Chapter 10: Chapter 10 – As A First Day Turns To Night

Dinner was some sort of bean stew. I could practically taste it just from the smell of it once we walked in the door, the aroma filling what felt like my entire sensorium.

The euphoric high—and it had definitely been that—was fading fast, and it left me with weak muscles and a wobbly lack of balance. After I slammed the side of my arm into the doorframe trying to avoid falling over, Kelly kept a hand under my armpit for stability, and it worked well enough. I didn’t fall again, at least, until she guided me to a bench and I more or less collapsed onto it.

I dimly heard someone commenting, with casual words but a viciously waspish tone, that it was certainly unusual for someone to be so late to the seating. Kelly’s entire body tensed up, her hand squeezing my arm like a stress ball, but her voice was steady and kind as she said something about yadda yadda Hall of the Thousand blah blah Godtouch, but I wasn’t listening.

I couldn’t listen. It was a physical impossibility, because someone had shown up and slid a large bowl in front of me, along with a flat wooden plate of sorts that looked like a cheeseboard with a very small hollow. There was a loaf of bread on it, brown and crusted and smelling like God had decided to prove the existence of the World To Come, and I had a piece of it in my mouth before I’d really registered my own intent to move.

It tasted even better than it smelled. There was a hint of sourness, a bit of acid, but mostly it was salt and carbs and a butter that was definitely the most flavorful butter I’d had in my life. I had to force myself to slow down enough to chew it enough to swallow instead of choking on it, but I was absolutely a grown-ass adult of thirty-nine, and not a two-year-old, so I managed.

I still somehow choked on the spoonful of stew I followed it down with, coughing with my mouth closed by dint of long habit, but it barely slowed me down.

The stew was almost as good as the bread. It wasn’t complex, not by any measure, but it was hearty; beans, mostly, with something very much like cabbage and a dead ringer for eggplant, salted somewhat less than I’d usually go for and spiced with a bunch of flavors I didn’t recognize and a couple that I did. Bay leaves and rosemary were distinct, and these were absolutely those, and that raised a bunch of questions that could definitely be answered later.

My spoon clinked against the bottom of an empty bowl about a moment later, and I looked at it in stupefaction. I mopped up the last of the stew—and, belatedly, the drips of butter from the loaf—with my last hunk of bread, chasing it down with the last of a large mug of water, and sighed in relief.

“Welcome, young lady. How good of you to join us.”

I looked over at the speaker, across the table and one seat to my right. I hadn’t had a chance to take in the surroundings, to look around, but this was the first person since I’d met Kelly whom I was going to have a conversation with. A shame, then, that I recognized her voice, now with that waspish tone hidden under thin graciousness; a shame I could see the twist in Kelly’s lips where she sat next to the woman, see the crease between her brows.

Also probably a shame that I was so exhausted I could barely register her as a person, much less really notice anything about her. Still, I’d dated a girl from the South; I could do politeness in social combat with… not the best of ‘em, but I wasn’t the worst.

“Thank you. This has been… I don’t have words for how nice this place seems. I don’t know how I haven’t started disbelieving it, honestly. It’s absolutely the kind of thing that I’d expect to have a dark hidden secret, like Kelly’s going to harvest my o-oh—” I tried and utterly failed to stifle a yawn, blinking back tears with how deep it had been and rubbing my jaw. “Excuse me, it’s been a long day. Like she’s going to harvest my organs—”

“As your friend?”

“—once I’ve been here a year and a day.” I winked at her, smirking a little. “I would never accuse you of planning to betray me during your First Friend tenure! So yes, it’s been very good to have joined you. Miss…”

I could see that my politeness had just scored a direct hit, because I heard someone audibly snicker on the other side of me and I could see Kelly’s eyes light up. It got a brief death-glare out of the woman, which vanished into a tight smile that did a respectable job of pretending to be kind, judged on an extremely sleepy curve. “Matron Zeva. And what is your name, child?”

“A pleasure to meet you, Matron. You can call me… Doctor Nadash?” I frowned at the table, breaking eye contact without thinking about it. “Not Professor; I didn’t teach, I did research. I got the language, but I didn’t get enough Shemmai cultural context. Help me out here, someone?”

“A Doctor might teach, but the essence of the word is singularity.” The voice came from my left, and I turned to see an absolute titan of a man with an astonishing light baritone voice. “One so wise in their field that there is no-one they might not teach; one so brilliant that they forge a new path of light through the shadows of ignorance. Scholar Nadash, I am Kan; Stone Shaper, Engineer, and Quilter.”

“And father of four children.” The words came with an eye roll from the woman across from him. She was tiny, not just by comparison with him but entirely; he had to be well over six feet tall, and she probably wouldn’t have broken five feet on her tiptoes. “Yes, yes, they aren’t children anymore, but we will never stop being parents. Ketana; I met this lunkhead on the Kaffar stone team more than two hundred years ago. Stone Shaper, Geomancer, Clerk.”

