B3Ch61-Vera (Patreon)

Vera sat at the little table by the shuttered window, turned a page in her journal, and wrote a line she knew she would strike out later. I am sick to death of being sick.

She struck it out anyway. It helped. The scratch of the nib was one of the few honest sounds left to her in a day built entirely out of pretending.

The room was cold. The brazier in the corner had burned down to a red eye, and she had not gotten up to feed it. Getting up quickly was one of the hundred small things a woman recovering from a burned life thread was not supposed to be able to do. The lie was second nature to her now. Her breath fogged over the page. She wrote through it.

The journal had been Elia's idea, back when Vera had been too weak to stand and had spent whole days staring at the ceiling planks counting the grain. Put your thoughts somewhere. It orders them. Vera had thought it a child's remedy. She had been wrong, though. The writing had been relaxing. But it worked. Stuck indoors through the deep of winter, running a spy net out of a sickbed with a cane leaned against the wall for anyone who might glance in, she needed her thoughts ordered. The alternative was going mad, and she had already had a taste of that on the road home.

That road. Three lines, no more, she told herself, and let her mind walk it while her hand rested.

The Cascading Seal had nearly finished her. She had put the guardian down — she remembered the choice, remembered putting something extra into the last strike — and nearly taken her with it. Not a wound a normal healing potion could fix. Somehow she had touched her own life thread, and she had spent part of her life force with that strike. The team had gotten her out, though. She had been carried part of it. Carried. She had lain in a sled like baggage while Tresh and Dorrin argued over footing and Maggs walked point without a word. Lynn kept up a bright, exhausting patter aimed entirely at keeping Vera awake and annoyed. Then, the few times they had gotten into a fight, she had been forced to just watch instead of taking part. They had only made the time they made by falling in with a convoy of the swamp folk headed up to join the Landing.

Then the weeks in this bed while the team was out gathering ingredients for Lord Harold to make a potion to heal her.

Lord Harold and Elia had made the potion themselves in the alchemists' school with the shutters barred. Vera had watched a great many powerful people do a great many powerful things. She had seen Councilor Josh throw up a wall of stone. She had seen Jack Churchill fight against 5 of his knights without losing ground. She could throw a javelin with enough force that it could punch through a stone troll now. But now she had stood in rooms with the man. She knew better than most what he was under the courtesy he displayed to everyone. None of it had prepared her for watching him call mana into that little cauldron. It was denser than any monster she had ever faced — denser than the guardian, denser than the troll — and the pressure of it filled the room. Vera had sat there while her breathing grew shallower and shallower and did not understand why until Elia grabbed her by the collar and hauled her bodily back out of the worst of it. Hissing at her to breathe, you idiot, breathe. She had been drowning in the room. Elia had also been half-transfixed herself, green eyes gone huge, watching Harold's hands with the naked hunger of a craftsman seeing something done she didn't understand.

His control had been on another shelf entirely from those first fumbling alchemy classes Vera remembered him teaching. Whatever he had become in the year since, he had become it quietly.

Then he had helped her drink it, one hand behind her head, a small smile on his face. He had hauled her to her feet by the wrist. She had managed — barely — to say thank you. Then the pain arrived, and she had passed out again.

She had woken in her own bed feeling better than she had in months.

And now — Vera set the quill down and reached inside herself and found the thread. It answered. She could sense it plain as a bowstring under her fingers, and if she wanted, she could pluck it, feed a little life into a limb, empower herself with mana and her own life.

He had looked at her with that same small smile and told her not to overuse it. Don't use it much until you've earned enough life-related perks to shore it up yourself. All I have done is strengthen it, but until you can do so yourself, it's not something to use. Sound advice. She agreed with every word of it.

And she could not do a single thing about it. Earning life-tied perks meant going out into the world, and instead she was sitting in a freezing room pretending she could barely reach the chamber pot.

She picked the quill back up and wrote, in a hand steadier than her mood: The job before the self. Always the job. Then she looked at it, decided it was maudlin, and struck that out too.

The door opened and shut fast, and the latch dropped, and Elia was inside with her back against the wood before Vera had fully lifted her head.

Vera closed the journal over the pen. "You could knock."

