Chương 162: Chapter 159. Before Dawn

Adom woke before the sun, before anyone had to wake him, his body already braced for a long day. The room was dark and still warm from sleep. Against his side a small weight stirred and grumbled — Zuni, curled into a tight blue ball of quills, one eye cracking open in deep disapproval of the hour. It is not yet morning, the little creature informed him, with great solemnity. I wish to lodge a complaint.

"Noted," Adom murmured, and got up anyway. He crossed to the washstand, where the basin had warmed itself the moment his feet touched the floor; his mother's charm, worked into the house years ago and faithful ever since. He splashed his face, ran mint powder over his teeth with a frayed twig until his mouth stung pleasantly awake, and dressed in the dark by feel, travel-clothes laid out the night before. Beyond the door, the house was already awake.

He could hear his father out in the yard, the slow rasp of whetstone on steel; a sound he'd fallen asleep and woken to all through his childhood. Arthur always put an edge on his blade before a parting, whether or not the parting was his to make. Closer, from somewhere down the corridor, came thunder of another kind: small bare feet, the scrabble of clawed ones chasing them, and Ada's delighted shriek ringing off the rafters. So Bennu was up.

As it turned out, the phoenix could sleep; he simply chose, most mornings, not to, and spent the hours he might have dreamt away chasing Adom's little sister from one end of the house to the other instead. They have been at this since the third hour, Zuni said darkly, uncurling at last and shaking out his quills. Adom huffed a laugh and scooped him up onto one shoulder. Downstairs, the kitchen glowed.

His mother stood at the stove with a lamp turned low beside her, and the smell of frying eggs and warm bread came climbing the stairs to meet him, the smell that had always meant home more than any roof. He came down into the light of it just as the others tumbled in from the hall, and for a little while, in the dark before dawn, the whole family was in one room.

There was food enough for twice their number, with eggs, fried bread, a crock of butter, a pot of the dark sweet stuff Maria made from autumn plums, and a kettle that had long since learned to hold itself just short of boiling until someone reached for it. Arthur came in from the yard with the cold still on him, set his sword by the door, kissed the top of Maria's head, and folded himself into his chair. Ada had got perhaps three bites in when she noticed the travel-bag waiting by the door.

She set her fork down and frowned at it.

"Is Adom going away again?" The table quieted a little.

"He is," Maria said gently.

"For a few weeks." Ada's whole face fell. The last time he'd gone, she'd refused to speak to anyone for a day and slept at the foot of his empty bed besides.

"I don't like it when he's away," she said, as though this were new information.

"I want to come."

"Me too!" Bennu put in at once, around a mouthful of egg, spraying crumbs.

"Me too, me too, I can carry things, I'm very strong now!" Maria laughed and shook her head, which was answer enough.

"You can't, either of you."" Why?" they demanded, in perfect unison, as though Ada was the one Bennu was bonded to.

"Because it's grown-up business," she said.

"And Adom is a grown-up, who does grown-up things; which is more than I can say for two people at this table who still won't finish their crusts." Ada turned and looked at Adom, weighing the claim against the evidence in front of her. She found it wanting.

"But he's not a grown-up," she announced.

"Father's a grown-up. Look!" She was out of her chair before anyone could stop her, scrambling into Arthur's lap and seizing a fistful of his beard, holding it out like a lawyer presenting the decisive exhibit." See? He has hair on his face. Loads of it. Adom doesn't have any. So he can't be a grown-up, so I can come." Arthur bore the assault on his beard without complaint, long used to it, and only raised an eyebrow at his son over the top of Ada's head. Adom laughed.

"Yet," he said. A compelling argument, Zuni observed from his shoulder, with great gravity. I find for the child. It was funnier than she could know. He could still remember how, in his first life, he'd stayed smooth-cheeked and boyish long past the age it embarrassed him, the last of his friends to manage anything worth the name, until somewhere around twenty-four it had finally come in and then, as though making up for the wait, simply never stopped.

He'd spent the whole back half of that life with a beard he could never quite keep tidy.

"Yet," Adom said again, more to himself, and reached for the plums before Bennu could finish them. And so they ate together, all of them, and took their time over it; eggs and bread and the plum sweet, cup after cup of tea poured from the patient kettle. That was Arthur's tradition.

Back when he still led the Iron Wolves, before he hung up the command for good a couple years ago, he'd kept this same ritual every time he rode out: the whole family at the table before dawn, little Adom blinking and cross in his chair, Maria with both hands round a cup, nobody permitted to rush. As a boy, Adom had never understood it. It had seemed a small cruelty, being hauled out of a warm bed into the dark only to watch his father leave anyway. But he understood it now.

