She told him about the Academy, about the journey to Kavera, and about the Benevolent Union base in Vertal. He talked about his work, the friends he’d made, and how happy he felt being out in the sun. Despite his awkwardness, he knew a lot of people in town. He hung around the pub some nights with his old schoolmates, when he wasn’t at home reading. One thing was missing, and she did not want to ask him about it. He didn’t have a girlfriend. Laris never brought this up, but Agna pieced it together, outlining the negative space. He was happy with his life, as a whole, except for wanting to see more of the world – and one other thing.
She never heard him say anything dismissive about any of the other townsfolk, and when he asked about her traveling partner, the cynicism of her reply made him fidget and stammer. Agna apologized, embarrassed. It had been a difficult few months. She should try to have more patience with people. Laris seemed the type to give people the benefit of the doubt. Rone was like that too, she thought, remembering him for the first time in hours.
“I should go,” she admitted. “I wanted to visit the shrine today.”
Laris nodded, looking down at his folded hands. They had drunk their fill of tea and set the cups aside. They stood, stretching. That was when he kissed her.
It was obvious what was coming. He stepped close to her, cradled her face in one hand, and bent down to meet her. Laris kissed too hard, as though it might be his last chance. His mouth was hot, and his hand was gentle on her cheek. His other arm circled around her back and hesitated there. Agna had no idea where to put her hands, so she didn’t move.
She broke off, trying not to breathe too heavily. “I... I’m leaving town tomorrow.”
“I know.” The second time was a little better. In the back of her head was a furious noise: what was wrong with him, this wasn’t right, no one liked girls like her. It was hard to hear over the light clanging through her. Her hands rose to his hips, rested there, and stopped on his back. That seemed all right.
Finally, Laris drew away. He held onto her hands, looking past her at the floor, chewing on his lip. “That was too forward. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.” She was dizzy with things that she had only read in novels, that she never thought she’d want to do. Never her, not even in her own thoughts. These were things that other people could have. She wanted to discover every inch of his body with her hands, with her mouth, and he would want her to do it, and she was terrified by the prospect. She hardly knew him. Such things were not for her to want. They were two logical reasons, and they meant nothing to her thundering pulse and the tingling in her skin.
“I’m sorry that you have to go.”
Agna laughed, relieved to divert the torrent of her thoughts. “I am, too. I would have liked to spend more time with you. But I want to visit the Balance shrine before it gets too late.”
He squeezed her hands. “I’ll be here.”
She smiled at him, the way she had wanted to from the start, warm and unafraid. His returning smile stirred something deeper, something slower than the clamoring need to throw him down in front of the fireplace. She wanted to know him and understand him, as well as... other things. This slow dance would take months and years, but it would be worth the time.
By force of will, she stepped away. “I have to go. And...” ...and if she stayed she’d be tempted to overrun her common sense. “Well. That’s all.”
“All right.” He let her hands go. “I wanted to tell you. You look pretty in that dress. I mean. I think you’d look pretty in anything. But I like it.”
“Oh, that’s—” She bit off her instinctive dismissal. “Th-thank you.” She was blushing to match the dress. She kept talking, like an idiot, feeling as though the compliment should be returned. “I liked the shirt you wore to the clinic. It... ah... fit you well.”
Laris chuckled nervously. “Thank you. I had to go back to work, so I changed.” They stared past one another. “I’ll walk with you over to the shrine,” he said. “If you want to. You don’t have to go all that way alone.”
“Oh... thank you.” She bit her lip. “At least to the camp. Is that all right?”
“Sure. Of course.” He didn’t move, and after the silence stretched into awkwardness, Agna took a step toward the door. Laris followed, laughing at himself.
In the entryway, Agna slipped into her shoes, then stepped aside as Laris put on his own and lifted a key from a hook by the door. He paused before the closed door. She heard him take a breath. “Thank you. For coming today. Even if you have to go. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Thank you for coming by earlier. Even though I was an idiot about it.”
“No, no. It’s all right. In the end it was all right.”
“Yes.”
Eventually Laris turned the door handle.
Keifon: Perspective
“You’re…” Edann chose his words carefully. “…high-spirited today.”
Keifon stretched and folded his arms behind his head. Edann did not always deign to let him linger, and Keifon basked in the privilege while it lasted. Edann’s feather mattress was heaven compared to his own bedroll.
“Suppose so.” He stared at the arched canvas ceiling, debating whether to explain. He knew the embarrassing source of his enthusiasm, and suspected that Edann would not react well. Lacking any other confidant, Keifon found himself shaping the words anyway. “She – Agna – picked up a suitor. A patient. And…” He shrugged with a rustle of feathers. “They’re… sweet. I just – I got to remembering what it was like to be like that.”
“What, cow-faced and stupid?”
Keifon ignored the uninspired jab. “Young. What’s the word? Infatuated.”
“So just stupid.”