"I could." Elia pushed off the door. Snow was still melting in her blond curls, and she shook them once like a dog, scattering it. "But then anyone in the hall would see me stand there waiting, and I'm a healer who comes and goes; healers don't wait to be let in." She dropped into the other chair, breathless, forest-green eyes bright with whatever she'd carried up the stairs. "Henri reached out."

Vera went still and tried to shush her, but she kept going.

"He's made contact with his family." Elia leaned in, voice down even with the door latched. "They've — they've started helping him. Putting out feelers to find the parties who'd be interested. It's working, Vera. It's actually working. And one of them wants more proof."

"Proof how?"

"Recipes. Potion recipes." Elia said it and then made a face, as if the word tasted of something spoiled. "They want me to hand over recipes."

"You can't do that." Vera didn't have to think about it. "Even if you weren't bound six ways by oath — even setting all of that aside — it's not something Lord Harold wants loose in the world. His recipes are half of why the basin is what it is. You tell them you'll supply potions. You do not expose how they're made."

Elia was already nodding, curls bouncing, before Vera finished. "That's what I said. Almost word for word. I told them I could send finished potions, but the methods stay with me." She pulled her lower lip through her teeth. "But it's the potions they're asking for that I don't like. Vera, they want ones I really don't want to be handing to strangers who hate us."

"Which ones?" Vera reached over, hooked the cane off the wall by its head, and laid it across her knees without thinking. Her hands reached for it now the way they'd once reached for a knife. "Tell them the good ones take time to brew. Buys us weeks. I'll ask the Spider and see what she'll allow them to have."

Elia breathed out some of the tension. "Okay. Time. I can do time."

Vera continued. "And when you do give them something — give them a batch that goes bad. Tell them the potency won't hold; it has to be used within a day or two. It's even believable coming from you." She let a thin edge into it. "You're not Lord Harold, after all. No shame in a lesser hand's work spoiling."

Elia snorted, then caught herself, then looked genuinely interested. "I — huh. I could actually do that. Bind it so it degrades. There are a couple ways. Timed, so it looks like a flaw and not a choice." She was doing the math now; Vera could see it move behind her eyes. "Yeah. Yeah, I could make it fall apart on a schedule."

"Then we've turned a weakness into a leash. Good." Vera set the cane back. "Have they given you a contact? A person?"

Elia shook her head, curls swinging. "No. Just a place. A dead drop."

"Where?"

"Over by the barns. The ones they keep the tatanka in, down near the warehouse row." Elia dug into her satchel, came out with a folded map of the Landing gone soft at the creases, and spread it on the table. Her finger came down. "Here."

Vera looked at the spot and felt, for a moment, entirely herself. This she could do lying down. "Good ground for it," she said. "You've got all the herd traffic — drovers, feed carts, muck haulers, people coming and going at all hours and none of them looking at each other. Busy enough to hide in, quiet enough that a face that lingers stands out." She tapped the warehouse line. "I'll set a watcher. Someone with a reason to be down there smelling of dung all day. We'll know who comes to collect before they've got their hand out of it."

"You make it sound easy."

"It is easy so far. The other lords haven't really had a lot of time to get real agents here yet." Vera drew back from the map. "I'll get you an answer from the Spider and tell you exactly what to do. Until then, you stall, but you'll have to give them something real after it."

Elia sat back. The joy ran out of her all at once. "I don't like it," she said quietly. "Any of it. It's so — it's so much, all the time, right here in my chest. And I keep thinking, we've barely started, and already there are this many people out there trying to move against him. Against Lord Harold. He healed you. Half of them owe their lives to what came out of this basin, and they'd still put a knife in it the second his back's turned." She pushed the curls off her face. "How are there already so many?"

Vera snorted and pushed up out of the chair. The door was latched, the shutters closed, and she trusted Elia. She stood straight and pulled a blanket off the bed and around her shoulders. Putting the disguise on. "There are always this many. There's nothing special about it. People envy what other people have — it's the oldest thing there is." She tucked the blanket. "Nobody likes looking up and seeing someone stand higher than them. Doesn't matter how they got there. Doesn't matter if standing there is the only reason those same people aren't dead. They see the height, they want it, and they tell themselves a story about deserving it. You stop being surprised eventually."

"That's grim."

