The Taking of Breath

“Carry light softly. The dark is listening for arrogance.”

The Quiet Library, marginal note

Morning rose thin and reluctant, as if Gloamreach mislaid the habit of dawn. A pale wash found the crowns of the alder trees and ran out of courage before it reached the ground. Liora left Harrow’s hearth at first light because sleep made her restless and restlessness made her honest. The house behind exhaled smoke and safety. She thanked it with her eyes and moved on.

Her body remembered the chamber as a bruise remembers a blow. Sometimes it was the cut of the blade at the nape of her neck. Sometimes it was the mirror’s cold hunger. Mostly it was the weight of Maerin’s silence. Memory walked with her like another shadow. She let it. A woman who tries to outrun grief breaks her ankles.

Harrow given her a satchel and a short knife and a list of names that were not names but markers in the land. The bell tree that would not ring. A pool that watched the sky with one unblinking eye. A fallen oak that pointed like a finger toward a ravine where the fog gathered to talk. Liora kept them in mind the way a healer keeps the feel of a pulse at the wrist. She did not grip them. She noticed them. When the bell tree showed itself, its tongue still gone, she touched the metal once with a knuckle and moved on.

The path bent toward the sound of water. Not the broad river that spoke in many voices. A smaller run that hurried and did not apologize. The air was damp and clean. Her robe already gave up the fight to look like ritual. It hung in folds that told the truth of the road. The mark in palm slept and woke in a rhythm that did not belong to the Sanctum’s prayer hours. She was beginning to learn it.

Before she saw the girl, she felt the watched feeling that means trouble chose a shape.

There was a crack in the brush to her left. Not the careful crack of a hunter. The impatient noise of someone who didn’t learn how to be a ghost. Liora kept walking. The crack came again. A breath. A curse. The smallest scrape of wood against wood. She stopped, crouched and pretended to examine the gray moss on a rock so that whoever watched could decide who they were without deciding whether to flee.

A girl stepped out with a staff too long for her arm span and a face that learned to be stone and failed. She was lean as a feral cat and just as certain that she was owed something. Her hair was a tangle that might once have been braids. Her coat turned inside out so many times the threads argued about which side was true. She looked no more than sixteen. Her eyes were older than trouble.

“Give me your satchel,” the girl said. “And the knife.”

Liora straightened slowly. The girl set her feet as if someone taught her that balance is more useful than strength. Her hands were wrong on the staff. Too high. Liora had to swallow a lesson.

“If I give you the satchel,” Liora said, “what will you do with the knife.”

The girl blinked once. “Keep it sharp.”

“For what.”

“For work.”

“What work.”

“Any,” the girl said and lifted her chin. “Yours if you like your skin.”

Liora’s mouth wanted to smile. She did not let it. She saw the hunger in the girl’s neck. She saw the way her boots had come from three different boot makers. She saw the thinness that had not yet learned humility.

“You can take the satchel,” Liora said. “You can try to sell bitter herbs to people who prefer meat. You can keep the knife and cut your hunger smaller until it looks like it will fit into your mouth. Or you can eat with me and tell me your name.”

The girl did not lower the staff. “Names are expensive.”

“Then we will pay with something else first,” Liora said. “Sit.”

The girl did not move. Liora sat anyway. She pulled bread from the satchel and tore it in two, set one half on the rock beside her. Then poured water from the skin into the cup Harrow insisted she take and put the cup between them. The girl watched as a dog watches a hand. Suspicion was not strong enough to hide the longing in her throat.

“What will you do if I hit you,” the girl asked.

“Fall,” Liora said. “Then stand up.”

The girl’s mouth bent. A laugh tried to get out and changed its mind.

“You are too calm,” the girl said.

“I am very tired,” Liora said.

The girl dropped to a crouch that looked like it had been taught by cold and not by anyone who loved her. She kept the staff across her knees, stretched a hand toward the bread and did not touch it. She was testing whether Liora would snatch it back. Liora did not move. The girl took the bread into her hand and stared at it as if it were a riddle. She ate with quick small bites as if someone might count them. When the bread was gone she took the cup, drank and held the water in her mouth for a moment before swallowing, a child’s trick to make a small drink last.

“What is your name,” Liora asked again.

The girl considered the trees. “Miri.”

“Truth,” Liora said.

“Miri,” the girl repeated. “Truth enough.”

“Who taught you to hold a staff.”

“No one,” Miri said. Then, because something in Liora’s face made lying feel like a pebble in a shoe, she added, “A woman at the edge of the bog. She said my hands were too busy and made me hit reeds until they listened.”

“She was right,” Liora said. “Your hands still want to talk over you.”

Miri’s eyes narrowed. “Are you a hunter.”

“No.”

“A priest.”

“No.”

“An exiled liar,” Miri said with satisfaction. “You have a Sanctum robe. You have a mouth that knows how to keep quiet. You have a mark on your hand that says you will bring trouble to the table and call it bread. That is a liar’s work.”

