I had walked these streets today, accompanied by a gaggle of bickering children. I walked them now. There should have been no difference. There was. It was just Ash and I now, and Sol atop my head. I kept my hand around Ash's arm as we walked. I had permitted an hour, and it would have been graceless to withdraw that permission before the hour had properly begun.
The square ahead was brighter than the street we had left. The crowd had gathered in a wide ring around a man who stood upon a wooden crate, throwing painted balls through the air. He was the fourth juggler I had seen today alone. This one had drawn by far the largest crowd, though he threw only balls. Six of them moved deftly between his hands.
They rose and fell in a pattern that never broke, red chasing blue chasing green, and his hands moved so quickly that I could not follow them, only the arc of the things themselves, climbing and falling and climbing again. He looked out at the crowd, and smiled, and the balls kept climbing.
Sol chirped. The juggler sent all six balls high at once. Sol chirped again, louder. "Do you find this to your liking?" I asked her.
I reached through the bond, and the answer was oddly clear. She had watched the man and concluded that she too, would learn this. How she would learn such a thing with wings instead of hands seemed not a question Sol had asked. "A worthy ambition," I said. "See that you achieve it."
"I can juggle." Ash said. Ash took one more step before my hold on her arm stopped her too. She looked back at me. The lantern light found the side of her face. "What?"
"You can juggle?" I asked.
"A little." She shrugged. "Never got past four. Elowen taught me to."
I considered this. “This Elowen…she was the [Sage], was she not?” Ash nodded.
What manner of [Skill] was juggling? It was not a thing I had ever seen or heard a warrior nor Sage trained in. And yet, the more I considered it, the more a certain logic revealed itself. To hold multiple things aloft at once, to divide one's attention several ways and let no part of it falter. It was not so different from the discipline required to hold four spells at the ready and cast them each at the proper moment. Some [Sages] spent decades learning to split their focus so. If this juggling taught the same discipline by simpler means, then whoever had devised it as a training method was quite bril-
"Lys." Ash was looking at me. "I can't imagine what you're thinking, but it probably isn't that."
Heat climbed my face. “What, then?" I asked, a touch too sharply.
"She grew up in a circus." Ash turned back to the juggler. "That's why. And then she tried to teach the rest of us, too. Of course, she did it with knives. None of us ever tried anything of the sort."
Ash had told me of this Elowen once. A [Sage], but also a girl who juggled knives and wanted to bake bread. There was a weight in Ash's voice as she said it, a thing that lived beneath the words and did not show itself, and I recognized the shape of it because I had carried its cousin.
Sol let out a squawk. She rose from between my horns and her four wings caught the lantern light. For two seconds she flew. On the third, flight became falling. Ash's hands came up. Sol dropped into them with another outraged squawk.
"Hey. Easy there. You okay?" Ash held her up. Sol chirped and craned toward Ash's head.
"I believe," I said, "that she wishes for a different seat. For now."
Ash blinked at her, then carefully raised her. Sol scrambled into the gold of Ash's hair and settled there, tucked between no horns at all. "Thanks, Sol," Ash said. Her voice had gone quiet.
I understood some of why the Hero had said it. Not all, but some. The juggler caught all six balls. The square broke into applause. We walked on before he could begin again.
The smells changed as we walked deeper, and the crowd thinned with them. There was less of roasting meat and sweet fruit now. Merchants had set their stalls along the narrowing street, and they hawked their wares to any student who passed, and there were fewer students to pass with each turn we took.
"I don't suppose you know where we're going, Lys," Ash said.
"I do not have the faintest idea."
"This is just fine by me." And she leaned a little closer as she said it, so that her shoulder found mine
A vendor caught sight of Sol atop Ash's head and lit up like one of the lanterns above us. He gestured at the stones arrayed before him, a dozen colors of them, each one catching the lantern light. "Come now, little lass! I'll wager that friend of yours would adore one of these Essence Stones."
I looked at the stones. Then I looked at Ash. I shook my head. "She burned the last ones. I suspect these will meet no kinder fate."
