Chapter narrated by Lira:
11/14/95
The contract had been on the board for three days.
I knew this because Sera had mentioned it each of those three days, each time with slightly more pointed emphasis, as though the contract itself was personally inconveniencing her by remaining untaken.
"Nobody wants it because it pays terribly," she said on the first day.
"Nobody wants it because it is in the bad part of the eastern district," she said on the second day.
"Nobody wants it because it involves an old woman, and old women are unpredictable," she said on the third day.
This morning Sera decided enough was enough, which was how we ended up standing outside a narrow house on the eastern edge of Vareth while Sera knocked for the third time on the door with the same energy she used in the church when we first met.
"Sera."
"Everything alright, Lira?" she said.
"She posted the contract herself," I said. "She knows we are coming."
"Old women operate on their own schedule," Sera said, and knocked again.
The door opened.
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CONTRACT #512-G
Required rank: 1
Client: Maren of the eastern district
Task: Clear the storage beneath my house. There are things living in it. I do not know what kind. They make noise at night.
Reward: 4 silver coins and one item from my personal collection, your choice.
Note: I am not paying more. Do not ask.
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The woman who opened the door was small — I could tell from where her voice came from, lower than I expected, and from the particular sound of her steps, light and unhurried.
"You are the adventurers," she said.
"Sera Voss and Lira Aurelios," Sera said."Rank one, Guild of Vareth. We are here about the storage problem."
"I know why you are here." A step back from the door. "Come in then."
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The house was narrow, warm, and smelled of dried herbs and something older underneath.
I tracked the layout as we followed her — four steps to the main room, furniture placed with the slight irregularity of someone who never moves things once they have found their position, a table to the left, shelves along the back wall carrying more weight than shelves usually do.
The warmth mapped it clearly. Two rooms beyond this one. A staircase going up. A door to the right that led down.
"The entrance to the storage is there," Maren said, and I felt her gesture toward the door before Sera confirmed it with a quiet "right side."
"What kind of noise?" Sera asked.
"Scratching. Movement. Something knocked over my winter preserves two nights ago." A pause that contained genuine irritation. "Those were good preserves."
"How long has this been happening?"
"Three weeks."
"And you waited three weeks before posting a contract?"
"I posted it when it became inconvenient," Maren said. "I am old, not incompetent."
Sera accepted this without comment.
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The storage was below the house, accessible by a short staircase that smelled of earth and old wood. Sera went first with a lantern. I followed with my bow unstrung — close quarters, stairs, no clear line of sight. I would restring when we reached the bottom and I had a better sense of the space.
"Four steps down," Sera said quietly. "Then it opens out. Big room. Lots of shelves. Several things have been knocked over on the left side."
"How many presences?"
I focused. The warmth moved differently down here — the absence of sunlight thinned it, but not entirely. I could feel the broad outlines of the space, the shapes of things on shelves, the specific disruption of bodies moving through air.
"Six," I said. "Left wall, near the back. They are grouped."
"What are they?"
I focused more carefully. Small. Fast. Warm.
"Not hostile," I said. "Frightened, I think. They have been frightened since we came through the door upstairs."
Sera held the lantern up. A pause.
"Lira," she said.
"Yes?"
"They are rabbits."
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They were, in fact, rabbits.
Six of them, pressed together in the back corner behind a fallen shelf. One of them had clearly been living very well on Maren's winter preserves. I could not see this, but I could hear it in Sera's voice when she said, "That one has no regrets," which told me everything I needed to know. One of the rabbits was very fat.
"Three silver coins," she said to no one in particular.
"Plus an item from her personal collection," I said.
"Plus an item from her personal collection." The sound of her crouching. The rabbits, from the quality of the silence, were not impressed. "How did six rabbits get into a sealed storage room?"
I moved the warmth along the back wall, letting it find the edges of things, and felt the answer in the back left corner. A section where the foundation met old wood, a gap just wide enough, cold air coming through it in a thin steady thread.
"There," I said. "Bottom left corner."
"Oh. Yes. That would do it."
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Getting six frightened rabbits out of a storage room without harming them took considerably longer than the contract had implied.
The first rabbit was collected by Sera with relative ease. The second was less cooperative. The third knocked over two more shelves in the process of not being caught, which created enough noise that Maren called down from upstairs to ask if we were still alive. Sera assured her we were, which the fourth rabbit chose as the ideal moment to attempt an escape past my ankles.
I caught it.
Not gracefully. I fell down on the floor of the storage room with a rabbit held firmly against my chest and the awareness that my dignity had not survived the landing.
"Good catch," Sera said.
"Thank you," I said, from the floor.
The rabbit, after a moment of tense consideration, stopped struggling. I felt its heartbeat against my palms — very fast, then gradually slower. It turned its head and pressed its nose against my wrist.
The warmth around me shifted in the small way it does when something is calm.
"Hello," I said quietly to the rabbit.
