Chương 177: Chapter 173. Divination

Home was meant to be quick. In the door, out of the smoke-stained clothes and into a shirt that didn't smell of chimney dust, and gone again before the light went. Beth kept to sunset, and Adom had no wish to keep waiting a woman who'd have watched him coming for a week. He made it as far as the stairs when...

"Brother!" Ada came round the banister at a flat run and fastened herself to his leg. Behind her, at a statelier pace and twice the determination, came Bennu, as a small dark-haired boy with amber eyes.

"You're back." Bennu said it like Adom had been away a year.

"Good. We've been waiting."

"Have you now?"" Ice cream," Ada said into his trouser leg, muffled and final.

"You promised. You said soon, and soon was ages and ages ago." Adom looked down at the crown of her head, then past it to the window, where the street had gone gold with the last of the day. A few hours back, on a street not so different from that one, two people had tried to open him up in front of a crowd. The memory sat cold under the warm evening light.

"It's really not the best—""You said." She tipped her face up, all wounded reproach.

"Two days," Bennu supplied, folding his arms.

"By my count. I keep track of these things."

"You keep track of ice cream?"

"I keep track of everything!" He had a dozen good reasons to say no, and every one of them held. Then he looked at the two faces waiting on him, and made use of not a single one. What were the odds of two assassination attempts in the same day, huh?

"Get your shoes." Ada was gone up the stairs in a streak, shrieking with joy while Bennu allowed himself one small, vindicated nod, as though the matter had never been in any doubt.

The best Ice cream spot in Arkhos and possibly one of the top three in the world, according to Adom, whose global ice cream expertise was mostly limited by the apocalypse, was a cart that stood where the lane spilled out into the square, under a striped awning gone soft with years; run by a wide, slow-moving man named Petros, who made every flavour himself and would close early before he'd sell one he wasn't proud of.

The boards above the counter listed things no other cart in the city would chance: black fig and burnt honey, sea salt and bitter orange, a violet sorbet that tasted faintly of rain. That one was provided by Mr. Biggins, unsurprisingly. If a customer turned up with an idea that actually held together, Petros could sometimes be talked into churning it to order.

Ada had agonised at the display case before settling on vanilla, then chocolate, then back to vanilla with the solemnity of a treaty, and Adom took the coffee. As for Bennu, he set both elbows on the counter, gave the boards a grave study, and then produced from his pockets a small jar of mustard and a twist of paper with peppercorns in it, which explained, at last, why he'd been so insistent they stop at the convenience store on the way, and so cagey about why.

"Can I get mustard flavored ice cream? But sweetened with the dark amber syrup through it, not the pale. And please keep a vanilla base under the whole thing, so it has something to stand on." He tapped the glass.

"Then cracked peppercorn, but only at the very end. So it arrives in pieces instead of bleeding grey through all of it." Petros, who had been half-asleep against his cart in the cooling air, came fully awake.

"... Mustard? Through vanilla?"

"Mhm-mhm, through vanilla." The man studied the smiling boy a moment. Then he fished a stub of pencil and yesterday's newspaper from under the counter and started writing it down, muttering the peppercorn part twice to be sure of it. He worked the churn slow, frowning, tasting off the back of a spoon and tasting again, and when he packed the cup and handed it down he did it carefully, not quite hiding how impressed he'd gone. He made himself a thumbnail of it as well, then his brows climbed after tasting it.

"Well, I'll be damned." He turned the spoon over on his tongue.

"That's a summer flavour, that is. Going on the board." He aimed the spoon at Bennu.

"What do I call it?"

"Bennu's Magnificent Mustard?"

"... I'll come up with something," said Petros, but he was grinning as he said it. Adom had watched the entire performance over the rim of his softening coffee.

"Where did you learn to talk about food like that?"

"The cookbooks." As if nothing on earth could be plainer.

"There's a whole shelf at the house and no one ever opens them, so I did. All of them. The southern spice one was the best, but the pastry one lied about resting times."

"... I see," Adom said. He didn't, quite. But where Bennu was concerned, he was learning to live with not quite. They went on toward the park with the light going soft and tawny around them. He'd forgotten, a little, how much he liked this city in the evening.

The day's heat was lifting off the stones; somebody's supper drifted out of an open window, garlic and frying onion; a knot of old men hunched over a board game outside a wine shop and argued while a girl tipped a coin to a fiddler and got half a song for her thanks. This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

And overhead, a pack of teenagers swept past on flying swords — wobbling, showing off, one of them very nearly clipping a chimney — the latest thing the city's youth had decided was the height of cool. No one hurried, and no one looked over a shoulder. He'd very nearly died for the right to an ordinary evening like this one, and he tried, when he thought to, not to take a single lit window of it for granted.

"Let me try that," he said. Bennu narrowed his eyes, weighing whether the request had been earned, then held the cup up. He'd developed quite the personality overtime. Mostly a mix of Zuni and Ada. Adom took a spoonful braced for the worst, and was ambushed. Sweet came first with the amber syrup rounding the cold off and then the mustard rose up warm and tangy beneath it, and right as he placed the taste the pepper turned up and crackled bright across the back of his tongue. It had no business working.

But it worked beautifully.

"Huh," he said." Told you," said Bennu, vastly pleased, and reclaimed the cup before a second spoonful could be got at. The park opened ahead of them as the tawny drained from the sky and the blue settled down behind it. Lamps had woken along the paths, laying warm coins of light over the grass, and Ada strained toward the fiddle music until Adom turned her gently the other way; toward the far green, where the bronze of Law stood tall above an empty stretch of lawn. Though, not quite empty.

