“New crew,” he said and put out a hand. “The bag.”
Llama glanced at himself and Lumi, in the same outfits as the men blocking their way, the same weapons. Two against five.
“No,” Llama said.
The scarred one sighed as if this was tedious and swung. These were five men who fought dirty and knew the ground, against two who were already hurt.
Lumi smiled.
The guardian had been immune to her, and these men were not.
She got her back to a wall and her hand up, and there was no crystal to ground it and nothing dry to catch, only salt air and meat, and she didn’t have to be careful anymore.
She put a thread of current into the scarred one’s chest, and he went down and stayed down, jerking. She put another into the next and dropped him against the wall. She had mana for maybe two more, and she spent them well.
Llama took the other three with his hands and his whole body. He caught a pick meant for Lumi on his own forearm, the gashed one, and I heard him grunt. He put the man who’d swung it into the wall hard enough to stick. He took a boot to the knee and a pick that skated off his ribs and opened his side, and he stayed up, and he stayed between them and her, and he brought the last two down without stepping back once.
Then it was quiet, and there were five men on the floor of the passage, and two of my people standing over them.
Lumi had a split lip and a knee that wasn’t holding her right, and a burn on her sleeve she’d long forgotten. Llama was bleeding from the forearm and from a gash along his ribs.
“Up,” he said. “Before they get up.”
Lumi walked with the dish against her chest, Llama behind her, walking backward, watching the passage, one arm pressed to his side, all the way to the door.
I went through first.
The kitchen came back around me, warm and gold, smelling of bread and now of cow and scorched wheat and everything else the day had put into it. Llama came through last and pulled the door shut, and it was a wall again.
The bag was gone. The dish was in Lumi’s hands, and the gold salt was still in it.
The wood rack was down to a handful of splits. The middle oven had sunk to a low, patient orange. “Majesty.” Her voice had become rough, and she held the dish out on both palms. “Appraise it.”
I lifted the scepter.
[Attention! Appraisal.]
[Golden Rock Salt]Type: 5-EpicQuality: 68%
“Sixty-eight,” I said.
“How are we doing?” Lumi asked smiling.
“Sixty-seven point seven.”
“And before the salt?”
“Sixty-seven point five.”
She laughed.
Then I healed them.
I asked the room first, and then I watched the gash on Llama’s arm close, and the wrong angle go out of Lumi’s knee, and the split leave her lip. The burn on her sleeve stayed because the sleeve wasn’t her.
Though, I put back everything that was her.
Lumi reached over and set her thumb to the healed skin on his forearm, pressed once to be sure it held, and took her hand away.
“Three,” she said, when she had her hands back, and flexed them, both of them, whole. “Egg next. An egg. One egg.” She looked at the plain wooden door with the egg cut over it. “It’s just an egg, Majesty.”
“Mm,” I said, and didn’t tell her what I thought about that, because she’d earned five minutes of thinking it was going to be easy. I put my palm to the door with the egg over it, and gave them the line one more time, because it belonged in the doorway even if they’d outgrown it.
“Not real. None of it. I’ll be with you, and I still can’t—”
“—do a thing about it. I remember, Majesty.”
“Mm,” I said again, and pushed it open.
The noise that came up was ordinary.
A market closed around us all at once, and none of it turned to look. Awnings in Empire colors. A banner with their stupid crest, hanging dead in the air with no wind in it. A long, crooked row of stalls down a street I couldn’t find the end of, and people, hundreds of them, buying and carrying and arguing, and not one of them ours.
I put my hand out. A woman with a basket walked through it.
They’d changed again. The plate was gone off Llama, the shield gone off his back; he stood there in a brown coat and worn boots, looking like a man who sold chickens. Lumi was in grey wool with her braid pinned up under a plain cap, standing in the middle of an Empire market like a duchess some costume department had failed.
There was a purse at her belt. She found it, opened it, and tipped it into her palm.
Two gold coins.
She looked at the two coins. She looked up the street at the fruit and the cloth and the fish and the tin charms, and she closed her hand around them.
“Two,” she said. “For an egg.”
I wanted to laugh or say something, but all I could do was watch the two of them find where the eggs were.
They were halfway down, in straw-lined trays, and they were not all the same.
