Soar-wings

Opening

Emisne was waiting up for him.

The house had gone quiet around her — their parents in bed, the dishes from the long dinner stacked and drying, her son asleep somewhere upstairs — and she sat at the kitchen table with her hands folded around a cup that had long since gone cold, and when the door opened and her youngest brother came in from across the street, she did not pretend she had been doing anything else.

"So," she said. "How was it across the street?"

Zuktind closed the door behind him. "Eri said I was giving them false hope. He told me not to speak of their daughter to them again." He sat down across from her. "Uldoru never said a word."

"They miss her, Zuktind." Emisne said it gently. "I'm sure they miss her very much. But you have to understand how much it costs them to miss her." She turned the cup a quarter-turn on the table. "There are a lot of people in this town who, if Insa came back, wouldn't want to hear what happened to her. They would just want justice."

What He Had Not Said at Dinner

He had meant to say it at dinner. He had been about to, and their mother had spoken over him — she did not want to hear Insa's name in her house again — and so he had swallowed it, and carried it across the street instead, and been turned away there too.

"There was something I thought I could tell them," he said. "Only them. And even that, they didn't want to hear." He looked at his sister. "If I say it, you won't believe it either."

"Well," said Emisne. "Push it out."

He breathed in, and let it go.

"We learned that Insa is not simply a free agent of the ferals, or of the cult. It's more complicated than that. She's under the influence of dark magic. Magic that would do her terrible harm if she tried to fight it — magic that might even kill her, if she refused to obey."

His sister looked at him for a long moment.

"Zuktind," she said. "Are you sure you're not looking for excuses for what she did?"

"No. She is not fully in control of herself. That's what we learned. She's a prisoner of it, and that is why I believe she can be saved. I want to set her free. I want to find out how the spell can be broken."

"Of course. The prodigy." There was no cruelty in it, only a great tiredness. "Of everyone in Claw Ridge, she's the one the dark magic chose."

"I don't know why she ran," he said. "Maybe she went out for some reason of her own. But while she was out there, I am certain they put a spell on her and made her serve them."

"And what are you going to do about it?"

"What I told the Elder five years ago." His voice did not waver. He had said these words before, to a different woman, and he had not forgotten one of them. "I will save her from herself if I can. And if I cannot, I will be the one to put her out of her misery. My mission is not over until she is either free and one of us again — or dead."

"I don't think the people of this town would believe you," Emisne said, "if you came back and told them you'd killed her."

"Then I'd bring her body home. Even if nobody else would bury her, I would bury her myself."

Somewhere in the back of his mind, as he said it, a thought brushed past him — cold and quick, a shape of a thought, one of the uglier roads a clever man might take to make a promise like that come true. He saw that it was there. He did not follow it. Whatever it was, it went back into the dark, and he let it go.

"Sister," he said instead, "if I can free her — if she comes back to answer for what she was forced to do — would you stand with me? You know what I've told you now. Would you help me make the town understand?" He tried to smile. "I know it's a hard sell."

"It is a hard sell," Emisne said. "Yes. It is."

She reached across the table, and put her hand over his, and he could see in her face exactly how much she loved him. And then she told him the truth as she saw it, because she loved him.

"Zuktind, I know you love her. I know you went on this five-year mission to rescue her. But I think it's time you understood that you're trying to rescue her from herself. There's no dark magic. She's not a victim." Her hand tightened on his. "The people of this town are the victims. The ones who suffered when she betrayed us. Vessa is a victim — not Insa. And you will find a lot of people here who think the same."

Zuktind did not let go of her hand.

"You remember what I told Mother," he said. "Something big is coming. It may be the one whose name we'd rather not speak. If it is her — I would rather have Insa fighting beside me to save this world. And maybe this town would think of her more kindly if she came home a hero." He drew breath. "The ferals with the cult call me a traitor to my kind. They say we betrayed our mother. Well — if she is what they mean to bring into the world, then I want to stand in front of her with Insa beside me, and both of us tell her together: she may be our mother, but she does not get to choose how her children live. We chose a father. And he has been far better to us than the one who made us ever was."