Keifon glanced over; Edann had huddled on his side, and picked sourly at a loose thread in the pillowcase. Keifon caught his hand and laced their fingers together. His fingertips flexed against the faint dent in Edann’s middle finger. There was one on each hand, as though Edann had worn rings for a long time and then stopped. They were invisible, revealed only to touch, and so part of him was intrigued by the discovery. Keifon hadn’t asked about it yet, wondering about guild sigils or Achusan fashion. One more thing that he might find out someday. The apothecary was an uncharted country, and he did not give up his ground easily.
Keifon smiled despite himself. “Yeah. Stupid.”
“I’m not infatuated with you,” Edann grumbled, but his breathing quickened.
Nor I you, Keifon did not answer.
Edann tasted like mint and honey. It had taken a bitter argument and some creative bribery to convince him to wash his mouth out between wine and kissing. It had been worthwhile. Now that he was sated and comfortable, Keifon thought that it had all been worthwhile.
“No – listen,” Edann insisted, when he could steal breaths. “Don’t get – stupid. I won’t put up with – sentimentalism.”
Keifon rolled back and sighed. Edann could build up and break down his good mood in a matter of hours. Though most of the building had happened beforehand, watching the young Nessinian and Kaveran orbit one another in fascination.
The healer was young. He wasn’t sure how young, but she was several years younger than Keifon, and she was sheltered for her age. Because of this, she was short on common sense and knew little about life in the world, as he’d found to his irritation many times over. It also meant that when she encountered infatuation, it hit her like a thunderbolt.
And though Keifon was a foreigner here, he knew the Kaveran’s world. He knew the feeling of working in the fields and catching his breath at the sight of a glance across the room in the evening. He knew how the rush of excitement could sweep away the bone-tired fatigue. He knew how a new face, a new voice, could carry with it all the promise of faraway worlds.
The Nessinian and the Kaveran felt that way now. This sudden connection between the spoiled patrician child and Keifon’s younger self left him staring at Edann’s ceiling. He remembered, and let the f
eeling fill him until he could name it.
Empathy.
The Nessinian – Agna – was not his punishment, sent by the gods to plague him. She was just another traveler, far from home. She had her own fears and dreams and hopes, and she could fall in love, because she was human too.
And yet this realization brought him a sinking feeling in his midsection. He didn’t know what to say to her when – if – she came back. He hadn’t always thought of her as fully human, rounding her down to a symbol, a stand-in for his own fears. No true follower of the gods would do that to another person, even an unbeliever.
Keifon began to see the underlying shape of his cowardice. A punishment was easier to shut out than a real person. If he didn’t see her as a real person, he didn’t have to explain his own dismissive behavior, or apologize when he lost his temper, or open up to her about Kazi. If she was human, then Keifon wasn’t alone. He owed her civility and consideration.
Edann leaned his cheek against Keifon’s shoulder. Keifon focused back into the present and licked his lips. “…I should go. I said I’d – I should go.”
“Fine,” Edann whispered. He plucked his glasses from their hiding place and unfolded them. Keifon watched him slip them on. The muscles of Edann’s back tightened, and despite their physical closeness, Keifon might have been no more than a customer, a mark passing by Edann’s apothecary stall.
Edann never spoke about himself, so Keifon had pieced together what he could, reading sideways, decoding him like an ancient text. That little gesture of leaning on him had been Edann’s attempt at an apology, for chilling Keifon’s mood. Keifon’s apparent rebuff had stung him, and his hurt feelings came to light as pure ice. It was no use apologizing now, because Edann would never admit to being hurt.
Edann stood, shrugging off Keifon’s conciliatory hand on his shoulder. He dressed as though he were already alone. Keifon had little choice but to do the same.
***
Keifon’s book had been opened to the same page for at least half an hour. He was lost in memory, reliving those stifling, desperate summers ten years ago. He had been just as foolish and ecstatic as the Nessinian and the Kaveran. He had watched from the edges of the crowd and mapped out the network of alliances and rivalries until he could edge closer to the one who burned brightest in his heart in that instant.
Three half-strangers had enthralled him, obsessed him, when he had needed obsessions most of all. One had smiled apologetically at him and kissed his forehead. One had met him in secret, just once, then disappeared to appease a jealous lover. One had stayed with him for a little while, finding what happiness they could, before departing to a distant apprenticeship. Then, when he was almost seventeen, Keifon had met Eri.
At first it hadn’t been any different; he hadn’t told himself I’m going to marry her, and we’re going to try to be happy, and then I’ll ruin everything. At first it hadn’t been any more complicated than his other fancies. It ended at her smile, her laugh, and the absolute necessity that he know her, that he learn the soul behind her keen eyes and the skin under her understated, stylish clothes. That was all, at first.
He had been a different person when he’d met Kazi, no longer young, no longer breathless with the sense of endless possibility. He had found that later, in the inverse of his younger fancies. He had met Kazi as a disillusioned shell and left as a disillusioned shell, and in between he had been whole, at least for a time.
And now… Keifon set the book aside. Edann seemed determined not to trust him, which seemed easier, more comfortable, than the alternative. Keifon was beginning to hope that he would turn a corner soon, that this armored silence would begin to lift. Edann’s endless cynicism seemed to suggest that he might accept Keifon’s brokenness as the price of being human. They might reach a strange kind of equilibrium, in time.
