Jade was already sound asleep by the time Av’ry finished cleaning up his herbs and stowing his gear in his pack.

  “So, is she dreaming now?” Mikiva asked, watching Jade as she breathed slowly and evenly on the bed.

  “No,” Av’ry replied. “With what I just gave her, her sleep will be black and dreamless.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because that’s why I formulated it in the first place. And it always worked for me,” Av’ry closed his bag and headed for the door. “Admittedly, her situation is peculiar, but it should work just as well.”

  He hadn’t considered it when he had suggested this to Jade, but making this particular concoction again had brought back some memories he would rather have left buried. Memories of the nights when no amount of alcohol couldn’t prevent the dreams and he had been so desperate that he had started experimenting on himself, until he had found a mixture that could make them stop. He had almost killed himself in the attempt, but he was pretty sure it was the only thing that had saved his sanity. Those had been bad days. Days he had vowed never to return to.

  Opening the door to his adjoining room, Av’ry threw down his bag and collapsed onto the bed, trying to shake the dark thoughts. He pulled the flask from his pocket and took a long pull, leaning his head back against the wall.

  “Are you alright?”

  A hand on his shoulder made him jump, and he looked up to see Mikiva standing over him.

  “Not really,” he admitted.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.

  “You sure you can spare the time?” Av’ry asked, unexpected bitterness creeping into his voice. “I mean, shouldn’t you be with the prisoner?”

  Mikiva hadn’t left Jade’s side for an instant since they’d departed Gullmar. It seemed that her performance with the sage had spooked Mikiva enough that she had redoubled her vigilance. Perhaps she was afraid of what Jade would do, given the opportunity. Jade pretended not to notice, but it was obvious to Av’ry that it hurt her.

  “You said she would be out until morning, so there is no need for me to stay with her, is there?” Mikiva asked.

  Av’ry shook his head.

  “And besides, I got the feeling that you might need me more than she does, right now,” Mikiva sat next to him. “So, what dreams were you trying to silence?”

  Av’ry sighed, taking another drink from his flask.

  “It’s about her, isn’t it?” Mikiva asked softly.

  “Yeah,” he replied slowly. “You could say that.”

  “You know, you’ve never really talked about Taevyn Fox. About what happened,” Mikiva broached the subject tentatively.

  “She died,” he replied simply. “What more needs to be said?”

  “It’s been over 2 years, Av’ry. It still haunts you like this?”

  “Time doesn’t fix everything.”

  Mikiva was silent for a moment, clearly wanting to ask something, but afraid of how he would react. At last, her curiosity won out and she said,

  “Did you love her?”

  “Yeah. I still love her,” Av’ry smiled sadly. “But not in the way you mean. She was my partner, my sister, my best friend. I know it might sound strange, but neither of us had any biological family. Her parents… died when she was young and I was abandoned at birth, so I never knew my parents at all. Before her, there wasn’t a single person in my life that I trusted, that I truly cared about. There was a time that I didn’t even think I was capable of it. We came to depend on each other, and I guess over time, she grew to fill that void for me. I never really asked her if she felt the same, and she wasn’t the type to make it obvious. But for me, she was family. My only family.”

  Av’ry paused for a moment, remembering.

  “Still,” he continued. “Maybe I would have been able to move on, to get past it, if it hadn’t been my fault. I mean, how can I let it go, when I am the one to blame? It would be an insult to her memory. No, I decided long ago that I could never forget, and I could never forgive myself until I made amends. But how do you make amends to the dead?”

  “What makes you say it was your fault?”

  “Because it was,” he shrugged.

  “I don’t believe that,” Mikiva shook her head. “At least, I don’t believe it is as simple as you are making it sound.”

  Av’ry chewed a fingernail pensively.

  “You really want to know? Everything, I mean?”

  Mikiva nodded,

  “I don’t mean to pry, I just, I want to understand. To help, if I can.”

  “I suppose it is only fair. And it is, in a way, what started all of this. Perhaps you should know,” Av’ry took a deep breath, the type of breath you take before diving into deep water. “It all began when Fox got back from travelling in Maaskal, the last time. I could tell that something was wrong. She was… pensive, nervous about something. She didn’t seem to want to talk about it, and I didn’t ask; she never told me anything unless she was ready, and I had long since given up trying to force her to. In retrospect, she had clearly hit the dead end we have now and had come back to reset, to try and think of a new angle for her investigation. I also suspect that she knew she was in danger, though I doubt she knew how serious it was.

  A few days after her return, we were out riding to meet a new client. The job was nothing special, but it was the first one we had worked together in some time. We were in the woods on the way to the meeting when they set upon us. Before I even knew they were there, I had two arrows in my chest and I’d been thrown from my horse,” Av’ry absently fingered the scars through his shirt. “Fox got me up and we managed to find cover in a nearby cave, but our attackers were well-trained, had the advantage of numbers, and they had at least one mage. So, they penned us in, but didn’t rush after us; they knew we were trapped and would have to come out eventually.