His sister did not argue with any of that. Every child in Claw Ridge is taught the same story — made by Tiamat, enlightened by Bahamut, and choosing the light against their own maker. That was not the part she disagreed with.

"Not everyone believes in dark magic, Zuktind," she said quietly. "Not everyone can cast a spell. How many people can lay a curse, let alone a hold on someone's mind that lasts for years? People know the gods exist. But how many have seen one? How many have spoken to one?" She looked at him. "How many can say they have lived through a god putting a hand on their life?"

He could. That was the whole trouble. He was asking her to take on faith the one thing that had only ever been proved to him.

"Then if I can't persuade you," he said at last, "I suppose I'll just have to make sure everyone knows when I have proof."

Emisne let go of his hand.

"I wish you good luck, brother," she said. "I really do."

The Fang and Talon

There was no room in the house for two more guests, and Yeltsu and Rathenfall had not wanted to put anyone out of a bed. Lissandra and Mira had stayed up at the temple with the High Priestess, deep in old maps. So the yuan-ti and the leonin walked down through Claw Ridge in the cold mountain dark to the inn Zuktind had sent them to, and found it without any trouble at all.

The Fang and Talon had been carved by everyone. That was the first thing they saw. The beams, the lintels, the backs of the chairs, the edges of the stairs — every surface a knife could reach had been worked into scales and wings and the curling shapes of the faith, four centuries of somebody's spare evenings, and none of it matched, because no two pieces had been made by the same hands.

Behind the desk sat a black-scaled dragonkin woman, who looked at them with curious eyes and said nothing at all. She set a heavy book on the desk, opened it, dipped a pen, and held it ready — over the page, not toward them. The last entry on that page was in faded ink.

"Names," said Gelar Naktar.

"Yeltsu," said Yeltsu. "And this is Rathenfall."

She wrote them herself, carefully; she did not trust strangers to spell anything properly in her book. Then the pen stopped.

"House."

She looked up at them over the register. "That's the part where I usually write Claw Ridge," she said. "I haven't had to write anything else there in eleven years or so."

Yeltsu thought about it the way he thought about everything. Among his own kind, a house was where your clan had lived for generations. "The House of Stones," he said. "That is where my family has always lived, where I come from."

She wrote it. Then she turned the corner of her eye on Rathenfall, suspicious, and waited.

"And you, furry one?"

Rathenfall did not know. That was the simple truth of it — he had been very young when the Order of Tyr took him in, and of whatever came before, nothing had stayed with him. His people did not even come from this world. Somewhere, a long time ago, something had torn a leonin cub out of his own plane and left him in this one, and he had grown up never knowing where home had been.

So he gave her the only house he had ever had.

"I am of the House of Tyr."

Gelar Naktar wrote it down. And then she asked her real question.

"Which gate did the two of you come in by?"

"We came by the teleportation circle," Yeltsu said. "In the temple basement."

Her eyes went very thin.

"You wouldn't be lying," she said, "to the person giving you a bed in writing. Would you?"

"Of course not," said Rathenfall.

"May Tyr strike me down if I am," said Yeltsu.

She looked at him a moment longer. "I don't doubt He would," she said, and told them the price.

It was a small town on a mountain, and its economy was strong, and for a gold piece each they had the finest rooms in the house — spacious, comfortable, more than either of them was used to. She asked whether they wanted a meal before bed.

"Certainly," Yeltsu said, and reached for his purse again — and then stopped, and coloured faintly under his scales, because the meal had come with the room, and he was so used to paying extra for food everywhere else that it had not occurred to him it might not cost anything here.

There Is No Bar

There was no bar.

