Page 44 of Sightwitch
He wanted me to stay. He wanted my company.
So when he strode onto the isle beside me and our gazes met for the second time, I did not look away.
Nor did he.
His eyes were green now, with the light to course into them, and his lips were parted, his chest still.
We stared and stared and stared.
The breeze twirled around us. The birds sang. The horse munched.
I cannot say how long we stayed that way. A man and a woman caught in a sunbeam. All I know is that eventually one of us moved and time resumed its forward beat.
Gone was the awkwardness after that. I had no trouble speaking nor holding his eyes nor enjoying every laugh and sideways smile I earned.
Hours we stayed together, until the sun overhead grew hot in its directness. Until I knew more about him than I’d ever dared ask before. How he was not amalej by choice, but that his tribe had been forcefully disbanded by the Exalted Ones. How the girls’ mother had passed away from a wasting disease. How he traveled far and wide, protecting the Rook King’s mountain people.
Only when we had to go our separate ways—he to return home, and me to check on Cora—did any of our earlier tension return. Though even that was changed now, our clumsy good-byes fueled by reluctance instead of nerves.
Or at least, so it was for me.
Goddess, I do not know how I will wait twenty-eight days for his next visit.
LATER
I found this in my workshop last night. Lisbet clearly left it for me before her Summoning, but I don’t know what to make of it.
Fissures in the ice
always follow the grain.
Unless something stops them,
something blocks them,
something forces them to change.
Then the fissures in the ice
will find new ways to travel.
There are no coincidences.
Except when there are.
5(?) hours to find Tanzi
On and on, Tanzi’s memory teased me. “Laugh, Ry!” she insisted while I searched the nearest floor for some kind of exit. “It’s funny, don’t you think?”
Then, as I moved upstairs, her voice sang in time to my steps on the winding, creaking wood.
Laugh. Ry. It’s. Fun. Ry. Don’t. You. Think.
I hit the upstairs, a wooden loft that spanned into a larger floor of stone. More shelves, more tables, more books and papers and gadgets.
Even the brief earthquake that shivered through the workshop, ending almost as quickly as it began, seemed to move in time to Tanzi’s mocking words.
“I don’t think it’s funny,” I muttered. “It’s not at funny at all …” I trailed off, my eyes landing on another door with an eye-level keyhole.
