Page 23 of Add To Hoard

“Thank you,” I say, because those are the words that fit and I do not have better ones right now.

He nods, once, at the canopy. Then he turns and walks back into the trees, and his footsteps fade until the forest takes them, and then I sit in the warm water of the spring with my heart doing something loud and uninvited and my hand still on the knife I no longer need and the morning light coming down through the gap in the canopy in thin columns that land nowhere near me.

“Absolutely inconvenient,” I say again, quieter this time.

The island, for once, does not disagree.

12

MAELOR

Ifind the beach empty.

The fire has burned down to cold ash. The provisions chest is open, meaning she has eaten. She has been up for some time. The mooring lines on the ‘Tenacious’ have been checked and re-tensioned. I can see it in the angle of the bow line, tighter than it was yesterday, someone who knows rope having assessed them in the early light and made adjustments. The basalt chunk I had seen her drag toward the treeline yesterday is gone from where she left it. She has already been working.

I follow her trail into the forest without deciding to.

The marks are easy enough to read — disturbed ground where something heavy was dragged, a heel print in the soft soil near the first root crossing, a broken stem on one of the broad-leafed plants at the point where she turned north. I have tracked things in this forest for six centuries. I am not tracking her. I am simply moving through the trees and reading what the trees record, which is a different thing.

The distinction stays unexamined.

I smell the spring before I see it. Thermal water and mineral rock and something else underneath that I register and do not name. I come around the root formation at the eastern edge of the depression and stop.

She is in the water.

She has her back to me, head tilted back, hair dark and loose and spreading across the surface of the pool around her shoulders. The steam rises around her in the cold morning air and the water is dark enough that it gives nothing away except the pale line of her arms resting at the surface and the absolute stillness of a body that has finally, after days of relentless motion, stopped.

I should leave. The thought is immediate and correct and I turn to act on it.

It is in the turning that I see the scar.

Her left forearm, resting at the waterline, angled toward me as she shifts slightly in the pool. A hook-catch scar, old enough to have silvered, running three inches along the inside of the forearm in the specific shape of a wound received from below rather than above, the kind you get when something catches you from underneath and you pull away before it can take more. I know the shape of it because I have seen it before, on dock workers and sailors and people whose bodies are their primary tool and who cannot afford to be precious about what that costs.

She has not been precious about it. The scar sits in her skin with the same settled quality as all the others I have catalogued without meaning to, the rope burn on her right wrist, the three knuckles on her left hand that healed slightly wrong, the line along her palm that is still pink and recent. A body that has been used hard and has continued regardless.

A feeling moves through my chest that I do not have clean language for.

I turn and walk back into the trees.

I go thirty yards before I stop. Stand in the forest with my hand against one of the black-barked trunks and the sound of the spring behind me and the sound of my own breathing, even, because I am six hundred and forty years old and my breathing does not betray me.

Other things apparently do.

I think about Aevyn. I do this carefully, the way you handle a blade, not avoiding it, just aware of the angles. Aevyn had the spring too, in the years when we were still in the years, when the wars were not yet the wars and the island was younger and so was I in the ways that mattered. Aevyn had found it the same way — following the thermal smell into the trees, returning to it, making it a place. I had known about the spring for two centuries before Aevyn came to it and it had simply been a feature of the terrain. After Aevyn it had been grief. After the wars it had been its own different thing. and I have not gone near it in longer than I have been counting.

Nerina Ashvale has been on this island for one day and she has already found it.

I do not know what to do with that. I am going to set it down and not look at it and go back to the Spire and the survey records and the political situation, which requires my attention, which I am capable of addressing without my chest doing whatever it is currently doing.

I go back to the spring instead.

I make enough noise this time that she hears me coming, a deliberate heel strike on the root formation at the rim, a pause, and I stop at the edge of the depression and look at the canopy and tell her about the stone grain on the shear face near the overhang, which is true and useful and the only thing I trust myself to say.

I do not look at her directly.

She says thank you in a voice I do not examine.

I leave.