A smile crept across his mouth, and Brin laughed-really laughed. It made Havilar’s heart ache. “I missed you,” he said after a moment.
I still miss you, she thought, but didn’t dare say. Everything was still a mess, still had to be sorted out right, before she tried anything as rash as telling Brin she loved him. Might as well try to leap the Underchasm with a cat tied to your tail, she thought.
She didn’t mean to let the prickling silence grow-she hardly noticed until Brin cleared his throat.
“We can’t really avoid it, can we?” he said. “Can’t go on, because who even knows where to start?”
Havilar looked at the fire. “I suppose I don’t really even know you. Not anymore.”
“You do,” he protested. “Not everything changes.” From the corner of her eye, she saw him shift closer to her, the better to knock the ashes from the fire and stir it up. “Do you remember,” he asked quietly, “what happened in those seven and a half years?”
Havilar shook her head. “First I was there, with you, and then I was pushing open the door. And then we were waking up in the forest and everything was wrong.” She nudged one of the stones deeper into the fire, and heard Brin’s sharp intake of breath as her foot breached the fire. She smiled at his surprise. Then she added, “I dreamed the other night. A nightmare. It was so hot and close and dark. Like being trapped in a stove, maybe, only the stove is alive.” She looked over at him. “And I dreamed of being shocked and being pricked with needles and being talked about in some other tongue. But I couldn’t see any of it, you know?” She turned away from his sad face. “Maybe that’s what happened, or maybe I just invented it. Mostly it all just vanished.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Havilar kept watching the flames, remembering the smell of something burning, something alive. She shut her eyes and shook her head. “If you could have changed it, I’m sure you would have.” Or maybe not, she thought, sunk in her sadness. Maybe he was glad to be done with her. Maybe the Hells just made things easier-
“I tried,” he said, so much emotion in his voice she was almost afraid not to look at him, and all those self-pitying thoughts scattered. “I tried,” he said again. “I waited three days there, until I was almost out of coin and food. I was so afraid to leave, but what else could I do? I rode hard the whole way to Suzail. I nearly killed the horse.” He cleared his throat. “I went home. I had to. I needed their help. I got Mehen free-Helindra let me go, I think she knew she couldn’t keep me and that I’d keep my word and come back. We went back to the inn. But you weren’t there.”
He rested his head on his hands. “I thought it might be a cycle, you know? I came back in a tenday, in a month, in a season, in a year and then two and then three and then four. But you were gone. Every time you were gone.”
“Four years is a lot of trying,” Havilar said. “I don’t blame you for giving up.” Would she have given up on him? No, never, she thought.
“I never gave up,” he said fiercely. “I went back every year, and every time I took the road past Proskur. You were never there, but I didn’t stop looking-I let all sorts of unsavory people take my coin to find some hint of how to get you back and I didn’t care. One of them might have managed, after all.” A bitter smile crooked his mouth. “Even Helindra couldn’t make me stop. I’m afraid my family has invented some pretty unfair things about us. About what we were. I suppose it’s been good practice, though,” he added with a chuckle. “If I wouldn’t promise Helindra that I’d stop going to that inn, I suspect I’ll keep from buckling on more than that.”
Eight years ago, Havilar thought, I would have known what to say. But there by the fire in the middle of nowhere, her tongue felt like lead. She was sorry her disappearance tangled Brin back up in the family that sought to control every part of his life. She was glad he didn’t sound so scared of his old terror of an aunt anymore. She wanted to tell him how glad she was to know he hadn’t given up. She wanted to tell him she was so glad, because maybe-maybe-it meant he still loved her back.
But then he might tell her that he didn’t.
“Thank you for saving Mehen,” she said finally. “Thank you for sticking with him.”
Brin sighed. “I can’t believe we just left him. Again.”
“I know.” Havilar drew her knees up to her chest. “But he would have stopped me going. I’m not going to leave Farideh to die just because she’s ruined my life.” She shut her eyes. Gods, she couldn’t even keep it in that long. No one wants to hear how angry you are, she thought. The horse lifted its head and nickered.
“I know.” Brin sighed once more, and Havilar wondered if he was angry at Farideh too.
Something popped in the underbrush, and Havilar whipped her head around toward the sound. The shadows of the forest were deep and not even Havilar’s sensitive eyes could pierce them. Beside her, Brin’s hand went to the sword on the ground.
“Lorcan?” he whispered.
Havilar shook her head. Lorcan would fly back. She checked the bandages and stood carefully, glaive in hand. The crackling and popping came again, the shiver of leaves too low to the ground to be wind. A flash of light and then another.
“Lorcan!” Havilar shouted, as loudly as she could. “Come back!” She and Brin shifted, fanning out without a word to better meet whatever was about to come at them, out of the portal opening in the brush beside the road north.
If someone had told Sairché the forest was older than the archdevils themselves, she might have believed them. Broadleaf trees towered over her, too ancient and imposing for common names like “oak” and “alder.” Despite the fact it was late winter in this part of Toril, their leaves stayed, emerald and viridian. Sairché twitched her cloak over her wings. She couldn’t shake the feeling the trees were watching her wait in the ruins left behind in the little grove.
However old the High Forest was, it’d had time to accumulate its own layers of magic. This spot, in particular, bubbled with long-dead powers from some failed civilization, stirred to wakefulness by the Spellplague, and simmering now as the Weave shifted and changed. Perfect for conversations you didn’t want people eavesdropping on.
Sairché counted the glowing, pale green crystals protruding from the crumbling stone wall for an eighth time, when the second devil finally stepped free of his portal.
“You’re late,” she said.
Magros of the Fifth Layer regarded her as one regarded a furious imp- unconcerned, unimpressed. The misfortune devil looked as much like a human as Sairché did-only instead of wings to name him a fiend, his feet were cloven hooves the size of an erinyes’s fist.
“I thought that was how we were doing things,” he said. “How you were doing things, anyway.” Magros shed the heavy furs he wore, draping them over a spike of crystal. He rolled up his sleeves and patted a cloth to the sweat that had sprung up between his tiny horns. “Blasted heat. Your Chosen is finally in play, I take it? Better late than never. I suppose.”
Sairché gritted her teeth. That stlarning phrase.
“Much better,” Sairché said. “Or will you claim that the Chosen you used for your prince’s personal efforts-the one that died far too early-was a better played piece?”
Magros gave her a withering look. “What can we do for the frailty of mortals?”
“Not get them killed unnecessarily?” Sairché offered.
“And what of your wizard?” Magros said. “My agent in the camp reports witnessing-over several nights-a carrier landing in the courtyard of the fortress.” He settled himself on a fallen pillar. “Seeing as how there were not more guards in the camp after, and the beasts that bore the carrier had a harder time leaving than arriving, I’m beginning to wonder if you even know what your pieces are managing in your absence.”