  And eventually was not going to be very long. I could already feel the numbness spreading from the wounds. The arrows had been coated in a paralytic toxin, and I knew that it would take only 10-20 minutes for the paralysis to spread enough that I would stop breathing and suffocate. The poison was common enough that I kept the antidote in my bag, but I’d lost it when I fell. It was lying in the woods outside the cave, and there was no way I could get to it.

  Fox knew as well as I did that I was too badly injured to make a run for it, and that I had no time to wait them out. So, she told me that she was going to go out and lure them away; she said that they would follow her, because she was their real target. I could tell that she knew that with certainty, though she wouldn’t explain why. Once they were gone, she said, I could go get my bag, treat the poison, and then we would meet back in town.

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  I knew it was crazy; I told her as much, but she just said that it was the only way. Like I told you before, that was when she made me promise that if she didn’t come back, I would take care of things for her. And then she was gone.”

  Promise me, Ave.

  Av’ry pinched the bridge of his nose, pausing to collect himself,

  “I waited as long as I could after she left, then I crawled out, retrieved my gear and treated my wounds. The paralysis receded and I was able to make it into town and get my injuries properly tended to by a healer. But Fox never returned. Her body was discovered a few days later. The official story was that a guard patrol found her body in the woods, not far from where she’d left me.

  The guards who found her were Istaria’s men; that particular forest bordered some of her lands. That, of course, meant nothing to me at the time. No investigation into Fox’s death was ever made, and the whole thing just quietly went away. They never even turned over her body. She had no family to press for it, and there was no funeral, no burial. Now, of course, it is pretty obvious that Istaria had her killed and then covered up the murder. Not that I needed another reason to hate Istaria, but if I did, I certainly have it.”

  For a moment, there was silence.

  “I am so sorry,” Mikiva replied at last.

  “So am I. She deserved better than that. Better than what I’ve done since, too,” he rubbed the bridge of his nose. “But I… I just fell apart. The guilt over what had happened, what I’d done, it almost destroyed me. Maybe it should have. Maybe I don’t deserve to be here. Why me, and not her?”

  “I don’t see how any of that was your fault, Av’ry. You didn’t do anything.”

  “I suppose not. But that is the problem, isn’t it? I didn’t do anything,” Av’ry bit his lip. “They say that all men are guilty of the good they did not do. If that’s true, I am guilty of a great many things, but none greater than that.”

  “I don’t understand. What choice did you have?”

  “There is always a choice,” he said sadly. “I just made the wrong one, that’s all. She counted on me, trusted me to have her back, the way she had mine. And when it counted, I failed. I didn’t protect her. But it’s more than that; I knew what was going to happen when she left, when she made me promise. I knew she didn’t think she was going to make it back. Still, I let her go. I let her go to her death, to save my own skin. I will never be able to forgive myself for that. She was willing to sacrifice her life for me, but I wasn’t willing to return the favour,” Av’ry drained the last of his flask and set it aside with a disappointed scowl. “I’m a coward and she’s dead. Nothing I do will ever make that right.”

  Av’ry hung his head, this was why he didn’t talk about it; he was ashamed. Ashamed of how weak he had been, how weak he still was. Mikiva was silent. What was there to say, really? He waited to feel her disgust, it was what he deserved, but somehow it didn’t come.

  “I don’t think you are being fair to yourself, Av’ry,” she said finally. “You couldn’t have changed the outcome.”

  “I could have stopped her.”

  “Could you really? Would she have listened if you tried?” she lifted his chin and held his gaze. “She told you that they were after her, right? Even if you had stayed there until you died, they still would have been waiting for her, they still would have killed her. Nothing would have been different, except that you would have been dead as well. If what I’ve heard about Taevyn Fox is true, I am sure she knew that. She made the best choice she could, under the circumstances.”

  Av’ry had never really considered it that way, but there was some truth in that. Their assailants would not have let Fox go, no matter what he had done,

  “Still, I should have…”

  “You trusted your partner’s judgement, trusted her to make the right choice. I bet you had done the same thing dozens of times, hadn’t you?” Mikiva interrupted.

  Av’ry nodded slowly.

  “Yes. Though, I probably should have known better. If there was one thing I couldn’t trust Fox with, it was her own safety,” he shook his head, ruefully.

  “Even so, if she really cared for you as much as it seems, she wouldn’t have wanted you to waste your life agonizing over her death, would she? I mean, what would she say if she could see you now?”

  “Say?” Av’ry chuckled softly. “She’d probably smack me upside the head and tell me to get over myself. Fox wasn’t really the sentimental type.”

  “Well, there you go, then. You can’t go through your life blaming yourself for everything you couldn’t do. Everyone you couldn’t save. Trust me,” Mikiva rested a hand on his shoulder. “I felt the same way about my father’s death, and all it did was turn me into someone I hated. Don’t do that to yourself.”