Not a poor one, not a closed one. There simply was no bar, and no place in that room where a bar had ever been or could be. What there was instead was one long table, taking up most of the room, with eleven people sitting at it. A fire burned at one end that somebody kept getting up to feed. Bowls went down the table from hand to hand rather than being carried. Two children were under it.

Nobody stopped talking when they came in. Three people slid up the bench to make room for them, without being asked.

There was a pot of something with more marrow in it than meat, and there was bread, and the bread — Yeltsu took one bite and stopped — was better than it needed to be. Considerably better. He and Rathenfall ate with the quiet concentration of men who had spent a long time on the road eating what they could get, and the talk went on around them, and nobody turned to stare.

"I don't think I've felt this welcome," Yeltsu said under his breath, "in a long time." He thought of Zuktind's family and amended it. "Not like this. That's different — that's family." He looked down the table. Most places they went, there was always at least one person who stared at him. One pair of eyes that followed the scales, the tail, the slit pupils. He could always feel it. Here he could not feel it at all.

The people at that table talked about the valley the way people talk about weather. Three fires again last week. Last spring there were four by this time. Ordinary concerns, for a town that had lived for a long time at the top of a cliff above people who wanted it burned.

The children under the table were looking at Yeltsu.

He felt them before he saw them — two pairs of eyes, very wide, peering up from between the boots. The harmonica at his belt, which he had carried openly ever since he first had it. The tail, with its rattle. He bent and looked down at them.

"Well, hello there."

One small hand pointed at the harmonica. "What is that?"

He told them, with great seriousness. It was a magical instrument. It could make a silence. It could catch a sound and keep it, and play it back later. It could make a noise so loud it carried for streets, or one so quiet it carried barely past your own ear. "It's a wonderful device." He paused. "Or I can just play music on it. I do that sometimes."

At the word music, both children came out from under the table at once and stood at his elbow.

"Can you play it for us?"

The Song

He put the harmonica to his lips and did not reach for any of its magic at all. He only meant to play.

It went badly. It had been a long time since he had played for anyone who was not his friends on a road, and he started out of tune and uncertain, not sure what to play, and the children's faces began to do the polite thing children's faces do, and he felt it slipping —

Rathenfall had been eating. He put his spoon down.

He was not a talker. Everyone who had ever travelled with him knew it; lately his voice had gone rough, worn down to little more than a rasp. He did not try to rescue the tune on the harmonica. He did not try to say anything. He simply began to sing the song the two of them had sung so many times on the road — and the moment he did, Yeltsu knew it, and found it, and followed him.

It was a beautiful voice.

Nobody at that table had expected it, least of all, perhaps, Rathenfall. Relaxed, and deep, and truthful. Whether it was the mountain, or the fire, or the bread that was better than it needed to be, the voice that came out of the leonin paladin was the voice of a man who had walked a great many roads and meant every word. He sang about the roads they travelled. About being lost, and being forgotten. And then about being found — about being taken in by strangers.

Yeltsu played under him, and shook his rattle softly in time.

The whole room stopped. All eleven people at the long table. The children standing at Yeltsu's elbow. Gelar Naktar in her doorway. When the last of it had gone up into the carved rafters, they applauded — all of them, loud, delighted — and Yeltsu bowed his head to them in thanks. Rathenfall rubbed the back of his own neck and did not know where to look. He did not do things like that. He was not used to being praised for them.

Yeltsu ruffled the nearest small head. "Well. You got your song, kiddo. What did you think?"

"That was amazing! Your friend sings really well." An accusing look. "You didn't say he sings."

"He doesn't usually, in front of people," Yeltsu said. "Sometimes on the road. Not very often in front of anyone but me and our companions." He smiled. "But yes. He does sing."

The Man Who Ate Quickly

People began to talk to them then — excited, congratulating them, asking where they had come from. And from one end of the long table came a voice that did not introduce itself the way everyone else had.

It belonged to a man who ate like someone with thirty years' practice at eating very fast. He had listened to the whole song. Now he spoke without looking up from his bowl.

