I had found another student, and I was joyful. However, the misery of my last encounter with one of my own left an ashen flavor to this pleasure. Lavinia was different from Viorica. I had to keep reminding myself of that. As different as the sun is from the moon.

  From the journal of Drago? Buh?scu

  The wanderer had been with Lavinia a few days before daring to step into the boundaries of Fantana Rece. The woman wanted to go, and, after a thoughtful pause, a weighing of consequences, he decided to go with her.

  “Why today?” Dragos asked, hood pulled low over his forehead as he walked along the well-rutted road.

  His old schoolmate sauntered beside him, her chin up, fearless gaze surveying the fields. “Mar?i Seara, I go to market, so I don’t forget.”

  Dragos snorted softly. Mar?olea was one of the few Unspoken unsupported by reality as he knew it. Still. Having a day off certain chores wasn’t exactly terrible for anyone who had to constantly do them.

  Lavinia swung her basket on her arm and smirked. “What was that about? You’re not a woman. You won’t suffer.”

  He grinned. “Wouldn’t want a woman to risk their guts getting ripped out over spinning, baking, boiling laundry or sowing fields.”

  “Exactly,” Lavinia said curtly, chin lifting higher.

  As they walked, Dragos found his eyes on the mountain amongst many. Spineback. Their home once, before the strange fires that ravaged the mountain's innards and cracked the entrance arches. Before they caught up to any travelers, he asked. "Do you think about the school much?"

  "Sometimes. I try not to." Lavinia responded, her own head down, eyes on her feet. "I usually think of Spiritul de Munte. If anything, that caused it."

  "That's just a story. Mirel said so," Dragos said with a frown that belied his doubts. Mirel wasn't a liar.

  "Just a story, I suppose. Why would they live where a supreme spirit dwelt?" Lavinia agreed.

  They fell silent for a time. Only the sounds around their own steady footsteps increased.

  The village wasn’t much, too far from the rivers to have barges come, so wagons creaked along the rough roads. The scent of horseflesh in the sun tickled his nose. The dung was sharper.

  The springs around the village spilled generously down into trenches, sparkling between fields in straight lines. Dragos squinted and looked at the road instead. Horses with riders were rare, so he picked out a handful of them amongst the wagons ahead of them, plodding toward Fantana Rece.

  “Was it hard to get here?” He asked suddenly. The mountains were closer, but did not yet dominate the view as they would in a few days. Unless Zgavra suggested carrying him, he’d go back up the way he came down. Slowly.

  He wouldn’t ask it for a ride.

  “I don’t remember much. Hana, running at me, on fire, screaming, pushing at me to run. Smoke. Grabbing Hana’s robes… Then a snowy field.” She looked down at her long sleeves, and the tools strapped to her arms. Her expression was haunted for a split second before she shrugged and smiled. “I’m here, now. That’s all that matters.”

  “Mm, yes. All that matters,” Dragos murmured, catching a glint of metal on one of the riders. Bronze embellishments? On leather? He dared to lift his hood a little to see better.

  He smelled trouble floating over the dung piles and unwashed bodies on the road. A nameless dread crept around his belly like a parasite. Aside from a few spare tavern stops during bad weather—where he’d met Dimi and heard the fateful whispers that led him to Ewa Cel Tradat—he’d avoided people, trouble, and potential consequences.

  The creep of inevitability shadowed his steps.

  “Hm?” Lavinia hummed the question. She sensed the change. The basket in her arm swung to her step, steady as a clock’s pendulum.

  “I’ll tell you later,” he murmured. Dragos still needed rope and twine, easily bought in a farming town where hemp grew. A little flash of bronze in the sun wouldn’t send him running—but he did note where the horsemen turned, past the bridge over one of the channels.

  Sweat trickled down his neck.

  Lavinia turned the other way, thankfully, to a brief line of dwellings with the semblance of shop fronts, porches open to customers. His old schoolmate stepped up onto the creaking wood, into the welcome shade of a thatched awning.

  “Fetia, lumina s?-?i fie pa?ii,” Lavinia chirped, holding her basket towards the young girl.

  Dragos stood back a pace from her, observing. Fetia’s smile turned wary when her gaze flicked to the man in black behind the woman who spoke to her. Without missing a beat, Lavinia tilted her head toward him.

  “That’s my cousin. He found me! Isn’t that nice?”

  “He’s got a strange look,” Fetia murmured, her hands pausing in the motion of scooping something from Lavinia’s basket. A simple farm girl in a rough dress and smock, with scarred, calloused hands and fine features, Fetia had an innocence about her that made Dragos glance in the shadows for his lecherous zmeu. It hadn’t been around when he woke that morning.

