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I trailed after him, catching up at the base of a spiral staircase made of glass. Counting all the way, trying my best not to look down as we climbed the twenty-eight steps. I held my breath until I was sure we had reached a more solid and less transparent footing.
We arrived at the threshold of a rather cozy-looking loft. Some type of study, I gathered, as I looked closer at the leaves of paper tacked into a flurry on all three walls. Even more collected dust on the large ash-wood bureau in the corner. There were map sketches and stacks upon stacks of intensely scribbled on pages making miniature monoliths in the corners. The small space was overwhelmed, some of the work spilling out onto the floor. I stared at the curved writings for less than a second and already my head began to throb.
“What is all of this?” I asked, as Kalen freed himself of our breakfast. I ran a hand along the sanded wood of the desk. My nails scratched against small stars and circles carved out into its panels, collecting thin powdery dust atop the pads of my fingers.
“Being Preserver isn’t all heroic brawls and show-stopping magic, you know,” Kalen said as he crossed the room to a shelf of books, filtering through them until he landed on a small novella. “Sometimes you have to fill out paperwork and run theaccounts.”
He tossed the book right into my hands. The binding was smooth red velvet with tapered edges. Some of the pages were tabbed while others were beginning to wilt and blacken from dozens if not hundreds of turns. Whoever had used this, used it well. At the back of the book, underneath my middle and ring fingers, I felt the soft indent of a branding. I sought it out immediately. I could make out these letters.
“A.H.” I whispered, thumbing the weathered groove where they were embossed. Turning the text back over to the title page, I glanced at the string of shapes and then looked helplessly at Kalen.
“A Soul Without Tether,” he said with a grin.
“Ha-ha.” I groused flatly. He just shrugged, clearly finding himself to be hilarious.
“It’s an easy read,” he said simply.
I looked up at him, immediately confused.
“I’ve been trying...” Kalen began, but stopped to seemingly search for the rigth words. “There are some things that you have forgotten. That once were important to you.”
I blinked.
“I put these outside of your door in Leoth.”
The books. My cheeks flamed. I thought back to that miserable night, when I had stumbled on that stack of antiquarian-looking texts outside my bedroom door, finally understanding just how much I’d underestimated him. I thought Kalen had taken my negligence to read them as a subtle jab after our fight, but I should have known he was smarter than that. I looked down at the thin novel in my hands, then back up at Kalen.
“These used to be important to me?”
“Very,” he said, breathily. Kalen inched towards me to put his hands over mine, and we held onto the book together. “I thought, maybe if you skimmed these, it might triggersomething. Something we could use to find your next stone.”
Kalen’s eyes looked from mine to our hands, and his forefinger swiped feather-light across my knuckles. “Don’t worry,” his voice was full of mischief. “They’re poems, and a few of them are snippy enough to even give you a sense of humor.”
I was the first to step away, nearly yanking my hands and the book from his grasp. “And just what strenuous work of the mind will you be doing for the next few hours, oh Beloved and Faithful Preserver?” I ignored the flicker of darkness in his eyes as I called him by his title. Just as I ignored the tightening in my stomach.
“The important kind,” he answered. “Now sit down and get started.”
“Yes, sir.”
Kalen looked at me sharply. Why I said that I didn’t know. Just that I liked to see him lose that steady composure he always kept centered on his face. To know that I wasn’t the only one affected by a passing look, a touch, or half-meant words. To be sure I could look to the frays of his expression and see a tremor in his jaw or a bob of his throat. Those hardline edges that always seemed fixed, but loosened just for me.
I looked for them, now, only to find that Kalen had schooled himself, grabbed a stack of letters, and sat down in the bureau’s matching seat, leaving the chaise by the window for me. A sigh fell from my lungs as I sank into the cushions. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the ghost of his smile.Mark for mark, I thought and turned the first page.
We stayed in theoffice for hours that first day, Kalen making notes in the margins of his books and me staring dumbly at mine. In between lazy cat stretches and pecks at the breakfasttray, we bickered whenever one of us spoke. In truth, he mostly bickered at me.
The task Kalen had give me was fruitless. My memories weren’t the only thing that escaped me as I read. Every five lines, the bird’s scratch in my book would become an endless river of ink that meant nothing. I had tried to hide it, on that first day, when Kalen was explaining the Binding to me. He’d told me I was holding onto a book and I vaguely understood its importance, but the words were illegible blobs of dried ink. I had only begun to see the shapes and recognize the letters after my first stone, but every time I attempted to make sense of them, my head pounded. A blistering pang of blankness splintering out from the crown of my head to the small crevices behind my ears.My mind refused to wade through the text, let alone allow it to trigger some important revelaton.
I shoved my face into the too-stuffed cushions and let out a wretched groan. There wasn’t a stone I wouldn’t give to be back in my grove, threading lilies until my fingers bled. Anything was better than this very specific kind of torture. As my mouth opened to emit the twelfth wail of the afternoon, Kalen finally raised his head from his work, exasperated.
“Could you be any more insufferable?” he barked.
“I can’t be sure. Do you have any more dull poems? We could try and find out.”
“How can you call them dull when you aren’t even reading them?” He bit back swiftly, no longer empathetic to my plight, it seemed.
“The same way I don’t have to listen to your endless scribbling, to call you impatient,” I looked at him sideways over the ledge of my book, “and quite useless with an abacus.”
For the last half hour, Kalen had scraped the little metal beads of the counting device back and forth along the rods of its wooden frame, failing in his attempts to balance the ledgers ofLeoth’s war budget.