"You came in with the lieutenant."

"Yes," said Yeltsu. "Yes, we did."

"I heard Tracdraix's strongest youngest was back. Is he well?"

"He's doing well," Yeltsu said. "I can't tell you how many times he's saved my hide."

"Good," said the man, and went back to his soup, and did not say another word. Neither of them knew his name. Nobody at that table offered it.

Is That Plate?

There was a young dragonkin woman at the table who had been staring at Rathenfall's armour since the moment they sat down.

She was bronze-scaled, and very young, and wore a militia coat at least one size too big for her — issued to someone else first, by the look of it. She had waited, very deliberately, until the table was loud enough with the after-song excitement to cover her voice. Then she leaned over.

"Is that plate?"

Rathenfall took a moment to answer, because he was not used to being asked — and in that moment she went scarlet with mortification. "Sorry — sorry. It's just, we've got mail. All of us, we've all got mail, you know? There are maybe four sets of plate in this whole town. Some of them are only ceremonial."

"Yes," said Rathenfall. "It is plate." And then, because she looked so stricken: "I'm not used to people asking about my armour. Most people are more interested in the fact that I'm a paladin."

Her face changed. He could see the real question coming up behind her eyes before she asked it.

"How long does it take?"

"How long does what take?"

"To get good."

He considered it honestly. "It depends on how you look at it. It could take years. It could take longer. It depends who you ask. But it's all about dedication."

"I joined the militia four years ago," she said. "You probably don't know — but when I was fourteen, something really bad happened in this town." Two or three people further down the table, who had not seemed to be listening, went quiet. "And then I enlisted." She lifted her chin. "I'm going to wear full plate like yours one day. I'm going to get good."

"That's a goal worth having," Rathenfall said. "Don't let anyone tell you you can't."

She pulled a breath into her lungs in a strange, uncomfortable way. And then, lower:

"I've never been in a fight, though."

"The first fight is always nerve-racking," he said. "But once you get the handle of it, it becomes second nature."

She moved her stool closer — right up beside him now — and leaned in, and whispered it as if it were a confession.

"Well. I guess you need to survive the first fight first."

Rathenfall looked at her for a long moment: a girl of eighteen in a borrowed coat, who had been fourteen when the ferals came over the edge of the town.

"Surviving the first fight is about knowing what you can handle," he said. "Keep it simple, at first."

"You look like you've survived a lot of fights."

"It's been a long journey."

She believed him, and she listened to everything he would tell her about it, young and hungry for it. And Yeltsu, sitting close enough to overhear, leaned toward his friend and whispered: Offer to spar with her. Help her get ready for the first one.

So Rathenfall did. "If you want," he said, "I could spar with you. Help you prepare." A glance at the yuan-ti. "It was his idea."

"Sparring? With you? Are you serious?" She lit up like a struck lamp. "I would love that. We spar every morning in the militia — it's part of the routine. You could come to the barracks." She hesitated. "And the lieutenant — you said you came with him? Maybe he'd come too."

"I'll have to ask him," Rathenfall said. "But I'll see."

"If you're willing," Yeltsu put in, "I wouldn't mind joining in as well. I've survived a few fights myself."

"Are you joking? You totally look like it." She was staring at his scales — at the hard, healed ridges on them, the little scars and dents and scratches that anyone else with scales would read in a heartbeat. Yeltsu had never thought about it. Among the people he usually walked with, nobody could read scales like that.

"Then after the temple tomorrow," Rathenfall said. "In the morning."

"Tomorrow," said the recruit, "is going to be awesome."

The Room Not for Letting

Every wall of the Fang and Talon was carved — every beam, every lintel, every chair-back, four hundred years of it. Every room but one. At the end of the back hall a door stood open on a room with a bed, a chair, a blanket, and nothing else. Not a single carving anywhere.

