Notes: Third chapter coming your way, halfway through! Reviews really make my life, if you have a moment it'd be rad if you left one, and if you already have, thank you I love you!


Chapter III.

A Fire.


IX.

"—Oh, it does! It stretches a fair ways. I will only be a short while; sometimes these old caves have dragon runes in them, I just want to check."

Gunther gave no answer. He was trying to remember the dream Jane had only halfway woken him from. It hadn't been a nightmare, but nothing good either. Muddied thoughts and images swirled sleepily around him. His bedroll was much more comfortable than his horse, who was snuffling at the moss against the cave walls, and the stone ground beneath was luckily only the slightest bit damp.

There had been stone around him in the dream, he was sure — but that meant little. There was always stone in his dreams. (How much longer they would have had if the warehouse had been stone instead of wood.)

And Jane. Jane had been there.

(That was also far more commonplace than he'd like.)

And she'd been standing below him for once, across and below…

On a ledge. She was on a ledge, and he's on a cliff facing her. He's fourteen all over again, with her trapped across the gaping chasm of a sheer drop, the stone unsteady and traced with faint patterns, break lines just waiting to give.

Go, she says.

There isn't time. They've stretched their arms as far as they will stretch, reached for each other as much as they can reach. She isn't getting over to this side. That much is clear.

He shakes his head. Somehow he knows the rock beneath him is steady still, even as he sits on the edge and dangles his sword belt for her to grab.

She doesn't even look at it. She's staring up at him. She isn't twelve, but she isn't seventeen either. He knows her face so well it doesn't matter that this is a Jane who exists outside time.

Take it, he growls, shaking the damn belt, swinging it closer to her.

I wish you were not the one here, she says instead.

The bitterness floods heavy and familiar through him. I am doing everything I can, he snarls. Tell me who could do more. We cannot all have wings, Jane—

She grimaces. Or maybe it's a smile; he's never seen her face quite like that, like her mouth and her eyes are having two different conversations. Her voice sounds as if it's coming from much closer than across a chasm. Are you dense on purpose?

He only stares.

Go, she says again. You have watched enough people die.

The stone cracks, peeling away in jagged sheets from beneath her, and he hears a loud clunk, and then her swearing.

"Nothing interesting, hang it all. But now I have a lovely bruise on my toe to remember this journey by. Oh — sorry, I should have been quieter. I did not realize you were sleeping."

Jane's horse whickered next to his ear. He frowned up at the rock above, the dream crumbling fast, already barely more than dust. "Well. Not anymore."

X.

It was cold the winter Jane was gone (though Gunther would not admit, even to himself, that it seemed colder somehow without her), and the warehouse office was small and dingy. Some evenings and Sundays, when the ledgers and shipment logs needed looking over, his father would send him instead. Before, Gunther used to sit there resigned, feeling wretched and chilly. It was a horrid windowless space, silent, candlelight catching on dust motes.

But it was silent no longer.

If no one was unloading, Gunther started with a gentle hum — very nearly casual, as if he didn't even notice he was doing it. And after the first couple notes dissipated, the whistling followed.

The first time Gunther heard it, he froze. The notes came soft and pure through the boxes, tiny and clear despite the musty dark building. For a minute he could only sit there listening, wondering at how the sound hung so delicately in the dry air.

Gunther couldn't help a grin when he realized what it was. The boy could whistle like a damned nightingale.

Soon enough he was repeating back anything Gunther hummed, and finishing whatever he started, even if it was some silly ditty Gunther had just come up with. He could imitate any bird, knew the popular ballads better than Jester did — and it wasn't a broken promise, was it, which Gunther liked perhaps best of all; he still couldn't see a single sign of the boy anywhere.

And where was the harm in it, if it made it so easy to scratch through the numbers? The minutes soared by. And if Gunther accidentally left behind the warm supper he'd brought himself, or some small coin fell from the desk and he couldn't be bothered to pick it up, where was the harm in that?

XI.

"I can make the fire."

Gunther reared back. Jane had stuck her hand out almost directly into his face (which, to be fair, was very close to the flint in his fingers), and he frowned up at her, a little insulted.

"No," he said. It seemed the easiest thing to say.

"I could use the practice," she said, her staunch cheer not dampened by his attitude. It had been almost two days now since they had left the castle for Loefbury, and she continually and without fail returned to good spirits no matter what he said. At this point it had to be intentional. "Dragon lit all our fires when we were away, I have not done it in ages."

He glared at her. "Practice. At starting a fire."

She nodded, looking a bit chastened but still unwilling to drop the act.

"And who has lit your fire since you have been home? Dragon passes a freshly charred torch through your window, does he?"

Her smile soured as surely as if there were a bad smell about. "It is too warm for room fires."

"And too bright for candles?"

She scowled at him.

He almost smiled at that, but hid it in his sleeve, scraping a spark into the tinder. "I think I can handle lighting a simple campfire, Jane."

"Of course," she said, after a beat. "Well." She sat and watched him finish. "If you ever tire of it, I do not mind."

