There You Are

The first question took him a while to choose.

“The circlet,” he said at last.

Maeril’s fingers rose to the band. “This old thing?”

“It does not feel like an old thing.”

“No.” She brushed the green stone with her thumb. “It is my excellent bad decision.”

His brow lifted.

She smiled into the coals.

“Let me show you.”

She raised two fingers and drew a quick sigil in the air. Heat shimmered above the fire, gathered, and took shape.

A young woman appeared in the glow.

Maeril.

And not.

She looked twenty-five, perhaps younger. Her skin was unlined, her dark hair loose around horns set with jewels. A dancer’s skirt flashed with green glass and tiny mirrors; anklets sparked at every clean turn.

The illusion made no sound, but Rishi could almost hear the bells anyway.

Maeril watched the image with a crooked mouth.

“Ridiculous,” she said. “Look at that hair. Do you know how long that took? And the beads. Gods, the beads. I spent half my twenties sewing little green baubles back onto skirts because apparently I believed dignity came in reflective pieces.”

Rishi studied the illusion, then the woman beside him.

“You were beautiful,” he said.

“I was,” Maeril answered at once.

No coyness. No apology.

The answer pleased him more than modesty would have.

“Properly, painfully beautiful,” she continued. “The sort of beautiful that made people stupid if they were careless enough to look too long.”

The illusion turned again.

Mirrors flashed. Dark hair swung around jeweled horns.

Maeril watched the younger woman finish the turn.

“Now I have lines at my eyes, and my back has opinions about potato sacks, and most merchants look at my ladle before my hips. Which, frankly, improved the quality of conversation.”

Rishi’s mouth softened.

“I see the resemblance.”

“That is a careful answer.”

“I prefer the woman who knows how to build wards.”

Maeril went still for half a heartbeat.

Then she looked at him sharply, as if checking whether he had meant to strike so cleanly.

He had.

“Hm,” she said. “Good. You may survive this road after all.”

The young Maeril danced a little longer. Then the real one closed her hand, and the illusion broke into sparks.

The darkness after it felt older.

Not sad.

Only true.

“The circlet came from those years,” Maeril said. “When I still thought charm and cleverness could outrun time.”

She tapped the emerald.

“I was poor, beautiful, and hungry for magic. A dangerous combination. A wealthy merchant wanted me. Comfortable man. More perfume than spine. He kept this in a glass case and thought it was a pretty trinket for quick sums.”

Her eyes brightened with old indignation.

“An insult to both magic and sums.”

Rishi listened.

“He wanted the dancer,” she said. “I wanted the circlet. So I let him think he was bargaining for one thing while I measured another.”

The coals shifted softly.

“I did not love him,” she said. “I did not even like him much. But I was not a child, and I was not helpless. I made the trade I chose to make.”

Her fingers rested lightly against the green stone.

“He got a night with beauty already fading. I got a lifetime’s worth of mind.”

The sentence held no shame. Rishi did not answer with pity; she had not offered the truth as a wound.

“What did it do?” he asked.

“When I first attuned to it?”

“Yes.”

Maeril’s smile changed. Younger, suddenly, than the illusion had been.

“It opened a window in my skull,” she said. “Everything I had been reaching for—abjuration patterns, layered wards, the way a spell folds without tearing—suddenly had room. The world went from crowded room to workshop.”

She closed her eyes briefly, remembering.

“I do not regret it,” she said. “Not for one breath. Back then I thought my face was my most valuable piece. This taught me better.”

“And now?”

“Now?” She opened her eyes. “Now the lines on my face tell me I lived long enough to use what I bought.”

The younger Maeril was gone.

The fire showed only the woman beside him now: circlet on her brow, new staff across her knees, hands quiet over the wood.

Rishi looked at the empty air where the dancer had been.

“Do you miss her?” he asked.

Maeril considered.

“I miss the knees.”

He huffed softly.

“And the certainty that every path was still open,” she added. “That part was nice. False, mostly, but nice.”

Her gaze moved past the fire toward the dark line of the road.

“I do not miss being defined by hunger in other people’s eyes. Want is pleasant. Being reduced to it is tedious.”

Rishi nodded.

Maeril turned back to the fire.

For a while, she only watched the coals settle.

Rishi did not hurry her.

When she spoke again, her voice had changed.

“Rishi, we are not young.”

“No.”

“You are nearer fifty than twenty.”

“Yes.”

“I have seen enough winters that my body has begun writing complaint letters.”

“I have old breaks that predict rain.”

“See?” she said. “Useful. Tragic, but useful.”

He waited.

Maeril’s humor thinned, not gone, but no longer defending the door.

“There are only so many years left,” she said. “Years where I can sleep on bad ground and wake up willing to do it again. Years where my fingers hold the weave cleanly. Years where I can still say yes to a road because I want what waits at the end, not because something is burning behind me.”

