Chapter 29 Sage
Sage
Their trek back through the Graywood is a sober one, indeed.
Arkney has no mounts to spare, and it will take them twice as long as the journey from Briarwall.
But they’ve supplies enough to see them through, and weapons from the armory of Arkney, happily shared.
Sage carries a bow that Wren’s momma made just for her, whittling away at it over the long winter months, and a second dagger to replace the one left behind.
The warmer weather makes the journey less arduous.
Like an early spring stroll through a mist-clogged forest, but with a traveling companion who won’t meet Sage’s gaze.
Sage can’t blame her. She isn’t angry, and neither is Araphi, she suspects. Whatever injury they did to each other with their words was shallow. It’s sadness that clings to them like the fog to the trees. Grief, even. And that runs deep.
The pocket dimension has closed at last, no more pretending.
The cabin is fewer than five miles from Arkney, and even stopping to restock the supplies for the homecoming spell as a kindness to Wren, they reach the ruined temple—the same distance again—by evening.
Sage approaches with caution, but as expected, Wren’s old home was abandoned by the rest of their party months ago.
There’s no smell or trace of human presence left save the dead ashes of a long-extinguished campfire blown across the tiled floor…
and a few piles of long-dried horseshit in the sanctuary, rekindling Sage’s guilt.
That night they eat in further silence, and bed down across the room from each other with their backs turned to the fire, and each other.
No sense in torturing each other with what they know they can no longer have. Hadn’t Sage always been told that a clean break healed best, even if it did nothing to dampen the pain?
On the second day, they make for the base of the Kald Mountains to set up camp.
They’ve been successful thus far at avoiding the attention of beasts or wandering raiders, blessed with the stealth of two people traveling on foot, rather than as a full party on horseback.
But they’re nearly to the foothills when Sage feels it: a prickling at the top of her spine that spreads quickly through her limbs, readying her for action.
Just ahead, a troll near twice her height steps out of the gloom between the trees.
Despite its size, it’s well camouflaged in its environment, the sickly green of a sun-starved plant, with scant hair clinging mosslike to its scalp.
Saliva pools in its open jaw and spills out over its jagged, protruding incisors to spatter the snow between its front paws, sizzling where it hits.
Araphi braces herself in a fighting stance, slingshot in hand. After practicing with it all through winter, she is more than capable. But before the troll can put a paw toward them, Sage’s arrow thunks into its jaw and it falls, dead before it hits the ground.
“You didn’t want to give me a go?” Araphi mutters. They’re her first words all day.
“Nothing personal,” Sage returns. “However simple they look, trolls have a psychic aura. The closer they get to you, the more of your life force they leech away. Best to dispatch them and move on.”
They do just that, silence falling between them once more.
Truly, trolls are the least of their problems.
On the third day, they cross through the mountains.
The passes are more slush than snow, likely to be melted altogether within the week, though they’re treacherous in their own way now.
Once, Sage reaches out to grab Araphi and keep her from slipping backward down the mud-slick trail, waiting perhaps a heartbeat too long to let go after the bard has regained her footing.
The skin of her palm feels seared at the touch despite the cold, never mind that they’ve only clasped gloves.
Araphi feels it too; Sage can tell by the crease of her brow, the quick intake of her breath.
But what good would it do to admit it? What good to say it aloud? Sage has said too much already.
When they pitch their tent that night with the fresh canvas provided by Arkney, slinging the sheet over a low branch and staking it into warming earth, it seems impossible that they’ll both fit inside without touching.
Yet the bard manages it somehow, hugging her side of the tent while Sage tosses and turns and shivers on her own.
As sleep refuses to claim her, Sage’s thoughts drift inexorably toward Ollie.
It isn’t that she never considered her ex-wife’s pain, or doesn’t feel the sour churn of regret in her belly whenever she remembers their parting.
Not for her choice, but for the hurt it caused.
Ollie risked their heart to ask Sage to choose them; to ask the person they’d claimed as theirs to claim them back.
