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S he slept in Tandri’s room, waking intermittently to attend to necessities, although Viv insisted on taking a blanket and lying on the floor. She was used to it anyway. Her awareness of Tandri’s comings and goings was hazy at best.

On what she thought might have been the third day, a knock came at the door. Viv heard Tandri moving to open it, a quiet exchange of words, and then someone entered. She heard them pad across the floorboards.

“Hm.”

Viv opened her eyes and half-turned over.

Cal stared down at her with his arms crossed, and she felt suddenly foolish…

and angry … lying there and exposing her weakness to him.

In years past, she would have cursed herself as a fool for giving a foe such an advantage.

Such carelessness would have killed her a hundred times over.

But Cal was not her enemy.

The hob drew up the chair and sat, his legs too short for his feet to reach the floor. He clasped his hands between his knees, looking away and giving her a moment to push into a sitting position.

“Cal,” she rasped, and nodded. She didn’t feel as though she’d slept, at all.

“First thing to get a handle on is cleanup,” he said without preamble. “Then materials. Then labor. Need more’n me and you, this time.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked, and there was an edge of irritation in her voice.

“Rebuildin’, o’ course. Ash is cooled. We’ll get it shifted. Maybe eight, ten trips to the midden. Hired hand or two’ll speed it up fine.”

“Rebuilding?” Viv stared up at him. “Cal, I don’t have the coin for that. And even if I did, I don’t think it’d matter.”

“Hm. Tandri told me. The Stone.” He shrugged. “Maybe worse odds now, but didn’t figure you were one to duck at a soft blow like that.”

Viv flicked a glance at Tandri, who stared back with a level expression.

“Still doesn’t change things,” she said.

Her battered strongbox sat to the side, where they must have placed it while she slept.

She reached over with one huge hand and dragged it closer.

Viv took the key from around her neck and unlocked it, flipping back the lid.

Maybe seven sovereigns, a handful of silver, and a scattering of copper bits lay within. The platinum was long gone.

“I saved for years ,” she said grimly. “Bounties. Blood work. Most of it’s gone, now.” She glared balefully. “As gone as the shop and everything else. There’s almost nothing left. Less than what I started with, by leagues .”

She looked at Tandri, who winced at her tone of voice. “What did you call it… Arcane Reciprocity? Well, here it is , this is the backlash.” She felt her teeth bared, her fangs huge in her jaw, her burnt and barely healing skin tight over her skull, her brain throbbing.

A part of her understood that she was hurting them, wounding these people who were friends.

That some older, crueler self was emerging, crawling from the wreckage of who she thought she had become.

That newly ruined part of her cried out for her to stop, to let it be for now, but the crueler self was ascendant, its opponent too weakened and diminished to intervene.

“It’s fucking gone, ” she snarled. “I spent my chance, and I can’t earn it back.” She held Tandri’s gaze and deliberately said, “This is the part where I do what desperate people do. This is the part where I flee.”

Tandri jerked as if struck.

Savage satisfaction burned through Viv, followed by a wave of nausea.

“Give it time,” said Cal, in his gritty, patient voice.

“ What fucking difference would that make ?” she roared.

In the next moment, Viv slumped, staring down at her hands, limp in her lap. “You should go,” she whispered hoarsely.

She heard him quietly rise and leave.

For a while, she thought Tandri had left, too, but then Viv felt her draw near, crouch in front of her, and stroke her burned cheek.

Tandri’s forehead touched hers, an echo of days ago. “Do you remember what you said, in the street? After the fire?” she murmured, her breath light on Viv’s nose and lips.

“No,” she lied.

“You said, ‘ At least we didn’t lose everything .’”

Tandri paused.

“And I said you risked too much for the things you saved,” she continued.

Another, longer pause, her breathing slow and sweet.

“But I knew what you really meant.”

Viv didn’t notice her own tears until Tandri’s lips brushed her damp cheek.

She opened her eyes and stared into Tandri’s, so close to her own.

The woman held her gaze steadily, face composed, but eyes wet.

Viv felt a warm weight in her center, and for a moment, they were enclosed again in that bubble of calm rightness they’d once shared.

Then the savage, older Viv clawed her way to the fore, whispering “ It’s what she is. You’ve felt this before. She keeps it hooded like a lantern until she needs it, and then she lets it loose, and you fall under her spell. ”

But even as that bleak thought spread through her mind like the spectral flame, it evaporated just as swiftly in the light of dawn.

Tandri’s warm, pulsing aura, the one that had touched her a few fleeting times, was absent.

There was no arcana, no force, no trick.

No magic to it, at all.

There never had been. Not even once.

She saw in Tandri’s face, composed though it was, that she was awaiting some judgment. Preparing herself for it, to be struck, ignored, or accepted.

And terrified of all three.

