Page 31

G atewardens appeared soon after the blaze began, lanterns in hand, and bellowed at the growing crowd in the street.

Viv only dimly registered their presence until one of them approached, directed to her by some neighbor.

She numbly answered his questions and forgot her answers almost immediately.

When he disappeared, she returned her attention to the wreckage.

Ignimancers from Ackers—recognizable by their robes and pins and air of scholarly annoyance—were able to contain the spectral flames and prevent the spread to the neighboring structures, but there was nothing they could do that would have changed the outcome for the shop itself, so they let it burn.

The flames raged until nearly dawn, and Viv and Tandri remained in the street, watching the shop reduced to cinders. The walls collapsed and fell in fits and starts, a slow crumbling, and then a sudden rush, as timbers tumbled inward in corkscrew ribbons of sparks.

Tandri huddled by Viv’s side. They were blasted dry, like they’d been scoured by a desert wind.

The skin of Viv’s face was raw, the burns on her thighs angry and throbbing.

Laney hobbled over to them at some point, bringing blankets to cover up with.

It was too hot, and Viv shed hers almost immediately, although Tandri kept one wrapped around her shoulders, held together in front with a fist.

By degrees, Tandri slumped against Viv’s arm, exhausted. The succubus didn’t suggest they leave, but she did murmur at some point, “When you’re ready, we’ll stay at my place.”

Viv couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge the offer.

Despite the heat on her flesh, a coldness drew down from Viv’s skull to the soles of her feet, like every day she’d spent in Thune was leaching away, leaving a growing emptiness, the most physical manifestation of despair she had ever known.

Was this what Tandri had spoken of? What had she called it… Arcane Reciprocity? Was this what that felt like? Or was it just plain old, everyday hopelessness?

She didn’t know. And she supposed it didn’t matter.

Tandri tried once more, still indirect. “Aren’t you tired?” Her voice was hoarse. While the smoke from the spectral flames had been sparse, their throats still burned from it.

“I can’t leave,” said Viv. “Not yet.”

Her eyes stayed fixed on a place in the heart of the ebbing destruction, where the Stone once rested.

She had to know if it was still there.

As dawn glimmered, the green flames sputtered and died, as if they fed on the night as much as on earthly fuel. The heat was still intolerable, though, and the blackened spars and charred and glowing tile could not be approached.

Eventually, Tandri persuaded Viv to sit on Laney’s stoop, and together they watched the dawn bloom fully.

Now, the blackened wood did smoke in a more natural way, as though the arcane fire had consumed it until then.

A black, noxious cloud of soot grew and spiraled skyward, where it was torn apart and scattered by a breeze from the direction of the river.

Laney stood behind them, leaning on her broom. After a while, Viv asked in a ragged voice, “Laney, do you have a bucket or two you’d lend?”

The old woman did, and Viv took one in each hand.

Still barefoot and in her undershirt and short linen pants, she strode to the well, filled them both, and grimly tossed water onto the ashes of the space where the big doors had once been.

It splashed and hissed now, without the green flames to burn it away before it could fall.

She took the buckets back to the well, refilled them, and did it again. And again. And again, forging slowly inward toward the ruin that had once been the big table.

Viv didn’t count the trips, and her feet left bloody prints on the cobbles. Ashes caked her legs up to her stinging thighs.

Tandri waited on the stoop and didn’t try to dissuade her. It would have been pointless.

The heat was still intense, and sometimes Viv poured a bucket over herself before she returned. The water always wicked away soon after she re-traversed the spattered trail she was blazing. At every splash, the ashes became briefly muddy, until the blackness quickly dried and cracked again.

In the street, the crowds had thinned some, although the murmuring onlookers that remained stayed far away from Viv as she deliberately forged ever inward.

Sometime during this endless, numb repetition, Tandri briefly disappeared and returned with Cal and a small wagon drawn by a sturdy pony. They enlisted the help of some nearby folk and loaded the coffee machine and the lockbox into the wagon, and Cal took it away again.

Viv hardly cared.

At last, she reached the place. Barely any wood remained of the table, and what did was powdery and burnt through in a patchwork. The first bucket of water that struck it made it wither and crumble away like salt.

Viv knelt and pawed away the ruin, her fingers scorched by embers hiding beneath. She stood and kicked at the cinders with her bloody feet until the flagstone beneath was exposed.

She breathed heavily, inhaling smoke and coughing raggedly, staring at it.

One more trip with the buckets washed away some of the accumulated ash and cooled the surface of the stone.

She took a blackened twist of metal and levered up the edge, flipping it into the crumbled remains of the table in a plume of gray.

Dropping to her knees, Viv sorted through the startlingly hot earth beneath with her scorched fingers.

There was, of course, nothing there.

* * *

When Viv returned to the street, she moved as though underwater, weightless, sound distorted and far away. She stared bleakly at Tandri, then stumbled toward her.

Before she reached Laney’s stoop, Viv was surprised to see Lack shoulder past the people fringing the street.

He carried folded sets of clothing and two pairs of cloth shoes.

He said nothing when he passed the bundles to Viv and Tandri, but Viv saw the flash of a fine gray dress between a few of the folk behind him.