Sage has never in her whole life risked so much.
At least, not until three days ago.
She understands Ollie better now, in a way her younger self never had. Surely it hadn’t felt to Ollie that they were asking Sage for something unreasonable, something ungiveable. They had only wanted her safe. They had only ever loved her.
Sage loves Araphi. Of course she does.
Well, what if she were to join Araphi in Ashaway—not that the bard has asked—to stick by her side as Araphi put away her lute and tossed out her traveling boots and retired Phi Runesong to take up the mantle of Clauneck heir once more?
Even if Araphi were able to convince her family to break her engagement to Denby—and perhaps she could, compelling as she is—surely it would cost her every other rebellion, every other piece of herself not suited to the role.
Araphi’s spirit, her softness, her improbable love of the wide world that nearly killed them both.
Even if Sage was allowed to remain as Araphi’s companion, what would she do with her days?
Wait in Araphi’s bedchamber, surrounded every day by stone walls and cold stares, slipping away every now and then to sample the taste of the fields and rivers and woods beyond Ashaway’s black hexagonal walls, before returning to her tower once more?
Maybe if she did, she could hold on to the parts of Araphi that the bard felt compelled to whittle away in order to appear the dutiful heir, until years or decades from now, she was handed the power to fight back.
Maybe Sage could keep them safe. She hadn’t been willing to pay the cost of being loved by Ollie, which seemed little now by comparison.
But isn’t Araphi worth the price?
After a long and restless night, their final day of travel dawns overly, offensively bright. Araphi makes tea while Sage takes down the tent, pinching leaves out of a pouch and into a small saucepan of boiling water over the campfire.
As Araphi offers her a cup without meeting her gaze, Sage breaks their silence at last. “We’ll reach Briarwall by midday, with easy weather like this.”
“Mmm.”
“You know, we don’t have to—”
Araphi holds up one finger. “Please, if you’re going to try to change my mind again, just…don’t.” She sounds as exhausted as Sage, as though her own night was just as sleepless. “I’m trying to hold on to some scrap of conviction.”
“That’s not what I was going to say.” Sage kneels beside the campfire, muddying her breeches to place herself in Araphi’s eyeline, where the bard can’t help but look at her.
“And it isn’t that I don’t believe in you, or what you’re trying to do.
I just meant that we don’t have to part like this.
Maybe we don’t have to part at all. Perhaps…
I was being stubborn. Selfish. But we survived an unsurvivable river together, didn’t we?
We can keep each other safe. Even if it’s in Ashaway, even on your family estate, as long as we’re together—”
“But you wouldn’t be happy,” Araphi interrupts. She says it simply, sadly.
Sage blinks up at Araphi. “I am happy. I’ve been happy.”
The bard sighs. “Perhaps, but that was when you didn’t have a choice, nor anywhere else to go. And you can’t tell me that you would have wanted to winter in Arkney, planting parsley and hunting frost frogs for the village soup pot, if there’d been any other option. Isn’t that so?”
“I don’t know,” she answers honestly. “But what does that matter?”
Araphi sets down her mug to cup Sage’s face in her still-warm palm, her large brown eyes thawed at last. “It matters, Ranger, because I won’t make the same mistake as Ollie.
” Though she says this so gently, some part of Sage crumbles like campfire ash all the same, scattering under the slightest pressure of her touch.
“I wouldn’t ask you to leave this life behind to come and play politics with me in the capital, for however long it took for me to work my way back into my family’s good graces and come to power.
You would hate that, and we both know it.
You don’t travel with the same party twice, you don’t sit still if you can help it, and you wouldn’t trade the road for anything, or anyone.
But it’s all right. You never lied to me about who you are, Sage.
And unlike my family, I wouldn’t dream of telling you who you ought to be, or trying to force you to change.
I’m not a Clauneck. Not really. I’m just a bard.
” There’s a hint of humor in her voice when she repeats Sage’s words, but when Araphi leans close and presses a soft kiss to Sage’s lips, it feels like goodbye.