“Now? Why? Whatever it is, it’ll keep. There’s nothing there to recover.”
“There’s just something else I have to see.”
Tandri stared at her, then sighed and shrugged. “Let’s go then.”
“You should sleep. I kept you out of your bed.”
“I couldn’t sleep without knowing where you were, anyway,” replied Tandri. “Sleep will keep, too, I suppose.”
Viv groaned as she sat fully upright, pushed herself to her feet, and then found and slipped into the cloth shoes that the Madrigal had provided. She hissed through her teeth as her soles protested, but she mastered herself.
Outside Tandri’s room, she saw it was late afternoon, tending toward dusk. She must have slept for seven or eight hours.
The walk back to the shop was very slow, and she stepped carefully. Pain that she had shrugged off hours ago became insistent and sharp. She thought about what Tandri had said just a day ago about reciprocity. Pain that was ignored, magnified on its return.
Absolute devastation.
The heat had died down a great deal over the course of the day, although it was still uncomfortably warm. No walls stood. Hills of ash and the stubs of burnt spars and tumbled stone marked the perimeter, and slumped piles of gray and black resembled a blurry map of what had once been the interior.
Viv left Tandri in the street and waded in, carefully choosing her steps. She made her way behind where the counter had once stood and cast her gaze over the wreckage there.
At last, she found it. Viv tentatively reached out, careful of potential heat, but it was cooler than she expected.
She withdrew Blackblood from the pile, and black grit sifted away from its warped, tortured length. The leather that had bound the grip was, of course, burned away to the tang. The crossguard was curved and melted, the blade twisted, and a mother-of-pearl sheen rippled across it like oil. A crack ran from one side all the way down to the fuller, the steel destroyed by the incredible heat of the unnatural fire.
Viv held her sword in both hands, head bowed.
She’d forsworn her old life, crossing a bridge to a new land, and now knelt in its ruin.
This was the bridge burning away behind her, leaving her in a desolation.
She tossed the blade back into the ash and took the only path that remained.
26
She slept in Tandri’s room, waking intermittently to attend to necessities, although Viv insisted on taking a blanket and lying on the floor. She was used to it anyway. Her awareness of Tandri’s comings and goings was hazy at best.
On what she thought might have been the third day, a knock came at the door. Viv heard Tandri moving to open it, a quiet exchange of words, and then someone entered. She heard them pad across the floorboards.
“Hm.”
Viv opened her eyes and half-turned over. Cal stared down at her with his arms crossed, and she felt suddenly foolish… andangry… lying there and exposing her weakness to him. In years past, she would have cursed herself as a fool for giving a foe such an advantage. Such carelessness would have killed her a hundred times over.
But Cal was not her enemy.
The hob drew up the chair and sat, his legs too short for his feet to reach the floor. He clasped his hands between his knees, looking away and giving her a moment to push into a sitting position.
“Cal,” she rasped, and nodded. She didn’t feel as though she’d slept, at all.
“First thing to get a handle on is cleanup,” he said without preamble. “Then materials. Then labor. Need more’n me and you, this time.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked, and there was an edge of irritation in her voice.
“Rebuildin’, o’ course. Ash is cooled. We’ll get it shifted. Maybe eight, ten trips to the midden. Hired hand or two’ll speed it up fine.”
“Rebuilding?” Viv stared up at him. “Cal, I don’t have the coin for that. And even if I did, I don’t think it’d matter.”
“Hm. Tandri told me. The Stone.” He shrugged. “Maybe worse odds now, but didn’t figure you were one to duck at a soft blow like that.”