Sol chirped. I checked the bond, and found there only indignation. She was insulted at just the mere sight of these Essence Stones. And beneath the indignation was something else. A longing. A longing for a thing that had not been petty at all. What could she-
Oh.
The merchant was still speaking. "-three for the price of two, and for a bird like that I could make it four if-"
"Do you have an Essence Heart?" I asked.
The vendor's eyes went wide. He looked up at my horns, and then looked pointedly at my face instead. His gaze dropped to the grey of my uniform, and stopped there a moment too long before climbing back to my face. "Err- no. You can't just find something like an Essence Heart at a stall like this. But if you're interested, I could get you something just as good-"
I was already walking away. So these Essence Hearts were difficult to acquire, then. And yet the girl Alisa had produced two of them, and had pressed both upon me without my asking. How curious. Perhaps I would grace her with my gratitude. It was, after all, one of the few offerings my familiar had ever deigned to accept.
"You should have at least told him you weren't interested first," Ash said, falling into step beside me.
I looked at her. "Was that custom?"
"Maybe not custom, but it's polite."
I nodded slowly. There was sense in it, I supposed. "Very well. I shall inform them of their inadequacy in fuller detail next time. So that they may learn from it."
Ash sighed. "That's not exactly what I-" She stopped, and something like a smile tugged at her. "Okay. It's a good start."
The lanterns grew farther apart as we went, until they were islands of warmth strung along a street gone mostly to shadow. The music had thinned until we could not hear it.
It was very quiet here. It was exactly the kind of quiet that a certain manner of person waited for. A follower who wished to remain unseen did not make their move in a crowded square. They waited for streets like these.
I kept my stride even and my senses open. Nothing came. The street stayed empty. I felt nothing from Sol, though she had caught the strange presence before even I.
The street opened onto a stream where it cut between two rows of buildings, and there was a small bank there, sloped down to the water, and the grass on it was silvered under the moon.
"Want to sit?" Ash asked.
I looked at the quiet of the place and concluded that the Hero had wanted the quiet. "For a time," I said.
Sol pushed off from Ash's head. She flapped hard and landed upon the grass with only a small stumble.
"You're getting better at that," I told her, and scratched beneath one of her feathers. She chirped. She was pleased.
We sat halfway down the bank. The grass was cool beneath my palms. Ash had taken off her shoes, letting her bare feet rest on the grass. I watched her for a moment, then reached down to take mine too. The grass was no cooler on my feet than it was on the rest of me. It still felt superior this way.
"So," Ash said. "What was that thing earlier?” I looked at her. "In the crowd. You looked worried, and you said you'd tell me later."
"I thought I felt something." I watched the water. In the moonlight it seemed almost to shine. "A gaze that was doing more than looking. But when I turned, there was no one there." I paused. "Sol felt it before I did."
Something moved across Ash's face. She seemed almost puzzled. "I didn't feel anything," she said. "Or I would have-" She stopped.
I nodded. "I know. That is what concerns me."
The Hero's senses were keener than mine. Whatever had watched had hidden from her and somehow not hidden from me. That could only mean two things. Either I was mistaken, or that gaze had, somehow, been for me alone.
"Perhaps," I said, "it was only my imagination. Nothing more."
Ash studied me for a moment. Then she nodded.
Sol chirped. I looked at her in time to see her tuck her wings, and roll. Sol rolled down the bank with gathering speed, gold and black turning over gold and black. She seemed to be enjoying herself. I only stared, because I had watched her do this a dozen times on level ground and it had never once occurred to me that she might attempt it on a hill.
"Sol!" Ash was already moving, and then I was moving after her. Ash's hand closed around a small tumbling body a hand's width from the edge of it. I was at her side a moment later.
"Solara." I took her from Ash's hands and held her up before my face. I would have to discipline her properly for this. Those big eyes stared at me and I felt my resolve crumble. Only somewhat. "You may do your rolling. You will not do it down slopes."
Sol chirped. I checked the bond and found only confusion. She had no notion of what the fuss was about. Ash had called her rather intelligent, and Sol certainly was. It seemed the intelligence was rather selective. I sighed.
"She's going to be a real handful as she gets bigger," Ash said.
"I expect she will."
