The Promise
SEVRIN
The letter is already open when he reads it again, the parchment creased where his grip had tightened, the ink offering nothing beyond what it gave him the first time.
The house is gone, overrun and broken down by a horde large enough to erase it entirely, and the morrak assigned to it has been killed.
There is a final note beneath the report.
Recovered from the remains.
He unfolds the inner fold and draws out a single strand of hair, darkened by heat but not entirely destroyed, and brings it closer without thinking.
The scent is faint beneath the burn, altered but still there.
It is hers.
The recognition is immediate, leaving no room for doubt and no answer beyond the fact that she had been there and is not now.
He sets it down and closes his hand around the edge of the table, the wood breaking beneath it as the force moves through him, the sound that follows low and uncontrolled before he forces it back under restraint.
He is no closer than he was before.
He exhales and holds himself still within the absence of anything useful, the room unchanged around him, the letter and the strand resting where he left them, and then something in him shifts.
He reaches for the only memory that has ever quieted him.
The sound of water arrives first.
The Past
The Fivefold Mountain
He does not mean to wander this far. The procession moves between the sacred points in the order it has always moved, every person veiled in white as tradition demands, adults and children alike brought to the same anonymous presence by the fabric.
On this mountain everyone is equal before Divara.
Somewhere in the waiting he had simply walked away from it, and no one stopped him because no one could tell him apart from anyone else.
The sound of water reaches him before he sees it and he follows it because there is nothing else pulling him anywhere.
The spring is small, tucked between two rocks, clear enough to see the bottom. No one here. Almost no one.
She is sitting at the edge of it with her knees pulled up, her white veil identical to his own, so still he nearly takes her for part of the landscape.
Then she shifts and drops a stone into the water and watches the place where it disappears with the patience of someone who has been here long enough to have already made a small world of it.
He should go back.
She looks up before he decides. Two veiled children at the edge of a spring that belongs to neither of them. He cannot see her face. She cannot see his. They are simply two figures in white, which is perhaps why neither of them leaves.
"You're lost," she says.
"I'm not lost. I just didn't want to be where I was."
She considers this carefully, the way someone does when they take words seriously. Then she nods, as though he has said something reasonable, and looks back at the water.
He comes a little closer and sits above her.
The silence between them is not uncomfortable, which is already unusual.
Most people fill silence around him. They perform, or they are afraid, or they want something.
She simply exists beside him as though his presence requires nothing from her and hers requires nothing from him.
He does not know what to do with that, so he just sits in it.
They are still sitting there when she arrives.
He feels her before he sees her, a change in the air that is not wind, the particular pressure of something ancient moving through the mountain toward them with the unhurried certainty of something that does not need to rush. The spring goes quiet. Even the light shifts.
Divara of the Five Mountains comes through the trees slowly, her eyes clouded white, her attention moving between them in a way that suggests she sees something other than two veiled children sitting beside a spring. She stops in front of them.
"Hold out your palms," she says.
They do, without speaking, without looking at each other.
Divara studies what she finds there for a long moment. Something moves through her expression.
"Ah," she says softly. "Light and dark." She looks between their open hands. "You have mirrored souls."
Then she turns to him, and her clouded eyes hold his through the veil in a way that should not be possible and is.
"In a future that is dark, she will bring you both light," Divara says. “Keep it, even if there is a cost.”
Then she turns and walks back into the trees and is gone, as quietly as she came, and the air returns to something ordinary and the spring begins to move again and neither of them speaks for a long time.
He finds a rock and presses it into her hand eventually. She throws it. They watch the water close over it.
"We have only spoken a short while," she says, and her voice is quiet and entirely honest. "But conversations with people who understand me and still want my company are rare." A pause, and something in it that costs her something. "In fact, they never happen."
He looks at her through the white veil and feels something he does not have a name for yet.
"They don't happen for me either," he says.
She turns toward him and he can feel the quality of her attention even through the fabric, the way she is truly listening.
"That sounds lonely," she says.
He opens his mouth to say that it isn't, because that is what he always says. But she has said it so plainly, without pity and without trying to fix anything, and he finds he cannot produce the usual answer.
"Yes," he says instead.
She nods and receives it without doing anything to it at all, and that is the thing, he realizes, that is the thing he has never had before. Someone who takes what is true and simply holds it.
They talk for a long time after that, about nothing and everything the way children do when they have accidentally found someone who speaks the same language, and at some point he becomes aware that he is laughing at something she said, genuinely laughing, and he cannot remember the last time that happened without something else underneath it.
Eventually she goes quiet.
"I may forget you," she says. "Every day new dark memories are made in the life I live now. And although meeting you has been lovely, losing you is just as dark as everything else." A pause. "But just because I forget doesn't mean you don't mean something."
"I'm a feeder," he says. "I forget nothing. I cannot."
She is quiet at that, and he wonders what her life looks like that forgetting would be a mercy.
She reaches for the small knife at her hip. "Let us carve an X," she says, and before he can ask what she means she has pressed the blade lightly to her ankle and made the mark.
She holds the knife out to him.
He takes it and makes the same mark on his own ankle, and they look at each other's and then at each other and neither of them laughs because it has become something more serious than they intended.
"I may still forget," she says.
"Why would you forget?"
"Because everything that hurts I try to forget." Her voice is soft. "And saying goodbye in a moment will hurt."
He looks at her for a long moment, at the white veil and the mark on her ankle and the way she has spent this entire afternoon simply being honest with him as though it costs nothing.
"What if I promise to help you remember?" he says.
Something in her goes quiet in a good way.
"I always keep my promises," he continues. "One day I will be a great king."
He pauses. The feeling moving through him is enormous and entirely new, built from an afternoon of kindness and laughter and the particular lightness of being with someone who required nothing from him. He has no experience with any of it. He does not know where to put it.
"Nothing has ever made my heart as soft as you," he says quietly.
She does not answer that, and he is glad, because some things are better received in silence. “No one has ever made a promise and kept it,” she says. Her voice is quiet, barely above a whisper.
Her words hollow something in his chest.
She goes first. Her white veil moves through the trees and disappears and the mountain is immediately different for her absence, heavier, the air returning to its ordinary weight as though it had only ever been held back by her being in it.
He stays by the spring for a long time.
He does not know her name. He does not know which family brought her here or which kingdom she will go back to.
He knows the mark on his ankle. He knows the sound of her laugh.
He knows that she said saying goodbye will hurt and meant it, and he knows that she was right, because he is sitting beside a spring on a mountain feeling something he has no word for yet, something that has gotten into him and will not come out.
He turns and walks back toward the path.
He gets into the carriage as the procession reforms, the adults settling back into their roles and their silence, and as it begins to move he looks out the window and sees, at the edge of the road, a young girl in a white veil being struck by a man he assumes is her father, her small body flinching with each blow while the procession moves past as though it is not happening.
His chest tightens hard. He looks away.
And then, almost immediately, he feels the particular ugly relief of knowing it is not her.
That whoever that girl is, she is not the one he just left by the spring.
He holds that feeling and hates himself for it in equal measure.
The carriage moves on. He keeps the mark on his ankle.
He keeps the promise too, though he does not yet know who he made it to.
He returns to himself without warning.
The room closes back in around him, the letter still open on the table, the strand of hair where he left it. His hand is still braced against the wood. It is cracked beneath his grip.
He looks at it for a moment longer. Then he reaches for the letter again. It is the only memory he has that brings him anything close to calm. He has returned to it more times than he would admit.
He has never known who she was.