The near tray was ordinary, brown and speckled, a copper-apiece egg. The next caught more light than it had any business catching. The tray past which held shells with a warm sheen crawling over them. And at the back, alone on a square of black cloth in a little iron stand, sat one egg the size of two fists, its shell like a banked coal, a slow red glow turning over under it as if something inside had shifted in its sleep.
The woman behind the trays had a face like a shut ledger. She watched Lumi walk up and didn’t change it.
“Good day,” Lumi said. “What do they run?”
“Common, five silver. Uncommon, a gold and a half. Rare, three.” She didn’t look round at the coal-shelled one. “That one, epic. Ten gold. No, I’ll not cut it. No, you can’t hold it.”
Lumi looked at the epic egg with two coins in her fist, and I watched her decide she wanted it anyway.
“That one,” she said. “Your best price.”
“Ten.”
“For one egg.”
“For that egg. There’s a phoenix three back in that line and a shell that’ll hold a warming-charm a full day.” The woman folded her arms. “Ten.”
Lumi leaned a hand on the trestle and gave her a smile. The one that had put fifty thousand strangers on their feet, an hour and a lifetime ago.
The woman watched the smile arrive and didn’t warm.
“Eight,” Lumi said. “And I take it now, and you’ve the table clear for the next of them.”
“Ten.”
“Seven, and it’s a fair price, and we both know it—”
“Ten. It was ten when you walked up; it’s ten while you talk; it’ll be ten when you go.” Something almost soft crossed her, and she looked at the egg then, once. “Five’s the lowest I’ve ever gone. Once. For a man who’d just put his wife in the ground.” Her gaze flicked to Llama. “You’ve not buried a wife. Ten.”
Lumi’s smile held for exactly as long as her pride required and came down off her face. She opened her hand and let the woman see it.
Two coins, side by side on her palm.
“Then I’ve wasted your morning,” she said, and there was nothing polished left in her voice. “I haven’t ten. I haven’t five. I’ve two, and I need the best egg two will buy, and your rare is three.” She set the coins on the trestle and pushed them across the wood. “Two. For a rare. It’s what I have, and it’s all of it, and it’s yours this second.”
The woman looked at the coins. She looked at the tray of rare eggs, warm and shining.
“Rare’s three. I don’t sell a three for a two.” She didn’t sweep the coins back, though. She left them lying there and looked at them. “I do that once, I’ve done it for the whole street, and then I’m the fool who sells threes for twos.”
Llama had been standing off Lumi’s shoulder the whole time, brown-coated, quiet, a man who sold chickens.
He stopped being that and put his arm around Lumi, around the grey wool, and drew her in against his side. In public. Where people could see. He does not do that.
Then he looked at the woman across the two coins, and his chin came down, and his weight came forward off the back foot, and he held it.
The woman held his eyes longer than most would have.
Then she picked up the two gold, reached into the warm tray, set a rare egg in Lumi’s free hand, and folded Lumi’s fingers over it with her own.
“Go on,” she said. “Before I come to my senses.”
Lumi went. At the frame, Llama’s arm came off her, and he dropped in behind, out of pure habit, though nothing in that market wanted a thing from them.
I went through first.
The kitchen came back gold, and smelling of everything the day had put into it. The door clicked shut over the cut egg. The brown coat was gone, the grey wool was gone, and Lumi stood in her own robes with the burn still down one sleeve, holding a single egg in both hands as if it might change its mind.
The wood rack was down to a few splits. The middle oven had banked to a deep, patient red.
“Majesty.” She held it out on both palms. “Appraise the just-an-egg.”
I lifted the scepter, and the socket at its head drank the light.
[Attention! Appraisal.]
[Egg] Type: 3-RareQuality: 61%
“Sixty-one,” I said.
Lumi set the egg down in a copper bowl on a fold of cloth, gently, so it couldn’t roll.
“And the total?”
“Sixty-six.”
Her mouth went flat. “Down.”
“Down. And still over the fifty we need by a mile, and the reward line’s seventy-five, and it was always going to be whatever’s behind the sixth door that carried us there or didn’t—not this.” I looked at the egg in its nest. “You bought a three-gold egg for two. Take it.”
