Creusus's Arc

Chapter 29 of 43

Creusus was three strides past the tavern door when he heard boots slap the mud behind him. He turned. Thane, the survivor mage from the Lorimar spire, stood in the lane with his blue coat half-buttoned and a satchel on one shoulder. His hair was still wet from where he had splashed his face. "I am not going south," Thane said. Creusus watched him. "I told you to ride to Sir Syble." "You did." Thane's mouth worked. "I taught those children fire tricks. I could not save one of them. If I ride south I will spend the rest of my life hearing them ask why." He held up his hands. Thin, ink-stained, shaking. "I do gravity. I do time. Let me come." Creusus did not want him. A grief-sick boy in a coat with gold thread would slow him down and die on the road. He said none of that. He turned and walked. Thane followed. They climbed out of the log-built town before full dark. Pine smoke thinned. The road narrowed into a game trail. Neither spoke for an hour. Creusus led the horse. Thane walked behind, breath loud on the grade. "Who did you lose?" Thane asked once. "A woman in a garden," Creusus said. He did not look back. "You?" "Everyone I knew by name." They did not speak again until the rain started. Creusus found a cave mouth in a rock face above the trail. Low, dry, smelling of fox. He walked the horse in and set his pack against the wall. Outside, the rain came harder. Then he heard a branch snap that was not a branch. Something heavy moved in the trees below. He stepped out. A boulder sat in the scree twenty paces off, chest-high, mossed on one side. Creusus set his shoulder to it and rolled it up the slope. He fit it against the cave mouth. Light died. The horse shifted. "That will not stop what is coming," Thane said in the dark. "It will slow it." In the morning Creusus put his palm on the stone and pushed. The stone did not move. He unwrapped one hand. The black cloth beneath his knuckles warmed. He set that hand flat on the boulder and drove his weight through it. The stone cracked from the point of contact outward in a white web and fell apart in three pieces. Thane stared. "Show me your hand." Creusus showed him. Thane exhaled slow. He raised his own hand and turned it palm up. A pebble on the cave floor lifted, hung, then pressed into the ceiling and stuck there. He lowered his hand. The pebble stayed. "Gravity," Thane said. "I can pin him. If you can hit him, I can hold him still." Creusus looked at the shattered stone at his feet. Then at the boy who had refused to go south. "Then we walk together," he said.