Ash looked at the stream. Then at Sol. "Can phoenixes even swim?"
"They are beasts of fire. It stands to reason that they cannot." I said.
"But do you know?"
"I know enough of nature to-" I stopped. I turned Sol toward me. "Can you swim?" I caught myself only after the words had already come out. Why was I consulting the bird? I checked the bond, and found her answer there. Through the bond came a bright and total confidence. She had, I was fairly certain, little idea of what I’d asked.
"She claims she can."
Ash’s lips had quirked up, then straightened, then quirked up again. “Of course she does.”
"Hmm." I knelt at the water's edge. I lowered her toward the slow current with both hands cupped beneath her, ready to lift her at the first flicker of distress. I lowered her until her feet touched the water. She drew them up at once. I expected distress. Instead, she chirped. And then, gently, I let go. Sol floated.
She turned lazily with the current, twisting a slow quarter-circle, and she floated. She turned once in the current, not by any motion I could see, and drifted on her side as though she had always belonged there. Her golden feathers caught the moonlight and held it. The black ones drank it from the dark water, so that half of her seemed made from the night and the other half from what shone upon it.
"My mighty phoenix," I said, "can swim before she can fly." I had never heard my voice sound this way before. Perhaps it never had.
Ash was laughing. "I don't know that I'd call it swimming. But she's doing something."
A creature of fire, content upon the water. This world kept producing things that refused the Roles given to them. And I found that I did not mind it in the slightest.
We walked the bank keeping pace with her. The grass bent beneath our feet. Sol drifted in the slow current, and through the bond came simple contentment. After a time she chirped to be lifted. I reached down and gathered her from the water and held her up towards me.
Sol spread all four wings and shook. Cold droplets struck my face, my arms, my sides, and the entire front of my clothes. "Sol. You have one chance to reconsider."
She chirped, lazily. When I set her down upon the grass, she was asleep within moments.
Ash was looking at me. “Not a word, Hero.”
“I didn’t say-” She paused. “Let me guess, my face is saying things?”
“So it is.”
Ash grinned, and her face said more things. I found I did not mind.
We sat with our legs in the water. It was not so different, I thought, from a river we had sat beside on our first days in this world. The water had been cool then, too. There had been fish in that river, and I did not think there were any here. There had been a Hero and a Demon Queen who had not yet decided whether to kill one another. It was a long road, from that river to this one.
"A lot has happened, hasn't it?" Ash said. Her voice was low, but it carried easily in the stillness. "Since we came here. Not just to this city, I mean. Since we came to the future."
"Indeed it has, Hero. I do not recall the old world being quite so eventful."
Ash was quiet for a moment. The stars had come out fully overhead, and the water carried their thousand glittering lights past our feet.
"You wanted to come here," she said. "To the future. Somewhere you could just do what you wanted." She looked up at the sky. "So. Is it everything you wanted?"
I did not know how to answer that. The question was too large for the words I had. Once I might not have tried to answer at all. Now, when so much had happened, and with Ash asking, I did try. "I do not know," I said at last. "But I will say this." I leaned back against the grass. "It is different than I imagined it would be. And not in bad ways." I looked at the stars. "For one, I had thought I would come here alone."
I felt Ash go still beside me. "And," she said. "Do you mind? That you didn't. Come here alone, I mean."
I turned my head and looked at her. Her face had color in it, and her eyes searched my own for something I could not guess at. "Do not ask me something that foolish again, Ash."
The stream moved around our legs. She let out a breath. She lay back against the grass beside me, close enough that her shoulder pressed to mine, and above us the stars glittered, and the wind came off the water cool and slow, and Sol slept somewhere in the grass next to us.
Her hand found mine. I took it. "Hey. Lys." Her voice was quiet. "Can I ask you something?" I felt her pulse grow faster through her hand. I looked at her. "You call me your retainer," she said. "And I suppose I've been roped into it by now."
Roped into it. It was a graceless lie, but one I allowed Ash for the moment. For I felt she was building and circling towards something. Like Sara once had, before she had asked me for a boon she thought herself undeserving of.
"What does that word mean to you?"
The Ember Core hummed once beneath my ribs.