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i.
A sun-dappled day in the marshy forest. Sparrow’s hair is tied back, loosely, a high ponytail to keep it off her tanned neck. Garth’s satchel is full of plucked herbs, from the bases of towering oaks and the banks of shallow algae-filled pools.
They stop to rest. Garth crouches by the pond to watch an old turtle cross.
"All things serve the fuckin’ Beam," he whispers reflectively, and Sparrow, long-used to him uttering strange sayings seemingly at random, suddenly bursts out laughing.
At his questioning look, she explains.
"That’s the first time I ever heard you swear."
ii.
"Are you ever going to tell me what a Beam actually is?”
He doesn’t answer right away. Sparrow wants to be frustrated with him, but it’s difficult. She knows him too well.
The clouds are wispy, fragmented. The sun burns clear. The trees sway gently, whispering, conspiring.
The kingsroad is naught but a gravelly path here, engraved into the ground by the occasional set of carriage wheels, but it stretches as far as the eye can see, right into Bowerstone.
But Garth doesn’t face Bowerstone. He faces the open sea, and the shadowy, broken structure that still makes fear worm in the pit of Sparrow’s stomach.
She starts to ask him, irritably, why they’d stopped walking. He stills the words in her throat by pointing to the sky.
The wispy clouds seem less random, suddenly; their feathery lengths angled just-so, there seems to be a lightly-sketched kingsroad in the heavens.
A road that points to the Spire.
"All things serve," he says quietly. "Even — especially — here."
iii.
"He doesn’t make sense,” Hammer insists, her ruddy face scowling. “He never makes sense. Sometimes he doesn’t even speak our language. Literally!”
"He’s not from Albion in the first place, what do you expect?” Sparrow replies in a matter-of-fact voice, drawing her dagger’s blade across the whetstone with an easy, practiced motion.
"How do you stand it? He never answers a question directly, he’s always looking into those coloured orbs of his and muttering about things, and what the hell is a chary-ka and why does he always call Reaver that?”
Sparrow sighs and sets the stone and dagger down.
"I don’t need to understand him. He understands me. That’s a tall order, you know. I'm not exactly Simple Sue myself.”
"Yeah, well." Hammer sniffs and pushes to her feet. "If you ask me—"
"I’m not asking you."
I love you, Hammer, her steady gaze clarifies, but you know so much less than you could.
iv.
Sometimes even he is wrong about things.
Reaver is not chary-ka.
Garth himself is.
v.
"I’ll leave you one day."
Night has fallen thick and absolute. The moon is but a sliver in a sky as black as pitch. The stars are weak, their light dimmed.
Sparrow shifts closer to him, but her warmth isn’t enough.
"You will," she allows.
He shifts to look at her, surprised. “You know.”
"I know." The mattress shifts as she props herself up to look him fully in the face. "You’re not from here."
Everyone knows this, but he can tell it’s not his foreign birth she’s referencing.
"Take me with you when you go."
"What if I cannot?"
"Then do not forget me."
"Will that be enough?"
"No." The bed shifts again as she lays back down, drawing the blanket close around their bodies. "But it will have to do."
vi.
He doesn’t say it in the coarse, colloquial common tongue.
He tells her that he sees her visage in the intricacy of the stars. He tells her that his dreamlands are calm when she is beside him. He tells her that the colours of the Wizard’s Rainbow are vivid in her eyes, that her heart is Whiter than the freshly-fallen snow, that of all things in this world and others, he is most grateful for her.
He tells her in the tongue of the clan that raised him on far Samarkand. He tells her in runic etchings she finds on ancient ruins, intricate and indelible. He tells her in speech that is decidedly not of their world, but of one she dreams of; in speech that makes the arcane sigul on her chest thrum with power.
He returns to the Spire to whisper it upon the slick, vibrating, inky-black stone.
In another world, a similarly dark tower pulses in glad recognition.