Liora opened her palm so that the mark caught the weak light. Miri leaned forward without wanting to. She did not flinch. She did not ward herself. She stared the way a starving person stares at a locked door.

“You seen one like it,” Liora said softly.

Miri said nothing. The set of her jaw tightened as if a story was trying to escape and she had no leash for it.

“Who are you to judge the color of my hands,” Miri said at last. “You walk like someone who forgot to be afraid.”

“I am afraid,” Liora said. “I simply do not ask fear for directions.”

Miri looked at the staff across her knees. She looked at the trees. She looked at the empty half of the rock and seemed to decide that sitting upon it would not give Liora power over the day. She sat. The staff rolled and thumped once against her shin. She controlled the flinch and failed.

“Tell me what you want,” Liora said. “Not the kinder lie. The true version that embarrasses you.”

Miri’s mouth went flat. The look she gave Liora would have been thrown like a stone if looks had weight. “I want to be the hand that opens a door,” she said. “I am tired of standing outside them.”

Liora let the words stand in the air until they belonged.

“Then eat with me again at dusk,” Liora said. “Walk with me until then. Listen. If you still want to stand at my shoulder when the sun is gone, I will show you work that requires both hands and the part of the heart that is not afraid to stay wounded.”

“That sounds like priest talk,” Miri said.

“It is field talk,” Liora said. “There is a boy with a cough, a man with a wound and a path with too much old rope on it. You can carry the herbs. You can carry the names. You can carry the questions and put them down when I do not answer them.”

“What do I get,” Miri asked.

“Bread,” Liora said. “Water. A roof when I have one. A share of anything I do not need. And the truth that I will not leave you behind unless you walk away from me first.”

Miri studied her face as if it was a map whose symbols might betray a village. The girl seen promises become weapons. She was hunting for the blade hidden in Liora’s words. She did not find it. She did not find a guarantee either. Something in her loosened but did not soften.

“I will walk until dusk,” Miri said. “After that I will decide whether I want your work or a knife you did not see me take.”

“You will not take this one,” Liora said. “It is dull and fond of me.”

Miri’s laugh escaped. It startled her so much she looked down at the staff and back at Liora as if to apologize to the world for a moment of lightness. She stood. She tried to spin the staff end over end and knocked her own knee. She gritted her teeth. Liora reached out and turned Miri’s right hand a finger’s width lower and her left a finger’s width higher.

“Do not fight the wood,” Liora said. “Ask it to carry your intention.”

Miri tried again. The staff turned like a thought remembered at the right moment.

They walked.

The path refused to call itself a path, but it allowed their feet to insist. Miri stayed three steps ahead as if she wanted to pretend she led. She did not range too far. Every few dozen paces she glanced back to make sure Liora was still there. Each time she did, her face changed by a grain. Suspicion made room for curiosity. Curiosity made room for an ache that wanted a place to sit down.

“What did you do,” Miri asked finally without looking at Liora. “To be thrown here.”

“I touched what we were told not to touch,” Liora said.

Miri snorted. “So you were not thrown. You were pushed by an old rule.”

“Both can be true,” Liora said.

“What did you touch,” Miri said. Then she paused and turned. The question had been a hook she had meant to hide. “No. Do not tell me yet. I want to like you first.”

“Prudent,” Liora said.

Midday came without warmth. They crossed through a stand of alder where the trunks were stitched with initials cut by hands that wanted proof that they existed once. Miri read each mark aloud as if naming sustained them. On the far side a woman waited with a basket of roots and eyes that nearly forgot how to trust. Harrow told Liora of her. The cough had grown teeth. The girl in the house slept for an hour and woke in a fright and then slept again. Liora listened to the woman’s breath, to the place under her ribs where fear can cause its own fever. She placed two fingers against the woman’s wrist and counted. The count gave her the size of the task. She placed her palm over the sternum and felt the clench and the loosening. The woman cried only once. Liora did not step back from the salt of that tear. Miri stood at the doorway pretending she was interested in the shape of a crack in the wall. When it was done the woman pressed a wool mitten into Liora’s hand and would not take it back.

“For the cold,” she said.

“It will fit a smaller hand,” Liora said and held it out to Miri. Miri took it as if it might bite, then jammed her fingers into it with the fury of someone who wanted to be offered such a thing and never had been.

They left the house to the sound of a kettle beginning to remember song. Miri walked closer now. Close enough that Liora could hear the catch in her breath when a hawk slid between clouds. Close enough to smell smoke and unwashed cloth and the stubborn wildflower of youth.

“Why do you look at the sky as if it will drop a mercy,” Miri asked.

“Because sometimes it does,” Liora said. “Not often. But sometimes grace is impatient and falls.”

Miri made a rude sound and tried not to be moved by the truth it contained.

