I collect frostbark shavings from a stand of low trees near the scree field. He watches me strip the bark with the knife, efficient, careful, hands that know what can hurt them.
“Where did you learn all of this?” he says.
“The guild. Magnelle, mostly. She taught me plant identification before she taught me venom work. Said you can’t understand what kills until you understand what grows.”
“She sounds patient.”
“She was. She is.” The tense catches in my throat. “I don’t know which tense to use. She’s alive. We don’t speak.”
He’s quiet for a while, and we walk. The scrub crackles under our feet, and the mountain is enormous and quiet around us.
“My mother grew herbs,” he says. “Outside the burrow. Small ones, in clay pots. She said the smell kept the insects away, but I think she just liked growing things.”
It’s the most he’s told me about her. The cooking reference was about his failure; this is about her.
“What happened to her?”
“She died. Before the mining work. Before the mountain.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.” He says it level.
But his hand finds mine as we walk, his fingers closing around mine, and we keep walking like that down the tree line with the garlic and the root vegetables in my pack and the berries in their vial.
Back at the cave, I make stew. He watches me cook with the fascination of someone who finds not-burning-food a magic he hasn’t cracked.
“You’re just... putting things in water,” he says.
“That’s what cooking is.”
“I put things in water. They burn.”
“You put things in water and then forget about them and go outside and come back when the water is gone. That’s not cooking. That’s arson.”
“I don’t commit arson.”
“You committed arson on three hares this week.”
He eats two bowls. The stew is plain; the garlic makes it good. He eats like a creature who has been alone too long and has forgotten that food can be an act of care.
I watch him eat. The stew and the glow-stone make the cave feel like a room where two people live.
The blue-ringed result sits in the back of my mind. Small and sharp.
A splinter I can’t quite reach.
SIRATH
She’s at the workbench before dawn, all the retained sample vials lined up on the shelf, the assay stone in front of her, her notebook open to a page covered in numbers.
She did something with them while I slept. I can tell by the way the vials are arranged, out of their usual order, the labels angled where she pulled them fast.
I uncurl and watch her from across the cave. She’s staring at the notebook, not writing, just staring, and the glow-stone catches her face and the expression on it is one I haven’t seen from her before.
Confusion. I’ve never seen that on her.
“Something’s wrong,” I say.