Llama was already at the wall, at the door with the comb cut over it, the little one, dripping. He put the back of his hand near the oven as he passed and judged the heat and said nothing about it.
“Honey,” he said.
“‘A comb, uncrushed,’” Lumi read off the great page, and looked at the dripping comb over the door, and then at her hands, whole, put back twice now. “Uncrushed. Which means bees.”
“Bees,” I agreed.
“I liked it better when it was just an egg,” she said, and went for the pail. I put my palm to the comb door and opened it without a word.
The world came up green and enormous and too warm.
A valley, steep on both sides, and one tree in the middle of it with no business being a tree. It went up past where I could follow it. Wider at the base than my throne room. The bark scarred silver in long vertical tracks, from root to well over a bear’s standing reach, and higher than that too.
Two-thirds up were the hollow: a split in the trunk wide as a gate, and honey coming out of it. It was running, a slow gold sheet down the bark, comb stacked in the dark of the split like plates in a rack, and the whole tree humming with ten thousand bees or a hundred thousand, working.
At the foot of it, in the roots, bones. Big ones, cracked and gnawed, half-sunk in the leaf mould, and under the honey-smell another smell I placed a second too late.
[Attention!][Take a comb. Uncrushed.][The hollow you rob does not sleep alone. Be gone before the valley stands.]
Then the far mouth of the valley moved.
The whole green edge of it stood up at once and came forward, and the hum in the tree climbed a bit, and the bees started leaving, pouring out of the hollow in a dark rope and going, streaming down-valley and past us and gone, thousands of them abandoning the best thing they’d ever made.
They knew.
The dark line resolved as it came. Brown. Black. Shoulders. Hundreds of them, more, flooding up the valley floor at the tree and the honey and us, and the ground gave their weight back up through my feet, and I was made of nothing again.
Llama looked at it once.
“Comb. High as you can. Go.”
Lumi went to the tree.
She hit the trunk and climbed, knots and claw-steps and old dead branch-stubs, up in robes worth a duchy with her hands still remembering the sickle. She reached the first comb at twice her height and stopped.
It was right there. Dark old comb, packed and crystallized, a fistful she could tear loose in a breath and be down before the bears made the halfway rock. Dead brood in it. Wax gone brown. A few late bees crawling stupidly across it.
She looked up instead.
Higher, the comb went pale. Higher again, at the lip of the hollow where the new build ran clean, it went white and gold and capped and perfect; and twice as far, and the floor of the valley was filling with bears.
“Pick one,” Llama said from the roots, already setting his feet in the mould among the bones.
She climbed.
The first bears hit the tree.
[Friendly Bear Lv.30]
He met them low, shield off his back and into the nearest skull, and it went over sideways and took two behind it down the slope. He set the shield across the gap in the roots where the climb began and became the door to it, and they came, and he broke them, one, two, four, and there were a hundred.
He couldn’t break a hundred. Nobody could. We both knew this wasn’t a fight won by waiting.
Lumi reached the hollow.
The honey ran up her sleeves and over the backs of her hands and she got a knee into the split and her shoulder to the white comb and cut, slow, both hands on the blade, along the seam where the comb met the living wood. The length of her arm. Dripping. Whole.
Below her the mound had reached the first branches. A bear was climbing. Then three.
“NOW.” Llama’s voice, and something under it I had not heard before, because he’d felt the trunk take weight that wasn’t hers and he could not leave the roots to answer it.
She pulled the last of the comb free. The final centimeter tore instead of cut; she was out of time and she ripped it, and one corner crushed against the bark and wept, and the rest came away perfect gold across both her arms.
She came down faster than she went up, half a fall, comb put to her chest with one arm, and she kicked a climbing bear off the trunk with heels and a single white thread that cracked and dropped it into the mound. She hit the roots beside him.
The door hung ten meters back across open ground gone brown with bears.
“Move,” she said.
He didn’t move. Bears on three sides of him, the mound cresting the roots, his feet set and his shield up and every line of him locked against the backward step.
She got both hands in the shield-strap.
“We have it. Move—”
He didn’t move.
She put a boot on a root and her whole weight into the strap and hauled the largest immovable thing I have ever met off the ground it had chosen. One step. The second he took himself. Then he turned, and they ran.
