Page 36 of Add To Hoard

That one had been a deflection. I had said it because something else was trying to come out of my mouth and I had redirected into something safer, which was the habit of a lifetime applied to a situation where the habit had already started to fail. I remember the adjacent-to-amusement thing that happened in his eyes when I said it and I remember being unreasonably pleased by it and then immediately irritated at myself for being unreasonably pleased by it.

The island plays that one twice. I deserve it.

You came back down here instead.

That one stops me completely.

I had said it on the third morning, standing at the waterline with my heart loud and inconvenient behind my ribs and my voice coming out even by what I still consider one of the minor miracles of my life on this island. I had said it as leverage, as argument, as the next move in a negotiation I was conducting under the constraint of having nothing left to trade except the truth. I had said it and he had gone very still and something had moved behind his eyes that I had not been able to name and had not tried to name because naming it would have meant admitting I was looking for it.

The island does not play it twice. The island lets it sit.

In the warm air, in the soft light, with the breeze moving over the sand and the brig in its lines and nothing left on any list anywhere, the words land differently than they did when I said them. Not as leverage. Not as argument.

As the thing I meant.

My hand goes to my pocket and closes around the stone and holds on and I breathe.

The thing about urgency is that it does not go away because you are not looking at it.

I have been not looking at it for seven days with the focused discipline of a person who knows that looking at it will not change it and will only make the not-changing harder to sit with. I came here for a reason and I have the reason in my pocket and the reason has a name and the name is Bren and Bren is fifteen years old and his lungs have been failing for three years and Sevraine said months and months was generous and every day I am on this island is a day I am not on the water and every day I am not on the water is a day the crossing waits and every day the crossing waits is a day Bren spends in the back room of an apothecary on a hill in Blackwake breathing carefully around lungs he is renting on borrowed time.

I know all of this. I have known all of it every day since I arrived. I have been knowing it quietly, in the background, behind the work and the negotiation and the storm and everything that happened in the shelter during the storm, and I have been letting the knowing sit there without looking at it directly because looking at it directly while I was in the middle of things I could not stop being in the middle of would not have helped Bren and would not have helped me.

Today there is nothing to be in the middle of.

Today is warm and still and asking nothing of me, and Bren is in the back room, and I have been gone for seven days.

I think about his face. Not the thin careful face of someone managing his lungs, not the face he puts on when I come in and he wants me to think he has been fine — his actual face, the one he has when he is reading the natural history book and finds something that delights him, his whole expression reorganising around it like a window being opened. He has been doing that since he was small. He used to do it about beetles. Then birds. Then weather systems. Whatever the book Sevraine found has in it. I don’t know, I didn’t ask, I was already planning to steal a brig when he told me about it and I listened and laughed at the right moments and held his hand through the coughing and I did not ask about the book because I was already somewhere else in my mind.

I should have asked about the book.

My hand goes to my pocket. The stone is there. The stone is enough — more than enough, if the zagfer drunk was right and I have every reason to believe he was because he had no reason to lie and considerable reason to know, and this stone is dark and small and has something moving inside it that is not light and it is going to save my brother’s life.

I am going to go home. I am going to pay the healer. I am going to watch Bren’s lungs stop failing and watch his face do the thing it does when something delights him, and I am going to ask about the book.

Tomorrow.

The word settles in my chest as it has been settling for two days now, and I sit with it in the warm island light and I leave the rest of it unexamined, alongside the healer, alongside the crossing and Blackwake and the dock and the ordinary shape of my life that is waiting for me on the other side of the Varak Fog.

I check my pocket again.

Still there.

He comes at dusk.

Earlier than yesterday. I have been clocking this without deciding to, the way his arrival time has been moving toward the earlier hours by increments, the distance between the Spire and the beach compressing in some way that has nothing to do with geography. I hear him in the treeline before I see him, the familiar weight of his footfall on the forest floor, and I have rebuilt the fire by then and I am sitting beside it and the warm day is going cool at its edges the way warm days do when the light starts to leave them.

He comes out of the trees and crosses the sand and sits. Not where he used to sit. Closer. The fire between us and the shelter behind me and the brig behind him and the island breathing its slow patient breath around us both.

Neither of us comments on the closer.

We talk. Actually talk, still new enough that I notice it, not the language of negotiation or the language of strategic information exchange or the language of two people carefully not saying what they mean. Just conversation. I ask him something I have been wanting to ask since early on and have not asked because there was always something more pressing. Which was true and also convenient.

“The wars,” I say. “You’ve mentioned them. Everyone here seems to carry them. What were they actually.”

He is quiet long enough that I think he is not going to answer. Then:

“A disagreement about what dragons were for,” he says. “It lasted forty years. At the end of it, roughly a third of everything that had existed at the start of it did not exist anymore. The island nearly went with the rest.” He looks at the fire. “The burn scars are from the last year of it. The eastern cliffs. I was trying to hold the barrier while the concealment magic was being rebuilt, which meant staying in place while the fire came through.” A pause. “It was not a sophisticated plan.”