Gelar Naktar followed Rathenfall's gaze to it.

"That one," she said, "is not for letting."

She did not explain. They did not ask.

The Black Jungle

Yeltsu slept the way he always slept on the road — lightly, with one hand where he could reach a weapon. A soft bed in a good room did not change that. Somewhere in the night, in the deep of it, there was a coiling.

Not a shape. A pressure. The sense of something very large, held very still for a very long time, the way a rope under a load is still.

It was something old. Something that had not changed in a long, long while. It reached for him from a black jungle far, far away — something that ought to be free and was not, and it was tired — and it knew that he had not forgotten its name.

He woke before anyone, before dawn, lying in the dark with his eyes open.

He had not felt that in a long time. He had chosen Tyr; he had meant it. And still — the god who had made his people a weapon was imprisoned against his will, his worship stolen from him by a usurper wearing his name. Whatever else Sseth was, that was unjust. My goal is still to free him, Yeltsu told himself, there in the dark. But I will do it in Tyr's name now. That much he would keep.

When the window greyed, he woke Rathenfall, and told him what he had felt — and what he was sure it meant.

"Even now," he said, "sometimes I can feel his pain. Even though I've chosen to worship Tyr. It's like feeling the wounds of someone who is hurt." He was quiet for a moment. "I'll figure something out. And if I can't do it myself, I'll at least lay the groundwork. So the others of my kin can follow, when they find out the truth."

Rathenfall heard him out, and nodded, and did not try to talk him out of anything.

Downstairs, early as it was, the innkeeper was already up and two or three people were already eating, and they barely looked up. There was food — good, rich food. "This place has such good food," Yeltsu said, mournfully. "It's hard to leave it." But they had Zuktind's house to get to, and a temple after that, and a recruit after that.

Before Dawn on the Doorstep

Yeltsu knocked on the door of the house where Zuktind had grown up while the sun was still under the edge of the world.

An upstairs window banged open. "Why are you two up so early?"

"It's partly because of me," Yeltsu said. "But I'd rather we kept it between party members."

"Fine." The window shut. A minute later they heard him knock on his sister's door — "Telno, it's time to get up, Yeltsu and Rathenfall are already here" — and then he came down the stairs with his hair every which way and Rusty clanking at his heels, and opened the door with a yawn. "All right. Why are you already up? The sun isn't even over the horizon."

Yeltsu told him.

"So Sseth contacted you," Zuktind said. He thought about it the way he thought about everything, out loud. "Because he knows you're the only one who knows what's really been done to him. You're his only chance. Even if he'd care, after he was free — right now he can't afford to care that you worship another god. That's why you're able to help him."

"Probably," said Yeltsu. "I'm not sure he's known for gratitude."

"Darkness and evil are two different forces," Zuktind said. "Darkness is darkness. Evil is pure malice. At least he's not —" He did not say her name.

Yeltsu did. "At least he's not Tiamat," he said, and then winced. "Sorry. I'm not used to not saying it."

Zuktind explained, in a lowered voice on his own doorstep, how it worked in Claw Ridge: that a name like that was a true curse here; that the Elder could brand it on someone as a last name of shame; that the clergy dealt with it every day and would understand, but the ordinary townsfolk would only hear he said the T-word and go uncomfortable. Yeltsu promised to say it in front of nobody but the party.

"Come in," Zuktind said. "It's cold up here in the mornings. Come in."

They sat at the dining table while the house woke up around them, and Rathenfall told him about the recruit in the oversized coat, and the armour, and the sparring.

"She wasn't in the militia when I was lieutenant," Zuktind said slowly. "But you said she joined after the attack."

"Four years," said Rathenfall.

"She'd like to spar with you too," said Yeltsu.

Zuktind sat with that for a moment. Then he stood up. "Give me a minute. Rusty, stay with them." He was already on the stairs. "If I'm going back to the militia, I'm getting my coat."

