Chương 125: The visit

The weight of a falling god. Was it falling? Maybe it was failing. Or palling. Galling. Walling. Stalling. It was stalling, wasn't it? Stalling the falling. Stalling the flailing. Flailing against the palling, until everything became galling. Words were odd. Language was odd. Mira liked odd. She was odd, wasn't she?

"You're being weird, sis," a dry voice said to her right. The voice wasn't dry. Voices couldn't be dry. They were just vibrations. They were only vibrations—pressure nudging pressure through the air, little compressions and loosenings jumbled together at different frequencies until an ear was tricked into believing they meant something. There was no dryness anywhere in that. But language was odd. It decided words didn't have to mean what they meant.

"Odd," Mira tried saying damply. There was no moisture in the pressure waves that left her mouth.

"Odd?" the other voice asked. Mira turned her head and gazed at the young girl sitting beside her, washed in the night's paling moonlight.

"Odd," she repeated.

"I'm being odd. Not weird." Her gaze lowered to the half-melted fence of dark metal beneath the girl. It looked uncomfortable. Pokers weren't meant to be sat on. They weren't meant to be fences either, but Cin had disagreed. Moni was driving her Resonance just to keep the pointed pickets from poking into her. Mira looked down at her own legs. They dangled on either side of the fence, her heels drumming softly against the iron bars. She wasn't driving her Resonance. It was uncomfortable. Drip. Drip. Drip.

Was that the sound her blood would make when it reached the ground? She doubted it. Someone should have invented better onomatopoeia.

"Does it matter if it's weird or odd?" Moni asked.

"Does it matter if a god is falling or failing?"

"What?"

"Maybe." Mira reached down and wrapped her hands around the bars beneath her. She lifted herself, legs rising over her head as her hair tumbled across her face and hid the world. Blood gathered heavily behind her eyes. Her head swayed to the rhythm of her pulse thudding in her ears. Back. Forth. Back. Forth. Until it drowned out everything else. Then she had enough. Her arms bent. Straightened. She released the bars, and the spearpoints leapt toward her face. One combed through her hair, but none found skin.

Mira twisted in the air and landed on the inside of the fence. She turned to take in the courtyard and the dark bulk at its heart that drew the eye. The guildhall, like a hearth set upon by fused metal and half-melted stone. Truly odd. Moni hopped down and landed beside her.

"Mola should have told me you were coming back. Does this mean I can finally leave this place and come with you?" A moment passed. Mira blinked, then turned to Moni.

"No," she said. The girl paused, then pouted. The freckles across her tiny button nose bunched together.

"Why not?"

"You're too slow."

"I'm almost at the Eighth Binding. I promise I'll keep up. I can help lots. You know that." Moni reached up to the crossed baldrics strapped over her chest and plucked two ring-handled knives from their loops. She set them spinning around her fingers, the blades trailing thin, braided threads of Resonance.

"Nope." Mira raised a hand and flicked one finger against the girl's forehead. Then she ruffled Moni's mess of dark hair before turning toward the guildhall.

"Sis, wait up." Moni's footsteps sounded behind her as she hurried to catch up.

"I don't reckon your no should count when you're all knocked loose in the head. I'll ask again when you're not being odd, yeah?"

"I'm not odd." Mira's hand shot out, catching one of the girl's knives by its blade and flipping it to spin it around her pinky.

"Just regular ol' weird now. And it's still a no. Reach the Tenth Binding, and I'll let you join me on probation."

"That'll take years. I reached the Seventh before I was fifteen. Nobody else in the Hearth has done that. I'm faster than everyone Mola puts me against, and I'd get stronger even faster if you stopped leaving me here." Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

"If I'm not mistaken, Vera's kid has already reached the Eighth." Mira glanced at her.

"How old was she again?" Moni fell silent.

"I'm not blaming you," Mira said.

"Vera's cheating."

"What? How?"

"Hmm." Mira tipped her head.

"That one is a tough cookie. But I'll crack it eventually." She chuckled to herself as she crossed the courtyard. Her gaze wandered, half hoping to find the Slag Sentinel Vera had broken lounging around somewhere, but it was nowhere to be seen. Maybe Old Kest had already fixed it. Shame. Mira had really been hoping Cin would get to waste his time on that. At the guildhall entrance, she gave Moni's knife one last orbit around her pinky, then tossed it over her shoulder. No clatter followed.

