Page 71 of Homeward for a Spell

Half an hour later, as promised, Sage sits on a battered but comfortable chaise with her leg propped up on the long seat while Araphi explores their borrowed lodgings. This was Wren’s aunt’s room in their family quarters before her death this summer. “No sickness, naught like that, just a heart that reached the end of its journey,” their moody rescuer assured them. In truth, there’s not much to explore. It must seem incredibly humble to Araphi. Smaller even than the hunting cabin, the narrow chamber still manages to accommodate a decent-sized bed with a headboard of thin, braided pine branches, a washstand, a standing cupboard for clothing and possessions (little of which they now own), the chaise that Sage occupies, and at the far end, the stove. It’s an ingenious box built of clay tiles set atop a brick foundation, with a rounded roof. As Wren explained while sliding dry logs into the firebox, the clay is slower to heat, but retains that heat much longer than an open hearth or iron stove, allowing them to warm their rooms while burning far less wood. She left them to their own devices after that.

Once Araphi has run out of nooks to peer into, she sinks down onto the bed, bouncing slightly to test it. “What do you need?” she asks Sage for perhaps the third time. “I can ask directions to the mess hall, or help you to the washroom for a soak, or…”

“How about we just sit for a moment?” Sage suggests.

Araphi rises to cross the room and squeeze between the furnishings with a dancer’s grace. When she reaches Sage, she hikes up her long skirts, still soaked at the hem. Taking great care around Sage’s bad leg, she settles herself onto Sage’s lap with a troublesome little smile, her knees on either side of Sage’s hips. The dark hair that’s come unraveled from her hasty braids hangs down to brush Sage’s cheek, they’re so close.

She gives Araphi a quick, answering grin, but then turns to business. “Listen. We’re in a better position than we were in the cabin, but our greater circumstances haven’t changed. We’re in possession of a very powerful and valuable artifact, with a party somewhere in the area who’ll be looking for it, and us.” Reaching into her waist pouch, which she’s yet to take off, Sage pulls out the dragon’s tooth to hold between them, its weight in her palm even more considerable than its size. “I’ve a feeling your aunt won’t simply throw up her hands and write this off as a lost investment. If we do manage to make it out of the Northlands once the snow melts and my leg has mended, there’ll be them to contend with, and if you’re planning to—”

“Ranger,” Araphi interrupts softly, leaning even closer to press a silencing kiss to Sage’s lips.

Sage welcomes it.

When she pulls back again, Araphi plucks the tooth from her palm and says, “I’ve a bargain to make with you.”

“I’m listening,” Sage says, sliding her emptied hands around Araphi’s waist.

“I would guess that, without you around to guide them deeper into the Graywood or provide for them throughout the winter, the party will make for Briarwall rather than risk straying from the route they know to search for us. Especially if there’s a good chance we drowned in the Swallow. Would you agree?”

Sage considers what she knows of Remy—a shrewd adventurer if a reluctant leader—and has to concede. “That would be the sensible course of action. I doubt Remy will assume we’re dead without proof, despite the river’s reputation. But he’ll know that we have to return to the gate to travel south, just the same as the party. With the weather about to turn again, they may be well on their way back already before the mountain passes are untraversable.”

Pleased to be agreed with, Araphi nods. Her fingertips stir, gently and maddeningly, through the short hair at the nape of Sage’s neck, growing out from the last shave. It sends a shiver down Sage’s whole body, and a heat kindling between her legs. “And would you agree that when Remy does manage to get word to my aunt at Hazelbend, it’ll be too late to cross back into the Northlands, whether to find us or to hunt anew for the tooth?”

It’s getting a bit harder to think logically, especially when Araphi squirms on her lap to readjust her weight, and the friction between them only feeds the fire. But Sage does her best. “That seems sensible too.”

“Well then. We can’t go south to them, and they can’t come north to us. Not until the passes are clear. We’re good and stuck. So what if, for now, we don’t worry or plan? Pretend we’re back in the hunter’s cabin, or better yet, in our pocket dimension? We’ll keep the tooth a secret—borrow a needle and thread and sew it into the lining of this dress for safety, and tuck it away—but otherwise, there’s nothing to do for a time but survive the winter and keep each other warm. Could you agree to that, at least for now?” Her fingertips dip beneath the loose collar of Sage’s shirt to trace a path down Sage’s spine.

Reflexively, Sage’s fists bunch in the fabric of Araphi’s dress, and she tugs her closer still. “Yes, Bard.” Her voice is husky as smoke, her aching knee momentarily forgotten. “I could agree to that.”