  “Sickly, poor thing,” Lavinia’s glib words seemed to calm the girl’s doubts.

  Fetia held the small packet to her nose and breathed. “Truffles? Tati will love these.”

  “My cousin would like to purchase twine for trapping and rope.”

  Fetia’s clear brown eyes flicked to Dragos.

  Dragos was the hidden figure in a black cloak, hood up against the glaring sun, difficult to see. He was unspurprised by the girl’s reaction. In the height of summer, only the ill swaddled themselves.

  Fetia frowned and nodded, turning to suspended dowels heavy with both. “What does the sick need with these?”

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “Ill or not, things must still be done,” Dragos spoke for himself before Lavinia could.

  The girl didn’t respond, instead pulling and winding lengths until Dragos told her it was enough. By her arm, she measured and offered the bundles to Lavinia.

  Dragos stepped forward to take them. Fetia pulled her hands back quickly, as if his sickness could be passed on.

  His particular afflictions were firmly lodged and wouldn’t wander, but he couldn’t tell her that. Instead, he nodded and stepped away with rope slung over a shoulder, twine tucked under the strap of his peddler’s box.

  He handed her thaler, some of the precious wealth for which he’d traded Ewa’s gold beads. Lavinia nodded a farewell to the girl and stepped into the sun. When they were away, she teased, “Scaring little girls?’

  “Not on purpose,” Dragos murmured. He spotted a horse without a wagon and shifted to watch it before following her.

  “Seems the least of your troubles,” Lavinia remarked as she headed for the market stalls. Her skilled bartering bought her much for her packets of truffles. Dragos carried her laden basket on the way back to her little house in the woods.

  Later that night, Lavinia challenged him.

  “So, who’s after you?”

  Dragos dipped his wooden spoon into the bowl in his palm and flicked a look up at her. “Maybe no one… Possibly the Sigovaran Prince.”

  The ladle clanged in the pot. He glanced up to see Lavinia fumbling to catch it again, her face pinched. “Of all the troubles in the world, you might be the greatest. Why would the Prince bother with you? What did you do?”

  The question he did not want had been asked.

  Dragos could have diverted her easily distracted attention or simply not answered. Instead, he told her. Everything.

  Once he started, he spoke of Viorica and The Lady’s Stag, of Fane and Katya, and the women who lived there. The clients who visited.

  A dark wisp of smoke slithered in through the cracks of the door and formed into the half-human dragon as he finished his gloomy tale. It clacked its claws together as it said with a voice that dripped with the deliciousness of a gossiper sharing news, “Don’t forget the other murder.”

  Dragos shot it a dark look. “How could I.”

  Lavinia’s brows vanished into her mop of tangled hair. “What other murder?”

  “The one I committed,” Dragos said bluntly. For all the flatness of his words, he felt it settle on him again. Guilt’s weight, ugly and unavoidable. He still did not regret it, despite all that.

  He let the zmeu recount the details. Dragos didn’t bother to add anything as it spoke, shoveling rabbit stew into his mouth mechanically until its tale was done. Lavinia listened, absently stirring the pot.

  “I don’t suppose I blame you,” she said, her voice empty of judgment. “There is little justice in the world.”

  “There is none,” Dragos corrected, the bitterness of his tone tasted like venom to his tongue.

  Lavinia sighed and did not argue the point. Maybe she didn’t have anything to support an opposing view. He watched her dip her bowl into the pot and maneuver it to sip. She watched him back, though not quite meeting his gaze.

  “I’ve an idea,” she said after some thoughtful silence. “Let’s teach each other. You show me Owl’s tricks, and I’ll show you Serpent’s.”

  “I can’t show you everything, it would take years,” Dragos said, not bringing up how her not having hands would make it very difficult for her to learn surgical arts.

  Spells? That he could do. Philosophies? That as well. “I’ll teach you what I can, before I go.”

  Patience and adaptability. He knew their creed, but not much else. It was worth learning. It gave him a reason to stay. Perhaps Lavinia, for all her cheerful ways, was lonely, too.

  Dragos stayed away from town after seeing the horsemen. For a week, he meditated on the Serpent’s Virtues while Lavinia sat across from him and meditated on the Owl’s Virtues in the sunlight of the little glade.

  Or, maybe she just smoked her pipe and sunned herself, and he meditated. He wasn’t sure.

  Breath. He’d learned that on the road; breath was a vehicle for moving through discomfort. Judgement. The ego and one’s morals must be released to learn patience, and letting go of judgment was paramount to patience and adaptability.

