The fish burned my throat.
I’d never really had much of a home, so I, perhaps naively, thought I would be immune to homesickness. Not true, it turned out. There were many things I missed about Threll, even about the Mikov estate, the only home I had known for my adult life. Near the top of that list was food that didn’t hurt to eat. Arans, apparently, confused “taste” with “pain.” Or at least, Max did.
He kept turning that glass flower around and around in his fingers as I ate. To my delight, he had nothing bad to say about it.
“Now you just have to learn how to do that in seconds instead of hours.”
“I will,” I replied, even though the prospect of it seemed dizzily daunting. “We will continue after eating.”
I said this very casually, even though my stomach clenched at the thought. The floor felt like it was shifting beneath my feet, like I was back on that wretched boat with my infected back.
Max scoffed. “Like hell we will. You need at least a few hours to rest.”
“I feel fine.”
Untrue. But I had no time for rest. And besides, the thought of lying there with nothing to occupy myself but my
thoughts seemed far more intimidating than forcing myself through exhaustion.
Max gave me a narrowed stare that pierced my lie. “You pushed yourself too hard. Wielding expends a lot of energy, and you’ve been doing it nonstop for the last twenty hours.”
“It worked.”
“This time. You won’t always be so lucky.” He shifted in his chair, opening his mouth as if he were about to speak. But before he could, the front door swung open and Sammerin stood there.
“Thank you, as always, for knocking. So very polite.” Max cast a glance over his shoulder, though Sammerin offered no response other than a smirk and a delicate shrug. “Did you bring our favorite apprentice-sized ball of destruction? Because if so, he’s not allowed in the house. Or the garden. I suppose he can sit very very still in a corner somewhere, touching nothing.”
“Moth is visiting his mother.” Sammerin slid into the chair beside Max. “Thank the Ascended.”
“And you choose to spend your precious freedom with us? How sweet.”
“Limited freedom. I have a client soon.” Sammerin’s gaze settled on me, pausing for a moment. I wondered if he heard it too — the “us.” “How are you, Tisaanah? You look a bit—”
“I’m fine,” I replied, at the exact same time that Max said, “She spent all night making this.”
He handed Sammerin my glass flower, who examined it thoughtfully before glancing from Max to me. “Good work.” “Thank you,” I said, at the exact same time that Max
remarked, “It’s acceptable.”
“Hm.” Sammerin looked from me, to Max, back to me. I was not typically one to be self-conscious, but I had to resist the urge to squirm beneath the assessing weight of his gaze.
“Client?” I asked.
“Sammerin is a healer,” Max said. Frankly, it was a relief to hear that answering for others was not just something he did to me.
“Like Willa?”
“Not quite,” Sammerin said. “The result is the same, but the process is different.”
“Valtain are internal. Solarie are external.” Max said this as if it was a self-contained explanation, but I was left turning those syllables around against my tongue.
In-turn-ul. Ex-tern-ul.
“What does that mean?” I finally asked. I hated the taste of every word, suddenly too aware of the thick tang of my accent.
“Valtain are…” Max chewed, thinking for a moment. “When Willa heals you, she is, in a sense, talking to your body. Encouraging it to grow and heal, feeding your life force from within.” He jabbed his fork toward Sammerin. “When Sammerin does it, he’s physically moving flesh, patching it together and melding it at a small, small level. The end result is similar, but the approaches are massively different. Sammerin’s way hurts much more.”
“But, it’s far better for serious injuries like broken bones,” Sammerin added, with a faint tinge of defensiveness. “And faster.”
“When things get particularly nasty,” Max said, “it’s best to have both.”
I wondered if he knew from experience.
“I see.” At least, I somewhat did. The boundaries would become more clearly defined, I was sure, the longer I spent in Ara. I had met a Solarie only once — a beautiful raven-haired woman who had attended one of Esmaris’s parties. She was the wife of a Lord, but was unusually kind to me for a noble, enhancing my performances with conjurings of little dancing lights and making the gold statues undulate as if they were moving with me. It was clear to me then
that she used magic differently than I did, but I didn’t fully understand how.
“Anyway, with that little lesson…” Max stood up and started down the hall towards the washroom, leaving Sammerin and I in awkward silence. I chewed the final forkful of my scalding fish.
Sammerin spoke first. “It looks like his attitude has changed since I was last here.”
“No choice. There was no one else.”
I said this matter-of-factly, as if we didn’t both already know it was far from enough to change Max’s mind.
“It takes a great deal to convince Max to do something,” Sammerin said, stroking his beard. “But when he does it, he does it. For example…”
He gestured at the window and I followed his gaze. I realized that he was referencing the gardens, sprawling out from the cottage in every direction.
“He made the whole thing?” I asked.
“Planted every single flower. It was obsessive. But he does nothing halfway.”
“He could be good teacher.” I paused, then added, purely out of pettiness, “Maybe.”
Sammerin shook his head slowly, his eyes crinkling with an intrigued smile. “There is no could. Max will be the best teacher you can find anywhere in Ara.” He leaned back, head poised in a thoughtful tilt. “Curious.”
 |
“MAX! Did you know that there’s a beautiful woman asleep in your house?”
I snapped my eyes open to see a mass of curly golden hair hovering over my face, fingers sweeping my hair off my forehead.
