There is no trail without him. The way through exists where his body flattens it, and three weeks of green have grown over the line he made. I am finding my own way.
The going gets harder as the light changes, roots catching my feet, a stream crossing that was simple three weeks ago taking three attempts because my hands won’t grip the rocks. I slip on the second attempt. My knee hits stone.
By late afternoon the grief has moved past my hands into my whole body. A vibration in my jaw. I stop at a clearing. I drink from the waterskin and open the bundle.
The food is wrapped in the cloth he uses for the flatbread. The dried meat is the good kind, cut thin, from the upper shelf of the supply room. The flatbread has berries in it.
He wrapped this while I was in the alcove. He knew I was leaving and he made sure I could eat. He put the berries in the bread.
The berries. The thing he does instead of saying what he means. The first time he put something in the bread that was not obligation.
My eyes blur. I eat the bread. I don’t stop eating. The tears run down my face, and I eat the bread with berries in it. I taste the salt and the tart sweetness at the same time and my hands are shaking and I eat until it is gone.
I make camp because I cannot walk in the dark with hands that won’t grip and eyes that won’t clear. I have no bedroll. I have the pack, the ground, and the second shirt rolled under my head.
I lie on my back. The canopy is black above me. The stars are not visible through the leaves.
Reka never came back. She saw this place from the air, crashed into the wards, drew the fragment with a shaking hand, and walked away. She went back to regular commissions and told me stories about the jungle and the serpent jambs and never returned.
I am becoming her.
I close my eyes. The ground is hard and cold and nothing like the curve of his coils against my back. I pull the second shirt tighter under my head. The cloth smells like him. Like mineral warmth and scales and the faint green scent of the moss that grew where we slept.
The man I love is alone in a temple that is dying around him. I left the drawings on the ledge. All except the channel sheet, folded into my pack beside my mother’s page. I have a head full of pieces that will not arrange themselves into a picture.
I am not done with this problem.
VADH
The silence has edges where her sounds used to be.
In the lower hall, I lower myself for the pour. The venom drips from my palms.
Clouded. Amber at the edges.
One night without her body in the building and my venom has reverted. The channels accept the weak flow as they always have. The seal stabilizes. The world is safer today than it was yesterday. Only because she left.
The moss outside my sleeping chamber is still green. It will die back without her.
Her pack is gone. Her boots. The bedroll is still here. She left it.
The drawings are on the ledge.
She left them. Every sheet except the channel drawing and the fragment.
I unroll the first sheet. The east corridor, drawn in her clean precise hand. Every channel marked. Every junction labeled in the notation she inherited from Reka and made her own.
The second sheet. The lower levels. The carvings she sketched by lamplight. The priestesses. The Naga. The paired grooves.
The third sheet. The decay map. My resting spot in the main hall marked with a pale circle. Her sleeping spot marked with green. The two patterns she pieced together over days, never announcing what she was building.
The fourth sheet.
I hold it to the corridor light.
It is me. Charcoal on paper. My face in profile, looking toward the supply room entrance. The angle of my jaw. The ridge of scales above my brow. The line of my throat descending into the collar of the armor. She drew the armor loose at the shoulder where the buckle has always been loose. She drew the seam at my wrist where the scales change grain.
She drew my hands. Both of them. Open. The detail in the scales of my palms is finer than anything in the building drawings. She spent time on my hands. She sat in the corridor at night and drew the creases of my palms from memory and she got them right. The place where Bryn put her thumb and my venom spiked and the stone did not die.