  Mirel would have contested letting go of ego and morals. He struggled with the concepts as he sat on a flat stone, staring into the green curtain of the forest. Birds flitted and twittered, small creatures slithered and scampered through the understory. They had no care for such things.

  Let things move. Absorb all that is, for what it is. React when needed. Rest whenever you can. Grow into the space you have. Seek what you need; it won’t find you on its own.

  Lavinia’s proverbs and idioms floated in his head.

  “How do you call serpents?” Dragos asked, gaze flicking around to his schoolmate.

  She tapped her pipe stem on her lips, then to her shoulder. “The bonding tattoo, like the one that’s peeking from your robe. Put that away. You’re not impressing anyone with your chest.”

  Dragos glanced down. The robes he’d worn from The Lady’s Stag weren’t common but were very comfortable. His pale skin showed through the gaping neck, and the black ink of his owl peeked out, as she said. He snorted.

  Lavinia wore an undyed woven hemp fot? over her chemise, which pooled around her legs as she sat before him. The sunny forest was warm, and she’d left her robe hanging in the house. No apron graced her hips; he didn’t imagine tying it was easy. The light shone through her chemise to the outline of her limbs. Where they terminated in straps and wood, where she had adapted to what was lost.

  “Do you want me to—”

  “I don’t want you to touch me. I can see what you’re thinking, and I don’t want that. None of it.” She didn’t speak sharply, but decisively.

  “I could wash your hair,” he murmured.

  “And get used to that? No.” Lavinia said, as firm as the rocks they sat upon.

  “Why?” Dragos asked, irritated by her stubbornness.

  Her eyes, when they rose to meet his gaze, were not the stone he expected. They were soft, pitying. Her pipe, braced in her hook by clever design and long habit, gave off the pungent, skunky reek of her medicinal herbs.

  “Not all wounds need mending, and not all troubles should be fixed. Who will wash my hair when you’re gone?”

  Dragos held her stare, his will unraveling in the face of it.

  There was nothing else to say, despite the churn of frustration in his frayed soul. He knew what she said, and yet... His gaze slid from her, back to the forest.

  Patience. Perhaps she’d change her mind. Perhaps not.

  The sun moved. They did not. Eventually, when his stomach was feeling hollow, but not yet creakingly so, he said, “Teach me how to call serpents.”

  She looked at him, consideration creasing her brow. “It’s probably not safe. The owl and serpent aren’t friends.”

  He thought about it more. It had been an impulsive question, but he decided he wanted it. He looked through the forest, toward where the mountains loomed, impossibly huge, spanning outward and upward. Containing the spirit rivers, channeling them towards the cel?lalt t?ram, the other realm. Beyond that of life and death. The Embrace’s nexus.

  “Let’s find out,” he said. He wasn’t sure what his face expressed, but he watched hers go through a few transitions before settling into one.

  Doubt. Consideration. Acceptance.

  Lavinia tapped her pipe on the rock beside her and smiled. “Then I will. The hardest part will be the tattoo, but—I think I can get a tool for that, if you’ve got money to pay.”

  Dragos's brow raised. Get a tool? That sounded intriguing. It also sounded like another trip into town, which he was less keen on, but he’d spend his last thalers on it. He’d go with her.

  He thought briefly of bronze, flashing in the sun. Chances were those horsemen didn’t belong to Sigovara’s prince. The city was not so close that he should worry much.

  He was hardly important in the life of a prince, after all. There’d been no notices posted on any boards looking for him. It should be safe enough to keep wandering on the edges of society. The countryside suited him anyway.

  Dragos did not consider, then, to what lengths an entitled prince might go.

  I'd like to thank for inspiration. The cultivation system in helped me formulate the idea for the multiple cultivation paths that Dragos will take on his way to mastery of the elements.

  (MARTS-ee SEH-rah): Tuesday evening.

  (MARTS-oh-LEH-ah): A spirit that punishes women for doing certain chores on Tuesdays.

  Spiritul de Munte (spee-REE-tool deh MOON-teh) [roled r]: Mountain spirit.

  Lumina s?-?i fie pa?ii (loo-MEE-nee-leh suh-tsheef-YEH PAH-shee): May light guide your steps.

  (zmyeh-oo): Romanian shapeshifter dragon.

  (TAH-tee): Father.

  (THAY-lur): a coin of greater value than obloi, lesser than denarii.

  Cel?lalt t?ram (chel-uh-LULT tuh-RUHM): Another realm of existence.