A few hours had passed since Sael's conversation with the High Priestess.
He'd told the Darranshi captain he would be back. The orcish uprising, the consequences of it, whatever the Darranshi leadership knew or didn't know about Corruption or the Path of Souls—all of that needed answering, and he intended to answer it. But not yet. He'd made a promise to a little girl, and breaking promises to children who'd just watched their mothers die wasn't something he was prepared to add to his day.
The captain hadn't asked what the promise was. He'd saluted, mounted his pegasus, and gone.
Antor was smaller than Sael had expected. A cluster of wooden buildings around a central square, a well, a stable, and a trading post that doubled as the only structure with a second floor. The kind of place that existed because two roads happened to cross in the same spot and someone had decided that was reason enough to build.
The bodies had been laid out along the eastern edge of the square. Eleven, on sheets of canvas that the settlement's residents had provided without being asked. The caravan guards were still in their mismatched armor; nobody had thought to remove it, and nobody wanted to be the first. Lira's mother lay at the end of the row. Dress still clean from where Sael's magic had mended it. Hands still folded the way he'd arranged them.
She looked out of place among the others. Too composed. Too... neat.
Two soldiers from Darransh had ridden ahead on pegasi to let the people of Antor know what was coming while Sael's cloud was still in the air, and by the time the corpses and survivors arrived, the settlement had already cleared space and set water to boil. A woman with rolled sleeves was distributing blankets as people moved around the dead quietly.
Sael stood at the edge of the square, near the well, and watched.
Oz was there, too. He stood beside Sael. Motionless as usual.
And the girl, Lira, was in her father's arms.
The man had come running the moment the cloud descended. He'd pushed through the crowd, past the soldiers and the merchants climbing down, scanning faces desperately and found Lira first.
She'd been standing beside her mother's body, holding the edge of the canvas, and when she saw him she made a sound that wasn't quite a word and ran.
He caught her, dropped to his knees in the dirt and caught her, and she buried her face in his chest and cried.
That had been twenty minutes ago.
They were still there, at the same spot. His hand on the back of her head. His face in her hair. His eyes shut. Whatever was happening behind them, he was keeping it there.
"Weak and stupid," Oz said.
Sael glanced at him.
"This." Oz didn't gesture, but he didn't need to. "They know they are dead. They knew before we arrived. They will still be dead when the kneeling is over and the crying is done and the ground has been packed over them. Nothing that is happening in that square is changing anything." A beat. "It is weak. And stupid."
Not quite cruel. That was the thing about Oz that still caught Sael off guard sometimes, even after all this time. He didn't say it to wound. He said it the way someone might say water runs downhill. A fact too obvious to dress up.
"What would you have them do?" Sael asked.
"Stand up. Bury what needs burying. Take stock of what is left and what is needed and move." Oz's jaw shifted faintly. "There is always somewhere higher. Always something to be done that the grief is delaying. A settlement to rebuild. Defenses to shore up. The girl needs to eat. The man needs to provide. Every moment spent on the ground like that is a moment they are choosing to be less than what they could be."
"And among dragons?"
"Among dragons, you burn what fell and you climb. That is the way of it. You do not kneel or hold what is already gone. You look at where you are, and you look at where you are not yet, and you close the distance. That is what strength is. The act of always becoming more."
Sael reached into the inner pocket of his coat and pulled out his pipe. He packed it slowly, because the alternative was sighing, and sighing at Oz, he supposed, would not really accomplish anything.
He lit it, drew once, then let the smoke drift.
"Can I ask you something?"
"You will regardless."
"Where are you going, Oz?"
There was silence for a moment.
"I mean it." Sael continued. "Every dragon I've known has said some version of what you just said: burn what fell, don't stop, close the distance. And I've always wanted to ask, genuinely, as someone who has been aware of your kind for a very long time and admired more about you than I've ever said out loud—" He tapped the pipe against his thumb. "Where does it go? What's at the top?"
"There is no top. That is the point."
"Is it?"
"Yes."
"Then where are you going?"
Oz didn't answer.