"It's winter. Everything's grim." Vera almost smiled. "Keep passing me what Henri sends. What else did he give you?"

"That was most of it." Elia gathered the map. "The recipe request. The drop."

"How is he? Holding up?" Vera kept it light. "I imagine Lukas is keeping him lively."

Elia paused, folding the map more slowly than it needed to be folded. "He... seems all right? I think. It's hard to say with him — he's so smooth, you know, everything's a courtesy." She frowned. "This is his world more than mine, all this whispering and dealing. He should be in his element. But when he talked about reaching out to his own family — his sister, his brother — he was nervous, Vera. Really nervous. More than I had seen from him before."

Vera filed that away to pass onto Margaret. "Hm." She kept her face easy. "Let me know if anything else about him. Little things. Anything."

"I will." Elia stood, and she was brisk again, all business. "I have to go — I've got a group waiting on me. Mana-control drills, the breathing forms. Half of them still hold their breath the second it gets hard, which is backward." She hitched the satchel up. "Where are you going?"

Vera had crossed to the door and taken up the cane.

"Out," Vera said. "The arena. My team's sparring with some of the other adventurers today, and I want to see how they're doing." She let the invalid return to her spine, degree by degree, until she was a woman leaning on a stick. "Good to know where they've gone soft while I've been decorating a bed."

Elia fell in beside her as she opened the door. "That's a walk. In this cold. On that." She nodded at the cane.

"I need to do something." It came out with more heat than she'd meant. "I've spent a season lying in a room being handed broth. If I sit here one more day pretending to be dying, I'm going to start actually wanting to. So. A walk."

Elia bumped her shoulder into Vera's, careful of the cane, gentle in a way not one other person in the Landing would have dared. "At least eat on the way. There's a hundred stalls between here and there." Something sly crept back into her voice. "See Kers, maybe."

Vera huffed and left the room.

---

The guild hall was chaos.

Even by day. The great common room was a churn of adventurers between contracts, the long tables loud with dice and boasting and the loud good cheer of people who did dangerous work and had, for now, survived it. Someone was singing badly. Someone else was arguing about a bounty payout at a volume that said he'd already lost the argument twice. In the corner two parties were squaring up over a spilled drink, and a guild officer was already wading in to sit on it. By day it was only a madhouse. Vera had seen it at night. At night it was worse, and better, and she missed it.

She went through it slowly, leaning on the cane, eyes down. A few called out — Vera, good to see you up, Vera, you're looking stronger — and she gave them the small, tired nod of a woman saving her strength, let them feel good about their kindness, hated it, and kept walking. Elia peeled off toward the school with a squeeze of Vera's arm and a look that said behave.

Outside, the cold came off the snow and cut through the fug of the hall, and that first honest lungful of it was almost worth the walk on its own. The Landing rose around her, white-capped and busy, breath fogging over a hundred chimneys. She turned for the arena.

Councilor Josh had built it into the side of the low hill south of the keep, for Lord Harold's tournament. He'd cut the seats right into the slope so the ground held the crowd, with the sparring floor sunk at the bottom of the bowl. It had been a good couple of days, that tournament. Some of the finest fighting Vera had watched without being in it. The spread of what people could do had surprised even her. Adventurers she'd expected to be good and who were better; powers she'd never have guessed at from the person carrying them. One quiet man won two rounds by simply not being where anyone swung — he walked in through the gaps and put his opponents to sleep with a hand on the neck, gone before you could track him. Vera had a private guess about who that man really worked for, and she kept it private. Another turned a common torch into a gout of flame that cleared half the floor. On the whole the crafters came in weaker than the adventurers, as everyone expected. But the good ones were better than the average sword, and it showed at the top. The champion had only barely put down the crafter who took second.

She came up over the lip of the bowl and lowered herself onto a bench in the second row, a hand on the cane and a hand on the cold stone — picture perfect for a frail, sickly woman. Below, the floor was busy.