Keifon laughed under his breath as he realized that the healer had been gone for more than three hours. He wondered again whether she would come back at all. Whether she did or not, he needed to sort out his thoughts. He had gone astray, and he needed to learn from what he had done.
He gathered his body into a seated position, his hands arranged for a prayer to Lundra. He knew prayers for guidance, for thanks, and for forgiveness. He needed all three.
***
Keifon looked up at the sound of a soft tap on the tent flap.
“Are you there?”
He unwound from the floor and lifted the flap. The healer was outside; the Kaveran boy lingered behind her, by the unlit fire pit. A nearby torch turned him into a silhouette. Keifon fought a sudden, alien tendril of thought: You’d better have treated her well. She didn’t need his protection. She wouldn’t want it.
The healer fidgeted, her fingers twisting together. “May I come in?”
Keifon shook off the thought. “Of course.” He ducked back into the tent, and the healer followed. She unlocked her trunk and rifled through it to pull out a sheet of paper and a pencil.
“I’m just going to get Laris’s address, and then I’ll be ready to head out to the shrine. Is that all right?”
“That’s fine.” Perhaps they were going to write to one another. If so, that meant she wouldn’t stay behind after all.
“Thanks.” She dashed back outside.
Keifon tucked his book into his backpack, waiting for the young lovers to finish their farewell. It was too bad that she had to keep moving. It wouldn’t be the first relationship carried out through the post, but he had heard that such things were difficult. They would miss one another, of course. He didn’t envy them that hardship.
After a respectable interval, Keifon lifted the tent flap. Agna and Laris held one another in the clearing in front of the tent. Keifon looked away, privately holding onto the sight of them. He didn’t want to pry, but some part of him needed to know that such good things existed in the world. Keifon could thank them for that in his prayers.
“Safe travels,” Laris said.
“Goodbye. Thank you.” Her voice was low but clear.
And then the young Kaveran turned, with one more little wave to his new love, and set off through the camp. Agna watched him go. Keifon watched her, and watched the Kaveran’s retreating form. If she cried, he should comfort her. He wasn’t sure how, because she would turn on him. She wouldn’t want his sympathy. But he had to offer it if she needed it.
Keifon realized that she held the paper with Laris’s address. And so, in case comforting her would embarrass her, he cleared his throat and avoided the subject. “If you want to put that paper away first...”
The healer turned. Her eyes were dry. She did not snap at him. Keifon let her pass him into the tent, and she stashed the paper in her box of stationery. She addressed him quietly. “Are you ready?”
“Yeah. If you are.”
“Yeah.” She leaned over to blow out the lantern, and the two of them left the tent.
She walked beside him on the road between the campsite and the lake, folding her arms across her body. She didn’t speak, and Keifon considered and discarded one possible approach after another. He didn’t know where to start. He didn’t know whether to offer condolences or congratulations. He didn’t know whether either of them would offend her, because everything he did offended her, and he didn’t understand what was proper in her world.
Their meeting seemed to have gone well, at least. They had looked happy in those last moments.
The healer spoke, startling him out of his worry. “Look, you may as well say it.”
“I didn’t mean to eavesdrop,” Keifon said without thinking.
Before he could babble an explanation, she said, “That’s not what I meant.”
“I don’t – I don’t understand. I am sorry for overhearing.”
She sighed, aggravated, and closed her fists at her sides. Keifon watched her face in the intermittent light from the lampposts, reading her dark, narrowed eyes and the tension in her brows. Was she angry with Laris, with him, with life itself? Keifon knew he
would be frustrated, at the very least, if he’d had to leave a new lover behind. She didn’t explain, lapsing into silence beside him, crossing her arms.
The lake murmured beside them, beyond a narrow lakeshore park – a stripe of cropped grass and trees punctuated by stone benches. Keifon thought about waiting there while she made her visit to her shrine. It would be nice to sit and think for a while.
He had to say something, though, before she got to the shrine. He wanted her to know that he wanted things to change, even if she had more pressing issues to handle. It might even ease her mind to know that she had an ally.
“He seems like a nice boy,” Keifon offered.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she snapped.
Keifon turned in the near-dark. “What?”
“Is he too nice for me, or something?”
It was the usual swiftness to attack, the usual defensiveness. Keifon recognized his own impulse to lash at her and carefully relaxed the muscles in his shoulders. It doesn’t have to be this way, he reminded himself. He cleared his throat. “No, not at all. Just as I said. He seems like a nice boy. I’m – I’m sorry for your sake that we have to keep moving.”
“How unfortunate for you that I’m staying,” she grumbled.
“Hn.” Keifon looked out over the lake, and they continued in silence. He could try to go on like this, offering peace and being rebuffed. For a little while. His patience would wear out soon enough, and they would be back to the usual.
If you need to kill someone in your ceremony... She had hurt him before. He could remember that, and take back the forgiveness that he struggled to find now. Cruelty was easy. It kept everyone away.
The healer’s voice was quiet. “I think he likes me.”
The Healers' Road Page 16