That was the thing no one warned you about, leaving. When you were the one walking out the door toward something dangerous, with everyone you loved at your back and no promise you'd come home to find them whole, every dull ordinary minute at that table was suddenly worth more than it had any right to be. The tea. The crumbs. Ada arguing law with a fistful of beard.

Adom wanted to take the whole morning in both hands and not put it down, because he never knew, not for certain, which of these breakfasts would be the last with everyone still in their chairs. His father had understood that as a young man. It had taken Adom rather longer. So they stayed. They talked, argued and laughed at things that weren't really that funny, while the lamp burned low and the window went from black to grey to the first thin gold of morning. Then the sun cleared the sill, and it was time to go.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Arthur waited until the cups were nearly empty, then started running through the old commander's checklist.

"Gauntlets?"

"Got them." Adom patted the bag. Wam and Bam, freshly back from Filli's and better than they'd ever been.

"Coin?"

"Enough. More waiting if I need it."

"Papers?"

"Signed and sealed. The Magisterium's handling the rest."

"Way to send word?"

"Sorted." Crystals were all well and good inside Sundar, but they hadn't spread far past its borders yet, and where he was going he'd be back to the old ways: letters carried by messenger owls, or falcon where the owls couldn't reach. Slow, but it would find its way home. Arthur grunted, satisfied, and got to his feet. They walked Adom out together, the house quiet behind them, and stopped at the gate in the grey-gold light just before full sunrise.

There Arthur looked him over one more time, and something in his face shifted.

"Look at you," he said.

"You're nearly as tall as me now." Adom laughed, and wasn't quite sure what to do with it. It was a strange thing to hear. For as long as he could remember — and he could remember a great deal — his father had been the one of the tallest men in any room, a wall he'd set himself against and never come close to topping. And now here they stood, very nearly eye to eye.

"Hm," said Arthur. Then, with no warning whatsoever, he had Adom's head tucked neatly under one arm.

"You think a few inches means you can take the old man?" He ground his knuckles cheerfully into Adom's hair.

"Eh? That how it works now?" Adom was laughing too hard to answer, but he held his ground, and he wasn't about to yield. He couldn't, really. Go easy on Arthur and the man took it for an insult, and he'd led the Iron Wolves the better part of his life and still trained like it. If Adom wanted out of this, he'd have to actually earn it. So he reached for it. Just a little.

The pale light of Axis began to gather along his arms and Arthur felt it, grinning wider, and answering in kind as Fluid bloomed around him in a slow azure sheen. For one ridiculous, delighted second, the two of them genuinely squared up." ABSOLUTELY NOT." The Axis immediately died. The Fluid winked out. And both of them went still as boys caught at a broken window. Maria stood on the step with the dish towel over her shoulder and a face that could have curdled milk at forty paces.

"Were you two," she said, slower now and twice as dreadful, "honestly about to go at it at dawn, at my own gate, with half the lane already up and watching from their windows?"

"He started it," Arthur said at once." I started it?"

"Standing there, being tall at me in my own gateway." Arthur let him loose and smoothed down his shirt with enormous dignity.

"Provocation, plain and simple. What's a man to do?" Maria kept her frown for a second longer, then finally sighed, which meant she let it go.

"Your sister and Bennu are fast asleep again," she said, in a gentler voice.

"Burned themselves out before the sun was even up. They're dead to the world on the couch and I doubt they'll stir till noon." Adom glanced back at the house. He could see them through the doorway: Ada flung out flat, mouth open, and Bennu curled into the bend of her in his bird shape, fiery tail draped over them both like a quilt. As Adom watched, the little phoenix sneezed in his sleep; and caught fire, just for an instant, a soft whump of flame that didn't so much as singe the cushions.

When it cleared, a small dark-haired boy lay where the bird had been, one arm flung over Ada exactly as the wing had been, neither of them so much as stirring. He did that now. Slipped between shapes without meaning to, even dead asleep, where not so long ago holding the human form had cost him every scrap of focus he had.

"Then don't wake them," Adom said. He looked down at his shoulder.

"Zuni. Watch them for me?" Zuni considered the request without enthusiasm. I will, he said at last. Though I'll note, for the record, that this places you considerably in my debt. Sugar, Adom. A great deal of sugar.

