Page 37 of Add To Hoard

“It worked,” I say.

“Most of it worked,” he says. “Enough of it.”

I give something back. Not the docks. He knows the docks. Something earlier. Something I don’t talk about. The year I was sixteen and new to the wharves and learning that the world had opinions about what I was worth and choosing not to agree with them. He listens completely, without interrupting, with an attention I am still not entirely used to, the attention of something that has all the time in the world and is choosing to spend some of it on this.

The fire burns down by degrees. The stars are out, or the island’s version of stars, the cloud cover thin enough tonight that something above it is visible, diffused points of light through the overcast, softer than real stars but present.

My eyes go to the shelter wall.

He is talking — something about the island’s thermal system, how the barrier magic is woven into the geological activity, how they are not separate things but one thing that the original architects understood and subsequent generations have been managing without fully understanding. I am listening. I am also looking at the rock face of the northern formation and the dark interior of the shelter and the wall I have been looking at for four days, and this time I do not look away quickly. I let myself look.

He notices. I feel him notice without looking back at him — his voice shifts slightly, the pause between one sentence and the next a fraction longer than the pause before it. He does not stop talking. He does not ask. But when I finally bring my eyes back to the fire I find his already there, waiting, and he meets my eyes for a beat before he looks back at the flames.

Not asking. Seeing.

Those are different things, and he knows the difference, and I am running out of reasons to find that inconvenient.

He stays until the fire has burned to coals. When he finally rises and goes back to the treeline I watch him until the black-barked trees close around him and his footsteps fade into the forest’s low register.

Then I reach into my pocket and take out the stone.

In the firelight it is less dark than it looks in daylight, the amber of the low coals gets into it and turns the thing moving inside it warm, slow, almost breathing. I sit with it in my open palm and I look at it and I think about Bren and I think about the healer and I think about the crossing and I think about all the things on the other side of tomorrow that are real and waiting and mine.

The stone is warm. It has been warm since the moment he put it in my hand and it has not stopped being warm, not in the cold nights, not in the water this morning. It holds the heat of a source older than I can account for and it sits in my palm like it knows where it is supposed to go.

I know where it is supposed to go.

I close my fingers around it. I put it back in my pocket. I lie down on the bedroll with my coat over my shoulders and the fire going to gray at the edges and the island quiet around me, warm still, the warmth of the day lingering past where warmth should linger, and my mind goes to Bren’s face.

And to asking about the book.

Tomorrow,” I tell myself. “Tomorrow is soon enough.”

And underneath that, quieter, not quite a thought yet, not quite ready to be looked at directly:

And after tomorrow.

18

MAELOR

The remediation proposal is finished before the second hour of the morning and it is good work. I know it is good work the way I know all work I have done carefully, not with satisfaction exactly, but with the particular absence of doubt that comes when a thing has been done to the standard it requires and not merely to the standard that would pass. Two hundred and forty years of barrier survey data, organized, cross-referenced, the degradation pattern mapped and named and the remediation steps sequenced in the order that addresses the most critical failures first. It is thorough. It is documented. It removes the factual basis of Drazik’s argument before he can make it in a room.

I have presented a version of this document before. Not this document, the barriers were different forty years ago, the degradation pattern younger, the political context entirely unlike the current one. But the shape of it: here is the problem I have identified, here is what I am doing about it, here is the evidence that I identified it and not you. I have done this in one form or another for six centuries, which is long enough to know that a well-documented answer presented before the question is asked is worth four answers presented after.

I send it to Soryth before dawn.

Then I go to the window and look west and do not think about the beach, which I do for approximately four minutes before I stop pretending.

Soryth comes to me at mid-morning with the co-oversight filing under his arm and the settled manner of an advisor who has read it already, identified its mechanism, identified the counter, and is bringing it to me as a formality because we have been doing this together for four centuries and the formality is part of how we do it.

He sets it on the table. I read it. It takes less time than he expects, which tells him I was already expecting something in this direction if not this exact shape.

“There it is,” I say.

“The co-oversight framing is new,” Soryth says. “The intent is not.”

“No.” I set the filing down. “The word.”