Page 58 of The Sorcerer's Alpha

Marut moved to him and set his hand at the back of Sycamore’s neck, holding him there gently, his lungs filled—somehow—with the air of home. “You’re a wonder. Can you walk? We’ll go ask for aid in the village. They can tell us where we are.”

“No,” Sycamore said. “I know where we are.”

CHAPTER21

Sycamore could walk if he leaned on Rhododendron for support. He felt shaky and queasy, weak with the abrupt emptying of his magic, and his fingertips remained numb even after his hands warmed. His palm throbbed steadily. Was it the exertion of transporting, or the shock of the destination? He had felt worse the last time, but that was with his shoulder shattered into a hundred fragments. His shoulder ached faintly now, as if reminded of that injury.

His feet led the way. Even after thirty years, he knew this narrow path through the trees. A few minutes of walking brought them to the end, where the house stood in a grove of apple trees: the house Sycamore had grown up in, with the stream curving away behind it. It looked smaller than he remembered, and shabbier, the green paint chipped and faded. His mother’s rose bushes still grew along the front of the house, covered in buds just beginning to show their color.

He was intensely disoriented. Half an hour ago, he had been climbing in the Koramandi, the mountain pass ahead of him and the air cold and bright. Now, standing here looking at his parents’ house, he had the feeling that he had traveled not only through space but also backward through time.

“Sycamore?” Marut asked from behind him, his voice filled with uncertainty.

Laundry hung from a rope tied between two trees, and a stack of firewood filled the shed at the side of the house. Sycamore’s aunt had said in her letter that the house would be sold, but Sycamore was still disconcerted to see this evidence of other people living here, in the house where his father had sung to him every night before bed and his mother had first taught him to scry.

When he was small, in those first years in Banuri, he had wondered, in his bitterness and grief, if his parents hadn’t secretly wanted to send him away. Wouldn’t they have put up more resistance if they wanted to keep him? But he knew now, with the perspective of maturity, that his parents had loved him, and that he had been lucky to be so loved. His memories of the first six years of his life were a golden blur of fishing in the stream with his father, climbing apple trees, playing with his cousins, and falling asleep in his mother’s arms when he had a fever. That root-deep certainty of love had buoyed him through the lonely years that followed and kept him afloat until he found Marut and entered into love once more.

“Sycamore.” Marut’s hand settled on his shoulder, and Sycamore turned to see his face filled with sympathy. “Is this where your parents lived?”

No surprise he had guessed, with Sycamore’s emotions so raw and seeping. “Yes. But as you see, someone else lives here now.”

“Would you like to ask if they’ll let you see the inside?”

Sycamore chewed his lip. No, he wanted to remember the house as it had been during his childhood, not dilute his memories with how things were now. “No. We shouldn’t disturb them.” He turned Rhododendron to lead her back the way they had come. “We should find somewhere to make camp. I need to sit with the earth for a while.”

He could sense Marut’s concern, but Marut made no protest, and let him stew in silence as they went down the road until they found a break in the trees where they could set up the tent, far enough from the village that no one would disturb them. Bees flitted through the meadow. Sycamore sat down among them and pulled off his boots and socks. With his bare feet resting in the clover, the earth began murmuring its green springtime thoughts to him.

By the time Marut unsaddled the horses and set them loose to graze, Sycamore felt mostly alive again. Marut brought him some dried meat and the last of their cheese, and Sycamore devoured every crumb and then said, “I should have listened to you about the weather in the pass. The wind was blowing off the steppe and spoke to me only of spring. It filled me with false confidence, I suppose.”

Marut shrugged. “We’re here now, and safe. And you saved us a week off our journey or more. Let me see your hand.” Marut took Sycamore’s hand in his and studied the cut on his palm. “Clotted over already. That’s good. I’ll wrap it anyway to keep it clean.”

“I can heal it,” Sycamore said, but in truth he was still so drained he wasn’t sure he could manage. He sat while Marut dug through the saddlebags and came out with a strip of clean linen, which he wrapped around Sycamore’s hand and tied off with a knot. “It’s strange to be back in Chedi.”

Marut glanced up at him. “What do you mean?”

“Everything is so familiar. The way the air feels. The way the earth speaks to me. And yet…”

“It would be different if we had spent a week traveling through the Mountain Kingdoms. Instead it was so abrupt. I understand what you mean.” Marut touched his cheek. “I thought I might never see Chedi again. Yet here we are.”

“Here we are,” Sycamore echoed, then sighed. “We might as well stay here for the night. Seoni isn’t near enough to reach before nightfall.”

“I’ll agree with that.” Marut sat back on his heels and looked at him. “I didn’t realize you had figured out how to do the—how to transport us.”

“I hadn’t. I thought about it some. It’s blood magic, or maybe it needs pain. Or both. But I hadn’t tried it at all, if that’s what you’re asking. I just couldn’t think of what else to do. I wasn’t going to let the damned weather ruin my plans again.” Sycamore gazed down at his bandaged hand. “I didn’t mean to bring us here. I was aiming for Banuri.”

Marut was still watching him, his eyebrows pinched together with worry. “Sycamore—”

“I’m fine. I was only—surprised. To come here.” Surprised: was that the word? Little wonder he was thinking about his parents so soon after scrying for Marut’s, but he hadn’t realized they were so much on his mind that he would transport here instead of to the capital. Marut’s expression didn’t change. Sycamore said, “The scar on my forehead—” He touched his fingertips to the raised line of scar tissue above his eyebrow. “It’s from tripping on the threshold and falling into the doorframe.”

Marut shuffled closer on his knees and wrapped his arms around Sycamore’s shoulders. Sycamore pressed his face to Marut’s coat and closed his eyes, breathing in Marut’s scent until his chest didn’t feel quite so tight.

“We could have ended up in the sea,” Marut said after a while, startling Sycamore into a laugh.

“Good thing we didn’t. I don’t know how to swim.”

* * *

They leftfor Seoni in the morning. The road was still drying out from the winter rains, but the mud wasn’t bad enough to slow their progress, although Sycamore saw deeply rutted wheel tracks where carts had gotten stuck in the recent past. The road followed the path of the stream by his parents’ house as it became a river, flowing from the head of the valley where his parents’ village lay to the distant mouth of the valley at Seoni. The hills rose above them, misty and forested, the high northern foothills of the Koramandi.