Chapter 88: Winter
Arthur pulled the chair from the corner of the room and sat beside Theodore’s bed and said nothing for a while.
Theodore was awake but barely. His eyes were open and tracking but the weight behind them was the weight of someone whose body had been through something fundamental and was still tallying the full cost of it. The linen wrapping at his side had been changed while he slept. Clean and tight. The bruising was still visible at the edges but the deep crisis color had pulled back to something that looked more like damage and less like a countdown.
Vexis sat on the windowsill with his arms crossed and said nothing.
Outside the fortress walls the forest was dark and completely still.
Arthur looked at his hands. The knuckles were split in three places from the rock face. He hadn’t noticed during the climb. He noticed now.
"Theodore."
Theodore turned his head on the pillow. Slow. Like the motion cost something.
"Hey," he said. His voice came out rough and quiet. Not his usual voice. Smaller than that.
Arthur looked at him for a moment. Then looked back at his hands.
"You should be home right now." He said it evenly, which took effort. "Helping your mother. Doing whatever you do in the winter when the academy closes." He paused. "Not here. Not because of me."
Theodore didn’t say anything.
"I brought you into this." Arthur’s jaw worked once. "I needed eyes on the perimeter and I looked at the people I trusted and I picked you and I didn’t think carefully enough about what that meant. What I was actually asking you to walk into." He stopped. Started again. "You almost died in that forest. You bled on my hands and I couldn’t fix it and I carried you through trees for hours and I didn’t know if you were going to make it." A beat. Longer than the others. "That’s on me. All of it."
"I’m sorry." Arthur looked down.
The room was quiet.
Theodore looked at the ceiling for a moment. Then at Arthur.
"Vex," he said.
Arthur looked up.
"I knew." Theodore’s voice was still quiet but the timidity had gone out of it. Replaced by something more considered. "When you explained what we were actually doing here. What the operation was. What kind of people were involved." He blinked slowly. "I’m not stupid. I knew it wasn’t going to be just investigation and reports. I knew there was a version of this that went badly."
"That’s not—"
"I’m not done." Not sharp. Just steady. "I didn’t expect to almost die. I want to be honest about that. I really didn’t expect that part." A faint exhale. Something that in a different context might have been the beginning of a laugh. "But I don’t blame you. I want you to know that. I actually don’t."
Arthur said nothing.
"What I keep thinking about," Theodore continued, looking back at the ceiling, "is that man. The one who gave the order." His brow pulled slightly. "Just. Kill them. Like it was nothing. Like we were nothing." He was quiet for a moment. "Those people are going to keep doing that. To other people. To elves who don’t have anyone looking for them." He turned his head back to Arthur. "So. I think we stop trying to do this ourselves. We’re clearly outskilled. We almost died proving that. We go back. We tell the princess everything. We tell Cael everything. We let people who are built for this kind of fight handle the fighting part."
Arthur looked at him.
"Yeah," he said. "That’s the plan."
"Okay." Theodore settled back into the pillow. "Good."
Vexis glanced over from the windowsill. Said nothing. Looked back out at the dark.
Arthur leaned back in the chair and let the silence sit for a moment. Tch’æ Varil made sounds around them. Footsteps in the corridor. The low resonant language of the elves moving through the stone walls like something the building itself was saying.
Theodore’s eyes drifted around the room slowly. Taking it in now that the immediate weight of the conversation had lifted. The ceiling height. The proportions of the doorframe. The particular quality of the light from the fire in the corner, which burned a slightly different color than any fire he’d seen before.
"Vex," he said.
"Yeah."
"Where are we."
Arthur told him. The fortress. The elves. Elrith finding them in the forest because Roz had gone ahead. The name Tch’æ Varil and what it meant.
Theodore listened with his eyes moving through the room as if he was mapping the information onto the physical space around him. When Arthur finished he was quiet for a moment.
Then he sat up.
Fast enough that Arthur straightened in the chair on instinct.
"Where’s Maya."
His voice had changed completely. The soft exhausted quality gone. His eyes were wide and fully present in a way they hadn’t been since he’d woken up.
"My bellus." He was already looking at the doorway. "Where is she. I haven’t— she wasn’t—" He pressed a hand to his side reflexively and winced and it slowed him but didn’t stop him. "She was running the roofline when we followed the carriage. I haven’t felt her since the fight."