Viv’s hand rose and carefully tucked Tandri’s singed hair behind one ear.

With a sharply drawn breath, she tipped her head forward, and brushed her lips against Tandri’s, light as a whisper.

Then she wrapped her arms around her and tried not to squeeze too hard.

Tandri squeezed back.

* * *

Cal was wrong. It took thirteen trips to the midden to clear away the debris. Viv didn’t know where he’d rented the cart and pony from and was too ashamed to ask. It was the work of a week to shovel and hoist the ashes and cracked tile and stone into the back of the wagon.

The oven was a mangled wreck of slag that flaked apart when she tried to drag it from the debris. Cal kept aside a few stones and bricks that might prove useful, stacked to one cleared end of the lot.

Mopping her brow with a forearm, Viv looked down at him. “I still don’t see how I’ll afford the stone and lumber for this, much less the labor. Is there really any point in clearing it all away?” The acid was gone from her voice, replaced by a stoic flatness.

He cocked back his hat and tugged at one of his long ears. “Hm. What’d you say to me at the docks? ‘Y ou do it even when some might say it’s wiser not to ,’ I think? Well. Guess I’ll just say… maybe be unwise a little longer.”

Viv couldn’t think of a response to that, so she got back to hauling and lost herself in the demanding physicality of the work.

She was taken aback when Pendry showed up on the second day with no lute in evidence. With a nervous little nod, he pitched in to help. Viv had to admit, his big, rough hands looked perfectly natural hauling stone. When she began to offer to pay him, he stopped her.

“No,” he said and shook his head. And that was all.

Tandri intermittently appeared and disappeared with water or bread and cheese, and Viv tried not to stare after her too hard, or to think overmuch about that single, stolen kiss.

* * *

Cal arrived with a cartload of bricks and river stone.

“Where’s this from?” asked Viv, squinting at him as he climbed down from the buckboard.

“Well. Those’ns come from the quarry. And those’ns from the river. Gonna have to leave you two to unload ’em. Ain’t tall enough for this.”

Viv and Pendry shifted the stone into piles on the lot.

Cal stacked a few of the bricks and planks to form a makeshift table and bent over a roll of paper with a stylus and a ruling stick. Tandri huddled over it with him.

As Viv approached them, breathing hard, Cal looked up. “Figured if we’re goin’ to all the work, best build it back better, hm? Two ovens shouldn’t be a problem with a bigger kitchen, I figure. So. Take a look.”

Viv stared down at his neatly drafted plans.

“That kid needs a dipper of water,” said Tandri, holding a hand over her eyes as she looked across the lot at Pendry. “I’ll be back.”

When she was gone, Viv looked back at Cal and pointed at the paper. “Is this the loft?”

“’Tis.”

“There’s something else I want to change,” she said. And then hesitated. “If… if you’re willing?”

“I’m waitin’.”

So she told him.

* * *

When Cal showed up again with lumber and sacks of nails, Viv forced him to take most of her remaining funds. He didn’t protest, but she wondered how he’d been paying for any of it. At some point, she simply allowed herself not to worry about it, which was both unnerving and freeing.

As construction commenced, Thimble made a habit of joining them at noon, bearing sacks of food—warm meat turnovers in flaky pastry, good hearty loaves of bread, and once, his cinnamon rolls. Everyone stopped their labors and companionably ate those, seated on the growing lower wall of brick.

Laney sometimes tottered across the street to offer advice. She’d tut over the fire and usually managed to abscond with a roll.

It turned out that Pendry was quite the stonemason, though nobody but Viv seemed particularly surprised. “Oh sure,” he said, cheeks red and rubbing the back of his head. “It’s the family business.”

They were sheathing the half-wall of brick in river-stone when Hemington picked his way onto the lot, having traded his books for a satchel of tools.

“Good afternoon,” he said, seeming a little embarrassed.

“Hem,” said Viv, surprised to see him.

“I thought… well, I thought you might appreciate a little ward-work in the foundation.” He chuckled awkwardly. “Some warded inscriptions to proof against fire might not go amiss, perhaps?”

“I didn’t know it was possible. If I said no , I think everyone here would curse me for an idiot,” replied Viv.

“That’s true, we would,” said Tandri, rising from where she’d been mixing mortar. She smiled at Hemington and raised a brow at Viv. Her cheeks were streaked with gray, and she wore a rough work shirt, rather than her customary sweater. Viv thought she looked pretty radiant.

“Well, then,” said Hemington. “I’ll just get to it, shall I?

” He withdrew a collection of instruments from his satchel and went to the four corners of the foundation, then the midpoints of each outer wall, where he busied himself etching and inscribing and doing whatever it was he did.

Viv figured she could probably ask Tandri for details later.

She reflected that if the Scalvert’s Stone had drawn something to this place, it might still be there.