By late afternoon the land leaned toward the river. The trees thinned and the ground went sponge soft and then firmed again. The Salt Path reappeared in a string of stones veined with white. Miri stepped from stone to stone with a confidence she had not earn but intended to. Liora followed at a pace that did not argue with her knees.

She felt him before she saw him.

The air thickened with the taste of iron that was not blood and not far from it. The mark in her palm warmed and then cooled as if a hand cupped a coal and then lifted. The hair at the back of her neck remembered fear and then remembered something more dangerous than fear, which is desire.

Miri stopped so sharply that the staff slipped and clattered. She hissed and clamped her hand around it.

“What is it,” she whispered.

Liora did not answer. She did not need to. The trees answered for her. They parted their branches with the politeness they reserve for those who can break them. He stepped into the pale light with a kind of reluctance that belonged to wounded animals and men who have learned that presence is a choice.

Kael.

He was taller than memory and the same height. He carried ruin as if he built it and was tired of living there. His hair dried into a black that was almost blue in certain light. His mouth looked like it had been trained for silence and forgot sometimes. He had a cut along the jaw that stopped bleeding because it decided to. His eyes found Liora as if they had been hunting for the exact place her face would be and were relieved to be correct.

The world moved away from them to give the moment room.

Miri put the staff between them as if the wood could hold back the sea.

“Do not run,” Liora said without looking at her.

“I never run,” Miri said, which was a lie, and her voice shook with the dignity of it.

Kael took two steps and stopped. He kept his hands visible. He did not reach for her. The light gathered across the planes of his face and made him look carved out of someone else’s grief. He took another step. He did not look at Miri. He did not look at the staff.

“Liora,” he said.

He gave the name the weight of a vow. The mark in her palm answered as if names were doors with the same key.

“You know my name,” Liora said, and it was not a question. Memory supplied the answer. His breath in the dark. The way her name would have sounded when spoken by a man who had not been given many names.

“I did not know I knew it,” he said. “Until you walked near me.”

Miri made a sound that belonged to disbelief. Liora felt the girl shift her weight so that she would be between Liora and any sudden movement.

“You should go,” Liora said to Miri.

“I will not,” Miri said.

“Then stand at my left,” Liora said. “If he moves I will say the word river and you will strike low.”

Miri moved to the left with an obedience that surprised her. She was smart enough to pretend she planned to be there all along.

Kael’s eyes flicked to Miri and then back to Liora in a way that said he counted the number of feet on the path and the weight each would put on the earth if they had to run.

“I did not follow you,” he said. “I happened to be alive where you are alive.”

“That is a kind of following,” Liora said.

“Then I will take the insult and keep it,” he said.

Miri’s grip tightened on the staff. “He talks too pretty.”

“He talks how he survives,” Liora said.

Kael’s mouth moved as if to say a humorless thank you and then changed its mind. He looked at Liora’s palm. He looked at the sleeve she torn to keep it from dragging water. He looked at the place on her neck where the blade stopped. His face did not change. It deepened.

“They cut you,” he said.

“They did their work,” Liora said.

He nodded once. The nod carried history.

“Why are you here,” Liora asked.

He looked at the river when he answered. “Because the ones who hunt me have forgotten what they are hunting for. They want the story more than the body. That makes them worse.”

“Umbren,” Miri whispered, as if a word could stain the mouth that used it.

Kael turned his head and considered her as he would consider a knife someone put in the wrong drawer. “Not all of us hunt,” he said.

“Enough,” Miri said.

“Enough,” he agreed without malice.

The river spoke in the pauses. A heron lifted itself out of a bank of reed with the gravity of old dignities. The light tried to make afternoon. It did not quite remember how.

“What do you want from me,” Liora asked.

He did not answer quickly. He seemed to be trying to untangle a truth that swaddled itself in caution until it forgot its own skin. He finally looked at her, fully, the way a person looks into a mirror and recognizes a face they expected to be a stranger.

“I want to stop dying,” he said.

Miri laughed, too loud. “Everyone wants that.”

“I want to stop dying the way I have been dying,” Kael said. “Which is the kind that does not end in a grave. The kind that ends in a room where no one remembers your name, not even the person who loved you most.”

Liora’s throat tightened until breath had to make an effort. “Who loved you.”

“A woman who would not want me to make her a litany,” he said. “She taught me to tie knots that stay tied even in wet. She taught me to listen for broken branches where there should be none. She told me once that some kinds of light do not burn if you stand with them. I did not believe her.”

“And now,” Liora asked.

“I am here,” he said simply.

He shifted his weight. The movement revealed a stiffness he had been hiding. He favored the left side. He had a tightness under the ribs that spoke of something that had not healed correctly and was trying to make a new way to be a body. Liora stepped forward and the world leaned in. Miri’s staff twitched.

“Do not touch him,” Miri said.

“Thank you for your counsel,” Liora said. “You may breathe while I do my work.”

She reached for Kael as she reached the first time. With the knowledge that some bridges burn as you cross them and you cross them anyway. Her palm met his sternum and the mark pulsed.