"Theodore—"
"She could be looking for us right now." He was sitting fully upright. His face had gone from pale exhaustion to a different kind of pale entirely. "She could be out there in that forest looking for me and I’m in here and she doesn’t know—"
"Hey." Arthur leaned forward. "Hey. Listen to me."
Theodore looked at him. His eyes were doing something that was trying very hard not to become something worse.
"Maya is smart," Arthur said. "She’s been operating independently since before we reached Creslan. She survived the fight or she ran from it, which is exactly what she should have done if she couldn’t help. She’s looking for you. That’s what bellus do." He held Theodore’s eyes. "But we cannot go back out there tonight. Our aetheric blood is wrecked, we don’t know where Malvric’s people are, and you are in no condition to move through that forest. If we leave now and run into them again we won’t survive it."
Theodore’s jaw tightened.
"We rest here tonight," Arthur said. "We recover what we can. Then we go back through Creslan, we report to the princess and Cael, and we find Maya. In that order." A beat. "She’ll be okay."
Theodore looked at the doorway for a long moment.
Then the tension went out of his shoulders slowly and he lay back down and stared at the ceiling and exhaled.
"You’re right," he said quietly.
"I know."
"I’m scared... for Maya."
"I know."
Vexis glanced back from the windowsill again. His expression was doing something that wasn’t quite a grin and wasn’t quite the opposite. He looked at Theodore for a moment in the particular way he looked at things he didn’t have words for. Then back out the window.
Theodore closed his eyes.
Arthur sat in the chair beside him and listened to his breathing even out and thought about the RP system and how it had gone completely silent since the Culmination . Not a single notification. Not a point. Nothing.
He turned it over in his mind the way you turned a tool over in your hands when it stopped working. Either the events happening right now existed completely outside the novel’s storyline, which was possible. Or LazyTurtle had been pulling threads in directions the system couldn’t track. Which was also possible. Or the system itself had limitations that Arthur had never fully mapped because he’d never been this far from anything resembling the original plot.
He wasn’t sure which option was most dangerous.
What he was sure of was that six hours ago he’d been blind in a forest with no network and no system and a dying friend and the only things that had mattered were his own eyes and Vexis and an ancient bellus who had refused to leave his shoulder. He’d survived that. Theodore had survived that.
The RP system had contributed nothing.
He looked at Theodore’s sleeping face.
Sure. The eyes would be useful. But I can’t rely on it. Never could.
He stood.
His knees did something unexpected on the way up. Not a collapse. More like a negotiation. Both legs registered their full complaint simultaneously and Arthur’s hand went to the doorframe and he stood there for a second with his weight distributed against the stone until his legs remembered their job and took it back.
He stood straight. Adjusted his coat at the collar.
Looked back at Theodore once.
"Rest," he said to the sleeping room. "We leave when you’re ready."
The corridor led to a narrow open arch at the far end of the fortress’s upper level. Not a room. Just a gap in the stone where the wall ended and the outside began, a wide enough opening to stand in and see the world past the tree line.
Arthur stood in it.
The sky above Tch’æ Varil was enormous. No city light to compress it. Just dark and deep and full of stars arranged in configurations he still hadn’t learned the names of in this world. The moon had risen fully and sat heavy and white above the forest canopy and threw shadows long and clean across the snow.
Snow.
It was coming down in individual flakes. Not a storm. Just a beginning. Single crystals drifting without direction, catching the moonlight on the way down, landing on the stone of the fortress wall and on the tree branches below and on Arthur’s coat where it lay across his shoulder.
Roz sat on his right shoulder.
Vexis hovered at his left.
Arthur watched a flake land on the back of his hand and sit there for a moment before it went.
He exhaled. Cold mist.
Cracked his neck left. Then right. Settled his coat higher against his collar.
"It’s snowing," Arthur said.
Roz glanced at him. His red eyes moved across the sky once and came back.
"The winter has come," he said.
The snow kept falling. Quiet and indifferent, the way weather was always indifferent, covering the forest and the road and the northern gate and whatever was still out there in the dark equally and without distinction.
Arthur stood in the archway and watched it come down and said nothing else.
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