“The beast?” she asks.
I check. Search for the rage the way I search for a sound in silence.
“Quiet,” I say. “Completely quiet.”
Something changes in her expression. Not surprise. Confirmation. Her chin dips once, a small nod, and she turns back to the road.
“Good.” She stands, brushes off her clothes, adjusts her pack. Gets back to business after kissing a Bogatyr on his knees in the middle of a road. The practicality of it undoes me more than the kiss itself.
“Maren.”
“What?”
“Your pack. Let me carry it.”
“I'm fine.”
“I know you're fine. But it weighs nothing to me, and it's wearing grooves into your shoulders.”
She stares at my outstretched hand. Then she shrugs off the pack and holds it out.
The weight barely registers. I could carry a dozen of these and not notice.
“Thank you,” she says quietly.
I rise from my knees, and the world resizes itself. She's small again, the top of her head below my chest, the distance between us measured in feet instead of the inches it had been a moment ago.
But the space between us doesn't sting the way it did before.
We walk.
The road winds through abandoned farmland, past crumbling walls and wild orchards. The sky stays gray. She's thinking. Her brow furrows, her lips press together.
“The creature,” she says after a while. “Rodvek. You said the oath keeps him alive. Keeps him trapped.”
“Yes.”
“And the berserker took him because he went into the rage to protect the stronghold. To fulfill his oath.”
“Yes.”
“So the oath and the rage are tangled together. The oath won't let him die, and the rage won't let him stop.” She's working through it the way she works through a diagnosis. Methodical.Precise. “There have to be texts. Records. Someone who's studied this.”
“There were. At the stronghold.”
“Which is gone.” She starts walking faster, the way she does when her mind is moving ahead of her feet. “What about other sources? Other orders, scholars? Anyone who's studied the berserker condition?”
“There's a woman. In Vorneth.” The name surfaces from memories I've been avoiding. “Mother Sanque. She's a healer, like you, but she also collects knowledge. Old texts. Forbidden books. Things the temples would rather forget.”
“Would she help us?”
“She owes me a debt. From a long time ago.”
“Then that's where we go.” She glances up at me with the same look she gets before she cuts into a wound. “How far?”
“A day's walk to the portal.”
She snorts, and I nearly laugh at the sound.
