Page 63 of Forged in Fading

“So, both of your parents are still alive?” Alvara asked as a small flake floated down and landed on the tip of her nose, only to melt seconds later.

“Not all of us have giant wounds we can build our personalities around.” Kat bumped shoulders with her. “Some of us are pretty normal.”

Alvara leaned her head to the side. “Normal?”

“Oh, fine. Not normal, but I’m fun to be around, and that counts for something.” Kat hopped to her feet and offered Alvara a hand. “Be kind to yourself, Alvara. Dinner tomorrow? I heard Isathir is making fresh rolls in the morning.”

She huffed a short laugh as Kat tugged her to her feet. “See you then.”

Alvara arrived at her room that night to find a small item at the foot of the door. It was too dark to make out whatever it was, so she brought it inside to hold it in front of the candlelight: a small statue of a house with Dalvian patterns curving around the entryway, including a terrible rendering of an ice bear, every detail too perfect to not have been created with magic.

Her eyes stung. In the palm of her hand sat her youngling home, fashioned out of stone.

Chapter Twenty-Three

“Pyry?” Alvara stood in one of the city’s other forges the next morning, trying not to drown in memories as she watched him work.

His hammer paused mid-swing. Sweat glistened on his brow, another reminder of the unusual passion they had always shared for this blistering craft that went so strongly against the frigid nature of their Dalvian magic.

He had been waiting too, she knew. For news of their home, their people. She wished she had better news to share, and that she wasn’t the one who had to do it.

“Vorianta is…” She didn’t know how to say it, let alone to Pyry, who she had been shamefully avoiding.

“I know. I heard.” His hammer slammed into the hot metal on the anvil.

“I don’t have news about Jalomir.” Or anyone in Vorianta, for that matter. “But it means war is coming to Ilmanir.”

Another clang of his hammer. “Vorianta, gone. And now, war.”

That about summed it up. “I’ve been avoiding you⁠—”

Pyry looked up from his work and quirked an eyebrow.

“I guess that was fairly obvious,” she muttered. “But Vorianta is home. I’ll talk to you, at least about that. If you need it.”

He set his tool on the anvil, his head hung low. “Do you think we’ll ever go back?”

The thought alone formed a lump in her throat she couldn’t swallow past. “I hope so. Even if we can’t, it will always be home.”

Pyry looked up at her, long enough for Alvara to wonder if that was his way of asking her to leave. When he did speak, his voice was faint. Mellower like the old Pyry, before life toughened him into something she had hardly come to recognize.

“The dagger from Jalomir.”

She stiffened.

“The dagger—it wasn’t why I agreed to travel with you.” Each of his words was slower than the last, as if he wasn’t sure he should even continue.

Alvara’s mouth ran dry. “I find that hard to believe.”

He pulled the dagger from his hip and held it in front of him. “I wanted to go, see you. Make sure you would be safe. But I didn’t think you’d want my company, after…” After he had left her years ago. “Jalomir didn’t want you to go alone. He offered to craft a weapon to make up for my time, and I…it gave me an excuse to agree. I could convince myself it was a business transaction.”

She took a small step back, her chest tight. There were so many things she expected him to say, but that was not one of them. “You hardly seemed like you wanted to be there. You barely spoke to me⁠—”

“Seeing you was…harder than I’d thought. After all that time, I didn’t know what to say, and it seemed better to keep to myself. And after the palace”—he shut his eyes for a breath—“it was all too much.” Pyry stretched the dagger farther toward her. “Take it.”

It was a small gesture and probably the closest she would ever come to hearing the actual words “I’m sorry” from his lips, but it was enough to keep one of the few remaining threads that tied them together from snapping. Alvara gently pushed the weapon back toward him. “Keep it. With everything happening in Ilmanir, you may need it sooner than you think.” She moved toward the door and paused. “I’ll see you around.”

As Alvara made her way to the training grounds for her meeting with Lilja, her conversation with Pyry swirled in her head, mingling with agonizing thoughts of Vorianta in a potent mixture that left her ready for a distraction. Hopefully teaching Boden’s sister in the way of the sword would wash it all away, at least for an hour or two.