Chapter 25 Sage
Sage
Five Years Ago
What most don’t know about a shard elk’s antlers—each of them the size of a fully grown person, and each boasting dozens of prongs as sharp as knives, and barbed at the tips—is that they aren’t only for self-defense.
They’re useful for goring, to be sure, whether it’s a hunter or a rival bull.
But the death throes of a shard elk trigger a kind of combustion at the root of the antler that sends prongs slicing through the air in every direction.
The elk’s final gift to its herd is to kill the thing that’s killed it. Or at least, to try.
In Sage’s case, the elk succeeded.
It was supposed to be quick work—a day’s side quest on the road to their true destination.
A crazed, lone bull had found its way into Weatogue, a farming village only an hour’s ride off the Queens’ Road, and was wreaking havoc on the crops as well as menacing the children.
Sage’s party would put it down in trade for a meal and a cluster of rooms above the village’s only tavern that night.
They made quick work of corralling it into a glen in the woods, where Sage waited with her crossbow to send it to the planes beyond.
Though she timed her shot to let the creature gallop far enough ahead of the party not to endanger them with a last burst of strength and desperation, she was still well out of goring range.
But alas, not out of range when the shard elk’s heart gave its last pump, and its antlers shattered outward.
The last thing Sage felt was the barbed prong embedding itself six inches deep into her stomach, slicing through something vital.
The last thing she saw was Ollie’s face above her own, blurred at the edges.
The last thing she thought was: But I never got to—
Then there was only the cold and the dark, and then nothing at all.
Until there was something.
Golden light bloomed in the black, and Sage opened her eyes to the too-bright world.
Overhead, birds moved through the tree canopy, but she struggled to focus on them before her wife hovered above her once more.
Their jaw-length black curls were wild around their heart-shaped face, and tears shimmered in their pale-green eyes, flowing freely over their high, round cheeks.
Their long fingers fluttered against her chest. “Oh gods, Sage!” they cried.
“We weren’t sure…we didn’t know if we could…
” Then they collapsed atop her, tucking their damp face into the crook of Sage’s neck.
“What happened?” Sage croaked into their curls. Her throat was dry with disuse, as though she hadn’t spoken for days.
“Webar healed you. Brought you back.” Ollie gave another great sob.
Then she remembered—at least the most important bits: the glen, the shard elk, the blinding pain.
Sage slipped her arm out from where it was pinned between herself and Ollie, then pulled up the hem of her tunic, soaked through with too much blood.
Carefully, she raised herself on one elbow to see a long and puckered white scar running from her navel to her lower left rib.
It felt ugly when she traced her fingertips across it, but painless.
As though the injury were years old instead of mere moments.
Impossible…
She moved to sit up, then slumped back against the forest floor when her vision sparkled and the world threatened to slip sideways.
“I, er, closed the wound,” Webar, their healer, spoke up from somewhere nearby. “Cost me my best gem to do it. But I couldn’t put the blood back in.”
“Just rest a moment,” Ollie instructed, smoothing back the hair that had fallen across Sage’s forehead. “We’ll spend the night in the tavern, and head for home tomorrow.”
“For where?” Sage dodged Ollie’s palm to prop herself up on her elbows once more, determinedly ignoring her own dizziness.
Ollie’s teeth sank deep into their heavy lower lip.
Then they said, “You can’t actually mean to continue?
This job doesn’t matter. If Webar hadn’t had the right ingredients in his kit…
If the gods hadn’t listened…Sage, you just died,” they reminded her needlessly, reaching out to brush their fingers through her cropped hair. “You bled out in my arms.”
Again, Sage dodged their touch. “Well, now I’m back,” she rasped.
She watched as the pain from a thousand small, half-healed aches washed across her wife’s face.
Little wounds dealt between them over the past five years, but never dressed.
Barbed words traded, but seldom spoken of again.
There was never time, Sage told herself.
There was always another client to serve, another adventure to embark upon.
Always, the path ahead beckoned. Yet at every new campsite and even under unfamiliar stars, the same old fight awaited them. And here it was again.
Ollie loved Sage.
Ollie did not love the road.
Sage loved the road—needed the road, in fact.
Sage had never figured out how to need Ollie, or to let herself be needed.
Though her wife still hovered within reach, they might as well have been standing across the glen from each other for how much distance had settled between them.
Sage doesn’t relay precisely what she and Ollie said to each other in the tavern that night; those words and the last memory of her childhood sweetheart–turned–ex she keeps sealed in a jar in a cabinet in a corner of her heart.
Instead, she simply tells Araphi, “They wanted me to leave. We fought all night, and parted ways the next morning.”
“Ollie wanted you to leave the party?”
“To leave…the road. Leave adventuring. But I couldn’t agree.”
“Why not?” Araphi’s dark brows crease in a way that reminds Sage a little of Ollie, though only fleetingly.
The two are alike in some ways. Beautiful, of course, and each with their own undeniable attracting force, like the power that tugs the high tide toward the moon.
It had been hard to walk away from Ollie, but it had been impossible to contemplate staying.
And it wasn’t only the thought of settling down in the Rookery, or some small hamlet near the capital where calamity seldom strikes but nobody ever has quite enough of anything, including happiness.
Sage tears off an over-large bite of buttered bread with her teeth to buy herself time before she answers honestly.
“I felt…that I hadn’t found what I was looking for yet. ”
“What was that?” Araphi asks gently.