The Coat

The closet in his old room had not been opened in five years. Everything in it was grey with dust: clothes he had not thought worth carrying, a boy's things, a younger man's things. He went through it all until his fingers closed on the one piece that had been hung properly, pressed and put away with care, and kept.

He wet a cloth in the washbasin and cleaned five years of dust from it a stroke at a time. Then he put it on over his travelling clothes and went down the stairs in it, and turned around once at the bottom with his arms out.

"How do I look?"

"Very official," said Yeltsu.

"I've seen something like it before," said Rathenfall.

"There are a few things on here that mark me as lieutenant." Zuktind touched them — the pips, the insignia. "They'll have someone else in my place by now. But if I'm going to the barracks, I can't go without it. I'd feel naked without my coat."

"Oh — look at you." His mother was on the stairs behind him with her hands pressed together. "My son. In your old uniform. Tracdraix, come and see." And his father came down after her, half-awake, asking what all the noise was, and saw him, and stopped. "Oh, son," Tracdraix said. "You know I've always been so proud of you."

Zuktind told them about the recruit, and the sparring, and why he had dug the coat out. "I couldn't face my old brothers in arms if I wasn't dressed like one of them."

And it was in the saying of it that he heard what he had said.

He was quick, and he was honest with himself, and the thing he had not seen five minutes ago came up and looked him in the face. Some people at the barracks would be glad to see him. Some would welcome him home. And some would watch him walk in after five years gone, wearing the coat, wearing the rank, as though they should all receive him with open arms — as though his place had been kept empty for him, waiting. As though he had come to take it back.

"Father. Mother." He looked between them. "Not everyone is going to see me in this uniform the way you two did. Do either of you know how I can show them I'm not trying to take my old place?"

His father had no answer for him. Tracdraix only looked at him with a kind of quiet pride and said that it did him credit to think of it.

Zuktind racked his memory. Veterans of the militia were allowed to wear their uniforms after they left — was there a mark for that? A ribbon, a band, anything that set a veteran apart from serving rank? If there was, he could not remember it. Perhaps that was a ceremonial dress, and not this coat at all.

And under all of it, a quieter, colder thought: that maybe this was simply not the time. That there was no way to walk in there unannounced, uninvited, and get ahead of every suspicion and fear that would rise before he could open his mouth.

"I think I have an idea," he said. "I'll be right back."

He ran back up the stairs, and came down again with a strip of black cloth, and wrapped it around the lieutenant's insignia on his right sleeve — over the gold draconic lettering — and tied it off. He held the arm out for them to see.

"Maybe this will send the message."

Maybe, said something at the back of his mind — his own good sense, which had already spoken once that morning and would not trouble to repeat itself — is the right word.

He did not take the coat off.

His Father's Bench

"Mother," Zuktind said, and brought out his cooking things, "what do you say we make breakfast for the household together?"

So they did. It was her kitchen, and she was a powerful force in it, and he was — to everyone's astonishment, perhaps his own most of all — helping. After years of rehydrated rations on the road, real ingredients felt like a kind of luxury. Bacon. Eggs. Pancakes. A great spread of it, for his parents and his sisters and his nephew and his two friends at the table. And one meat pie, the one his mother had promised the night before to the woman who had kept her son from becoming a werewolf. They wrapped it up snug to keep it warm as long as they could.

"As much as we liked the food at the inn," Yeltsu murmured to Rathenfall, "this is good too. I'm glad I left room."

And between the pans, Zuktind brought something else out to show his father: the incomplete prosthetic hand.

"A friend of mine lost her hand in a magical explosion," he said. "I made her a temporary one, with an infusion. But I want her to have something that doesn't need me nearby for the rest of her life. Do you think we could finish it before we leave town?"

Tracdraix was an artificer himself — an alchemist — and he took the schematics in his hands the way only another maker would, and turned them, and became interested in everything at once. He made suggestions. Some of them were improvements. And between the eggs and the pancakes, at his father's bench, the two of them bent their heads over it together.

