Chapter 29 #3
When he’s done Lyric collapses into the low bed.
A single candle burns, and no light from the world makes its way through tightly paneled shutters.
Lyric sprawls on his back, then can’t stand it and pulls his limbs close to himself, and the blanket, too.
He stares through the darkness at the ceiling, missing a lot of people, hoping he’s doing the right thing, that coming here to find Maimeri will lead to his mother and uncle and sister being born, to Garnet with the griffons, to his father he supposes, even though he doesn’t personally miss his father.
He thinks that depending on what happens he’ll need to write down the long line of Vertex Seals to make sure they stick to the same pattern, or write a letter maybe to prepare someone for the future.
Maybe he’ll give it to Maimeri for ahz descendants, and in four hundred years when the Vertex Seal vanishes the day after a giant spider stomps all over the Crystal Desert, Hehet méra Davith can realize his family has been in possession of a priceless page of history.
And save some lives when Lyric gets home. (If Lyric lives that long.)
“Lyric,” Maimeri says.
Lyric blinks. The other miran is stretched next to him in bed, and in the very dim candlelight, ahz red eyes are like lights in a deep dark sea. “Little Rabbit,” he says, liking the mirané meaning.
Maimeri touches the cool skin under Lyric’s left eye. “This is what she did.”
“Mmm, yes,” Lyric murmurs. “An argument right in my face.” That makes him laugh, and he wishes he could tell her.
“It’s beautiful.”
Lyric can’t think about it right now, but he can take Maimeri’s hand and press it to his chest, folding both his own hands over it. He closes his eyes as Maimeri lies fully down with ahz warm hand over Lyric’s heartbeat.
In the morning Lyric wakes early, hungry.
Not groggy or disoriented, but feeling very clear.
He waits for Maimeri and they rise together.
This time Lyric hunts for a razor and finds it.
He’s needed to shave for a few days, and in the cloudy mirror he wonders if he should give up and grow a beard at the same time he’s regrowing his hair.
He never has because Silent priests do not.
His father had a beard, as well as many mirané men.
Garnet seemed to enjoy shaving his in fashionable patterns like a half-mask.
But the shadows on Lyric’s jaw and under his nose make him uncomfortable, so he doesn’t.
After, they go out into the frosty air. Lyric startles when his breath puffs visibly before his face, and he laughs again. The laughter takes physical form, too. Maimeri watches Lyric make this discovery with something unreadable on ahz face.
Sah’set’s husband feeds them a hot porridge with dried fruits and leftover sweet-boiled pork from the night before.
The family piles goods into extra bags and insists Lyric and Maimeri take them up the mountain.
They know Maimeri won’t return until the first hints of spring, which out here will be over two months from now.
Lyric didn’t realize what he was agreeing to when he said he’d go to the mountain, but he can’t regret it, either.
Wintering in a valley with Maimeri and whatever so-called monsters az has can’t hurt his cause.
It will give him time to know Maimeri and convince ahz of the mission to return to the crater and start a new world, even at the cost of ahz mother.
Lyric is sure he can make it sound grand and glorious, not absolutely absurd. Or at least both.
Setka vibrates with eagerness despite her new friends hanging all over her.
She puts on a slightly regal facade, as if she must go on a quest up the mountain, alas, alas, how they will be missed.
Lyric aches to see her playing, for reasons he can’t quite name.
But it’s good, and the three of them go.
It will take five or six hours to reach the valley, Maimeri says, if they don’t dawdle or rest. Setka hisses at ahz, in a friendly way, accepting the challenge. She scrambles ahead, using her claws sometimes, though the way is not really that steep.
Maimeri takes Lyric’s hand for the start, before the path narrows to a rocky outcropping that winds through tall, rough trees still scattering brown needles. Lyric doesn’t mind the contact, though he’s surprised at himself for allowing it. Maybe it’s Iriset’s influence.
He can’t help breathing through his mouth, just to see the crystallized air, visible, cold, and wet against his lips.
It doesn’t grow old even as they climb. His thighs ache and he breathes hard, but it feels wonderful.
For the first time in a while everything that ails him is being earned.
The cold air in his lungs digs deep into his guts, as if he’s able to fully expand them finally.
Maimeri lopes along, unbothered, even weighed down by twice as much as Lyric.
They stop for lunch a quarter of the way up the mountain on a thrust of cliff where the trees fall away and the dark forest is visible for miles of rolling hills and crags cut by what Maimeri says is a river.
Probably still the Lapis in some form. Lyric stands at the edge, wind blowing him back, and seeks the smoke from Hehet town’s fires.
It’s nearly out of sight, below and around the curve of the foothill.
But a few massive kites or probably vultures drift among the thinning columns of smoke. The sky is painfully blue.
Once Lyric has been at rest to eat, his sweat turns him too cold and he shivers.
It’s novel but distracting, until Maimeri digs a coat out from one of the packs the headwoman gave them.
Lyric shrugs into it, startled by its weight and softness.
It must be wool, maybe from those long-haired goats, but there are leather panels at the shoulders and elbows, and it ties up his torso not quite snug enough.
There’s a hood that fits over his cold head, with enough of a cowl to shade his eyes.
Lyric hugs it close, feeling a different kind of vertigo suddenly: how bizarre this moment is.
That Lyric méra Esmail, the Vertex Seal, is somehow here on this old mountain with a chimera and the father of the mirané people, buffeted by cold wind and the distant cry of a kite, but warmed by a coat given freely to him for no real reason other than he needed it.
Behind him Setka and Maimeri are repacking, and Setka has asked again how many of the chimeras in the valley can speak. “All of them,” Maimeri promises in ahz quiet way. “But not all for Setka to understand.”
“Ugh, Maimeri, how many can speak to Setka?” she demands.
Lyric smiles at her confidence.
Maimeri shrugs one shoulder. “Find out,” az says, standing.
“If Setka needs patience, count breaths while climbing,” Lyric suggests, striding past them to take up the path again. He does it himself, breathing in long eight-counts and marking each cycle. It expands his energy even more. Lyric has the idle thought that he’s never felt so alive.