  “So, what am I supposed to do?” Av’ry asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mikiva sighed. “I haven’t figured that part out, myself. I know I’m that’s not much help. Just… think about it, ok? And if I come up with anything, you’ll be the first to know.”

  Av’ry smiled,

  “Thanks, Miki. That really does help, I mean it.”

  “I don’t believe you for a minute,” Mikiva patted his cheek gently. “But it is nice of you to say. There is one thing I don’t understand, though, if you don’t mind my asking.”

  “What’s that,” Av’ry replied.

  “Well, you described an ambush. Multiple attackers, with poisoned weapons, luring her out under false pretences. You said they even had mages.”

  “Right…”

  “Well, I don’t understand why they would do all that just to kill one woman. It seems like… overkill, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it seemed odd to me, too,” Av’ry admitted. “But I just figured that whoever it was had learned her secret.”

  “Secret?” Mikiva raised an eyebrow.

  Av’ry hesitated for a moment, uncertain if he should say more. But really, what did it matter, at this point?

  “Yeah. It was one of the things that she and I had in common. We were both keeping our talent a secret, to avoid being forcibly drafted into the Esrasean military.”

  “She was a sensitive, too?”

  “No,” he chuckled. “Would that have justified the overkill you were talking about? In my experience, only one thing inspires that level of response to a single person.”

  “She was a mage?” Mikiva concluded with surprise. “I’d never heard anything about that.”

  “I’m not surprised. It was a very closely guarded secret. I don’t know how Istaria discovered it, but she must have. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have sent so many men for us that day. Of course, she couldn’t have known the whole truth, or she wouldn’t have bothered.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Fox was never what you would call an enthusiastic mage. Quite the opposite. If Istaria’d known her, she would have known that Fox never used her powers, not even to save her own life. In all the years we were together, I could count on one hand the number of times she did, and it was always to protect someone else. Never herself. And even if she had resorted to it that day, she lacked the skill to put up much of a resistance. Because she never used her power, any half-decently trained mage would have easily bested her in a head-on fight.”

  “What? Why?” Mikiva frowned. “Most people would kill to have a mage’s power. Why would she squander it like that?”

  “That is… too complicated to get into right now,” Av’ry sighed. “Suffice it to say that Fox hated having that power. She was terrified of it, in truth, and had been actively repressing it since childhood. In fact, she did such a good job of it that I didn’t even realize she was a mage, when we first met.”

  “Really?”

  “Yup, only mage I ever met that could do that. Though, I suppose I wouldn’t necessarily know if others could, would I? Either way, I’ve always figured few develop that skill, because few even attempt to do so. Like you said, most people would kill to be a mage, they don’t hide it.”

  “When did she tell you?”

  “Tell me?” he laughed. “She didn’t. Probably never would have, honestly. Fox tried very hard to pretend that she wasn’t a mage at all. I only learned about it because she didn’t know I was a sensitive, either.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, remember that scar I told you about? I said I got it distracting a kidnapper?”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, I may have downplayed how close I came to dying, that day. I’m not really a great swordsman, even now, but back then I was much worse. Barely knew where to stick the pointy end, if I am being honest. The guy had me disarmed, injured, and on the ground in no time. Fox was across the warehouse, with the child, much too far away to intervene. At least, that was what I thought. The kidnapper raised his blade to finish me off, and suddenly the guy was flying backwards. He slammed into a stack of crates ten feet behind him.”

  “Impressive, for someone who never practiced,” Mikiva observed.

  “Oh, Fox had a decent amount of power, that was certain. Exactly how much, I could never really get a read on, because of how she kept it locked away, but she could shove things around pretty good, if she wanted to. What she lacked was finesse, control. Anyway, she saved my life that day. But I think she would have denied being responsible for it, if I hadn’t felt the power from her myself. She still tried, but I wasn’t having it, I told her I knew a mage’s power when I felt it. And that was the day we learned each others’ secrets.”

  Av’ry smiled wistfully at the memory.

  “After that, I used to try and encourage her to train,” he continued. “Or at least to use her magic before situations got that dire. She always refused. And she went to great lengths to make sure she was never pushed far enough to use them again. Though, she didn’t always succeed. I like to think I was starting to make some headway in convincing her, near the end. But I suppose I will never know, now.”

  Av’ry reached for his flask, rediscovered that it was empty, and tossed it aside with a scoff.

  "I'm going downstairs to the pub for a refill. Want to join me?"

  "Are you asking me on a date?" Mikiva asked with a sly smile.

  "Why not?" Av'ry chuckled.

  "Not the most romantic invitation I've ever received, but far from the least," she rose, slipping her hand into his.

  Smiling Av'ry followed her out into the hallway. He was certainly grateful not to be alone tonight.