unnecessarya waste of energy.
After about a half hour, she was finished filling the sack, her knees were soaked through, and her hands were numb and icy cold, covered with tiny scrapes from the sharp edges of the grass. Duvan’s fire didn’t seem so wasteful anymore.
Slanya stood up and brushed dirt and dry grass from her legs. She felt centered and focused for the first time since they’d entered the Plaguewrought Land. And famished.
“Come and eat something,” Duvan said.
“Thank you,” she said, walking over to the fire. She warmed her hands, relishing the tingle as the flames nudged away the chill from her fingers and palms. When they were sufficiently warmed, Slanya helped herself to the dried rations and fruit they’d brought and sat down on the ground across the small blaze from to Duvan. “I think we have enough plaguegrass.”
Duvan nodded. He swallowed his bite, then said, “Good. Unfortunately, I don’t see how we can get off this rock any time soon. Perhaps you should’ve hired a wizard instead of me.”
Laughing, Slanya said, “No, I can see now that you were the clear choice. Despite your inability to magic us back.”
“Well,” he said, his dark eyes soft in the firelight, “we could be stuck on this mote for a long time.”
Sitting there talking to him, the fire a warm glow next to them, Slanya felt herself relax. The searing screech of the heavens and the earth below faded to background, and all that mattered was the here and now. Her mind could contain this moment and make sense of it.
“Do you always assume the worst will happen?” Slanya asked.
Duvan smiled. “Yes, I suppose I do. In my experience the worst is more likely to happen than the best, and it’s far better to be prepared for the worst.”
So cynical, she thought. But there was practicality in that way of thinking.
“For me, being stuck doing nothing is worse than death,” he said.
“There’s not much we can do right now.”
“True, but if we’re stuck up here for hours or days…” Duvan let the idea linger in the air.
There were scars on this man’s soul, Slanya could see that in sharp relief now. But what had happened to him? He kept his past bottled up inside. How could he have turned out so bitter and jaded?
“The clerics and monks of my order sometimes spend tend ays doing nothing more than meditation and training,” she said. “Learning how to master oneself.”
“I’m no cleric.”
Slanya laughed. “Clearly,” she said. “But my point was that perhaps you could learn something from me just as I have learned from you.”
“As far as I can tell, 1 have taught you nothing.”
“Well, you many not think so,” Slanya said, “but your calm has helped me cope with the randomness of the changelands. While you may be a tempest in the city, you’re like a rock in this stormy sea. Just being in here has helped me understand more about chaosand fear it far morethan I ever have.”
Duvan looked her, the lines of his face bunched in puzzlement. His eyes reflected the fire as the sky continued to darken overhead.
“I am intensely uncomfortable with so much chaos,” Slanya continued. “But with your guidance, I have been able to stay sane in the midst of it. I consider that a gift.”
Duvan seemed to absorb her words, but his face was impassive. His blank expression was neither questioning nor dismissive, as though he merely accepted what she had said, but had no opinion of it. At least not yet.
Slanya stared at this enigmatic man, his strong, dark features limned in the orange glow of the fire. She wanted to heal him if she could, help him heal himself.
“All right,” he said. “Although it feels like a stretch to me. Now, what would you teach me?”
Slanya smiled. “Simple things at firstbreathing and meditation. But with those will come mind balance and perhaps the discipline to confront your demons. The ultimate goal is peace with yourself.”
Duvan frowned. “From where I stand, I don’t see the benefit of inner peace.”
She laughed. “Well, it’s liberating. Healing your scars and wounds will help you resolve your past. You are a remarkable person, Duvan, capable of so much. But you are held back by… I’m not sure whatguilt or regret, perhaps? Discipline can emancipate you from that, by resolving issues instead of burying them.”
Duvan’s eyes narrowed. “And why do you care so much?”
It was an appropriate question and one that had already occurred to Slanya. “Balance,” she said. “Because you’ve helped me.”
Duvan seemed to accept that, nodding.
Looking across the fire, its temptation dulled at the moment, Slanya watched Duvan’s dark shape. He was gazing into the glowing orange coals, his expression melancholy.
And of course he had saved her life. She had trusted him, and he had lived up to that trust. He had proved himself worthy. That too was a gift.
“What happened to make you so cynical?” she said.
Duvan remained quiet, but his expression in the firelight grew soft, pensive. And beneath, Slanya thought she detected some vulnerability, which was immediately endearing.
“By telling someone,” she said, “by sharing your story with another soul who will not judge you but will simply listen and validate what has happened to you… by doing that you take the first step to resolving it.”
“It can’t be resolved away,” Duvan said.
Slanya nodded, but she wasn’t ready to back down just yet. “Maybe not, but talking about it can let someone else share the burden.” She stared directly into his eyes.
He held her gaze for a moment then shook his head. “I can’t lose it,” he said. “And you don’t want to share this burden. You have no idea what you’re asking.”
“Lose it?”
“This cannot be washed away,” he said. “Like you’ve done with your past.”
Slanya bristled at that. “I have not washed away anything,” she said, then admitted, “Although it is possible that my memory of what happened isn’t accurate. But then yours might not be either.”
Duvan snorted. “And how would you know?”
“Exactly,” Slanya said. “It’s what we remember and the lessons we draw from those memories that are important.”
“No disagreement there,” he said.
She thought back to the fire in her aunt’s house. There was more to the story than what she had revealed to Duvan, but even beyond that, some of her recollection of it was fuzzy, the details indistinct. That bothered her.
“To be honest,” she said, “I don’t remember everything about the night of the fireabout my Aunt Ewesia’s death.”
Duvan’s dark eyes glimmered in the firelight. “I sometimes wish I didn’t remember, but I can’t help it.”
Slanya shivered and moved a little closer to the fire. “What happened?”
“I don’t want talk about it,” he said.
“I will trust with you with my story,” she said, “if you trust me with yours.”
Duvan chuckled. “Convenient,” he said, “since you don’t even know your complete story.”
Slanya smiled. “I will try to remember what really happened, but in any case, I never claimed the deal was fair.”
Duvan’s dark, grinning face reflected firelight for a moment before growing somber. And then, against the backdrop of the approaching stormthe sound and the fury of which surpassed every other phenomenon of Slanya’s experiencehe surprised her when he began telling his story first.
“Until I was ten, I lived in a small farming village with my father and my sister, Talfani. My mother had died giving birth to us. I never knew her. Talfani and I were inseparable.”
Standing, Duvan brushed the dust from his leathers and walked around the fire. The sky had darkened to a midnight blue, laced with threads of vibrant purple and punctuated by occasional explosions of blue. He noticed that
