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Kasia watches the young couple at the fountain in the square. The young woman is blushing, biting her lower lip against a smile as she shoots a glance at the young man under her lashes. The young man doesn’t notice, too busy looking at his hands or the young lady’s hands or the sky or the market stall across the way as he appears to stammer his way through some sort of question. When she slips her hand into his, the red in his cheeks matches that on hers.
Some things don’t change. The fashions are different—Kasia can only imagine what her mother would have said had she dared to wear a dress like that out of the house—but the people are the same. Young men and young women, and what they want from each other. And Kasia, watching. She could have been sixteen again, watching all the other children preen and peacock for each other, always on the outside looking in.
Well. She gives herself a shake and looks away. It has been a long time since she was that girl in the village square. King Stashek’s grandchildren are on the throne in Polya—or were they his great-grandchildren?—and Kasia has been in and out of so many towns and cities she hasn’t bothered to learn the name of this one.
She turns and wanders through the market, hardly noticing the glances and whispers that follow her. She knows how she looks, even in those regions where she hadn’t become something of a legend. The wandering golden queen, appearing unpredictably and disappearing again, never aging and with her beauty undimmed. Kasia stops at a stall half at random and trades a small coin for a hand pie, and the whispers mostly stop—no one is ever able to reconcile the legend in their head with a woman dripping gravy onto her shirtwaist. Kasia smiles to herself and thinks of Agnieszka’s constant stains and rumples. She learned long ago that real legends never look like you expect.
As if called by her thought, a small boy runs up to her with a folded paper in his hand. “Letter for you, miss?” he says, and snatches the coin she offers him with joy. She unfolds the letter, which is indeed from Agnieszka—not that anyone else writes to her, nor that anyone else’s letter would be delivered in such a way. Kasia hasn’t been back to the Wood in many, many years now, and Agnieszka has not left it in as long, but Kasia always writes Agnieszka, and Agnieszka’s letters always find their way to her, somehow. Sometimes it’s a street urchin who brings them to her, or a bird, or a gust of wind, or most frequently they just turn up, smudged and crumpled, somewhere they weren’t the last time Kasia looked there.
Kasia is no longer of the valley and Agnieszka is rooted as deep as can be, and it’s just as they always expected and not at all as they always expected.
Kasia enters the inn where she has paid for a room this night and reads her letter as she climbs the stairs. As usual the writing is cramped and smudged, mud or berry juice or sap dotting the words almost as punctuation, and as usual it is about the Dragon.
… the most infuriating, arrogant, short sighted man I have had the misfortune to talk to these 100 years and more. He never tries to see beyond the edge of that long nose he loves to look down, for he cares nothing for anyone who won’t submit to his absurd whims or who bothers to have their own opinions…
So they’ve parted ways again. Kasia opens the door to her room and drops the letter next to the small ewer on the bedside table. She takes a moment to dip her hands in it and wash the dust of the market from her face. The Dragon and Agnieszka’s relationship is a force of nature. They come together like the river and the sea, and they part like lightning. Sometimes literally—that time Kasia wrote quite sternly to Agnieszka, when the storms were relentless over the western sea all winter and too many in the fishing villages could not keep their children fed. The two wizards stayed apart for years after that, almost a decade. But they always seemed to find their way back to each other.
Kasia picks up the letter again.
… it’s been too long, my dear. Come back soon, won’t you, and tell me of all the new places you’ve been, how the world moves on outside my valley, and rest your feet in the Spindle again.
Ever your loving
Agnieszka
Kasia can’t help the shiver that runs down her spine. Agnieszka sends her waters from the Spindle occasionally, but not often, and never enough. Kasia has never quite gotten used to feeling thirsty.
But she puts the letter down, for now. Resisting the pull of the Spindle and the Wood has come to be something Kasia almost enjoys for its own sake. It’s a feeling of not being home, she supposes—a reminder that wherever she came from, whatever made her into… into whatever she is now, she has chosen her own everchanging path.
Agnieszka does not change, she thinks ruefully as she begins to prepare herself for bed. Agnieszka is the person she was a decade ago, a century ago, at age 15, at age 5. Tumbling through the Wood, caught by brambles and branches as if they wanted to hold her hand like the girl in the square held the hand of her boy. Bringing out berries and mushrooms as gifts and always surprised, every time, when what was sweet and natural to her was poisonous to others.
