Chapter 35 Sage
Sage
Returning to the Rookery for the first time in ten years doesn’t feel like coming home.
For a heartbeat, it does feel like turning back the clock, however—like Sage hasn’t changed much at all from the barefoot kid who used to sneak out of her parents’ house and down to the docks to watch the ferries pull away from shore, dreaming of the day she’d board one and then simply keep going.
Now, here she stands in the same dusty streets, frozen amidst the market day congestion and clamor, and knows that she isn’t the same at all.
For one, she no longer feels the bone-deep need to run and run and never stop.
She would, however, like to get this bit over with and head to the Dragon’s Bane for a well-deserved ale.
Turning down an alley three over from the one where she grew up—where Sage’s parents still live, and where they welcomed her with tears and too-fierce hugs, and will be expecting her to stop by with Araphi tomorrow morning before leaving the city again—her boots lead her to the door of the cottage her mother described.
It’s roofed with straw and moss, and the rippled windowpanes sit crooked in their frames, but it’s well cared for and cleaned despite the ever-present soot that blows across the river from the factory district.
Sage spends entirely too long on the little stoop preparing to knock on the door. But she’s going to.
Any moment now, she’ll raise her fist and knock.
She will.
She hasn’t so much as twitched a hand when the door swings open and Ollie stands in the doorway, arms crossed over their chest. Like Sage, they’re both the same and deeply changed all at once.
Their black curls have clearly grown out, piled carelessly at the crown of their head with the help of a sharp brass pin, and they’ve traded their traveling cloak and knife belt for a soil-streaked wool tunic tucked roughly into loose breeches.
But their pale-green, thickly lashed eyes are flint-sharp as they regard Sage in a terribly familiar way.
It’s the look Sage remembers as Ollie watched her walk away.
And when they sigh from the depths of their chest, it’s a sound Sage remembers too well. “Would you come in already and stop dithering on my stoop?”
Ollie’s house is as modest and well-kept inside as it is out.
The floors are rough old timber, but covered here and there with tidy little rugs made of dyed rags, worn though they are.
Early spring wildflowers rest in a milk jar on a little table with only one chair.
Ollie claims it, kicking the chair out from the table to sit.
Which leaves Sage standing in the center of the low-raftered room, unsure of what to do with her body or where to put her hands. “Hello, Ollie,” she blurts out once she realizes she’s yet to speak. A clever start, to be sure. “I…I suppose I came to say…that I’m sorry.”
Ollie only taps her long fingers against the table in an impatient rhythm.
Perhaps she’s meant to continue? “Sorry for, er…the way I left. You.”
“Thank you for the clarification,” they say dryly.
Sage is mucking this up, indeed. “Right. I just wanted…I needed to say that you were good to me. A good partner and party member and friend and wife. And you deserved somebody who loved you enough to choose you over everything else, so I’m sorry that isn’t what you got.”
“It’s all right, Sage. You can apologize for your part in our mess, but don’t neglect mine.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
Another deep sigh, which seems to expel more air than a body should be capable of holding. “I knew you loved the road. Before you died…and after. I guess…I just didn’t know how to love you anymore without needing more of you. Maybe all of you.”
Sage scrubs a hand down her face. “Well. I guess I didn’t know how to give you any more of me without becoming less.
Without losing myself. Especially after I died.
But it wasn’t just you. It was everyone, for a really long time.
I suppose I was also afraid that…that anybody who got a little too close and wanted a little too much would soon discover how little there was of me.
Like…when you’re climbing a tree, and put a boot on a branch only to feel it give beneath you, and find it’s been hollowed out by dire beetles. Do you know what I mean?”
Ollie shakes their head. “You were always a mystery, Sage Wilderstone,” they say almost fondly. Then their gaze sharpens. “If that’s still the case, then why do you look happy? Under all the nervous sweat, I mean.”
“Because I am.” Sage can’t stop the smile that spreads as easily as warm butter at the thought.
“It would be the polite thing to say ‘I’m glad for you,’ ” Ollie says. But their mouth quirks up in a slight, real smile in return.
“What about you?” Sage dares to ask.
“I admit I’ve been restless lately, even missing the road a bit myself.
Strangest thing. But planting season’s begun, and except for those last years of adventuring, I’ve spent my whole grown life crossing the river to tend the capital’s orchards, when folks on this side of the river can hardly afford the fruit.
Only just last summer, some odd customer at the perfumery greenhouse where my sister works gave her more jewels than exist in the Rookery for a tip, and told her of land for sale for cheap on the west side of the city.
You remember the overrun field where we planted our apple seeds? ”
Sage gasps. “Is that so? Did the trees ever grow?”
“Aye, two of them did. Grown and fruiting. At least, they will be when autumn comes again. Anyhow, my sister and our mothers have been planting on the land, planning to grow enough to eat and to sell. So if there were a season for me to strike out again, I suppose it’d be this one.”
“I’m glad for you too, then, if that’s what you want.”
Ollie chuckles. “Perhaps I’ll find out.”
“Well. If you’re thinking of the sea, we know a sorceress who’s headed to Shearwater and could probably use an adventuring companion. Just look for a little redhead with a very large snowy owl.”
“We?” Ollie prods.
Sage’s cheeks warm, and she rubs the back of her neck where Araphi gave her a fresh shave in Briarwall. “Just take care of yourself, will you?”
Her ex-wife winks up at Sage from their chair. “Whoever we is, take care of each other.”
As she shuts Ollie’s door behind her, Sage tilts her face up to the sky above the Rookery.
The clouds over the only home she knew before Araphi are exactly the same as she remembers, but then, they look much the same anywhere.
She wonders what her childhood self would think of that if she knew.
Turning toward the mouth of the alley, Sage tucks her hands into the pockets of her breeches and starts walking.
There’s a prize-winning bard waiting at the Dragon’s Bane, and she’s promised to buy Sage a drink.