Peony

The wood here burned wrong. It caught fast enough but the flames were the color of a bruise — dark at the center, greenish at the edges — and the heat it threw was thin, the kind that warmed the side of you facing it and left the other side colder for the contrast.

“The trees are getting it from the roots,” the mage said. She fed another branch into the fire and watched it go purple. “Another day and there won’t be anything left to burn.”

“We’ll be there by noon,” Davan said.

“I know.”

She had a way of saying “I know” that made it sound like she was forgiving him for telling her something she already knew. He’d noticed this on the second day. They were on the eleventh.

He set the pot on the flat stone they’d angled into the fire’s edge. Water for tea — the last of it. The canteen would have been enough for one person for two more days, but there were two of them, and he poured without measuring because there was no version of this where he’d need the water after tomorrow.

She was sitting cross-legged on her bedroll, turning something in her hands. A wooden disc, small enough to close her fist around. She’d been carrying it since he’d met her at the garrison. He didn’t know what it was. It wasn’t magical — he’d have felt that. It was just a thing she carried, smoothed by handling, and when she wasn’t talking or walking or working she turned it in her fingers like a stone in a creek bed.

“Teach you something?” she said.

“You’ve been teaching me something every night for eleven nights.”

“And you’ve been a terrible student every night for eleven nights. But you learned the fire charm.”

“The fire charm is a word and a hand motion.”

“Most magic is a word and a hand motion. The rest is believing the fire cares what you said to it.”

He didn’t smile, but his face did something near it. She’d gotten better at reading him — or he’d gotten worse at closing. Both, probably.

She held up her hand, palm down, and said a word he didn’t catch.

“Again,” he said.

“Teth.” She said it from the back of her throat, almost a cough. “It’s a mending word. You say it over a thing that’s torn — cloth, leather, a cracked bowl, a split seam in a boot. Not metal. Not bone. Nothing alive. Just the dead material that used to be whole and isn’t.”

“And it fixes it?”

“It remembers. The cloth remembers being whole. The word just asks it.” She pointed at his sleeve, where a branch had torn the fabric three days ago. “Try it. Put your hand over the tear. Say the word.”

He put his hand over the tear. The fabric was stiff with dirt and dried sweat. He said the word.

Nothing happened.

“You said it like you were ordering a drink,” she said. “Say it like you’re reminding someone of something they already know.”

He said it again.

The fabric moved under his fingers. A twitch, like a muscle. When he lifted his hand the tear was closed — not patched, not sewn. Closed, the fibers knit back into each other as though the branch had never caught.

“Good,” she said.

“What else can you teach me in one night?”

The question landed between them. He heard it after he said it — the “one night” — and she heard it too, and for a moment neither of them did anything about it.

“Water purification is three words and takes a month to learn,” she said. “Wound-closing is a year. Fire you already have. Mending you just learned.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “That’s a decent inheritance.”

“Don’t call it that.”

“What should I call it?”

“I don’t know. Something else.”

She turned the wooden disc. The firelight caught it and he saw there was a pattern carved into one face — a circle inside a circle, or a wheel, or something that had been a wheel once and was now just grooves worn smooth.

“My daughter made this,” she said. “She was nine. It was supposed to be a flower.”

He looked at the disc. It was not, by any measure, a flower.

“She’s nineteen now,” the mage said. “She works in a mill in Carden. Last letter she sent, she said the flour gets in everything — her hair, her bed, the pages of her books. She said she’s started dreaming in white.”

The fire popped. A log shifted and the flames went briefly orange — real fire-colored — before settling back to purple.

“Does she know?” he said.

“She knows I’m traveling. She doesn’t know where.”

“Will someone tell her?”

“You will.”

He looked at her. She was watching the fire, not him, the disc still turning in her hand. The carved grooves caught shadow and released it with each rotation.

“There’s a letter in my pack,” she said. “The front says Lira Kael, Miller’s House, Carden. The back says nothing because I couldn’t decide what to put there. You don’t need to add anything. Just get it to a post rider heading south.”

“I’ll take it myself.”

“You don’t need to do that.”

“I know I don’t need to.”

She looked at him then. The fire between them threw no warmth worth mentioning. Her face was half-lit and the shadows made her look older, or made her look the age she actually was — he’d been fooled by the quickness, the humor, into thinking she was younger than the grey in her hair said.

“Davan,” she said. His name. She hadn’t used it much. “Don’t make it a thing.”

“I’m not making it a thing.”

“You’re sitting there deciding to ride three days south to hand-deliver a letter to a girl you’ve never met because you think it’ll make something right. That’s making it a thing.”

“Maybe I want to see Carden.”

“Nobody wants to see Carden.”

The water boiled. He poured it over the tea leaves — the last of those too — and handed her the cup. She took it with both hands. Her fingers were cold. He could see that from the way they wrapped the cup, pulling the heat in.

“What will you say to her?” she said.

“What do you want me to say?”

“That I went north. That the work was necessary. That the seal will hold.”

“Will it?”

She blew on the tea. Steam climbed past her face and vanished.

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“Long enough. A hundred years. Maybe more. Nothing’s permanent, but a hundred years of quiet is — it’s a lot of flour in a lot of books. A lot of white dreams.”

He poured his own tea. They drank. The fire ate its bruised wood and the dark around them was the particular dark of a landscape that was sick — not empty, not silent, but wrong, the way a room is wrong when something has died in the walls and you can’t find it.

She finished her tea and set the cup on the ground and held the wooden disc up between two fingers.

“This was her present for me. For my birthday. She carved it with a kitchen knife — took her a week, cut herself twice, told her father it was a school project. She was so proud. She held it out and said ‘It’s a peony.’”

“It’s not a peony.”

“It’s not anything. It’s a nine-year-old’s idea of what a flower looks like when you can’t draw and the knife is too big for your hand.” She turned it. “I’ve carried it for ten years. It’s the best thing anyone’s ever given me.”

“Bring it with you tomorrow.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because the seal takes everything. I go in whole. What’s on me goes with me.” She put the disc on the ground between them. “Give it to her with the letter.”

He looked at the disc on the ground. The circle inside a circle. The grooves that were supposed to be petals.

“She won’t remember making it,” he said.

“I know. But she’ll hold it, and her hand will know even if she doesn’t. The hand remembers.”

She said this the way she’d said the mending word — as though she was reminding something of what it already knew.

He picked up the disc and put it in his coat. It was warm from her hands.

“I’ll take first watch,” he said.

“You don’t need to.”

“I know.”

He sat with his back to a tree that was still mostly alive, his hand in his pocket where the disc was, and listened to her not sleeping on the other side of a fire that burned the wrong color.

In the morning they would walk the last miles and he would stop where the air started to taste of iron and she would keep going. The breach would close. The sky would go quiet. He would stand there until standing became pointless and then he would walk south with a letter and a wooden disc and a mending word, and somewhere in Carden a girl who dreamed in white would open her door to a stranger carrying the things her mother had left on the right side of the world.

But that was the morning. Now it was night, and the fire was purple, and she was still here.

Neither of them slept.