Her hand rested on the staff.

“And yet.”

She said it softly.

Then she looked at him.

“Since I saw you through my hawk’s eyes, I have felt younger.”

The words entered him slowly.

Not because he failed to understand.

Because he understood too well.

Maeril’s gaze shifted to the coals. Not away from him. Toward something she could only see while looking there.

“You were in that alley,” she said. “Standing between two Flaming Fist soldiers and Rook, who had nothing but terror and bad judgment to his name. You were being beaten from both sides and still trying to make everyone less stupid.”

“That sounds unlikely.”

“It was extremely annoying.”

His mouth twitched.

“The hawk circled,” she continued. “I saw you from above. This ridiculous, stubborn monk who had no reason to stay and stayed anyway.”

Her fingers tightened around the staff.

“And I thought: there you are.”

Rishi did not speak. His breath had changed, and he held it slow—not to hide what her words had done to him, but to stay steady inside it.

“There who?” he asked at last.

Maeril’s smile came, small and afraid of itself.

“The person I could walk beside.”

The fire broke softly.

A branch collapsed inward, sending sparks up between them.

“And then,” she said, “because apparently age has not made me sensible, I went and invited you for tea.”

“I am grateful for your lack of sense.”

“Good. It may be my finest quality.”

Rishi laughed aloud.

She looked at him again.

“Rish,” she said.

The shorter, softer name landed between them like a hand laid carefully on a table.

She seemed to hear it after she said it.

Her eyes flicked once across his face, checking—not quite asking permission, not taking it back either.

Not the name given in a monastery. Not the meaning trained into vow and discipline.

Not lesser.

Nearer.

He let it remain.

Maeril’s shoulders eased by a fraction, and she continued before either of them could make too much of it.

“You make me feel like the festival girl again,” she said. “Not because I want to be her. Gods spare us all from that amount of beadwork. But because there is something ahead worth dancing toward.”

His throat tightened.

“Work that is ours,” she said. “Not soup because people are hungry. Not bandages because the city keeps making wounds.”

Her hand moved, small and uncertain, toward the road beyond the dark. “Something we choose before it is forced on us. Ours.”

“I want to use the years I have left feeling alive. Right now, that means this road. The book. The fortress full of scholars who may or may not deserve us. And you, standing beside me when mercy has to be argued to people who think it belongs in a footnote.”

Rishi looked down at his hands.

Hands that had caught steel. Set bones. Struck nerves. Folded cloth. Copied words.

Hands that knew what to do when someone was bleeding.

He did not know what to do with this.

So he told the truth.

“I know how to stand beside someone in danger,” he said. “I do not know how to stand beside someone who chooses me when there is no blade between us.”

Maeril’s smile softened.

“Then learn the quiet version.”

“That sounds more difficult.”

“It is,” she said. “No blade to blame. Very inconvenient.”

“You can let it be true before you know what to do with it. Put it somewhere among your vows, your guilt, your red cord, and your habit of stepping into knives. It has a place there too.”

He looked up.

“In that crowded hall?”

“Yes. Put out another chair.”

A quiet laugh left him before he could prepare it.

“I will try.”

“Good,” she said. “For this sort of thing, trying is already dangerously sincere.”

They sat until the fire sank low and the night cooled around them.

Weariness arrived slowly, honest and heavy: the fatigue of a long road and a conversation that had asked both of them to leave something unguarded.

Maeril rolled one shoulder. It clicked.

“There,” she said. “Listen. My body is composing a protest song.”

“I hear only one note.”

“It is a minimalist protest song.”

“You should sleep.”

“I was about to say the same to you and pretend it was wisdom.”

They banked the fire together.

At the tent, she paused with one hand on the flap.

“Rish.”

He looked at her.

The name struck differently the second time.

“Yes?”

“Thank you,” she said. “For looking.”

He waited.

“Not staring,” she said. “Not looking away. Just… looking. At the young fool, the old bargain, the circlet, the woman left after all of it.”

He inclined his head.

“It seemed the respectful thing to do.”

“It was.”

Inside, the tent was small and practical, smelling of damp cloth, road dust, and both of them. Their bedrolls lay side by side, with enough space for courtesy and not enough for denial.

They settled without ceremony: boots off, cloaks folded, staffs within reach.

In the dark, Rishi lay awake a little longer. He listened to Maeril’s breathing slow beside him.

Her voice stayed with him.

There you are.

As if she had found him on a road neither of them had known they were walking.

He turned slightly toward her warmth. Not touching. Nearer than before.

Outside, the night went on with owls, insects, and wind moving through wet grass. Inside, they lay close enough to know neither of them had turned away.

Not lovers.

Not strangers.

Something chosen enough to be dangerous.