An enquiry into the changing craft of shipwrighting in the cycles after the Blood Plague and mastering the Red Sea.
Hardly the most riveting read, but I’d already bled his collection dry of the juicier texts. However dull it seemed to me, I imagined the other laurels longed for something as merciful as boredom. My stomach drew tight, muscles knotting uncomfortably.
I peeked over the book to examine the druid. The scratch of a quill faded to nothing as his helm lifted then dipped to where I fondled the pages.
“You must wait a little while longer, Seamstress.” I paused my fiddling, eyes narrowing on his veil, Demetri’s words seeming to echo around us.
He couldn’t know, could he? A coincidence.
“I’m not so sure as to what it is I’m waiting for,” I admitted, calming my heart. Futile, since he’d scent my panic anyhow. I almost asked him what it tasted like, then thought better of it.
“Patience is a virtue, and we must be patient. I cannot act until it has been decreed.”
Decreed.I wobbled my head, miming the word.
“Oh pray, Druid Vetrius. What decree is it we await? One from the Blood God or from men?” I slammed the book shut, tossing it aside.
“Both.” He ground out the word, an ache in every letter, before returning to his quill.
“I worry for them,” I admitted, picking a loose thread on my sleeve, wishing it was a button. “I just feel so useless, trapped here, doing nothing. Whilst he…whilst they undoubtedly suffer.” He paused his writing. “You needn’t tell me; I know without testing the beat of your heart. You think I assume altruism after all that I’ve seen? For whatever reason you’ve deemed fit, this is a pocket of kindness amongst a swathe of cruelty. If there is no hope for me, for them, then better to end it. What happened to butchers and mercy?” I blinked back tears, watching the sun creep higher over Dendra from his small window.
If we fly, we fly together. Or plummet…
After a few breaths, he returned to the parchment. “Demmerick’s fate need not be your own.”
“Demetri.”
“Devri,” he affirmed with a confident nod.
“I’ve told you before, he’d hate that,” I sniffed, reaching for the abandoned book. I wetted a finger and separated the first page from the rest, feigning to read whilst I inwardly mapped the parts of the templum I’d come to know.Three turnpikes, two lefts, a walkway and an arch, right door, another turnpike…
“Hate what?” The scrawl of his quill halted, interrupting my silent list. I kept my eyes on the page, not bothering to respond.
“This laurel, Devrick…” he continued anyway. “Do you love him, Ashara?”
The words before me bled into a blur as my heart skipped a beat, spluttering back into rhythm once I remembered to breathe. “What right do you have to ask me something like that?” My eyes flicked back to his helm, the incandescence inthem unnecessary. I knew he could smell it. “That is none of your—”
“Do you love him, Ashara?” he repeated, talking over me as if he already knew the answer, but just needed me to say it. Whatever response I’d give, he’d know if it was a truth or a lie—though, I realised, perhaps it was I who wouldn’t recognise the difference.
“You put it to me so simply, but the answer is complicated.” I snapped the book shut.
A snort. “Complicated? That and love are one and the same. That is no reason not to give me your truth.”
“Druid or matchmaker? What do you know oflove?” My words were pinched, enough to make him flinch, if only slightly. Under the desk, his knee bounced.
I sighed. “We were in love, once…I think.” From the pit in my stomach, something grew roots. “But it’s been so long…”
“Eight cycles?” Of course he remembered.
His fingers drummed atop his desk, as fast as my heart. “If he is truly important to you, and alive before the decree, I shall try to spare him.”
I leant forward, book forgotten, resting the tips of my fingers upon the rug. The one stained with Osric’s blood.
“What decree?” I whispered, hope blooming. He rarely spoke of the group he conspired with, the so-called opposers of the Dendralis that he currently served. Whenever I asked, I was met with either silence or riddles. I inched closer, prowling like a cat, ready to feed on whatever he might give me, longing for it to be enough to keep the hope that had begun to unfurl from being cut away.
“Is that what you want?” he asked, angling forward in his chair, hands splayed on the desk. “Is that your demand? That he live? That if, or when, the decree is ordered, you’d put good men’s lives at risk for the sake of his?”
“Help is coming?” I stopped short of his desk, peering up over its ledge, skirts tucked under my knees.