The Madrigal caught her gaze, nodded solemnly, and then walked away down the street, stately and unhurried.

“Thank you,” managed Tandri in her cracked voice, but it was all Viv could do to reach out and take what Lack offered without dropping it.

Lack murmured something to them that Viv didn’t register, and then she stood staring at the clothes with only dim comprehension.

After that, Viv didn’t remember sitting, but she must have done so at some point. She stared dully ahead, vision blurred as her eyes watered from the smoke.

A familiar voice whispered, “ Oh no.. ..”

Viv blinked in recognition. She turned her head and squinted at the unfocused shape of Thimble. Tandri knelt before him in quiet conference, with Laney’s blanket puddling around her.

Viv closed her eyes, and when next they opened, he was gone, and she didn’t know how much time had passed.

Tandri was suddenly beside her again. “He’s here.

” She gently put a hand on Viv’s shoulder and turned her, and there came Cal, again, with the pony and the wagon.

Tandri led her to it and gently urged her into the back, where Viv lay with feet dangling off the boards, staring up at the sky and the black ribbon of smoke that bisected it.

She distantly heard Cal and Tandri speaking on the buckboard as the cart clattered away over the cobbles. The smell of the burnt shop receded a little—but never completely. Viv reeked of it. The ashes fluttered away from her in the breeze of their passage like snow blown upward.

At last, the wagon stopped, and someone guided her up some stairs, and then she was inside Tandri’s room.

The woman sat her in a wooden chair that creaked under her weight.

Tandri disappeared, only to return with a wet towel.

She scrubbed Viv as gently as she could manage, although the nap of the cloth was like sandpaper where she was burned, which was almost everywhere.

Afterward, Tandri managed to get her undressed and into the clean clothes that Lack had provided, and then she settled her into the lone bed in the room.

Viv resisted closing her eyes, resisted letting go of consciousness, but the next time she blinked, she was gone into a dreamless black.

* * *

When she slowly woke, Viv felt more present in her own body, but her bleakness had redoubled. Her eyes flickered open, and the blanket of Tandri’s bed rasped against her skin, painful on her burns. At first, she closed her eyes again, craving the oblivion of sleep, but it eluded her.

“You’re awake,” said Tandri.

Viv turned her head, and the muscles in her neck ached. All of her ached. Her feet sizzled with pain.

Tandri was seated in the chair with a blanket pulled up to her chin. Her eyes looked bruised, hair singed. The tracks of tears were still clear on her smudged cheeks.

The smell of the fire filled the room. They were both still redolent of it.

“Yeah,” whispered Viv. She didn’t think she could manage more than that. She realized how parched she was, and that was something tangible. She needed water.

Tandri seemed to sense it. She stood and shuffled in her blanket over to the vanity and brought a full pitcher.

Viv managed to prop herself up and drink it all, greedily, in a few enormous gulps.

“Thank you,” she said, not even bothering to wipe the wetness from her chin. It was icy relief on her tender skin. And then, because she felt it needed to be said, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Tandri frowned at her in a tired way. “Saving me from the fire? The one I was such a big help in preventing?”

“I guess we should both be thanking the cat.”

Tandri chuckled soundlessly at that, although it looked like it hurt.

“I have to go back,” said Viv.

“Now? Why? Whatever it is, it’ll keep. There’s nothing there to recover.”

“There’s just something else I have to see.”

Tandri stared at her, then sighed and shrugged. “Let’s go then.”

“You should sleep. I kept you out of your bed.”

“I couldn’t sleep without knowing where you were, anyway,” replied Tandri. “Sleep will keep, too, I suppose.”

Viv groaned as she sat fully upright, pushed herself to her feet, and then found and slipped into the cloth shoes that the Madrigal had provided. She hissed through her teeth as her soles protested, but she mastered herself.

Outside Tandri’s room, she saw it was late afternoon, tending toward dusk. She must have slept for seven or eight hours.

The walk back to the shop was very slow, and she stepped carefully. Pain that she had shrugged off hours ago became insistent and sharp. She thought about what Tandri had said just a day ago about reciprocity. Pain that was ignored, magnified on its return.

Absolute devastation.

The heat had died down a great deal over the course of the day, although it was still uncomfortably warm. No walls stood. Hills of ash and the stubs of burnt spars and tumbled stone marked the perimeter, and slumped piles of gray and black resembled a blurry map of what had once been the interior.

Viv left Tandri in the street and waded in, carefully choosing her steps. She made her way behind where the counter had once stood and cast her gaze over the wreckage there.

At last, she found it. Viv tentatively reached out, careful of potential heat, but it was cooler than she expected.

She withdrew Blackblood from the pile, and black grit sifted away from its warped, tortured length.

The leather that had bound the grip was, of course, burned away to the tang.

The crossguard was curved and melted, the blade twisted, and a mother-of-pearl sheen rippled across it like oil.

A crack ran from one side all the way down to the fuller, the steel destroyed by the incredible heat of the unnatural fire.

Viv held her sword in both hands, head bowed.

She’d forsworn her old life, crossing a bridge to a new land, and now knelt in its ruin.

This was the bridge burning away behind her, leaving her in a desolation.

She tossed the blade back into the ash and took the only path that remained.