"We'll see about that." Adom lifted him down and set him on the gatepost, from which he could keep an eye on the house, and then there was nothing left but the going. His parents knew enough. The whole of it was beyond them — Morgana, the contingency, the quiet lawful end of an emperor tucked inside a travel order — but they were old hands, the both of them, and neither had believed for one second that their son was crossing borders to study old rocks.

They understood the official version was a coat thrown over something larger, and somewhere along the way they had decided to trust him with the difference and ask nothing. So Maria straightened his collar, and Arthur clapped him once on the shoulder, and that was that.

"Well," Adom said.

"Be right back."

"Mind how you go," said his father. And he went.

The walk down to the harbor was a quiet one. The lane was barely awake. A baker's window glowed somewhere ahead, the first smoke curled from a chimney or two, and otherwise the world belonged to the occasional cat about its private morning business, and not much else. Adom took it slowly, in no hurry, letting the cool air and the empty streets of beautiful Arkhos do him good. One of the cats — a fat grey thing on a low wall — watched him come and gave a small, expectant trill.

Adom slowed, and reached without thinking for the easy sense the druid in him always kept close, feeling out the shape of the creature's wanting.

"Sorry, friend," he said, patting his pockets.

"Haven't got anything on me." The cat trilled again, more pointedly, and he realized he'd read it wrong. It didn't want food at all. It wanted, with the full and unembarrassed conviction of its kind, to be scratched under the chin, and had simply decided he was the man for the job.

"Ah. My mistake." He obliged. The cat leaned into his fingers with its eyes shut, rumbling like a kettle, and for a little while that was the whole of his responsibilities in the world. When he finally stood and moved on, it watched him go, plainly offended the audience had ended so soon. The harbor opened up below him, masts and rigging dark against a sky going pale at its edges. He was met before he reached the water.

A quiet figure fell into step beside him, said nothing worth overhearing, and walked him along the back of the docks, away from the lamps and the early dockhands, to a berth at the far quiet end where a ship sat waiting with no fuss made about it. By the time Adom reached the top of the gangway, the man who'd guided him was already gone.

"Magus." A young man straightened to meet him on deck, and Adom placed the face at once: the same earnest, literal-minded captain who'd ferried him and the Northking home at the start of all this.

"Glad you made it, sir. We'd started to wonder."

"Captain Lowe." Adom smiled.

"Good to see you again."

"Likewise, Magus." Lowe glanced at the paling sky, then at the crew already loosing the lines along the rail, every one of them standing a little straighter now that Adom was aboard.

"You're the last of us. We can be under way in a few minutes, if you've no objection."

"None at all," Adom said.

"Let's go." Below deck the ship was busy and quiet, a well-drilled crew already at their work. Adom made his way down through it, and the men he passed greeted him with a nod and a low "Magus" and got straight back to it. They were good; he could see that at a glance. Gaius's people, every one, hand-picked and discreet, told only that this was a matter of some weight and that they were aboard to carry the magus where he needed to go and fetch him whatever he needed on the way.

Not one of them knew what he was actually looking for, which was the point. The fewer who carried that, the safer it stayed. Though there was one exception to that rule, and Adom had needed the Archmage's permission to make it. He found the door near the stern and let himself in. It was a small, plain office: a round table, a few chairs, a lamp swaying gently on its hook with the roll of the water. Three people were already sitting around it, and they looked up as he came in.

Sam, glasses shoved up into his red hair, one foot hooked on the rung of the next chair. Damus beside him, still and unbothered, and Karion; whose moustache… wait, Adom paused on that, actually. It had come along. It had come along considerably, in fact, gone from the patchy rumour it had been a week ago since he last saw him to something dark and respectably full, and a week was not enough time for any of that to happen on its own.

Adom looked a beat longer, and there it was, faint under the hair: the telltale shimmer of magic. Alchemy, by the feel of it. He decided to let that one lie. For now.

"There he is," Sam said as he pulled out the last chair and sat.

"Long morning?" Damus asked.

"You have no idea." Karion leaned forward, elbows on the table.

"So. When you hauled us out of bed for this, and got us onto a ship, and wouldn't breathe a word about where we're going or why, you said you'd tell us once we were aboard." He spread his hands.

"We're aboard. It's been very mysterious, Adom, and we have been extremely patient." Sam and Damus said nothing, but they were both looking at him now too. They were the exception to the rule, so he supposed now was a good time, adom took a deep breath, then exhaled.

"Oh boy, that bad?" Said Sam.

"Yeah," he replied.

"About the mission, listen…"