Sael watched the smoke curl and thin. "My mother used to tell me about dragons from her childhood." He was quiet for a moment. "She told me they were vast, and wise, and that they cared about things. That they'd land in the fields outside her village and the children would gather and the elders would come and there'd be something like—" He searched for the word. "Counsel, or... partnership. She said the high elves rode with them. Shoulder to shoulder in the sky, fighting for things that mattered to both." The pipe had gone half to ash. "She used to say you could hear them speaking to each other across the valley in the evenings, and it sounded like thunder learning how to be gentle."
"Your mother," Oz said, "was describing the age that nearly ended us."
"She was describing dragons who knew what they were for."
"She was describing dragons who knelt and tangled themselves in the small lives of small creatures and called it wisdom. Then when the first descent of Corruption came, those dragons—your mother's gentle, wise, benevolent dragons—were slaughtered. Because they had stopped climbing."
Sael said nothing.
"That is what gentleness purchased them," Oz said. "The ones who survived were the ones who burned what fell and climbed. The rest are stories mothers tell children."
"Maybe," Sael said. He tapped the pipe against his thumb one more time. "But the ones who survived, the 'climbers'." He looked at Oz. "What did they build?"
This time, it was Oz who said nothing.
"My mother's dragons had valleys with villages and children gathering in fields. They had the high elves beside them. They had something to lose, and that's why they lost it, I'll grant you that. But they had it." He drew on the pipe. "What do the climbers have, Oz? What have you built, in all your climbing? What's beside you?"
"I am alive."
"You are." Sael nodded. "Is it not time to stop for a while, then? Look at what's around you?"
"You want me to become something from your mother's stories."
"I want you to see what he's doing." Sael gestured with the pipe toward the father. "Not as stupidity, but just as what it is."
"I see a man on the ground."
"You see a man who's going to get up."
Oz was still for a long time.
"Your mother's dragons got up too," he said. "And then they died."
"Everyone dies, Oz."
"Not if you climb high enough."
Sael looked at him as he drew on the pipe, then let it out slowly.
"Yes they do," he said quietly. "Even then."
They stood in a silence that wasn't agreement and wasn't argument. The sun kept dropping while shadows stretched and the pipe's smoke drifted and disappeared.
After a while, the man stood. He lifted Lira with him, settling her against his hip as she clung to his neck, then he turned and walked toward Sael who tapped the pipe out against the stone edge of the well, put it away and waited.
As they got closer, Sael opened his mouth—he'd been preparing something, a condolence maybe, or an introduction, some combination of the two that wouldn't sound like it came from a pamphlet—but the father spoke first.
"Thank you."
It came out steady with no tears. His eyes were red and the skin around them was swollen, but his voice was level and clear.
"Thank you for bringing her back to me."
Sael abandoned the introductions for now.
"You're welcome."
The man's name was Torren. He was a woodworker. He'd stayed behind in Antor because the job he'd taken couldn't wait and the caravan trip was supposed to be safe, the route was well-patrolled, the Darranshi had increased presence along the northern corridor after the last raids, and his wife had made the journey twice before without incident.
He said all of this very quickly and Sael didn't interrupt him. Lira had her face pressed into her father's neck, and one of her hands had found the collar of his shirt and was gripping it intensely.
"She told me what you did," Torren said. "With her mother. The dress. And that you—" He stopped and swallowed for a bit. "That you stayed with her."
"...She was brave," Sael said. It was the truth, but he wasn't sure if it was the right thing to say at this moment.
Torren looked at him for a long moment, then extended his free hand. Sael shook it, finding the man's grip was very firm, and he held on for slightly longer than was customary, but Sael let him, because it seemed important.
Then Torren nodded once, turned, and walked away with Lira still fastened to him.
Sael watched him go, and reached for his pipe, then remembered he'd just put it away, and decided that pulling it back out immediately would look odd.
"That was not as painful as I expected," Oz observed.
"Thank you, Oz."
"I am noting that your social performance exceeded—"
"Thank you, Oz."
Then the others came.
It started with a woman named Dalla. She was one of the merchants' wives, and she'd been in the second wagon when the attack hit. She had a bruise across her jaw and a bandage around her left hand.
"You pulled my wagon out of the ditch," she said.
"I did."
She stared at him, then grabbed both his hands and shook them.
"God bless you," she said. "God bless every bone in your body, sir."