I let out a wordless yelp, jumping up in bed. A stunning young woman, bright face framed by wild golden curls, perched at the edge of my bed. She smiled at me in unfettered admiration.
Holy gods, was I dreaming?
My window revealed a sky that was only barely tinted purple, the room hazy with the dusky light of almost-dawn. I had crawled into bed early that night and fallen into a sleep so deep that it seemed only a shade away from death. It did not seem out of the question that I was having some sort of strange, waking dream.
“Hello,” the woman said. Her fingers traced my cheek, following the edge of my patch of tan skin.
A Thereni greeting sat at the tip of my stunned tongue, tangling with the word “hello”, but I was too shocked and disoriented to spit out either one.
“I thought living in the middle of nowhere meant that I didn’t have to lock my doors. What did I ever do to make my house so welcoming?” Max’s voice, rough with sleep, approached from the hallway. “I really tried to be as unpleasant as possible.”
He appeared in the doorway, and I glanced at him before quickly looking away.
He stood there leaning against the frame, patting hair that stuck up at the back of his head. Crumpled linen pants rested low on his hips, and he was shirtless, lean muscle shifting across his stomach and chest as he yawned.
He looked… different than I would have expected,
considering that his main hobbies appeared to be drinking and enthusiastically doing nothing.
I noticed this and then promptly tried to un-notice it.
“Max.” The woman’s voice was a gasp of amazement. She moved from my bed to the doorway, where she ran her hands through Max’s hair. Her simple white dress floated around her ankles. She was barefoot. “You look beautiful.”
A lover, perhaps? Somehow that didn’t seem quite right.
“Thanks, Miraselle.” His voice was flat. He winced, pulling away from her hands. “Haven’t seen you around here in awhile.”
Miraselle didn’t even appear to hear him. Instead she looked back at me with the amazement of a child, pressing her palms together. “Look at her. Isn’t she lovely? Look at that eye! It’s the same color as the sun through the leaves! Did you notice that she’s two different colors?”
Max and I glanced at each other. I pulled my knees up to my chest and wondered if I should be alarmed that he was so un-alarmed.
“I did, in fact, notice that.” He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Where have you been?”
“I traveled the coast all the way to the Capital.” “I told you that wasn’t a good idea.”
Miraselle spread her arms out. “The wind just took me,
Max!”
Every word she spoke was a sing-song note, breathy and amazed. It seemed… off. And the more I watched her, the more something seemed strange about her stare, as if it looked past me, past Max, past everything that touched her delighted gaze.
Max sighed. Then he placed a gentle hand on her shoulder, nudging her out the doorway. “It’s not even sunrise yet. Let’s go.”
They padded down the hall. I slid out of bed and followed, too curious to remain in my room.
When I reached the living room, the door was already open and Miraselle swooned against it, face tilted to the garden. “Oh, how I missed the flowers here.”
“Rightfully,” Max said. “They’re worlds better than the fussy terraces you saw in the Capital.”
A lovely smile spread across her face. “I missed you, Max. You are so nice. I always loved that you’re such a nice person.”
If I hadn’t been so perplexed, I would have laughed at that characterization.
“Thanks, Miraselle,” he replied, unaffected.
And then, she spun to face me. “And you…You’re just so
lovely, Tisaanah. Truly beautiful.”
“Thank you,” I replied, because I wasn’t sure what else to say.
It took me a moment to realize that I had never told her my name.
“Don’t get into trouble,” Max said to her, but by then, Miraselle had floated out the door, transfixed by the flowers.
He closed it behind her and let out an exasperated sigh. “Ascended. What a way to wake up.”
“What is… wrong of her?”
“What makes you think anything is wrong with her?”
I gave him a look that silently reprimanded him for having the audacity to think I’m stupid.
“She’s harmless,” he said. “She just wanders around. She’s a little strange, but I suppose that makes sense, since she wasn’t always human.”
Wasn’t always human? “What was she?” I asked,
immediately fascinated. “A hummingbird.”
I blinked blankly at him. He picked one of the many gold figurines off the mantel and tossed it to me. “Like this.”
I looked down at the image of the bird in my palm — the pointed wings and long beaks. We had them in Threll, too, though of course the Thereni word was different. My nose scrunched up. “A huhm-ing-berd,” I repeated, practicing the word.
I got the distinct feeling he was teasing me.
“Yes,” Max replied, a little too casually. “She wanted to be a person, so I made her into one.”
“You made her—”
“Yes.”
“You can—”
“Yes.”
I glanced at the figurine, then at Max, who looked far too pleased with himself. “You are lying,” I said. “Making joke.”
“Me? Never. I’m thoroughly humorless.” He yawned. “Anyway, I’m sure we’ll see her here more often. She likes the flowers. Understandable, I suppose.”
Roughly three-fourths of me was sure that he was messing with me. The other quarter thought that he was, at the very least, heavily exaggerating.
“It’s too early. I’m not made for this.” Max began slinking back towards his bedroom. “Hopefully I can get a few more hours of sleep without anyone else wandering into my house, since that is, apparently, the fashionable thing to do these days.”
I stood in the living room for a few minutes longer, the bird figurine still in my hand, thinking about the emptiness behind Miraselle’s features. Then I rose my gaze to follow Max’s bare back sauntering down the hall. A long, angry scar slashed across it, starting at his right shoulder and falling all the way to his left hip, slipping beneath the waistband of his pants.
Interesting. Interesting, indeed.