By the time breakfast was finished, so was the hand.

Zuktind threw his arms around his father. "Thank you. I'm sure she'll love it."

"I'm sure she will, son." Tracdraix looked at the gilded thing on the bench. "It's a fine piece of art. Machinery, you'd probably say." He paused, looking at it a moment longer than he needed to. "So many things go unnoticed."

The Room at the Inn

They ate. They ate a great deal. And over the breakfast table, Zuktind asked whether Gelar had said anything about the room at the end of the back hall.

"She said it wasn't for letting," said Yeltsu.

"That room," Zuktind said, "is proof of how kind Gelar Naktar really is. She seems gruff, I know. She brooks no nonsense. But whenever a raid from the ferals is bad enough that people lose their homes, that room is theirs. For free. Until their homes are rebuilt."

"So it's always open," Yeltsu said. "That's — that's wonderful."

He told Zuktind about the long table, and how nobody had stared, and about the song. "Rathenfall sang."

"You sang for someone besides us?" Zuktind looked across at the paladin with something close to envy. "I wish I'd been there. But it didn't feel right not to sleep in my own bed while I had the chance."

"If I could ever go home and sleep in my own bed," Yeltsu said, "I'd take it too." He looked down at his plate. "I don't think they'd welcome me back. Not yet." And then, more quietly than he had said it before dawn: he might not be the one to set Sseth free. He had come to accept that. But he could set things in motion. Lay the groundwork, so that others of his kind could finish it once they learned the truth.

"Well," Zuktind said, "the one you're trying to free is a god. He has all of eternity to find someone to finish the job." He lowered his voice. "But we shouldn't talk about this around Mother."

Turning Point — At the Temple Door

Vessa was already there when they came up the street to the temple, with the meat pie warm in Zuktind's arm and the finished hand in his other. She had come early. She was waiting outside the door, and before any of them could go through it she stepped in front of them.

"Wait. I want to say something before you do this. Because after, I don't think I'll be able to."

She looked awkwardly down at the stones.

"I stopped asking for things. Years ago. You ask, and people are kind about it, and then you have to be kind back to them because they were kind—" Her hands made a small confused gesture in the air and fell. "It's easy to say. It's old news. You get used to it."

And then she looked up — not at Zuktind. At Telno.

"Telno. You say you can fix this. But you were an acolyte when you left." Her voice did not rise. "You used to get things wrong."

The question she did not ask hung in the cold air between them.

Telno did not answer. She could not. Of all the doubts she had braced herself for, that was the one she had not expected — her own girlhood, held up in front of her by someone who had known her then.

Zuktind answered for her.

"I promise you. We have been through things that would be very hard to imagine for anyone who hasn't been through them. And what we've been through — what she has been through, since she came to us —" He thought of the halls of Mount Celestia; of the Platinum Dragon looking down; of a sister who had gone out from this temple an acolyte and walked among the gods. "That would make anyone far more certain of a thing like this than she ever was, assisting the High Priestess. I promise you this will work."

He held up the gilded hand.

"And if somehow it doesn't — though I'm certain it will — I will build you a wing. If I can build a hand, I can build a wing."

Vessa looked at the hand. She looked at Telno. She nodded, and looked as ready as she was ever going to be.

"Inside," Zuktind said. "It's better to ask for divine help inside the god's own house."

Gifts

Lissandra and Mira found them almost as soon as they were through the door.

Zuktind gave the lesser gift first. "My mother made this for you," he said, and held out the wrapped pie. "In gratitude for keeping her son from becoming a werewolf."

Lissandra lifted it and breathed in. "It smells amazing."

"And Father helped me finish this." He held out the hand. "You can take off the temporary one now, and put on a real one."

"A morning full of spoils," said Lissandra, and her eyes had gone very bright.

