Page 54 of Homeward for a Spell

She isn’t ready for the adventure to be over. She isn’t ready to say goodbye to Sage, or the open road, with its promise of those places of transition her mother once spoke of. She isn’t ready to resume her life at Denby’s side, or give up music and Phi Runesong.

And what if, after these weeks spent reveling in her stolen freedom, her family is the very client she’s been working for? What could the Claunecks possibly want with a dragon’s tooth?

Nothing good, that’s for certain.

Remy must know more than he’s let slip so far. Perhaps she can charm a few answers out of him. Araphi pivots decisively on her boot heel to return to the fire. But as she passes the chamber where they’ve been sleeping, she pauses. Ahead, Nura and Sage still chat by the fire, their laughter drifting down the corridor. She doesn’t hear Remy, which explains the dark shape bent over the Agent’s bedroll. A happy coincidence.

“Remy, I wanted to ask…” she begins. But as the shadow quickly straightens, spooked by her voice in the dark chamber, it unfolds into a taller and broader stance than the Agent’s—a shape she knows well by now. “Bramble?” She raises the lantern.

Its low yellow light falls across the healer’s handsome face, glinting off their wide eyes. “Phi. I…came in for some dry socks. Mine are soaked through. Thought Remy might have a pair.”

“Right. Well…perhaps set them out by the fire if not?”

“Of course. I hadn’t thought. All the mead…” Bobbing their head, they squeeze past her in the doorframe, their large body scraping the corridor wall so as to avoid contact, before they hurry back to the rest of the party.

Curious.

Araphi steps into their sleeping chamber and lifts her lantern again, illuminating the mess of papers and clothing scattered across Remy’s bedroll. And glinting in among the pile sits the dragon’s tooth. Why Remy would have left it sitting out like this, she can’t fathom. Perhaps he was so giddy with triumph and drink, he grew careless. He was fairly well into his cups by the time they’d sat down at the fire.

Or perhaps she and Bramble are consumed by thoughts of the same artifact—the power surging through it, or the consequences of its delivery—and the healer wanted one more look, which she happened to interrupt.

Whatever the reason, there the tooth is, unguarded.

Approaching, Araphi picks it up, running her fingers over the impossibly old, pitted surface. A frisson of magic flares in her, as it had when she pulled it out of the river. Is she really holding the tooth of an ancient god?

“What would my family want with you?” she mutters.

Without stopping to think better of it, Araphi grabs her coat from her own bedroll, slips the tooth into the pocket, and hurries outside to examine it more closely, where she won’t be discovered or interrupted.

19

Sage

One by one, they all drift away from the fire. First Bramble to relieve themself, then Araphi, with some half-hearted excuse that Sage can’t challenge in the presence of the party without exposing her overly keen interest in the bard’s affairs. Then Remy stumbles outdoors to pack his pipe, so that it’s only Sage and Nura around the campfire. Soon, Sage too grows restless, and leaves the girl in charge of the fire with a promise to return before the last of their smoked sausages carried in from Briarwall have done heating on their pokers.

Outside the temple, Remy sits on the steps beyond the stone columns, blowing rings of pipe smoke that merge with the misty vapor of his breath in the frozen night. Somehow, it’s colder than it’s been yet in the Northlands.

Sage welcomes it, along with the quiet.

Until the party broke up, the mood around the hearth had been the opposite of last night’s. With no impossible task to contemplate, and no specter of failure to haunt their dreams, all that was left was to celebrate. They did so with relish. Or rather, Bramble and Nura and Araphi did, trading stories and songs while Sage kept her peace and sipped her drink. Bramble recited a gentle hymn meant to be sung on the dock when their village’s fisherfolk set out for the first time each spring, once the young salmon had migrated to salt water. Nura told the story of her first fight in the pits, which she lost spectacularly by knocking herself out when she misjudged a charge, slipped, and slammed nose-first into her own staff. Then Araphi silenced them all with a song she must have picked up in the taverns of the Rookery.

It was one Sage recognized. Workers in Ashaway’s factories sang it to keep up pace, then carried it back across the river with them, and sang it idly over the kitchen sink at night, or while sweeping the tramped-in coal dust from their crooked floors. That’s how it was when Sage was young, and must be still. On first listen, the verses seemed to come from a laborer encouraging their companions to keep their spirits up and pass the long hours in good cheer. Simple enough that the overseers often misunderstood its meaning and would find themselves whistling the lively tune in their own fine apartments outside the Copper Court. But the end of the song revealed its singer to be the overseers’ bosses, who owned the factories they never set foot in and collected money they never labored for to keep inside their fine manor houses. Sage had opened her mouth to tell Araphi—to recall how she’d sung it herself with school friends before she truly understood it.

But every piece of herself she gives the bard is one more she’ll have to leave behind when they part ways. And if Araphi truly intends to return to the Claunecks after everything they’ve been through, then part ways they must. So she’d stayed silent.

Now here she is with Remy, the only person she knows who holds his secrets more closely than Sage.

He passes her his pipe as she approaches. “Expect we’ll be heading out at first light to make Briarwall by nightfall?”

“That’s the plan.” Though as Sage casts her gaze up to the sky, she’s not so sure. The featureless expanse of cloud cover portends snow, and she can feel a change of weather coming in her bad knee, which aches more acutely than the days of riding would account for. She swears she can even smell it, though her parents used to insist that was impossible, until she was right most every time. They may have to bunk down for an extra day to avoid being caught in a blizzard on their way south, or perhaps two if the snowfall is deep enough. Their provisions can be made to last that long. Three days might be safer, if she manages a hunt…

“Something on your mind, boss?”

A growl rumbles from her throat as she passes the pipe back without smoking. “Don’t start that. You’re not as likable as Bramble, so I will push you into the Swallow.”

“Just thought you’d be in a better mood tonight, is all. You’ve done it, Sage! Your first time leading a party, and we’ve completed a mission where few would’ve risked it. Our ecstatic Client will soon have their prize, and we’ll all have more gold than has ever crossed our palms.” Aside from Araphi, that’s certainly true. “And you’ll have built your reputation as a successful party leader. So buck up, hmm?” He shoves Sage’s shoulder so she has to plant a hand down to keep from toppling from her perch on the temple steps. “I’d call this a critical success.”

Perhaps he’s right. And perhaps the snow will pass the river valley by, and she shouldn’t wish for a reason to delay the journey home, whatever that means for the party. Nura has her family in Kingfisher. Bramble has their pebble of a fishing village somewhere down the western shoreline. And Araphi? She has an entire future waiting for her in the capital. A marriage that, however displeasurable she finds it, she’s made no protest about, nor confided to Sage that she has any plans to change. She wanted one adventure as Phi Runesong before sliding back into her lifelong role of Araphi Clauneck, and now she’s had it. And maybe she’s the lucky one. Much as Sage would gnaw off a paw before she spent a single day caught in the lavish trap of aristocracy and obligation, at least Araphi has a place to belong.