Because an old woman sat on the bench beneath the statue, a fold of cloth across her knees and a needle moving through it in slow, sure passes. She wasn't watching her hands. She had her face turned up to the dark shapes of birds folding into the high branches for the night, and she was speaking to them low.

"Off you go now, little bird," she said.

"Fly safe." Then she turned, before any of them had made a sound, and her eyes found Adom in the dusk.

"There you are." She smiled.

"Hello, Adom."

"... Beth." He'd come looking for her, and somehow still felt she'd done the finding.

"Evening." He glanced past her at the branches. No bird had flown that he could see, nothing to explain who she'd been wishing safe travels. But she was a diviner, and there was no guessing what a diviner saw that the rest of the world didn't, so he let it lie. Her gaze moved over the three of them, unhurried.

"Out for a walk, I see. With the whole retinue, at that."

"Ice cream," Ada announced, holding up two sticky hands as evidence.

"And the park!"

"How lovely." Beth's attention settled on Bennu, and stayed a beat longer than it had on anyone.

"And who's this?"

"My… uh.. brother," Adom said.

"Your brother, is he?" The corner of her mouth lifted.

"Of course he is, you do look quite alike. A pleasure, brother of Adom." For once in his life Bennu had nothing to say. He edged half a step closer to Adom, all the usual swagger gone out of him, and managed a small "... Hello." Beth let him be, and came back to Adom.

"You've had quite the day, I hear."

"News travels fast."

"They do, when it's the kind that shuts a street." She said it lightly, with a glance toward Ada that left the worst of it unspoken, then patted the bench.

"Sit. Rest those feet. They've carried you through enough for one day." Adom sat, while Ada scrambled up on his far side and swung her legs over the edge; Bennu stayed standing, studying the old woman with open, fascinated suspicion.

"And what are your names, little ones?"

"I'm Ada!" She jerked a thumb at the boy.

"That's Bennu, he's Adom's brother. Sort of. It's complicated."

"Most interesting things are." Beth's eyes twinkled.

"Who are you?" Bennu asked bluntly.

"A friend of your brother's. From work, you might say." Ada's eyes went wide.

"But you're so old! Adom works with old people?"

"Hey, Ada." But Beth was already laughing, hard enough that her shoulders shook, yet warm nevertheless."Why scold her?" She said.

"The child only tells the truth, and there's no insult in it. I am old. Gloriously so. I've earned every grey hair on my head, and I'll thank no one to pretend I haven't." Ada beamed at that, going ' See? See?' as Adom felt his ears go warm. Meanwhile, Beth returned to her needle, the stitches going in slow and even.

"What're you making?" Ada asked, leaning in.

"A flag." Adom suddenly looked up, taken by surprise. He'd seen that sewing in her lap through months of council meetings. And every soul who'd ever worked up the nerve to ask what it was — the Archmage himself, more than once — had been turned away with a smile and nothing else. And she'd just told Ada on the first asking.

"A flag for what?" Ada pressed. Bennu had crept near enough now to peer at the cloth as well.

"I haven't decided yet." Beth turned it a little in the lamplight, studying it.

"I'll know when it's done. When I'm certain what it wants to be." She smiled warmly.

"Some things only tell you what they are in their own time." There it was again, the mysterious talk. They sat a while in the easy quiet, with the fountain somewhere behind them, a ripple of far-off laughter, and the leaves stirring in the last of the warm air. Then Beth spoke without looking up from her work.

"So. You're still set on this, are you? The divination?" The question had no business catching Adom off balance. He'd come for exactly this, after all. But it caught him anyway.

"Gaius told you I'd come, right?"

"Gaius told me nothing I didn't already have." The needle went in, came out.

"You've been knocking at this door the better part of a year, Adom. Four times you asked me to my face, and four times I sent you home." She looked up.

"And every time, I told you the same thing. You weren't ready."

"And now?"

"Now you're ready."

"... And if I asked what's changed," Adom said, "what's made me ready all of a sudden; I suppose you'd just be all mysterious and cryptic about it?" Beth laughed, clearly pleased.

"You're starting to learn. I like that." For all of Beth's eccentricity, Adom supposed it was earned. Because he knew very little about divination, for all that he'd chased it, and arrived at the conclusion, same as anyone else, that no one the world knew of could read even a day ahead with any reliability. No one but the woman on the bench. Beth Salazar, the finest diviner alive, who called events three days out and was right better than seven times in ten.

A natural gift of the rarest sort; and, like most such gifts, one she could not explain to save her life, which by every account made studying under her a thing equal parts wonder and slow madness. She unsettled him more than any magus he'd met. She knew things she had no way of knowing. Before his duel with Nox, Adom learned from Merlin that she'd told the council how it would end before he had weaved a single spell.

But the road to [True Archmage] ran through every school there was, and divination was one of the two that had always barred him. If anyone alive could unbar it, it was her.

"I'd be honored," he said.

"If you'll still have me."

"Good." Beth let her sewing rest in her lap.

"Then we begin now." Adom opened his mouth — to say he hadn't expected to start tonight, that he had the children with him, and that he ought to get them home first. But he never reached it, because his mind suddenly emptied. Every thought went out of it at once. Each notion, each word he'd been about to say, swept off between one breath and the next until nothing was left. Only Beth remained, her eyes somehow glowing now, and the world had gone still around her.

Time itself seemed to have stopped, the park and the lamplight and the sound all held fast, until there was nothing left moving in it but the two of them.

"Your first lesson," she said gently, her voice echoing in this new reality.

"Shall we begin?"