7.

It was a cold evening. Cold that snuck into the house through every miniscule opening. The fire behind the grate roared just as robustly as the wind across the plains.

'Wind we have out here on the prairie,' Mam stated, eyeing Ansley with kindness, sympathy. 'Snow… Snow we have very little of.'

The back door opened, with an incursion of swirling flakes and a gnash of angry air. Zero left his armload of wood on the hearth. His cloak was left on a hook near the door. Mam poured him a cup of tea. It warmed his insides, but did nothing for his weariness.

'Diat and Thiatu are all right,' he announced blandly. It seemed so unimportant. Yet he had roused himself to care for them, to feed the chickens, to check on the geese. Strange how death made everything unimportant, yet the senses were sharpened. 'There's a foot of snow. I think it's letting up. But the wind…'

'I don't mind the wind so much,' Ansley said. 'It's a companionable wind. It speaks, tells stories.' He spoke for the sake of saying something. The same question he had about himself did Zero also have. Why had he come? What was the point behind it?

They asked each other this question, never aloud, not yet, but quietly, in long regards across the table.

Zero helped his weary, weakened mother. She would never be the same, he recognised that. The sickness had taken some of her vitality, but the loss of her husband had stolen all hint of her inherent jollity. Afterward, she became vacant at times, often dreamy, and it was Nitten who had to run the household, for fear tasks and chores would never be completed. But that night, the night of his return, amid his own heartache, Zero told her to rest, to let him take over. He'd do this, he'd do that, if she would stop over-exerting a shattered strength, a recuperating spirit.

She went to sleep easily. Zero tucked the blankets around her shoulders, padding her down with extras nicked from Vier's bed. Ansley, surreptitious and curious, observed from the hall as Zero tended the recovering invalid. Even with her, pleasant and matronly as she was, Zero was reserved.

'This is my sister's room,' Zero said to Ansley as they entered Nitten's loft in the tresses above. It was accessed by a rope ladder, and Ansley popped up just at the tail-end of Zero's declaration. The mattress was tick and hay, comfortable, warm, without springs but merely set against the planks. Its pillow was a display of Nitten's childhood dolls, relics of olden days, of fond old playmates, that she would keep always. Ansley set these gentle, doleful ladies aside, rolled back the covers, a herringbone quilt the best of all, and made himself at home. Zero left the lantern beside the bed. Before he could turn away, Ansley's hand gripped his wrist.

'Why did I come?'

The look of pain and suffering across Zero's features worsened the thickness of this enquiry. Zero felt, void of absolute reason, that he knew the answer.

'Mystics go where they're needed. Your extended level of consciousness, didn't it tell you that?'

'Listen, priest,' Ansley did not let go, 'you are self-sufficient. More than capable of walking alone the path we just took together. You are the last person in the realms who has need of me.'

'I never said I had need of you.' He knew the outline of this conversation, knew it subconsciously, and that made this confession dire, and the sting in his heart grew bearable beneath the stable foundation of friendship.

Ansley smirked. 'You think I needed you.'

Zero nodded. 'As Diat needs Thiatu. Every artist has a canvas, Ansley.'

'You're not empty, colourless and grey.'

'Aren't I?' An eyebrow arched, taunting the mystic, teasing the friend. 'Maybe every friendship doesn't start out as a parable, Ansley, but some of them must.'

'And maybe ours isn't a friendship at all.' Ansley let go and dimmed the lantern. 'Guess what? I'll see you in the morning.'

Unable to be dismissed so effortlessly, Zero remained. This conversation hadn't ended. So few of their conversations ever had an absolute end. It always went on, as a circle they cavorted, an annular of dialogue again and again. 'Even the morning after that. We'll be snowed in for a while.'

'When your uncle arrives with Nitten and Vier, I'll go.'

'Where?'

'That temple I told you about. The gods have to be told what's happening here in the O.Z. If you won't tell them, I will.'

'Maybe they already know.'

'Priest,' and Zero heard him rustling beneath the covers, and saw a pale hand catch light from the hole in the floor, a flash in a brown eye, 'it's snowing, we're below the Rip, and it's the merry month of May. Before you go to sleep tonight, pray your gods can see snow where they are. I have a feeling they can't.'

