Vivian walked up to him and kissed him lightly. “I’d have to ask Ulamir,” she said, “but I’d bet it would be fine.”
The archway with white flowers led to a long room, slightly too wide to be a tunnel, with fire opal walls. A small dais rose at one end, with niches scattered near it in different shapes and depths. Many were strung with silver or gold wire, others filled with hollow stone pipes.
The stonekin had carved words into the other parts of the walls. Each subject was a shape: mostly they formed abstract curves or ladders, but a tree spread its branches near the exit. Over the dais rose a star larger than Olvir.
“Knowledge,” he said. Tinival’s gift allowed him to understand the writing. The star was praise to the gods, who went by different names with the stonekin but whose roles were obvious. One of the ladders was a poem about the darkness under the mountain. It sang to the writer. A human would have found that unnerving, but the verses made Olvir’s heart ache with the beauty of hearing the unknown. “Gods, if this is what they left, I can’t imagine what was here when this was still their home—”
“They handed some of it down, I’d imagine,” said Vivian, staring. “Some has even found its way into human hands by now. Just not this.”
Perhaps they’d remembered the poems on the wall or recorded them elsewhere. Perhaps they’d crafted spaces for music in their new homes that were almost as fine.
“I’d like to stay in here for a while,” said Olvir.
Vivian gave him an understanding smile. “Only if you read the walls to me.”
* * *
It was a day of busy contentment such as Vivian hadn’t had in a year.
Sitting in the ancient stonekin’s music hall, she listened to Olvir read her the poems of a vanished people while both of them took care of the many small chores they hadn’t had time for until then. She basked in the poems, laughing at one, then wiping away a tear at another, marveling all the while at the rich resonance of Olvir’s voice, even over words he’d never spoken until then.
They lingered when the poems ran out. There were still tasks to do, and from what Ulamir had told her of his people, Vivian doubted they’d mind human art in the place they’d once devoted to their own.
While she and Olvir sharpened their swords, they sang “The Violet Banner” and then went on to a drinking song Vivian had learned in Myrias, one that described the increasingly unlikely visions of the several-sheets-to-the-wind speaker. It had the sort of chorus that anyone could learn by the second verse and that stood up to being sung by people who had difficulty pronouncing entire words:
The wine down in Silane will make you see double.
The ale up in Criwath will make you go blind.
And though saying it may be asking for trouble,
The beer in this place is the best you will find.
One could substitute “worst,” depending on one’s opinions on the city, country, tavern, or army in question.
Olvir had a healthy supply of material to offer too. Apparently the knights, or some portion of them, had a good ten verses or so on appropriate actions regarding drunken squires. Vivian had heard a few applied to sailors or soldiers in the same condition, but some of the ones Olvir knew were damned inventive. She found herself with new respect for Tinival’s servants.
Their goal waited, success as uncertain as ever and the path every bit as unclear. Outside, the storm kept raging, a sign of what was to come if they failed and likely a danger to those they’d left behind. Vivian never quite forgot any of that, and she would’ve sworn before Olvir’s patron god that he didn’t either. It was easier to sit with that knowledge when they were talking or singing or even just working with each other close at hand, though. What was to come and what might happen shrank down, providing space for lighter thoughts.
Vivian had known such moments in the past.I could die tomorrowwas, in fact, a fairly constant tenant in every Sentinel’s head as far as she was aware. Each member of the Order found methods of living around it, bringing it out for extra alertness on missions and then trying to send it away again. Drink often worked. So did lust, or violence of a less lethal sort.
Being able to live withThe world may end in a few days, and we have to stop it, and still genuinely laugh at a tale of irascible superiors or contentedly grumble about the laces on her armor was a step or two beyond what Vivian would have expected.
She doubted she would’ve been able to manage it with many other companions—maybe Emeth or Katrine, possibly Bran, who she’d trained with. The idea of going to bed with any of those people held all the allure that trailbread did when she was well fed.
Denial had never been one of her skills. Holding off realization was exhausting.
Gods damn me,Vivian thought, watching as Olvir held up his shirt of mail and gave it an endearingly serious inspection,I’m well and truly in for it at the end of this.
She didn’t let herself consider that she might not be. In theory, they could succeed. In theory, Olvir might come back unchanged, and she wouldn’t need to do anything but serve as an extra body with a weapon. Those were theories, goals, impossible until she’d succeeded at them.
If she couldn’t keep herself from falling for the man, she at least wouldn’t let herself start hoping.
* * *
Until he spent a day inside the mountain, Olvir hadn’t realized how silent the wilderness never was. There was always some sound outside, whether the movement of small animals through the underbrush or the creaking of trees or the wind itself. Inside the caves, he and Vivian were the only sources of any noises at all.
It was comforting in a sense. There was a certain security in sitting indoors, relatively warm and comfortable, while outside the wind howled and the snow fell sideways. The guilt of knowing that many others didn’t have their shelter preyed on Olvir more than once in a while, but he could do no more about that than he was doing already.
