“The original mages built protections. I have felt them at the perimeter. A pressure that pushes against anything that comes too close from the air. Your mother hit the wards.”
“She crashed in the canopy. She was hurt. She drew what she could from the ground. Then she walked out. The wards scrambled her sense of direction. She could never find this place again.”
The corridor is quiet. The vibration has gone still for the moment. The thing beneath is sleeping.
“She went back to regular commissions. She told me stories about it when I was growing up.” She looks down the corridor toward the lowest level. “She died when I was twelve. I’ve been following your market appearances for three years. I sold the last thing of worth she left me to pay the entry fee.”
“You knew what you were walking into.”
“I knew my mother saw something in the jungle that threw her out of the sky. I knew it was connected to a Naga. I knew it was dangerous.” She pushes off the wall. “I didn’t know about the hunger. I didn’t know about the seal. I didn’t know about you.”
We face each other in the corridor between the second and third levels. The carvings of the priestesses and the Naga on the walls around us. Two people showing their cards in a corridor built for two.
“Take me to the bottom,” she says.
I take her to the lowest level. The green-lit chamber. The water that glows. The air heavy and old.
She stands at the edge of the lit pool and does not speak for a long time. Then she draws. Every junction. Every distribution point. The seal boundary. The pressure indicators.
When she finishes, she rolls the sheets.
“I want to go back up.”
We go up. The upper levels are cooler. Lighter. The jungle sounds come through the walls.
She goes straight to the hallway outside my door, picks up her pack, and carries it to the main hall.
She sets the pack on the steps beside my coils. Then she opens it and pulls out a piece of cloth. She unfolds it.
One sheet of paper. Old. Charcoal on paper, the lines softened with age.
She holds it up.
The serpent jambs. The entrance arch. The line work getting loose on the right side where her mother’s hand was shaking from the crash. A vine half-finished. The drawing stops mid-stroke.
I look at the page. The entrance to my home, drawn by a woman falling out of the sky thirty years ago.
“Her name was Reka,” Bryn says. “She was braver than me and stupider than me and she never came back for this. I did.”
She sets the fragment on the flagstone beside my coils. Beside the drawings she has been adding to since her second day here.
Her mother’s unfinished page, and her daughter’s finished ones, side by side on the same stone.
She goes back to the corridor and lies down on the bedroll outside my door.
“Goodnight, Vadh.”
I look at the fragment. I look at her drawings. I look toward the sound of her voice.
“Goodnight, Bryn.”
VADH
She is pressed against my coils when I wake.
Her back fits into the curve of the loop she pulled close last night. Her breathing is slow. Her hair has come loose from the braid and has spread across the scales beneath her head. She did not use a pillow. She used me.
I hold still for a long time. Her weight against my body is slight. Her ribs expand and contract with each breath, the rhythm of it transmitted through the scales.