She turned it in her fingers, already thinking — the way she was always thinking. The gold and silver, the thin engraved lines that ran along it. She had a hairpin, she reminded them, that could cast any cantrip she liked; lost in all that hair, no gaoler had ever thought to take it from her. A hand was the same kind of thing. Who would be so cruel as to tear a crippled woman's prosthetic off her wrist? It was only a hand. A pretty one, perhaps, valuable even — but only a hand. And a hand that nobody would ever think to take was a fine place to keep a little magic.

Zuktind let his own infusion go, and the temporary hand stopped being a thing he held together from a distance, and Lissandra fastened the new one in its place. It was hers now. Wholly hers.

She was eating meat pie with it a moment later, and had given a piece to Mira, and shared another with the High Priestess Hugto, who had come down to join them — grateful, the wizard said, for a very pleasant evening of study in the temple. And all the while there was one very anxious person standing in the middle of the room.

Regenerate

Zuktind and Telno took Vessa between them.

"You're the cleric, sister," he said. "You take the lead. I'll pray in support."

Telno had prepared for this. When she had knelt for her prayers the night before, she had set aside one of the great gifts she usually asked her god for — the power to call down a servant of heaven — and asked for this instead. Now she readied the room: the incense, the herbs, all the small honest motions of her house. She knelt and drew a prayer wheel on the stone floor in chalk, and took up a small instrument of her order, and began.

Mira leaned to Lissandra and whispered, what's happening? Lissandra did not know either.

Telno prayed, and Zuktind beside her prayed in silence, asking Bahamut to help his sister help their friend. The prayer took a full minute, and the whole temple was silent for all of it.

The wing did not snap back into shape. It was slower and stranger than that.

The joint she had not been able to straighten since the spring of that year straightened, over about four seconds, with a sound like a rope going down. And then the membrane — which had been thin and dull, scarred through in two places — filled.

Vessa did not say anything. She put her hand on the leading edge at the elbow, the way you test a step before you put your weight on it.

Then she opened both wings, all the way, in a building with a very high ceiling. Every brazier in the room leaned.

She beat them once.

"Oh," she said.

And then she could not say anything at all. Her hands came together in front of her and would not keep still; she tried for a word, and another, and her voice broke on both. She turned her head to look at one wing and then the other, and brought them forward around herself, and looked again, as if she would not believe them until she had seen them from every side.

Zuktind did not speak either. Something had come into the room that did not want speaking over. He only put his arms around her, gently, and patted her back, and let her cry into his coat.

Closing

When she could speak again, the first thing she said was his name.

Not Zuktind. Not the name his family used, or the name his friends knew. For the first time since he came home — the first time, in all of Claw Ridge, that anyone had said it to his face — she called him by the name the town had given him when he was a boy.

"Wildclaws."

He knew what he owed her for that. There was only one fitting answer, and it had been waiting five years to be true.

"Soar-wings," he said. "You can soar once again. Your name finally fits."

She cried a great deal more, then. They all did, the ones who were going to. And when it was done and she had recomposed herself, she was smiling, and flexing the wings, and opening and closing them, and everyone in the sanctuary was trying very hard to admire them discreetly.

All except Lissandra.

The wizard had crossed the room to Telno. She lifted the beautiful new hand Zuktind and his father had made for her — gold and silver, cut in thin lines, the finest thing anyone had built for her in years — and with it she pointed at Vessa's wings.

"You could do that?"

Zuktind answered before his sister could. He meant it fairly; he meant to protect her. A broken wing, he said, was a wing that still existed. The bones were all still there; they had only been set wrong, and could be set right. A hand that was gone was something else. It was a harder thing to ask, and it would take a great deal more faith. "Not impossible," he said. "But much more."

Nobody answered him.

Telno looked at the hand pointing at the wings. Lissandra looked at Telno. And across the room, the woman they had come to heal opened her wings one more time, just to feel them open, in the morning light of the Temple of Bahamut on Claw Ridge.