"That's—thank you. That's very thorough."
She left. A man took her place almost immediately. Then another. Then a young woman carrying an infant who Sael was reasonably certain had not been part of the caravan at all but who wanted to thank him anyway, apparently on principle.
A pattern established itself. People approached. They told him who they were: a name, an occupation, a relationship to one of the survivors or one of the dead. They thanked him. Some shook his hand. Some bowed. One elderly woman patted him on the cheek, which he accepted with quiet dignity and smiled.
The ones who'd lost family thanked him for bringing the bodies. That was harder. A man whose brother had been one of the caravan guards stood in front of Sael for nearly a full minute without speaking, and when he finally managed it, all he said was, "He's home now," and then walked away, and Sael had to take a very deliberate breath.
Others were lighter. A merchant he'd pulled from under a collapsed crate clapped him on the shoulder and said, "I owe you my life and approximately forty pounds of salted pork, which was lost, but the life I can still repay," which seemed to be a joke, though the man delivered it with complete sincerity.
"Just the life is fine," Sael said.
"You're sure? It was good pork."
"I'm sure."
Then the gifts started.
The first was a pair of leather gloves, offered by a woman who ran the trading post. Sael tried to decline. She put them on the edge of the well beside him and walked away before he could give them back, which was, he had to admit, strategically effective.
The second was a bottle of something amber. A man whose teenage daughter had survived the attack handed it to him and said, "This is the best whiskey in the northern valley," with the gravity of someone revealing a state secret.
"I appreciate it, but I really can't—"
"It is the best whiskey in the northern valley."
Sael took the whiskey.
Then came the old man. He was frail, hunched and moved slowly, leaning on the arm of a younger man: his son, one of the merchants from the caravan. The son had a split lip and a healing cut above his eye, and he looked... mildly anxious.
"Sir," the son said. "My father wanted to—"
The old man shoved something into Sael's hand. It was wrapped in cloth, and it was heavy.
"Oh," Sael said. "That's very kind, but you really don't need to—"
The old man pushed it harder. His hand was trembling, but his grip was iron, and he stared up at Sael with an expression which clearly conveyed that refusal would be taken as a personal and possibly civilizational insult.
"He can't speak," the son said quietly. "Hasn't been able to for years. But he—" The son rubbed the back of his neck. "He has a temperament, you see. And he wanted you to know he was grateful. F-For me. For pulling me out." He paused. "He's not going to let you say no, so please take it."
Sael looked at the old man, and the old man looked back. There was nothing gentle about the gratitude in his eyes. It was fierce and... slightly terrifying.
Sael took the gift.
The old man nodded once—a single, sharp jerk—and then turned and shuffled away, pulling his son with him as the latter mouthed sorry over his shoulder with a helpless expression.
After they left, Sael unwrapped the cloth and found a compass inside. It was old, brass and beautifully made.
He turned it over in his hand. The casing was etched with runic symbols along its rim that were faint and almost decorative.
"Oh."
"What is it?" Oz asked.
Sael ran his thumb along the etchings. "This is a Vaelith Needle."
Oz said nothing, and the silence had a... particular texture to it.
"You don't know what that is, do you?"
"Of course I know what it is."
Sael smiled. He couldn't help it. "What is it, then?"
Oz did not answer. The refusal was dignified and complete, delivered through the medium of simply pretending the question had not been asked, which Sael had to respect on a technical level even as he found it enormously entertaining.
"You know you can ask me things," Sael said, turning the compass over again in his palm. "If you don't know something. That's allowed. I won't think less of you, and I'm reasonably sure you won't shatter into pieces from the admission."
Oz maintained his prideful silence.
"A Vaelith Needle," Sael said, deciding to be merciful about it, "is a compass that points toward the thing you desire most in this world. If it exists, that is. If the thing you want is real, and it's out there somewhere, the needle will find it."
"That is… a broad function."
"So it does surprise you," Sael said. "I thought you knew what it was?"
"Please stop."
Sael held the compass up and watched the needle drift lazily behind the glass, not yet oriented to anything. "It's a rare thing. Genuinely rare, not merchant-rare where they say it to justify the price. But it's harder to use than it sounds, because it needs concrete desire. If you wanted riches, for instance—just riches, the vague idea of wealth—the needle wouldn't know what to do with that. It'd spin, or point somewhere useless, or not move at all. The wanting has to be sharp enough to cut with, so to speak."
