Kin

IN THE MATERIAL REALM

*

I’d worn a groove into the flagstones outside the north cloister by the second morning.

I paced the same stretch of corridor until one of the younger clergy took pity on me and brought a stool to sit on instead.

I didn’t sit on it much.

Sitting felt like giving up…

Even though I knew perfectly well that pacing wasn’t doing Job any good either.

They let me see him once a day, for a quarter hour, no more.

He looked peaceful in the way only the truly wounded ever do, laid out on a cot beneath a high arched window, that grey stump where his left arm should have been wrapped in linen that never seemed to need changing.

No wound wept beneath it.

Nothing about him seemed to be dying in any of the ways I understood dying to look.

He simply wasn’t there.

“You should eat something.” Dio appeared beside me on the third morning.

He was holding two bread rolls he’d clearly charmed off a kitchen maid, because Dio could charm bread rolls out of anyone.

It was practically a talent of his.

“You look like you’re about to fall over.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’ve said that every day since we got here, and every day you look worse saying it.”

He held one roll out until I took it.

Mostly to stop him standing there like that.

“He’d be cross with you, you know. If he woke up and found out you’d starved yourself worrying about him.”

I almost laughed.

It came out closer to a sob, but I swallowed it back down before it could properly get away from me.

“He’d probably lecture me about it for a week.”

“Two weeks, easy.” Dio grinned

Though it didn’t meet his eyes the way it used to.

He’d grown quieter since Gorge, since the fireball.

Since he’d thrown himself in front of something meant for Job without so much as a thought for what it might have done to him instead.

I hadn’t found the words yet to properly thank him for that, and I wasn’t sure he’d want to hear them if I tried.

We ate in silence on the cloister steps, watching clergy move between buildings in their plain grey robes.

That is until the courtyard beyond the outer wall drew my eye instead.

A company of soldiers had assembled there, thirty strong at least, the crossed spear and sun stitched bright across their chests.

I recognised the drill for what it was the moment they began.

It was the same sort of formation exercise the Protection Corp ran back in Paprika, though I’d only ever watched Job’s version of that from a distance, never trained in it properly myself.

“Is that normal?” Dio asked, following my gaze.

“Might be. Let’s watch a minute.”

It wasn’t a flight, not really, more a rehearsed exchange, pairs of soldiers thrusting and parrying in perfect unison, the kind of drill meant to carve the same motion so deep into your body that you’d never have to think about it again.

I’d have called it beautiful, if something about it hadn’t unsettled me the longer I looked.

It took me a while to place what.

The soldiers moved well, better than well.

But there was something wrong in the order of it.

A parry would come a fraction before the thrust it was meant to answer, as though the man defending had known the strike was coming before his opponent’s shoulder had even shifted to throw it.

I watched three pairings do the same thing.

Then a fourth.

And a fifth.

By then, it wasn’t a trick of the light or a coincidence of good training.

Every spear in that courtyard moved a half beat ahead of the soldier holding it, and every soldier simply followed where it had already decided to go.

“Mara? What is it?”

“Nothing.” I didn’t believe that even as I said it. “Just watching. That's all.”

-

Ser Aldric found us there not long after.

He was striding across the courtyard with the same loose familiar grip on his weapon, thumb tracing slow circles along the haft.

“You seem taken with our garrison’s discipline.”

“It’s impressive. Very precise.”

I chose my words carefully.

“The Way of the Spear demands nothing less. We do not merely wield our weapons here, Miss Hopkins. We commune with them. Doctrine holds that Karma flows most purely when the vessel and the hand surrender their separateness entirely.”

“Surrender.” I repeated it flatly. “Sounds a bit one sided.”

Something flicked across his face.

But it was gone before I could properly name it.

“A poor choice of words on my part. Forgive me, I only meant devotion.”

He turned back toward the barracks without waiting for a reply.

“I don’t like it here.” Dio said quietly.

“Neither do I. But it’s the only place with a chance of bringing him back. So we stay, and we watch, and we keep our mouths shut until we know exactly what we’re looking at.”

“Well… I just hope they can take care of Job, and quickly too.”

“Yeah, me too.”

*

IN THE SPIRITUAL REALM

*

“You’re anticipating again. You feel the strike coming before I’ve made it. That is not instinct Job. That is fear misdiagnosed as instinct. Stop guessing at my next move and simply be ready for whichever one arrives.”

“Easy for you to say. You’ve had a hundred years of this.”

Grandma let out a slight chuckle, then spoke.

“I’ve had a great deal longer than that, actually, though I’d rather you didn’t go around repeating it.”

She let the faintest smile through, the struck.

Quick and clean.

I met it half a second too late.

“Again.”

-

We went on like that for what felt like hours, though hours meant little enough here.

Each pass she found some new fault to sharpen.

My footing that wasn’t feet.

My breathing that wasn’t breath.

And each time I corrected it,it only opened some smaller flaw beneath it.

It was somewhere in the middle of a lunge that the light changed.

The endless white around us folded itself into something with edges again.

Walls.

A low ceiling.

The smell, impossibly, of roasted lamb and barley bread.

I stumbled out of my stance entirely, my spear dissolving back into the tide beneath me.

“Grandma wha-”

“Steady. It seems we have company.”

I turned, and the room around us had become our old kitchen.

And it didn't feel like a memory of it either.

The worn grain of the table, the chip in the second shelf where I’d dropped a pot as a boy.

My father sat at the table, broad through the shoulders same as always. That permanent half furrow between his brows like he was about to say something ridiculous, which, knowing him, he probably was.

“There he is!”

He tipped his head toward the bench across from him.

“Sit down before your mother has a fit, she’s had that lamb going since you left this morning.’

This morning?

“Dad.”

My throat had gone tight.

My mother turned from the stove, wiping her hands on her apron.

For a second neither of us said anything.

Seeing them alive…

“Job.” she said softly. “Come sit. You look tired.”

I sat.

My father clasped my shoulder, the same easy weight it had always carried.

My mother set a bowl in front of me that was steaming…

“Well go on then! Eat!” Dad nodded at the bowl. “You’ve gone and gotten thin on us.”

“I haven’t eaten in a kitchen since the last time I was in this one.”

I said it half as a joke, watching for some flicker of acknowledgement, anything at all about everything that had happened between that last meal and this one.

My mother only smiled and ladled more into the bowl.

“Where’s Jolee? Is sh-”

“Eat your food, love. There’ll be time for all that.”

I looked to Grandma, who hadn’t taken a seat, hadn’t so much as set her spear down, standing near the door like she was minding an exit rather than visiting family.

“Grandma?”

“Eat.”

She said it gently enough, though her eyes hadn’t left my mother once.

“There’s time enough yet.”

So I ate.

Dad told the same joke about his own smell he’d been telling since before I was born, and mom laughed at it the same way she always had, like she’d never once heard it.

For a good while, nobody mentioned the world I’d have to go back to nor my sister still out there somewhere without me, nor anything at all beyond how good the lamb had turned out.

And how glad they both were to have me home for supper.