***
So when the the Dragon turns up on Kasia’s doorstep the next morning, with as little warning as one of Agnieszka’s letters, she’s not surprised. Agnieszka and the Dragon part ways and they come back together, the river and the sea, the moon and the tide. Kasia supposes he sees her as some sort of extension of Agnieszka, or worse, of the Wood. She has run this far to escape that version of herself and it rankles to find it has pursued her.
His attitude doesn’t help. He’s prickly and unwilling to talk, but he doesn’t leave. Not when she walks through the town square the next day, murmurs and glances following her as surely as his soft footsteps. He walks just where she can see him if she turns her head, and stays there even as her footsteps speed up, until on the threshold of the inn she whirls on him.
“Why?” she says furiously. “Did she send you? Are you here to—” She stops mid-sentence, arrested by the look in his eyes. It’s smoke and flame, hard scales and beating wings. This is not a man who does anyone’s bidding.
“What are you—no,” he says abruptly. “I haven’t seen her in, oh, two decades now, I believe.”
Kasia blinks. Two decades? But… surely it was only…
His mouth twists. “Lost track of time, have you?” he says, not unkindly. “Don’t worry. I’m not here for her. I’m here for—” He stutters to a stop. “Well. Let’s say I’m… following an intuition.” He brushes past her into the inn, and by the time she gathers her wits enough to follow he has disappeared into his rooms. She doesn’t see him again during her time in the town.
But when Kasia moves on, the Dragon goes with her. She doesn’t ask why again, and he doesn’t offer. But she starts to to watch him, the way his fingers move and what his eyes catch on, and she begins to see. There’s a loss in him, something burning and loose on the wind. At first Kasia doesn’t know what it could be, if not Agnieszka—but eventually she recognizes it, because it’s in her too. It’s the Wood, the loss of the Wood. The severing of roots. It’s all the years in the valley and the waters of the Spindle and resisting the fear and resisting the longing, and it’s the leaving. There is something unquenched in Kasia, and she begins to see that in the Dragon, too.
The Dragon, who held himself apart from the valley he gave decades of his life to protect. The Dragon who turned away from everything he knew, everything he thought he wanted, to turn his face to the Wood. The Dragon, who tried to leave the valley and returned for love. The Dragon, who left again.
Kasia has never been unnoticable, doubly since she became… well, since she left the valley. But she finds that with the Dragon by her side she notices the whispers and darting looks as she hadn’t when they were directed at her only, and she minds them much more. So she finds her way out of the cities and into the mountains. And the Dragon follows her.
***
She climbs for a day and a night, forgetting to rest in the glory of towering rocks, pine, the smell of snow and moss, but the Dragon doesn’t remind her to stop. She stops by a small waterfall once, lost in the prisms it throws into the air. When she shakes her head and looks around, she finds the Dragon a few feet away, roasting a fish over a small fire. She moves towards him, hesitantly, and realizes as she lifts her foot that moss had begun to grow up one toe.
“How long was I there?” she asks him.
He shrugs. “More than a day,” he says, then, seeing her incredulity, “I didn’t count.” He darts a short look at her under his brows. “It doesn’t matter.”
She nods. It doesn’t matter. She’s here, and he’s here, and the mountain is here.
They climb some more, and descend, and climb again.
Eventually, on a ridge overlooking a river large enough that she really should know its name, she asks him, “Why?”
He frowns and is silent, but doesn’t pretend not to know what she means.
She lets it be. He is not angry, she doesn’t think, or at least not at her.
Eventually he says, “Did Agnieszka ever tell you about weaving our magics together?”
Kasia nods. “A bit.” It had been more than a bit—that letter had come immediately after one of their more public reconciliations, after they had together redirected a river to drain a great bog, opening acres of farmland and creating what had turned out to be a new era in agriculture. Agnieszka had been… enthusiastic.
Something of that must show on Kasia’s face, and his lips twist. “It’s addictive, and I don’t say that lightly. The power itself, of course, but more…” He absently picks a needle from a tree, and turns it over and over in his hands. “Knowing someone. Knowing someone else, absolutely, knowing their power, their beauty, that no one else could ever—” The pine needle snaps in his clenched hand. He stares at his own hand for a second, as if surprised, then shakes himself. Dust falls out of his hand. “Well. It is not the kind of intimacy I have learned to expect, or even thought to be possible.”