He tilted it slightly, watching the light catch the brass. "Same with anything abstract. If what you desired most was success, or fulfillment, or—" He glanced sideways. "—to 'climb', say."
"Tsk."
"—it wouldn't be able to point you anywhere, since there's no direction to an abstraction."
He looked at it for a moment longer, weighing it in his hand, then he looked up toward the spot where the old man and his son had been going.
They were gone.
Sael rewrapped the compass carefully, folding the cloth around it the way it had been folded when it was placed in his hand.
"He knew what this was," he said quietly.
Something about the value of it bothered him. A Vaelith Needle given away like a thank-you note... He thought about going after them, finding the old man in the crowd, pressing it back into his hands with some appropriate phrase about how the work had been payment enough.
But he didn't. Because he understood it, was the thing. He understood what it was worth to see your child come back to you, alive and whole, after you'd already made your peace with the idea that they wouldn't. There was no gift too large for that. There was no gesture that could overshoot it. If someone had brought Margaret back to him even a day sooner, he would have given them everything he owned and felt he'd gotten the better end of the deal.
So he tucked the compass into his coat, close to his chest, and he let the old man have his dignity about it, which was perhaps the only appropriate thing to give in return.
After that, the gifts came faster. A sword: short, practical, recently sharpened. Another sword from a different family, slightly longer and slightly less practical. A hunting knife with a carved handle. A woolen cloak that was clearly made for someone shorter, a jar of preserved fruit, a bag of dried herbs, and so on.
"Thank you," Sael said.
A pair of boots.
"Thank you."
A set of carved wooden spoons.
"Thank you. I—thank you."
Three children appeared. They were not from the caravan. They were from Antor, and they had apparently heard that a wizard had landed in a cloud and decided this warranted a diplomatic delegation. The tallest one, a girl of maybe nine, held out a small cloth pouch with both hands extended and her back very straight, like she'd been coached on this in the last five minutes and was taking the assignment seriously.
"These are for you," she said.
"What are they?"
"Honey sweets. We made them."
"You made them?"
"Bera's mum helped."
"I see." Sael took the pouch. "Thank you. All three of you."
The smallest child, a boy who might have been five, saluted. It was not a good salute. His hand was facing the wrong direction and he was using his left. Sael returned it anyway, matching the form exactly, and the children ran off in a cluster of elbows and bare feet.
Oz, who had not moved throughout any of this, said, "You now have two swords."
"I'm aware."
"You do not use swords."
"I'm aware of that too."
"The cloak does not fit."
"Oz."
"I am making observations."
A woman approached. She was younger, maybe thirty, and she'd been crying recently but wasn't anymore. She stopped in front of Sael, and before he could say anything, she started working the clasp of the bracelet on her wrist.
"Please," she said. "It's not much. It's not worth anything, really. But you brought my sister back, and for a moment, I thought I'd never—" She fumbled with the clasp. "I just want you to have something from me. So I know I did something."
Sael reached out and gently closed his hand over hers, stopping her.
"You've done something," he said. "You came here and you said that to me. That's enough."
She looked up at him.
"Please," he said. "Keep it." He glanced at the growing collection along the well's edge and found tt looked like a very confused market stall run by someone who couldn't decide on a specialty. "I have more than I can carry as it is. Truly."
She laughed. It was watery and short, but it was a laugh. She wiped her eyes and squeezed his hand once before she turned away.
Sael stood there as a few more people were glancing in his direction and clearly working up the courage to approach, and he suspected this wasn't over, but the bracelet had been the line and he needed it to be over.
"Please," he said, not loudly but clearly enough. "All of you. You've been more than generous. I don't need anything else."
A murmur went through the small crowd, and a man near the back who had been holding what appeared to be a smoked ham looked mildly crestfallen.
Sael saw this, and chose not to address it.
He looked at Oz, who looked at the pile.
"The spoons," Oz said, "are well-carved."
"I will not be taking commentary on the spoons."
"I am complimenting the craftsmanship."
"Please stop."