They ran ten meters through closing bears, Lumi with the comb, Llama half a step back and to the side, turning once to take on the shield a swipe that would have opened her spine, and the valley came in behind them like surf up a beach.
I went through first.
Lumi came through with the comb. Llama came through with claws still shrieking down the face of the shield, and he dragged the door shut on all of it, and it was a wall.
Gold light. Bread-smell. The hum gone.
Lumi stood in her own robes with the comb in both arms and her sleeves black with honey to the elbow, breathing like she’d run up a mountain, which near enough she had.
“Majesty.” She could barely get it out. “Appraise it. Tell me it was worth it.”
I lifted the scepter.
[Attention! Appraisal.]
[Honeycomb]Type: 7-LegendaryQuality: 90%Note: one cell crushed in the taking.
“Ninety,” I said.
Lumi set it down on the cloth by the snowflake mold, both arms shaking now they were empty, and looked at the crushed corner for a second, and said nothing about it.
“Ninety,” she said. “Tell me ninety helps.”
“Ninety helps Seventy point eight, over five. The fifty was never in question, we cleared that at the wheat. The reward’s at seventy-five.” I looked at the last door, the one with nothing cut over it, and the blank line in the book under the honey. “For that, the sixth has to come in at ninety-six.”
Lumi followed my eyes to the door with no symbol.
“And we’ve no idea what’s behind it,” she said.
“None.”
Llama set the shield down on the worktable. Four gouges in the face of it, bright and deep, a bear’s whole weight dragged the length of the finest guard in the kingdom. He looked at it for a moment. Then he looked at the wood rack.
I looked too.
Four splits left. Maybe five.
The middle oven had banked to a low, patient red, and it had been eating that rack all day, and there was one ingredient still to gather and a cake still to bake after it, and four splits of wood in the whole warm room.
“Fire’s low,” Llama said.
“I know,” I said.
He fed it two of the four because it needed them now, and we all watched the rack get shorter.
Lumi wiped the honey off her hands as best she could and looked at the last door. “Six,” she said. She was still up on the honey. “Last one. Whatever’s back there, it can’t be worse than a hundred bears at level thirty.”
She put her hand to the latch and opened it.
A wall.
Grey stone, flat and seamless, the same stone as the kitchen, filling the frame floor to ceiling with not a finger’s gap between the wood and the rock.
Llama put his palm flat on it and pushed. Nothing happened, it was a wall.
“...huh,” Lumi said.
I came round to the book because the sixth line had started to write itself.
It bled up out of the cream page one stroke at a time, in the same later, aggrieved hand as the note on the title page, and the three of us stood and watched it arrive.
VI. Love.
And under it, smaller:
You don’t fetch this one.
Then the dark spoke. “Five, you could carry.” It was almost gentle. “You cut the first, and milked the second, and dug the third, and bought the fourth, and robbed the fifth, and every one of them went in a bucket. The sixth does not go in a bucket.”
“Then how do we—” Lumi started.
“You bake it in.”
The fire cracked behind me.
“An All-Around Booster Cake gives its blessing in proportion to one thing, and it was never the flour. The blessing is the love in the making, or there is no blessing, and you know by now there is no third outcome.” Something in it warmed, and I wanted to put a wall of ice down its throat. “She will appraise it. She always knows. She will taste to the percent how much you meant it.”
Lumi’s hands had gone still at her sides.
“At my door,” the voice went on, “I asked you both a question. The shield said she was worth it, and would not be moved off it, and said no more. Good. That will bake. And you, Lady Luminaria. I asked why you serve her, and you handed me a banner. Something worth having. Useful to it. Flawless.”
Lumi did not move.
“So find the other answer,” the voice said. “The true one. The one you didn’t give me because there were people listening. You have until the fire dies to find it and put it in the bowl. She is standing right there. She has stood there all day, watching the two of you bleed for her, and forbidden to lift a finger to help. Look at her, and tell me what she is to you. Enough to sweeten a cake for a god?”
The fire popped. The rack was down to three splits, the middle oven glowing its low, patient red, and the last door stood open on a wall of dead stone.
Lumi turned around, honey drying black to her elbows, and looked at me.
Llama looked at her.
And I stood in the one spot the temple allowed me. “Guys, just do your best.”