Mother was finishing a wide skillet of eggs. Without looking up, she said, “Take the crescents out, put them in their bowl.”
The oven door creaked as it fell open. The curled loafs of bread were resting on a sheet of black iron, their tips just beginning to burn. The mittens were hiding. Diamond used his hands, setting the iron on the polished coral counter.
Mother disapproved. He knew she would stare, and he imagined their conversation as he emptied the sheet two crescents at a time, the tips of each finger burnt worse than the oily bread. But Mother was ignoring him. Instead of the conversation that he expected, she said to her companion, “I told you two sweet nuts. How many was that?”
“One and one and one,” said Good.
“Which is three,” she warned.
The monkey looked at his best old friend, trying to share a grin. Then dipping his head, he moaned, “Sorry.”
And he laughed.
“Take the crescents out,” Mother repeated.
Blisters were already turning back into ordinary flesh. As Diamond matured, the healing came faster.
Mother shoveled the golden eggs into a matching bowl. “These too.”
Diamond took the crescents, then the eggs. Mother had the nuts. Sweet nuts were the one indulgence—from one of the last happy blackwoods surviving inside their old District.
“Anything else?” she asked the table.
Reading wasn’t allowed with food. Master Nissim set the news aside, and Elata closed her book and sat on it. Every chair was filled. There was room at the long table for others, but Mother didn’t like how it looked. Empty chairs were just another item on that very long list of sights that made her sad.
Good sat on a box balanced on his chair. If he put one foot on the table, he would be sent to his room.
His room was Mother’s room.
The carafe of oil was passed first, a little poured into the center of their plates, and after the food was claimed, the oil was passed a second time. Every bowl ended with Diamond. His plate was a serving platter, and his appetite was as big as any two others. Twenty days ago, he had visited the Grand University for the single purpose of sitting alone inside a special room—a sealed room built specifically for him—and he ate what he wanted and breathed naturally. Unseen people measured the oxygen used and the carbon dioxide coming out of him. The amounts were in balance, and what energy wasn’t making new tissue went into heating his blood and stockpiling energy inside each of his busy cells. Numbers proved what everyone knew: his metabolism was like an hairyheart elf’s, only on a giant scale. Scientists and doctors couldn’t find anything that was genuinely, unabashedly magical, at least in that one narrow test. But all the same, the word “magic” was used quite a lot.
“Somebody needs to talk,” Mother told the table.
She was sitting where she always sat, beside her son.
Master Nissim was the best hope. He smiled in a thoughtful way while looking at her, carefully measuring her state of mind. She didn’t seem especially depressed or sensitive this morning, which was why he risked saying, “I’m taking my class on a little journey today.”
That was the first word any of them had heard about this.
“The four of us are going to visit the Grand University. Again, yes. But we’re exploring a different specialty. The world’s leading expert on spheres and their mathematics has kindly agreed to make my students feel stupid.”
Seldom laughed nervously.
Elata looked at Diamond. This was the first moment of the morning when she kept her eyes on him, and he felt her gaze, glad for it and not glad for it.
“Well,” Mother said with a flat tone. “That sounds very entertaining.”
Sarcasm, thought Diamond.
“Join us,” Nissim said.
Diamond thought that was funny, at least a little bit.
She looked at him, letting a smile slip free. “You think I’ll be bored.”
“I will be,” he said.
“Not me,” Seldom had to say.
Elata’s broad shoulder gave a shrug. “There’s a lot more than math at the University.”
“No,” Mother said. “I want to hear about spheres.”
She sounded earnest.
Diamond didn’t know what to believe. He tried to laugh but ended up sounding dismissive when he asked, “Why?”
“Spheres are the perfect shape,” she said. “Every child knows it, even before he learns so in school.”
Nissim had opinions on the subject that he didn’t dare mention.
Mother grabbed her boy by the hand, squeezing and staring at his face. “He told me,” she began, and then she had to gather herself.
“Who told you?” Seldom asked.
Father, she meant.
“Merit,” she said. But she didn’t cry or look especially sad. The name was a pleasure to share and she might be able say it ten times without bending too much, shattering in the end.
Reading strength in her face, everybody relaxed.
“When he was flying,” she said. “When he was beneath the District of Districts, and the sunlight was strong and the air clear, he would climb on top of his ship and look at all of the world at once. The hemisphere above covered with its the forest, and the reef wrapped the faintest gold mist, and he could almost see past the coral and wood, seeing the edge of Creation falling smoothly down into the demon floor, and that was one of the loveliest sights anywhere.”
Then with a bittersweet edge, she said again, “One of the loveliest.”
Nobody spoke.
Only time spoke.
Then out from the silence, she said, “Yes, I’d love to go with you.”
Good understood. He was going to be abandoned at home, and that was the moment when he reached out with his bare feet, nabbing several of the sweet nuts off their plate.
Then he galloped off, the usual reprimands chasing after him.
There was pleasant talk after that. For several recitations, every subject was small and vital.
Outside, the rain was finally slackening.
Silence was trying to grasp the world.
Then from some distant place came the diluted roar of a siren. There was just one siren, the warning beginning in the direction of the Bluewind District, but quickly more and closer sirens joined in. And in another few moments there was nothing to hear but the wailing of hundreds of sirens and the first ominous firings of cannons—every gun aiming at nothing, doing nothing but mapping the winds.
Slayers had always hunted the margins.
The best hunting was beneath the Corona District, which was a respectable reason for the papio to burn blackwoods and burn hunter-ships and kill every human clinging to any burnt out tree trunk, in hopes of dispatching just one more slayer.
Survivors retreated into the District of Districts, finding sanctuaries where new hunters could be trained, building shops and hangers where military weapons could be lashed to their last ships. But the early days of the war didn’t have much serious noise about chasing the coronas again. Fighting monsters was already difficult work, but it was familiar and halfway predictable. Slayers were not soldiers. Bullets and flame made the smallest hunt into a suicidal dash, and one little carcass wouldn’t be worth any risk. Besides, the Archon and his wise ancestors had stockpiled corona parts, stuffing warehouses full of bladders and scales and skins and iron—a cache that would surely outlast the anger that had already eaten away at lives and wealth.
But then again, maybe there weren’t as many warehouses as rumored. And there definitely was a shortage of visionaries—people who had imagined full-scale war being waged for six hundred days. Both sides were suffering from shortfalls, and both species were making brash plans. The papio had built ugly gas airships that hid inside bunkers by day, slipping out at night to hunt the margins of the reef. And meanwhile, the tree-walking generals had pulled some of their precious military fletches from service, adapting them to chase the coronas and fight the papio at the same time.
The young man was happy to learn how to hunt like a slayer.
But he already knew how to fight.