Chương 75: What Vashe Decided to Do With Hope

Vashe found me alone that evening, sitting by the same fountain where Ellia had once told me she loved me, and settled onto the stone rim beside me without asking permission first.

"I've made a decision," he said, "and I wanted you to hear it from me directly, since you're the one who actually made tonight's answer possible."

"Tell me."

"I'm going to find a way to Apros," he said.

"Not tomorrow. Not recklessly, the way two centuries of desperate searching once nearly cost me everything I had left to lose. Properly, this time with preparation, with patience, with the same care I finally learned to ask my question with, instead of simply demanding an answer the way I once tried to demand everything else." He studied the fountain's endless water a long moment.

"I don't know yet whether she'll want to see me. I don't know whether the crossing itself is survivable for someone my age, whatever my age actually amounts to after everything I've lived through. I only know that two centuries of not trying was considerably worse than whatever risk trying properly might actually cost me now."

"What will you actually need? To attempt something like that."

"I don't fully know yet," Vashe admitted.

"Passage across the Ashwater Divide isn't something Chronos has managed reliably in generations, if the guardian's own tone tonight was any honest indication. I suspect it will require considerably more than simple coin or ordinary cultivation strength. Perhaps an old relic. Perhaps a debt owed by someone who's actually made the crossing successfully before." Something wry crossed his tired features.

"I spent two centuries learning how to collect debts from other people, child. It seems only fitting that I'll likely need to call in a few of my own, before this particular journey is finished."

"You're not going alone," I said.

"Not immediately, at least. Whatever help Dororo can offer, whatever the Vortexian family's own old records might still hold about the Ashwater Divide I intend to make certain you have every advantage available before you attempt something this significant." Something crossed Vashe's face, old gratitude finally settling somewhere it could actually rest.

"You've already given me more than I had any right to ask for, child. A question answered. A daughter confirmed alive. I won't ask you to drop everything else waiting for you here to chase my own hope across an entire continent."

"You're not asking," I said.

"I'm offering. There's a difference, and I think it's one you're only just starting to properly understand." He laughed, quiet and genuine, the sound still unfamiliar coming from a man who'd spent two centuries perfecting an unremarkable, guarded face.

"Perhaps I am," he admitted.

"Perhaps that's the last lesson two hundred years of grief still had left to teach me." The farewells at the Greyhold's gate took longer than any of the previous ones had. Len Wei held me a long while, considerably steadier this time than our very first reunion had allowed either of us to manage.

"Come back soon," he said.

"And bring your mother next time, properly, the way she deserves to finally see this place for herself instead of only hearing about it in careful letters."

"I will," I promised.

"Once things settle enough to make that particular journey feel safe instead of reckless."

"They rarely feel entirely safe," Len Wei said, something rueful crossing his face.

"I've learned that particular lesson considerably later than I should have. Don't wait for safe, Fan'er. Wait for ready, and trust that ready is usually close enough." Serel embraced Vashe briefly at the gate, something warm finally replacing the wariness she'd shown him on arrival.

"Go find her, Old Reckoning," she said.

"And when you do, tell her this valley exists, if she ever needs somewhere considerably safer than wherever she's built her life to disappear into instead." Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

"I will," Vashe said, something steadier in his voice than I'd heard from him since the waystation.

"And you," Serel added, turning to me with the same dry warmth she'd shown since the first visit.

"Don't be a stranger simply because the world just got considerably larger than either of us expected it to be this week. This valley's door stays open regardless of how many continents eventually turn out to matter." Alfredo Van, dividing his time as ever between the valley and his family in Trigatia, clasped my shoulder once before we departed.

"Four centuries of hiding taught me one thing worth passing on properly," he said.

"Whatever you learned out there tonight let it make you more careful, not more frightened. Fear cost me four hundred years I'll never get back. I'd rather you spend whatever comes next actually living, instead of simply surviving it from a safe distance the way I did."

"I intend to," I said, and meant it. The ride back toward Trigatia felt different than any journey before it, the weight of what we'd learned settling slowly into something closer to purpose than dread. Ember rode confident and alert on my shoulder, wings catching the autumn light in a way that had become, across the past year, an old and familiar comfort.

Ellia rode beside me in comfortable quiet for most of the first day, until she finally broke it with the same directness she'd used since a courtyard conversation about Kalio, months and lifetimes ago now.

"What happens now?" she asked.

"Not just for Vashe. For us. For everything we're carrying home with us that wasn't there when we left this valley behind."

"I think we go back to living properly," I said.

"The Nightsky Sect, the academy, whatever ordinary life still waits for us in Trigatia. I don't think the answer is dropping everything to chase a continent none of us are ready for yet." I looked over at her, steady despite everything still sitting heavy in my chest.

"But I think we carry the knowledge differently now. Quietly. Patiently. The same way Dororo intends to keep researching, the same way Vashe intends to prepare properly before he ever attempts that crossing."

"And when we are ready?" she asked.

"For whatever's actually out there, waiting past a divide none of us had ever even heard named before this week?"

"Then we go," I said simply.

"Together, the way we've done everything else." Kalio rode a little ahead of us, quiet, clearly still working through everything the guardian had revealed, and Dororo brought up the rear, muttering half-formed theories under his breath the entire way, already planning whatever research came next. On the second evening, camped in the same rough country we'd crossed on the way out, Kalio finally spoke his mind properly for the first time since the valley.

"I keep thinking about my father," he said, staring into the fire.

"His whole life, he measured everything by the Nightsky Sect's standing against yours. Territory, reputation, old grudges neither of us fully understood the origin of. Tonight I learned there's an entire continent out there that would look at both our sects the way we'd look at two children arguing over a single toy in a considerably larger room." He shook his head slowly.

"I don't know how to explain that to him without it sounding like an insult to everything he's spent his life building."

"You don't have to explain all of it at once," I said.

"Some truths take time to actually land properly, the same way the truth about my own bloodline took me considerably longer to accept than the single afternoon I first learned it."

"That's fair," Kalio admitted.

"I suppose I'll figure out how to say it, eventually, the same way I've figured out everything else this past year." He managed a tired smile.

"Slowly seems to be the only pace any of us have actually mastered." Dororo, overhearing, allowed himself a small, dry laugh.

"Slowly and considerably more thoroughly than most people manage," he said.

"I intend to spend the coming months doing exactly that researching properly, rather than simply reacting to whatever fragment of the truth happens to land in front of me next." He glanced toward Vashe, still riding quiet near the rear of our small group.

"I suspect we're all going to need that patience, in equal measure, before this particular thread finishes unspooling." I looked back once, toward mountains that held a valley full of unclaimed things, a grandfather finally healing, and a great-grandfather learning, four centuries too late, how to actually live instead of merely survive.

Ahead of us, Trigatia's spires waited beneath a sky that suddenly felt considerably larger than it had a week ago, holding, somewhere beyond its own horizon, an entire world none of us had properly understood existed until tonight. I intended to meet whatever came next the same way I'd met everything else whole, patient, and considerably less alone than I once believed I had any right to be.