Mira shouldered open the broad, ironbound doors.

"Bram, I'm home," she called. A hearth occupied the center of the hall, its steady emberfire washing the surrounding stone in muted orange. Before it sat the broad, draped figure of the Last Hearth's steward, his wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his face. His head turned slowly toward her.

"Last Sung," Bram spoke in that deep, unhurried voice of his.

"So thou hast returned."

"That I have." Mira stopped beside him and rested one hand atop the crossguard of the immense sword standing at the hearth's edge. Its point had been driven so deeply into the stone that blade and floor might as well have been built around one another. Bram's gaze shifted from her to Moni, then returned to the fire.

"Thy flame burns too heedlessly, Last Sung. It risks passing beyond temper. By oath, I cannot offer thee the strength of the hearth, for thou art no longer truly of the Great Houses. Yet shouldst thou have need of counsel, speak it. What wisdom remains mine to give, I shall give freely."

"Keep what counsel you have, Old Votive," Mira said.

"Preserve it for those whose fires still burn bright, and whose paths thy counsel may yet illuminate." Bram lowered his head in a grave nod. Mira patted the sword's crossguard, then continued past the hearth.

"Go to sleep," she told Moni as they left the entrance chamber and moved deeper into the guildhall.

"I'll be staying for a while. We can talk more about your failed probation tomorrow. I'm going to find Syl."

"Wha—? But, sis!"

"But what?" Mira looked at her. Moni paused. She frowned, but after a moment she sighed and trudged obediently back down the hall. Mira smiled and continued alone through the winding corridors of the Last Hearth. She trailed one hand along the ever-warm surface of the slabs forming much of the guildhall's inner walls. They were warped and uneven beneath her fingers, their rippled surfaces frozen in the middle of melting. Down one corridor. Around another.

Then down a narrow staircase where the air grew close and stuffy, carrying scents of earth and dry bark. At the bottom lay the chamber Syl had once claimed for herself, buried beneath the guildhall where unwanted visitors had to make a deliberate effort to approach. Syl valued her privacy, and she didn't particularly like when people encroached on her space. Mira knocked once on a set of heavy doors before pushing them open and stepping inside. Grass brushed softly against her boots.

She looked down as she walked, watching the blue-green blades bend beneath each step and rise again behind her. Resilient little things. The trees lining the space were too. Trapped down here, their pale trunks barely looked as if they remembered whether they were a forest or walls. Mira glanced up at the lights above that played at being stars, then her gaze wandered toward the stream winding through the chamber.

It curved around roots and moss-covered stones in a path that had always bothered Mira because of how meandering it was. She circled a boulder for no reason beyond wanting to see its other side, then followed the sound of running water toward the center. Syl sat on a rock in the stream with her back to the entrance. Her trousers were rolled above her calves, leaving her feet and shins submerged, while damp green hair hung in loose waves down her back and caught around the little horn-studs above her temples.

Mira removed her shoes, then her socks, and left them in the grass. She balanced across the scattered stones before stopping on one side beside the woman. Syl's head tilted slightly.

"What would you have done if I'd been in the middle of my Walk?"

"Interrupted you, seems like," Mira said.

"Don't sound so flippant."

"Why not? You would have forgiven me."

"I wouldn't have."

"Even though you forgave Vera so easily? How cruel." Syl turned, her dangerously bright eyes settling on Mira.

"Vera is looking for you in the Thryne Passes."

"Yep. I'm aware." Mira dipped her big toe into the water and drew a slow circle through the surface. Then she lowered herself onto the rock and let both feet sink beneath it.

"You knew?" A note of judgment entered Syl's voice.

"Did you meet with her?"

"Nope. I ditched her there with Cin."

"…Why?"

"Oh, it gets much too complicated to recount all of it now. I would've loved to have a chat with her after all this time, but I decided to be a good friend and spare her from it for the moment. I'll call in that favor later."

"Do I even want to know what you mean by that?"

"I would assume so. But it's a little private, so you'll have to ask Vera yourself the next time you see her." Syl watched her for a while, then shook her head. Her Resonance stirred in a brief pulse before easing outward and settling throughout the chamber.

"You said Cinder was with Vera as well?" she eventually asked. Mira nodded, leaning back on both palms.

"Was he helping you with the matter in the Passes?"

"He was."

"Did you manage to resolve it?"