Tire of it. She said things so carefully now. (What did she think he saw in the flames anyways? What did she want him to see? Oh yes Jane, how his inner demons writhed within every coal and ember, how every merry pop and crackle made his soft heart ache…)

His gaze flicked back up to her. He wanted to be angry, partially because he sort of was, and partially because it felt as if he had the right to be, but that melancholy look had returned to her brow and he found himself unable to say anything sharp. Instead he watched as she stretched out a hare they had caught earlier and began, with absentminded focus, to skin it.

"Do you think you and Dragon will travel again soon?"

Her head shot up. She was abruptly strangling the knife in her fist. "What?"

Gunther felt his eyes narrow. He didn't repeat himself, just stuck a thicker branch into the tiny fire.

"Travel. Hm," Jane answered, or rather, didn't answer. "Huh." She was making a face at the slip of bloody fur and the carcass that had looked like a rabbit only moments before.

"You liked it, right."

It wasn't a question, because he knew she had.

(How could he be so glad she was home and so ready for her to leave again? If it was anyone else, he wouldn't have bothered with conversation and just sat with the horses instead.)

"Yes," she started, then paused a little too long. "It was wonderful. But I thought—" she stopped again, threading a skewer through the thin animal. "That we would find something."

He didn't say he had known they wouldn't. He just looked back at the branches he was aimlessly shoving into the pit while she dug her skewer a small hole and pinned the hare at an angle over the flames. Then she pulled her knees up to her chest and leaned towards the fire. A summer breeze coasted over her hair, lifting a few pieces that had escaped from her braid, and she gave a slight shiver, setting her palms out towards the blaze. Gunther wasn't cold, but he moved closer as well.

"Or I suppose…" she began again. "I thought at least we would know something more."

She glanced at him for a half second, and he made the smallest noncommittal noise he could.

"Some hint. Anything. That somehow even though it turned out we were looking in the wrong places, we would know where to look next because of it." She paused. Reached out to the last branch he'd placed and tilted it into the base of the fire. "The world is a very large place."

It had been a hard last few months. He had lost, and Jane had looked and not found.

"You put too many in," she said, too soft to be a real reproach. She was rearranging the whole fire pit now, and far more thoughtfully than was necessary.

"Just wait," he answered. "They will catch."

She tucked her chin against her knees and continued to watch the flames, and he did the same.

XII.

Sir Theodore's had been the first face he recognized. There had been others he should have, people from the village, dockworkers he'd unloaded with, a sailor from his father's ship, but they reeled in his vision, alien and strange, as if ash were smeared over his irises, smoky patches waving over face and form until they were barely people at all, almost inhuman strangers, monsters who had seen the warehouse aflame and done nothing — had come only now to pick over the bones.

If I burn the town burns with me.

His grandfather had said that. He'd never been so organized or educated as Magnus, and his ledgers were almost diaries, numbers written in a way that Gunther had never been able to parse out into actual figures or transactions. The whole thing read almost as a list of exploits —accomplishments, Magnus would have said. The king-in-exile, King Caradoc's father, lived in the tunnels within the mountain cave, and Corrin Breech sold him and the usurping king-in-crown supplies from the same ship and the same cart, proud to have all the morals of a freshly hatched maggot, proud to be the only one with gold flowing between his fingers.

They had appealed to him to charge less. Then begged. Then threatened.

Corrin Breech had laughed. If I burn the king burns with me.

Then Sir Theodore had lead the king-in-exile from the tunnels, and the king-in-crown found himself without a head to wear his stolen crown upon. Sir Theodore became a hero, and Corrin Breech became the richest man in the kingdom, untouchable, the golden base upon which the castle was rebuilt.

Sir Theodore's hands squeezed life back into Gunther's shoulders. He could feel his knees on the hard dirt, the boy clutched against his chest, the skinny arms tangled around his neck. The child had stopped coughing a while ago, and Gunther only realized because there was just one cough now, and it was Gunther's.

Sir Theodore poured water down his throat. His abraded lungs finally quieted enough for him to hear the old knight saying something, something he couldn't understand. He only saw the mouth moving and the sounds, arranged like words and indecipherable as such.

Eventually they realigned themselves. The mouth fit the sound fit his ears.

Let go, Theodore was saying. Gunther, you must let go.

Let go of what?

But Theodore was pulling gently at his arms, at the arms folded around him, and was saying something else, voice low, and clear, and yet impossible for Gunther to follow, for his dazed head and raw heart and unsteady eyes to do anything but hold the boy closer, palms against the small back, the shoulder-blades bony and thin as a bird's, Theodore's hands pulling his away, shaking his shoulders.

Theodore said it over and over until Gunther finally heard.

Already dead. Gunther. Let go.

Gunther let go.

Behind him, the village was pouring bucket after bucket on the remains of the warehouse, not monsters at all, or strangers even, their hands moving water in lines to the flames spreading towards the docks and the housing district. The tendrils collapsed into steam and smoke, and then the smoldering wood extinguished — finally only the frame of the building remained, jutting like a broken black ribcage into the sky, and it was over.

Magnus Breech burned alone.