Sage is fairly certain that once upon a time she could name precisely what she was chasing.
But sitting across from Araphi—who Sage fought so hard not to want, only to find that giving in was as simple and satisfying as slipping into a hot spring after a long journey—she can’t remember for the life of her what’s missing.
“Maybe I’ll know when I find it.”
Araphi tucks her knees up to her chest, her robe skimming the tops of her bare feet.
“My mother was a bard once, you know. But the family demanded that she give up playing for the court once she married my fathers. Anything but a somber quartet playing at company functions they regard as lawless frivolity. They want the same of me when I marry Denby. Or wanted, I suppose, seeing as we’re unlikely to live through the week, let alone until the wedding.
” She seems to perk up just slightly at this thought.
But Sage is awash with sympathy—for Araphi, and for the woman her mother might have been. “That’s awful!”
“Of course, that’s not to compare my family to your ex-wife. They wanted you to give up adventuring to keep you safe. But the cost would have made you miserable, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes,” Sage agrees, surprised to be seen so clearly.
“You’ve never regretted the choice, then?”
“Well…if I had gone with Ollie, then I wouldn’t be here.”
“What, trapped in a blizzard in the middle of the Northlands?”
“With you,” Sage corrects, and grins against her will. “Hard to regret that.”
“Even though we’re probably going to die in the wilderness?” She’s trying to match Sage’s smile, but the catch in her voice betrays her.
“Let’s not go so far as that. It’s true that we’ve got rather a lot of problems to solve, beginning with the fact that I can’t walk on this leg.”
“I’ll carry you again, then.”
“It’s miles back to the temple,” Sage points out. “Even dry, we’d fare only a little better in this storm than we did before.” As if to punctuate her words, a fierce gust of icy snow rattles like a palmful of bone dice against the windowpane.
“Perhaps if I go alone, I can move more quickly, and bring back help—”
“No,” Sage snaps, surprised by her own vehemence.
“No,” she repeats more gently. “Even if you made your way there once the snow stopped, we’ve no idea what you’d find.
Bramble might have lied and turned the party against us, told them we conspired to make off with the tooth together. And there’ll be Remy to contend with.”
Just sometimes, with an item this valuable, a client is willing to pay extra for…let’s call it an insurance policy.
She recalls Remy’s words on the temple steps.
There wasn’t time to press him for an explanation before she set off after Araphi, but whatever he’d meant, it doesn’t bode well for them if he believes they’ve compromised his mission.
She’d not send Araphi back to face him alone, no matter the bard’s skill for persuasion.
“Besides,” she continues, “Remy is still set on bringing the artifact to your aunt. Clearly, we can’t have that.”
“So we make our way alone?” Araphi guesses.
Sage wishes she didn’t have to extinguish the flame of hope in her question, but the bard deserves to hear the truth.
“It would take some time to hike out of the Northlands on this knee, I’m afraid.
Too much time. And even if we took the blankets and stripped this cabin of every scrap of food we could find—which wouldn’t last us more than a few days even carefully rationed, from what I’ve seen—we don’t have proper equipment to shelter in the cold along the way.
There’s no wood besides what’s stacked inside the hearth, and that’s more charred than not.
I’d wager this cabin’s magic lasts just long enough to have a meal and a fire ready.
But magic can’t sustain itself out of nothing forever; even I know that. ”
“So we shouldn’t expect breakfast tomorrow?” Araphi asks grimly. “You might have told me sooner.”
“It’s only a theory, and I thought it might be easier to hear once our stomachs were full.”
At the crestfallen look on the bard’s face, Sage leans as far as she can with her leg propped up to take Araphi’s hand between their soup bowls. “Do you regret leaving Ashaway? You could be safe on your family estate right now instead of in a hunting shack in the middle of nowhere.”
“Yes. I could be trying on wedding gowns,” Araphi says dryly. “You know, I was pretty good at being an heir. Better than Yael ever was, though that’s nothing worth boasting about. If I hadn’t mistaken your adventuring party for a festival—”
“Aha, you admit it!” Sage crows in triumph. “You did mistake it for a party.”
“Yes, Ranger.” Araphi smiles at her. “You win. Point being, if I hadn’t eavesdropped on those bards in the Rookery, I might be listening to my parents prattle on about my duty to the family right now, all while knowing that my mother is slowly withering without the life she could have had if she’d kept performing.
I’d never have played campfire songs in the woods, or charmed an entire village with my lute, or convinced a dragon god to let me pull its tooth from the depths of a deadly river.
And I wouldn’t be here, in this hunting shack, with you.
” Her eyes are soft as butter, warm in the firelight, and she’s looking at Sage as though she’s the moon.
When they fall into bed again—rather, when Araphi eases them down onto the mattress and helps Sage “relax” with her capable fingers, then her tongue, and, after Sage has begged sufficiently, both at once—Sage lies awake for a long time after.
Araphi’s leg is hooked over her good one, and her arm is draped across Sage’s waist, her fingertips idly tracing the long scar on Sage’s belly.
Her face is nestled into the top of Sage’s spine, breathing warm puffs of breath against Sage’s skin. Sage is entirely trapped by the bard.
But for the first time in longer than she can remember, and despite their admittedly dire circumstances, no part of her itches to be any place but where she is right now. She feels quiet. Perhaps it’s the magic of the cabin; perhaps it’s Araphi’s own magic.
Or perhaps it is something else entirely.