcomes it, along with the quiet.
Until the party broke up, the mood around the hearth had been the opposite of last night’s.
With no impossible task to contemplate, and no specter of failure to haunt their dreams, all that was left was to celebrate.
They did so with relish. Or rather, Bramble and Nura and Araphi did, trading stories and songs while Sage kept her peace and sipped her drink.
Bramble recited a gentle hymn meant to be sung on the dock when their village’s fisherfolk set out for the first time each spring, once the young salmon had migrated to salt water.
Nura told the story of her first fight in the pits, which she lost spectacularly by knocking herself out when she misjudged a charge, slipped, and slammed nose-first into her own staff.
Then Araphi silenced them all with a song she must have picked up in the taverns of the Rookery.
It was one Sage recognized. Workers in Ashaway’s factories sang it to keep up pace, then carried it back across the river with them, and sang it idly over the kitchen sink at night, or while sweeping the tramped-in coal dust from their crooked floors.
That’s how it was when Sage was young, and must be still.
On first listen, the verses seemed to come from a laborer encouraging their companions to keep their spirits up and pass the long hours in good cheer.
Simple enough that the overseers often misunderstood its meaning and would find themselves whistling the lively tune in their own fine apartments outside the Copper Court.
But the end of the song revealed its singer to be the overseers’ bosses, who owned the factories they never set foot in and collected money they never labored for to keep inside their fine manor houses.
Sage had opened her mouth to tell Araphi—to recall how she’d sung it herself with school friends before she truly understood it.
But every piece of herself she gives the bard is one more she’ll have to leave behind when they part ways. And if Araphi truly intends to return to the Claunecks after everything they’ve been through, then part ways they must. So she’d stayed silent.
Now here she is with Remy, the only person she knows who holds his secrets more closely than Sage.
He passes her his pipe as she approaches. “Expect we’ll be heading out at first light to make Briarwall by nightfall?”
“That’s the plan.” Though as Sage casts her gaze up to the sky, she’s not so sure.
The featureless expanse of cloud cover portends snow, and she can feel a change of weather coming in her bad knee, which aches more acutely than the days of riding would account for.
She swears she can even smell it, though her parents used to insist that was impossible, until she was right most every time.
They may have to bunk down for an extra day to avoid being caught in a blizzard on their way south, or perhaps two if the snowfall is deep enough.
Their provisions can be made to last that long.
Three days might be safer, if she manages a hunt…
“Something on your mind, boss?”
A growl rumbles from her throat as she passes the pipe back without smoking. “Don’t start that. You’re not as likable as Bramble, so I will push you into the Swallow.”
“Just thought you’d be in a better mood tonight, is all.
You’ve done it, Sage! Your first time leading a party, and we’ve completed a mission where few would’ve risked it.
Our ecstatic Client will soon have their prize, and we’ll all have more gold than has ever crossed our palms.” Aside from Araphi, that’s certainly true.
“And you’ll have built your reputation as a successful party leader.
So buck up, hmm?” He shoves Sage’s shoulder so she has to plant a hand down to keep from toppling from her perch on the temple steps. “I’d call this a critical success.”
Perhaps he’s right. And perhaps the snow will pass the river valley by, and she shouldn’t wish for a reason to delay the journey home, whatever that means for the party.
Nura has her family in Kingfisher. Bramble has their pebble of a fishing village somewhere down the western shoreline.
And Araphi? She has an entire future waiting for her in the capital.
A marriage that, however displeasurable she finds it, she’s made no protest about, nor confided to Sage that she has any plans to change.
She wanted one adventure as Phi Runesong before sliding back into her lifelong role of Araphi Clauneck, and now she’s had it.
And maybe she’s the lucky one. Much as Sage would gnaw off a paw before she spent a single day caught in the lavish trap of aristocracy and obligation, at least Araphi has a place to belong.
But for Sage and Remy, home is the road. Or is it what Sage has always secretly believed: a thing that waits somewhere down the road, if she can survive long enough to find it?
And how would she even know it if she did?
“Remy…”
“Mm?”
“Why doesn’t anybody know your name?”
He laughs, a puff of pipe smoke billowing up into the dark like the mist of the Graywood. “Surely you have theories. Let’s hear them.”
He isn’t wrong. Sage considers for a moment, then guesses, “You’re on the run.”
“A reasonable conclusion. Who from?”
“The Queens’ Guard?”
“Because I once deserted?” He shakes his head.
“That was two dozen years ago, and the generals hardly kept track of us in the chaos of battle. Half of our dead sank beneath the bog in the Swamplands, their bodies irretrievable, and the rest of us all looked largely the same to those in command. We always do. Besides, if that were true, I’d hardly have joined the adventure that placed me among an entire garrison of soldiers. ”
“From a job gone wrong, then,” Sage tries again.
Once more, the Agent shakes his head. “It’s nothing as dramatic as you’re imagining.
No double cross, no disaster. I simply left and kept riding.
Couldn’t go home again. Couldn’t look at the folks whose people died in the stink and the mud.
Besides, everyone I really had was on the battlefield that day.
So I found another place, another position, another name that suited my mood.
I made a choice. Then I rode on. Made another choice, and another.
Twenty-four years of choices that made me plenty of coins and kept the kingdom off my back. Kept me safe.”
Sage gestures into the dark, toward the black ribbon of the Swallow and the inhospitable, frozen forest beyond. “This feels like safety to you?”
“Well.” Remy chuckles, tugging down his cap.
“This job’s a bit of a departure from my usual routine of sitting in taverns and telling people what they want to hear.
Or listening in for scraps of information that may prove useful to potential clients.
Haven’t been on a proper adventure in years.
” He knocks an elbow into hers when he senses her starting to bristle.
“It’s no mark against you. Just sometimes, with an item this valuable, a client is willing to pay extra for… let’s call it an insurance policy.”
Before Sage can press further, there’s an almost impossibly quiet squeak behind them.
Ice crystals in snow rubbing against one another, compressed beneath a delicately placed boot.
Someone trying—and failing—to pass without notice.
Sage snaps her gaze around to see the back of Araphi’s traveling cloak as she moves carefully between the columns to disappear around the corner of the temple.
“What is it?” Remy asks, his own reflexes too dulled by the bottle and the pipe to note her before she vanishes.
“Just a fox. If I catch it, it’ll make a better breakfast than dried sheep and pickled onions.” She hasn’t got her bow with her, but she taps the daggers strapped perpetually to her hip. If she were hunting, these would be weapons enough.
“Off you go, then.” Remy nods. “Sheep never did agree with me.”
With that, Sage pads into the cold night after Araphi, unsure why she’s lied. But if the bard wanted to avoid detection, then Sage would prefer to find out why before the Agent does.
She follows Araphi’s tracks with a frisson of fear as she realizes she’s headed toward the Swallow, but calms when she finds Araphi sitting on the trunk of a broad downed tree, far enough back from the bank that she can’t possibly slip into the deadly stream by accident.
Araphi has her hands on her lap, cradling something in her palms that Sage can’t see from this angle.
When she puts another boot forward with the faintest crunch, Araphi jerks her head up.
She’s getting better at this adventuring business, Sage thinks with pride.
Araphi doesn’t look pleased to be found, though the look of alarm in her eyes recedes once she spots her tracker. “Ranger,” she greets her.
“Bard.” Sage scales the waist-high tree trunk from behind to sit beside her. “Surprised to find you away from the fire.”
“I needed to think.”
“About?”
She lifts a cupped hand to present the subject of her scrutiny.
Sage’s stomach clenches when she sees the dragon’s tooth in the palm of her glove. “What…Why do you have that?”