Two big men had the near circle. One was a bruiser, all shoulders, with some kind of barkskin perk that turned his forearms grey when he set himself. The other came at him fast and light, a short blade in each hand, hunting for the seams. Vera watched the fast one for ten seconds and wanted to walk down there and slap him. You're hitting the armor because it's easy to reach. Aim for the gaps. The bruiser was slow and knew it and had built his whole style around it — he planted like a post and dared the world to come to him, and the fast man kept obliging. Flurry, ring off the grey skin, dance back, again. He'd lose. He didn't know it yet. Vera knew it by the third exchange. Take the ankle, she thought at him, uselessly. He has to root to armor up. A rooted man has feet you can take off. Go low. The fast man went high again. Vera looked away, frustrated. She hated idiots.

Off to the left, a woman with a spark perk was sparring a shield-carrier, and this one was worth watching. She couldn't throw fire, nothing so gaudy, but she could snap it along a blade at the moment of contact. Every time steel met the man's shield, she cracked that spark across the boss and made him flinch. She used it well. She made him flinch over a dozen touches, and then, when he flinched at the spark that didn't come, she was already past his guard with the flat of her blade laid against his ribs. There. Vera's mouth twitched. That was a fighter who used her brain. She'd have taken that woman for the Thornwalkers on the spot.

And in the far circle, Lynn.

Vera settled her weight and watched. Lynn had her new bow, and across from her, some broad-shouldered adventurer with a spear and a grin. The idiot wasn't fighting her so much as performing at her. He'd close, and pull the strike, and say something Vera couldn't hear that made him toss his head; he'd hand her openings on purpose to see if she'd take his help. Lynn took the openings. Lynn took every one. She danced back lightly on her feet and put three blunted practice arrows into him in the time it took him to admire his own footwork — chest, chest, and, when he swaggered in close and murmured something clearly meant to impress her, one arrow hit dead center off his forehead, snapping his head back and sitting him down in the snow.

"OW—"

"You should keep your guard up," Lynn called sweetly, already nocking another, "and your eyes off my chest."

The people watching laughed. Vera didn't, on the outside at least. On the inside she was grinning like a fool, and it ached. She should be down there. That loose-limbed archer with the terrible mouth was hers. Instead, she sat on a cold bench in a blanket, pretending her body had betrayed her.

A body dropped onto the bench beside her; the whole bench shifted with the weight of it, and Vera sighed before she'd even turned her head.

---

"Kers."

"VERA." He boomed it, delighted, loud enough that two people in the row below turned around.

She closed her eyes. "You do not know how to be quiet. Do you?" She pulled the blanket tighter against the cold and against him.

"Quiet is for men with nothing good to say." He turned toward her and lifted one broad hand, palm out, and made a small motion near her. Heat came off him and gathered around her shoulders and settled there, driving the cold out of her bones in a breath. His forge perks. Warmth pooled under the blanket, and Vera let out a breath into it before she could decide not to.

"...Never mind," she said. "You can stay."

Kers laughed, big and easy, and the sound rolled down into the bowl. "Ha! You are difficult woman, Vera. Difficult. But—" he thumped his own chest, "—luckily I am stubborn too. You do not scare me off with your ice."

She turned and looked at him properly, which she didn't often let herself do.

No apron today. Instead, the great chestpiece he'd forged himself for the tournament — half the reason he'd gotten second place. Not many in the tournament had managed to actually hurt him. His beard was singed at one corner. Cropped blond hair, a little damp at the edges from the cold. Blue eyes watching her back, taking their measure of her while she took his.

She knew what most people saw when they looked at Kers. A big, loud, cheerful German who hammered iron and laughed too much and mangled his words when he got excited, but who could be handled. She knew better. She'd watched him work. One of the best smiths in the whole Landing, and under the noise one of its most dangerous men, though he took care that few ever learned it. At least before the tournament. Now everyone knew. His maul lay along the bench beside him, head down in the snow, a thing that would have taken two of her to lift and that he carried like a walking stick.

"Ah." He caught her weighing him and smiled, slowly. "You assess me. And I assess you. And we both sit here and wonder — who would win, hm? You and I. If it came to it."

Vera huffed a laugh out through her nose. "I think we both know the answer to that one, Kers."

Kers winked. "Indeed I do."

And that, she thought, was why she let him sit this close. Definitely not the warmth, though the warmth was heavenly. Not even that he wasn't pleasant to look at, though he most certainly was. It was the honesty. These days, half the Landing wanted to help the poor, recovering Vera up the stairs, fetching her broth, taking her arm and be seen doing it.