Sage can’t keep a low whine from escaping when Araphi stands again. She fetches a feather pillow from the bed, then readjusts the stool so Sage’s knee is propped atop it, properly cushioned. In the face of her impatience, Araphi works slowly, carefully. She removes Sage’s boots, and coaxes her to lift her hips so she can slide off her breeches and underpants, gently working the last leg over Sage’s tightly wrapped knee. Then off comes Sage’s shirt—the one with the sewn-up shoulder and long-dried bloodstain—as well as her linen bindings, so she sits naked in the chair in their swiftly warming chamber and stares up at Araphi, like a wounded raptor trapped just beyond reach of its prey.

“Comfortable?” Araphi asks. The studied innocence in her voice does nothing to belie the sparkle of mischief in her brown eyes.

“Enough,” Sage growls, grasping for her.

The speed with which Araphi throws off her dress and riding pants and straddles Sage suggests that despite her teasing, she’s in complete agreement. Then there’s no more worrying, no more planning, no more talking. Only the muffled crackle and pop of the logs inside the clay stove, and their quickened breathing as Araphi grinds her mound against Sage’s. Araphi’s fingers return to the hair at the nape of her neck, whispering so gently against her skin that it almost tickles, while Sage digs her fingers into the soft slopes of Araphi’s hips.

When Sage arrives from the pressure and friction of their bodies alone, it feels something like a homecoming.

For the next few weeks, they shelter in Wren’s family quarters, doing their best to stay out from underfoot. Araphi helps Wren’s mother with the mending, and they both help her momma with repairs around the compound. It turns out the bard isn’t bad with a needle or a knife, though where she really shines is while performing for the villagers in the mess hall or the common spaces. Wren’s momma found her a battered old lute that someone’s grandparents had passed down, but never taught them the trick of, and now she’s much in demand. The children of Arkney have taken to trailing after her, starry-eyed, when she’s simply passing through the corridors on the way to the washroom.

As her knee continues to mend, Sage has lately been accompanying Wren on her hunting and foraging trips around the Graywood, though she uses the walking stick still. Arkney is grateful for the extra food to pad their winter stores, and she suspects Wren is glad for the company, though they say little to each other in the forest. It’s the same business Wren was about when she found them in the hunting cabin.

The first time they get drunk with Wren, they’re in Arkney’s only tavern, which is really more of a big cupboard off the mess hall, where a woman named Barya makes oat beer and liquor brewed from rice. It isn’t until she’s three mugs of beer deep that Wren confesses the cabin’s true purpose, and what she’d hoped to find there that day.

“It’s been there for generations, since Arkney was a much larger village on the banks of the Halhazy where it neared the Willowthorn. No idea who built it. It’s older than the temple, even. My ancestors built that, you know?”

Sage recalls the ruins where they sheltered, its dusty floors and slowly collapsing roof, and the peeling icon of the dragon in the sanctum. “Truly?”

“Mmm. The room you said you slept in? That was ours. My mothers’ and mine, when I was a child.”

“It took you this long to tell us all this?” Sage asks incredulously. She thinks of the dragon’s tooth, sewn into the dress that Araphi has tucked away in favor of wearing clothing provided by the inhabitants of Arkney. What would Wren say, she wonders, if they dared to tell her that they’d found the artifact her family had dedicated themselves to protecting, and carried it here?

Wren shrugs and pets Goway, who perches on the countertop pecking at a bit of meat. At least the sight of him has become less startling over time. “What’s to tell? We tended the altar, kept the fires burning, guarded a great dragon’s grave—even after the rest packed up to find a safer place, away from what you two call the Swallow. Or some did, at least. Many went south to try their luck in the kingdom proper. But we stayed, my mothers and me. I was fifteen then. Another six years, we kept the fires, till finally I begged them to leave it behind, or I’d make my own way and never come back again.”

“That must have been a lonely six years,” Araphi says sympathetically.

“Often it was. Only sometimes my friend…no, not a friend,” she corrects, blushing over the lip of her mug. “Jasper. He left with his parents when the rest did, came here, and built Arkney. But as you’ve seen, it wasn’t so far that we couldn’t meet. The first time, he ran away all by himself, found his own path back to the riverbank. Along the way he found the cabin, nearly halfway between us. He told me about it before his father came to fetch him, and we agreed to meet on new-moon nights, as often as we could.”