It did not respond, but it also did not attempt to leave.
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We emerged from the storage with six rabbits in a crate Sera had found on one of the shelves, the gap in the wall temporarily blocked with a folded sack, and a quantity of preserved jam on my sleeve that I chose not to examine too closely.
Maren's voice came from across the room.
"Rabbits," she said.
"Six of them," Sera confirmed. "The largest one has been eating your preserves. We have blocked the gap for now, but you will need someone to repair the foundation properly."
A pause.
"I know," Maren said, in the tone of someone who had suspected as much and had been hoping to be wrong.
She paid us without complaint.
Then she said, "The item. Come and choose."
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The shelves along the back wall of the main room held more than I had mapped from the doorway.
I felt the weight of them differently now that I was standing close — not just physical weight but the specific density of things that carry history. Old objects have a particular warmth to them, or perhaps a particular quality of the warmth around them, a kind of settled stillness that newer things do not have.
"Anything on these shelves," Maren said. "Within reason."
Sera moved along them slowly. I heard her stop, move on, stop again.
"What is this?" she asked.
"A book," Maren said.
"I can see it is a book. What kind of book?"
A pause.
"The kind that is above your current ability to use properly," Maren said. "But not above your future ability, if you are serious about your work."
"What does it cover?"
"Time," Maren said. "Specifically, the manipulation of time as it applies to movement and combat."
Sera was quiet for a moment. Then:
"How does that work? The magic, I mean. I know the basics, but time magic is —"
"Different from what most people learn first," Maren said. "Yes." The sound of her settling into a chair. "What do you know about how magic works in general?"
"It costs energy," Sera said. "You use it and you get tired. Too much at once and you are useless until you recover. It is like running or doing a very demanding physical activity for the body."
"That is correct as far as it goes, a bit too simple of an analogy for my taste," Maren said. "A better one would be musical instruments. You can probably learn how to play the piano if you put enough effort into it. The same applies to almost every mortal. The same could be said about fire magic. Anyone can learn it, but that does not mean you will be as good as someone who is naturally more gifted than you.
Once, in my good years, I saw a kid barely older than ten years performing spells with a precision that made me reconsider studying magic for a whole week. People like that appear sometimes. The way he managed the energy cost and the output of the spells — it was truly..."
I coughed to take her attention.
"Oh sorry, got distracted with my story. What was I saying?"
"You were talking about magic," Sera said.
"Oh right. If learning magic is like learning an instrument, then time magic is one of those rare instruments that looks so bizarre that you would not even imagine what sound would come out of it. In short, it is painfully complex, not to mention hard to learn compared to other types of magic. But that is not why it is so rare to see."
"Then why is it?" I asked. Honestly, I did not know a lot about magic, so this was turning out to be one of the most interesting contracts until now.
"Time magic requires a particular kind of capacity because of what you are asking your body to do. You are not throwing fire or calling wind. You are asking the moment itself to behave differently — accelerating your own perception, sharpening a second into something you have more room inside of, moving within a window that your opponent does not have access to."
"And that costs more," Sera said.
"It costs differently," Maren said. "A fireball tires your arms. Time magic tires something closer to the center of you. Your focus, your sense of the present moment. Overdo it and you are not just physically exhausted — you are slow in the way that has nothing to do with your legs. Your thinking goes soft. Your reactions blur." A pause. "Rest fixes it, same as anything else. But it is an unpleasant way to learn the lesson."
The room was quiet for a moment.
"That is why nobody uses it," Sera said. It was not quite a question.
"That is why most people who learn it use it sparingly," Maren said. "And why the ones who use it well are very difficult to fight. A combatant who can choose which second to inhabit, who can be standing behind you before you have finished deciding to turn — that is not a speed advantage. That is a different relationship with the moment entirely."
Sera fell silent for a second and then, without doubt in her voice, said:
"I will take the book."
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Outside, on the eastern street with the afternoon warmth coming down at the angle that told me it was past midday, Sera was already turning pages. I could hear it. She occasionally stopped entirely without announcing it so that I almost walked into her twice.
"Time principles applied to combat?" I said.
"Time principles applied to combat," she agreed.
"Do you know anything about it?"
"No," she said. "That is why it is interesting."
I thought about the old woman's voice. The precision of it. The way she had answered Sera's question about the book before Sera had finished deciding whether to ask it.
"Do you think she knew you would choose it?" I asked.
Sera stopped walking.
A pause.
"Probably," she said.
"Does that bother you?"
She considered this with the seriousness she gives to questions that deserve it.
"No," she said finally. "People have been making decisions about what I would do my whole life. Usually they are wrong." The sound of the book closing under her arm. "She was right about the book. That is different."
I decided not to make a comment about it.
We walked back toward the guild through the eastern streets. The afternoon was ordinary and warm and smelled of bread from somewhere nearby.
I decided to let her read in peace and dedicate all my attention to not hitting anything else on the road.
This would be a long walk to the inn.