“I am so—” I yawned again, hearing my jaw crack and pop. “Mrrm. Good to meet you. So sorry, but I really doubt I’ll remember your names tomorrow. Won’t forget the food, though. It was—wait, Quilter?” I blinked at him owlishly.

“Indeed, esteemed Scholar. I—”

“No way, nuh uh.” I shook my head at him. “I am too tired to be esteemed Scholar to you. Call me Sophie… uh, Ken?”

“Kan.” His smile didn’t budge, so probably he wasn’t offended. “As a hobby, it has served me well. One can, of course, create more end-products more efficiently, but mine are made suited to the person and place.”

“That sounds nice.” I felt compelled to add something more, engage with him, and after a few moments, a memory struck me. “Oh! I had a neat quilt when I was a kid. It was, um, generational? A lot of layers and patches of clothes that got worn out. It was… it was always my favorite.”

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Ketana caught what I had let slip. “Was?”

I didn’t look at Ketana, couldn’t look at her, no matter how soft and gentle her voice was. “It, uh. Went to someone else.”

“It’s not so bad, when something nice goes to another child, or to a grandchild.”

I managed to drag my eyes off of the wood of the table enough to look at Matron whatever-her-name-was, who probably wasn’t even intending to be hurtful this time. “It went,” I said to her, like the two of us were the only people in the room, “to the boy my father adopted to replace me, when who I was became incompatible with his faith.”

There was, blessedly, silence after that. Kelly reached over the table to put her hand over mine, which I appreciated, and I slumped forward a bit to lean on my other arm. Conversation started up again eventually, and so did some kind of dessert, which I ate without tasting it or even knowing what it was. Someone slid the remnants of a couple of loaves over to me along with another bowl, some time later, and I ate again, feeling the hollowness in my stomach finally fade into contentment, and I relaxed into the renewed buzz of quiet conversation.

It was… nice. Nobody was expecting me to contribute or be involved, nobody was expecting me to be social or even particularly present. At the same time, the sound of voices in friendly chatter was soothing, and I dozed off, letting the ambiance soak in. Kelly’s arm under my armpit drew me out of that stupor, and I found myself being gently urged up.

“—need to wake up enough to walk, Sophie. Wake up enough to walk, Sophie, please, we need to clear out so they can clean and go home. I actually, literally can’t carry you, you’re heavier than I am and I’m not particularly strong, Kan, Kan! Over here, please help. Take her up?”

“She lodges in the travel rooms?”

“For tonight. She hasn’t chosen a Path, and we wouldn’t have time to get her settled in anyways.”

“Very well. Sophie, unless you should ask otherwise, I will undertake to transport you to your temporary home for the night.”

I murmured something vaguely positive. The table was comfortable enough, but okay, it made sense that I couldn’t sleep there, they couldn’t clean under my face. But just a little bit of a rest and I could walk—or I could be lifted; he was warm and his clothes were soft and his carry was utterly steady, and I regretted briefly that I wasn’t into guys because that would have made it really nice.

There was a flight of stairs, taken with barely any jostling and a little bit of sway, and then a short corridor or something. There was a door, and a doorway that I was very carefully maneuvered through, and a mattress, maybe this was a bed, way better than sleeping in a chair with my face prevented from planting onto a table only by my hands.

I stirred closer to wakefulness when someone started undoing the buckles on my boots, feeling the sharpness of the release, like they were ski-boot buckles. They drew something heavy over me once that was done, fluffy and smelling of something vaguely treelike. “Quilt,” I managed to say. “Kan?”

“Yeah.” Kelly’s voice. “He made this quilt. He makes all our quilts.”

“Nice quilt.” I smiled beatifically at the ceiling, or roof, or whatever was up there; my eyes were far too closed to tell. “Good night.”

If Kelly said anything in response, I didn’t hear it, or didn’t remember it.

I floated, instead. The waves rocked me, rising into the sky and falling gently into the depths, as I rode the peaks and troughs on a soft wind.

Everything was in motion, and everything was still. I wasn’t alone, and the sun and moon were high in the sky, light and light’s reflection, and the tree that swam beside us whispered with its branches a name I couldn’t hear or understand.

The man behind me and to the right was so thin, so very thin, but he had such fluffy wings, and I saw them slowly beating. I kept my eyes forward, though, and my hand where it was busy, and he muttered at me. This is crock, he said, and I giggled at him and replied, and he touched me on the forehead with the tip of his finger.

Pick a fucking Class tomorrow, he said as everything faded, or maybe I said it, or the girl behind me did.

And if I dreamed further that night, I didn’t remember it upon waking.

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