There You Are

The first question took Rishi a while to choose.

“The circlet,” he said at last.

Maeril touched the band above her brow. “This old thing?”

“It does not feel like an old thing.”

“No.” Her thumb passed over the green stone. “It is my excellent bad decision.”

Rishi’s brow lifted.

She smiled into the coals. “Let me show you.”

Maeril raised two fingers and drew a quick sigil above the fire. Heat gathered along its lines, thickened, and took the shape of a young woman.

Maeril—and not.

She looked twenty-five, perhaps younger. Her skin was unlined, her dark hair loose around horns set with jewels. Green glass and tiny mirrors flashed across a dancer’s skirt. Bright anklets circled her feet, sparking with every clean turn.

The illusion moved without sound, but Rishi could almost hear the bells.

Maeril watched her younger self with a crooked mouth. “Ridiculous. 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 dancer, then the woman beside him.

“You were beautiful,” he said.

“I was.”

She accepted the word without coyness or apology. The certainty pleased him.

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

The illusion turned again. Mirrors caught the fire, and dark hair swung around jeweled horns.

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

“I see the resemblance,” Rishi said.

“That is a careful answer.”

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

Maeril went still. She looked at him sharply, checking where he had meant the words to land.

Rishi held her gaze.

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

She let the younger Maeril dance through one more turn, then closed her hand. The illusion broke into sparks that rose among those from the fire and vanished.

The darkness it left behind felt older, but 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 green stone.

“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.” Old indignation brightened her eyes. “An insult to both magic and sums.”

Rishi waited.

“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.”

A coal settled beneath the ash.

“I did not love him. 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 against the stone.

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

Rishi kept his gaze on the green stone. “What did it do?”

“When I first made it mine?”

“Yes.”

Her smile changed. For an instant, it looked younger than the dancer had.

“It made room in my skull,” she said. “Everything I had been reaching for—abjuration patterns, layered wards, the way a spell folds without tearing—I could hold it all without losing the edges. I could see where one piece met the next. I could work.”

Maeril closed her eyes briefly.

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

“And now?”

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

The dancer was gone. The fire showed only the woman beside Rishi: circlet on her brow, new staff across her knees, hands quiet on the wood.

He looked at the empty air above the coals. “Do you miss her?”

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 to 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.”

She turned back to the coals and watched them settle. Rishi did not hurry her.

At last, Maeril rested both palms on her staff.

“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? Useful. Tragic, but useful.”

Her smile faded. One thumb followed a new channel in the staff, and blue light answered faintly beneath the wood.

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

Her thumb stopped.

“And yet.”

Maeril looked at him across the fire.

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

Rishi’s next breath caught high in his chest. He drew it down slowly and stayed with what her words had done to him.

Maeril looked into the coals again.

“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.”

The corner of his mouth moved.

“The hawk circled. 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 breathed once more before he answered.

“There who?”

Maeril smiled, small and wary.

“The person I could walk beside.”

A burned branch collapsed into the coals. Sparks rose between them and went dark.

“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.

Maeril looked at him again. “Rish.”

Her eyes searched his face, neither asking permission nor taking the name back.

Not lesser.

Nearer.

Rishi let it remain.

Maeril’s shoulders eased.

“You make me feel like the festival girl again. Not because I want to be her. Gods spare us all from that much 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.”

She gestured toward the road beyond the fire. The movement was small, almost uncertain. “Something we choose before it is forced on us. Ours.”

Maeril lowered her hand to the staff.

“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.

They had caught steel, set bones, struck nerves, folded cloth, and copied words. They knew what to do when someone was bleeding.

“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.”

The line of Maeril’s mouth eased.

“Then learn the quiet version.”

“That sounds more difficult.”

“It is. No blade to blame. Very inconvenient.”

She shifted the staff across her knees.

“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.”

Rishi 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. For this sort of thing, trying is already dangerously sincere.”

They sat until the fire sank low and the night cooled around them. Fatigue settled into Rishi’s legs. Maeril rolled one shoulder, and the joint 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. Rishi pushed the unburned ends inward while Maeril spread damp earth over the coals until no flame showed.

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

“Rish.”

The name reached him differently the second time. He looked at her.

“Yes?”

“Thank you,” she said. “For looking.”

He waited.

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

Rishi inclined his head. “It seemed the respectful thing to do.”

“It was.”

The tent smelled of damp cloth, road dust, and smoke caught in their clothes. Their bedrolls lay side by side, with enough space for courtesy and not enough for denial.

They settled without ceremony: boots beside the flap, cloaks folded, staffs within reach.

Rishi lay awake a little longer in the dark and 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, owls and insects called while wind moved through the 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.