Her face must betray some of her feelings at that, because he frowns more sharply at her. “You know it perfectly well—you must,” he says. “The Summoning brought you out of the Wood. I was there—I saw both of you in its’ light. It was harsh, brutal on both of you to see each other that clearly, and yet still it was compelling enough to allow your escape.”
“But that wasn’t—” She stops, puzzled for a moment, then tries again. “The Summoning only allowed me to see what was already there. I already knew everything it showed.”
He frowns, a gleam in his eye she recognizes as the pursuit of knowledge. “Everything?”
“Of course.” She fumbles for a way to explain—the certainty of being known has always been inextricably intertwined with the knowledge of being loved. “If I hadn’t, it wouldn’t have worked, do you see? There would have been nothing for me to come home to, if Agnieszka wasn’t—wasn’t my home.”
His face twists and he turns away, but she grabs his arm without thinking about it. He freezes.
“She was everything to me then,” she says softly, “because I didn’t know anything different. I’ve changed, now. Everything’s changed. She’s not the one who—” She stumbles to a stop, feeling herself flush.
She feels him take a deep breath, his arm warm under her hand. Then he walks away without another word. She follows him down the ridge.
***
“She was never my home,” he says abruptly, some days later. Kasia frowns—she hadn’t realized until he spoke how long they had both been silent. It must have been two days? Three? But she hadn’t noticed, because where she might have spoken there had simply been a look, a brush of a hand, one stepping ahead on the path and then the other. Neither had taken the lead down into the farmland and towns, though—by some silent agreement they had wandered up and around, through ravines and up ridges, but never within sight or sound of another person. There was something precious, something small and still, that neither wanted to disturb.
But the Dragon isn’t the kind of man to keep silent only because it’s easier. Only because it won’t rip him apart. So he says, “I didn’t know her. I thought I did—I thought I learned all of her when I learned her magic. But I—” He chokes and clenches his teeth.
Kasia feels something choke her own throat, and because she is not as brave as the Dragon, she turns away and stares determinedly at a rock before she says, “You knew her. I think it was yourself you didn’t see.”
She hears a short gasp from behind her, as if the breath had been struck out of him. She stays turned away from him, though, out of some instinct, because she can. Because she can not look at him, not know what he looks like when he’s gutted and reevaluating everything he had planted his feet on, and still…
Well. Still love him. She can be honest with herself.
She took a deep breath. “You saw how your magic fit around her, you saw what the two of you made together, but you didn’t see what you left behind to fit together.” She felt her lips twist, half smile, half snarl. “I didn’t see what I left behind. She is so—she is very…” Kasia closed her eyes. “She doesn’t question that the Wood is the center of the world, and she is at the center of the Wood, and when you’re around her you can’t either. But there’s so much, much more than that!” Her voice bursts out, shockingly loud in the quiet mountain air. She tries to calm her breathing, the racing of her heart. Her voice had sounded so raw, more frustration than she knew could fit inside her. She doesn’t want to swallow it again. She clenches her hands until the nails bite into her palms.
Until she feels his cool fingertips on the back of her hand. She looks down at his hand over hers—he is standing behind her, just where she can refuse to meet his eyes should she choose, and his hand is light and still.
“You know,” she whispers. “You’re the Dragon. You know what it's like—how much there is, how big the world beyond the valley.”
“You do too,” he says quietly. His hand stays on hers. Slowly, her fingers unclench.
***
Eventually Agnieszka sends her a letter. Only two words: Come home.
Kasia sits for a minute, holding the paper in her hands. It’s thin on one corner as if soaked in water, smudged with dirt and sap on the other. A small piece of the Wood in the palm of her hand, a ribbon halfway across the world to the only place she ever felt rooted.
She thinks about earth and water, wind and fire. The light that shows what you always knew was there and the light that shows a new path. And then she writes.
I am home.
She folds the paper neatly, closes her hand around it for an instant, then opens her hand and blows. A gust of wind whips it away, as if large wings had suddenly beat the air, until it is out of sight in an instant.
She turns, and Sarkan is behind her, eyes hot and lips trembling on the edge of a smile. She steps towards him and laughs, suddenly, unable to help herself, untethered. He kisses her, swallowing her laugh, though she feels his own in the tremble of his shoulders, the tightness of his sides under her fingertips.
“You’ll come?” he says. “I don’t know where—but you’ll—”
“Yes,” she says. “Anywhere.” She kisses him again, soft and light. “Everywhere.”