"I didn't. But from the look of things, Vera did."

"What was it?"

"Ask Vera."

"You were there for over a month, Mira."

"I know I come across that way, but I'm not omniscient." Mira swished her legs through the water, sending ripples across the stream.

"There are things even I don't know, despite being as brilliant, beautiful, and badly underappreciated as I am." Syl planted her feet against the streambed and stood, water breaking around her ankles.

"Why are you back here?"

"Because of the falling god," Mira said. Syl went still and turned toward her.

"What?" Mira met her eyes for several seconds, then smiled.

"What?"

"What do you mean, 'falling god?'""I don't know." Syl stared at her incredulously.

"You don't know?" Mira pointed at her temple.

"Sometimes words just pop up in here. Who knows where they come from?" Syl's gaze stayed on her. Then she slowly exhaled through her nose.

"You're worse than Vera."

"I would argue with that, but I'm here on much more important business, so I'll let it slide."

"And what's that?"

"I have been charged with corrupt—" Mira coughed into one hand, then cleared her throat.

"—with examining that little girl Vera has been hiding away." Syl looked unimpressed.

"Anyhow," Mira continued, "introduce us."

"I swear…" Syl pressed three fingers to her temple, rubbing the skin around one of her horn-studs.

"How are both of you like this?"

"I rubbed off on her," Mira said.

"Vera's surprisingly impressionable."

"That's vaultspat bunk if I've ever heard it," Syl muttered. She waded toward the bank, water streaming from her trousers as she stepped onto the grass. After several paces, she stopped and looked back.

"Are you coming?" Mira glanced down at her feet. She wriggled her toes beneath the surface for a few moments longer, watching the current divide around them, then pushed herself upright. She balanced back across the stones, collected her shoes and socks in one hand, and followed Syl from the chamber barefoot.

"Do you know anything about Serel, or are you going in blind?" Syl asked as they made their way through the corridors.

"I know most things," Mira answered.

"Including what you ate for supper last night. It didn't look especially appetizing."

"Of course you do." Syl quickly found one of her little Valewalkers and sent him to fetch a carriage from Old Kest's Forge Loft. Not long after, they were rolling through the dead of night. The carriage needed neither reins nor coachman, which was convenient. In this place, you could accomplish all sorts of useful things by throwing enough money and Resonance at a problem. Syl's Valewalker insisted on driving them anyway. The journey was mostly boring.

Much as Mira was fond of every member of Last Hearth in their own particular ways, she was aware that only a few of them could be bothered speaking with her for any extended period of time. She preferred it that way. Most human interaction was best experienced in bursts. Too much at once made people repetitive. People with worthwhile interests were rare enough. People she could needle endlessly, as she did Vera, without worrying that they might eventually smother her with a plushie in her sleep were rarer still.

Mira let her attention drift for most of the ride. It only returned when the carriage began its final descent and the road narrowed as it wound down a mountainside, the wheels carrying them along a steep path toward the fortress carved into the rock below. The Ashfast. Mira leaned toward the window. She had seen it before, naturally. Simply not in person.

Its walls rose directly from the mountainside, bleak stone merging with bleaker stone until it was difficult to tell where the fortress ended and the mountain began. She almost envied Vera a little. The carriage slowed before the gates. There was a brief exchange outside, but the guards recognized Syl and allowed them through. Soon the carriage rolled to a halt in a broad courtyard, its perimeter lined by rows of emberlights that cast steady bands of orange across the walls and paving stones.

"I can't guarantee that you'll get to meet the girl," Syl said as she stepped down. She ran a hand through her hair and looked around the courtyard.

"Vera made it clear that Valecrest is responsible for Serel while she's gone, and I'm not going to undermine the Flamebearer's judgment. Not even for you, Mira." Mira stepped out after her. She laced her fingers together and stretched her hands in front of her until every knuckle popped in sequence.

"You're saying I have to convince her myself?"

"If you can—" The temperature spiked. A blade of fire and living metal appeared against Mira's throat. Beyond its edge, fiery red eyes burned through the narrow visor of a dark helm. Mira met them calmly.

"Halstrad," Valecrest said, her voice hard and level.

"What is your purpose here? Where is Mournvale?" Mira studied her for several moments, then smiled and turned her head slightly toward Syl, who had gone rather tense beside her.

"I'll see what I can do. I have a few cards up my sleeve that I can play if things become too heated."