Kers wanted her. He'd wanted her since he forgot how to breathe watching her buy javelin heads, but he had always been honest about it. The others skulked around the edges with their soft eyes and their soft reasons, and she didn't trust one of them within arm's reach. Kers looked straight at her and told her she was terrifying and beautiful in the same breath and meant both.

It helped that he was the only smith in the basin that could make the javelin heads she needed. They already spent a lot of time together, arguing over balance and temper, and she'd come to look forward to it.

She didn't say any of that, of course. Couldn't let the frustrating man win. She turned back to the floor.

The rest of the team came up the steps a few minutes later, done with the floor and steaming in the cold, Lynn in the lead and still riding high off putting the spearman on his backside.

"—not my fault he can't fight and flirt at the same time," Lynn was saying. "Most men can't walk and flirt at the same time."

"Told you it was a waste of arrows," Maggs said. Two words. She dropped onto the bench below and went stoney.

"It was one arrow. To the head. That's efficient." Lynn flopped down and noticed the heat at once. "Ohhh. Kers is doing the fire thing. Kers, do the fire thing more; my hands are dead."

Kers spread the warmth wider, grinning.

Tresh and Dorrin arrived mid-argument, as ever. "—all I'm saying is you telegraphed the low sweep."

"I did not telegraph it, you saw it because you're my cousin and you've seen it four hundred times—"

"So has every monster in the basin, apparently—"

"Nobody in the basin has seen it four hundred times, Dorrin, you'd have to be family—"

"You two hunted the same three ridges your whole lives," Kers said, delighted, "and still you cannot agree who scared away the deer. Ha! It is marvel. Back home we would say you argue like an old married couple, but I think you would take offense, so I do not say it."

"You just said it," said Tresh.

"I said I do not say it. Very different. You must open ears more."

Maggs grunted. From Maggs it was a whole speech.

Vera sat in the middle of the noise, warm next to Kers, and let it wash over her. Something in her chest that had been clenched tight eased by a notch. Lynn and Dorrin had started re-fighting the whole spar with their hands, blow by blow. Tresh appointed himself referee and ruled against his own cousin. Maggs said "no" to something, and was ignored. And Vera found she was smiling. It was a small thing, but it was honest.

Kers saw it.

He didn't say anything for a moment. He just watched her smiling at her people, and something warm and knowing came into his big face.

"Ah," he said, quieter than she'd ever heard him. "You see. This is the medicine, yes? Not the broth. Not lying in the dark counting the roof." He tipped his chin at the pack of them arguing in the snow. "Life around you, Vera. It is good for the life inside you. This I believe."

She should have had something sharp for that. She didn't.

"So." He straightened, the boom came back into him, and he clapped his hands once, heat rolling off the impact. "Tonight. There is a fire outside the Longfire, down in the lower town — real fire, a big one, and music, and dancing on the boards they've laid over the snow. You will come."

"No," Vera said.

"Tanzen ist Leben," Kers declared, laying a hand flat over his chestpiece. "Dancing is living. A whole winter you spend proving you are dying — one night, prove the opposite. Come and be seen to live a little."

"Kers, I am an invalid. I can barely climb my own stairs. It rather undercuts it all if I turn up doing a jig in the—"

"OOOOH." Lynn's head snapped around so fast her braid whipped. "Dancing? There's dancing? We're going. Vera, we're going; that's not a question."

"It is very much a—"

"I wouldn't mind it," Tresh admitted. "Heard the fiddler down there's supposed to be worth it. The one from the convoy stayed on."

Dorrin nodded. Even Maggs, after a moment, shrugged one stone shoulder and said, "Okay."

Vera looked at the four of them, and at the enormous, singed, beaming man beside her holding the winter off her shoulders with the flat of his hand, and knew she'd already lost this. She opened her mouth to try anyway.

Kers got there first. He settled back against the bench, hooked his maul closer with one boot, folded his arms across the chestpiece, and looked entirely, unbearably pleased with himself.

"You and I," he said. "Is date. I come for you at your door, I escort you down myself — no cane, you lean on me, I am stronger than any cane — and I bring you back to life."

He leaned in close and whispered into her ear. "Besides. We both know your fire is back. I do not understand why you fake. But I will play your game."