The silence cloistered them and rendered obdurate their feelings. Zero, on knees and elbows, tilted to Ansley.

'I'll go with you.'

The eyes flashed again, deep like a bird's, endless like a waterfall. 'To the temple? Well,' and now a brief grin, succour to Zero's taut strings, 'watch me not stop you. But your family might.'

'Not this time.'

Now the conversation would cease for the night, to be picked up again in the morning.

-x-

After the fifth day, routine settled. The sixth day saw a patch of cerulean in the southern horizon. And the seventh day was filled with the shine of the suns. Snow melted, and everywhere was the happy sound of trees dripping, gutters gurgling, a sense of coming cleanliness.

Mam recovered her strength, pampered and cosseted by both Zero and Ansley, whom she had adopted as another son. She had taken his announcement that he was a mystic in the calm, unobtrusive manner of her character. And while it never tired her to see the feathers scattered about the house, she found Ansley and Zero's relationship of a considerably rakish dynamic. Zero, whom she had never seen fond of anyone outside of Nitten and Vier, of his own clannish roots, was absurdly fond of Ansley. And the mystic, soft of voice to Zero, but coerced into raucousness if teased, showed a love that exponentially increased. Some forms of love, she decided, watching the two boys slog through the slush around the barn, never died.

This became far more evident when, on the ninth day, a messenger from the village arrived at the Dertien farm. He left Ansley with a heavy gold envelope. He could not tip the messenger with a monetary unit, but Mam paid him in a fresh loaf of bread, all the happier with it than a q-plat.

Ansley stood as he read the letter, then he meandered into a chair. He held the letter to Zero. 'Always knew I'd be easy to find. It's hard to hide from anyone when you leave a trail of feathers behind you. Even the snow,' he shook his head, 'was no help to me this time.'

Quietly, severe of eye, Zero accepted the missive. He had a feeling it was the kind of document that would take Ansley away from him. Maybe not forever. But forever was always a possibility. It was a formal letter, a letterhead and address at the top, done in gothic typeset.

'The Guild of Realm Mystics,' uttered Zero. 'They want you to go to Central City?' His summary of the letter's contents, rambling as they were, were simple but foundational. He passed the letter to Mam, and she skimmed it but for the last paragraph.

'The Queen is asking that all mystics report to the Guild headquarters in Central City.' Astonished, anxious for Ansley, she set the letter down and sighed. 'You'll have to go. If the Queen is asking for you—it will be for an important reason. Perhaps she's hoping you'll be able to help her find her husband.'

'The Queen has the Tin Men for that,' spat Zero. 'Mystics cannot be used as guide dogs, Mam!'

'I go where I'm needed. It's all right, Zero. Apparently I'm not needed here any longer. I'm sorry we won't get to the temple. I was looking forward to that. It'd be worthless to ask you to go by yourself, wouldn't it? You won't go now.'

'How could I?'

'You're too afraid the gods might hear you.'

'I'm afraid the gods might hear me scream.'

'Boys,' Mam said sternly. She stood between them, eyes moistened. 'It is not the time, now or ever, to say something to each other you'll always regret.'

'I'm not worried about that, Mam,' Ansley explained. Mouth pursed to a fine line, he rubbed his face wearily. 'Things are moving faster than I thought they would.'

Mam put the letter into its envelope. 'You'll have to leave immediately, Ansley.'

'No,' he voiced adamantly, 'I'm not leaving until Nitten and Vier return. It will take me a week or more to reach Central City, and I know it'll take another month for them to hunt down all the mystics of the realm. The Guild has a powerful reach, and powerful tools at their disposal to hurry their whims and wishes, but this herding will take time. And gods know what they want us in one place for…'

Absolute fear scorched through Zero. Whatever the Guild wanted, if they should huddle all mystics to one city, one town, with the monarchy of the O.Z. beginning to topple, he feared that this would be, like the death of his father, another insurmountable grief.

-x-

Uncommonly, Ansley rose at first light. Drowned in his cloak, he took care of the barn chores. Diat and Thiatu were pleased to see him, and made murmurs of greeting. The morning was frosty, but the unmistakable redolence of spring hung as hope in the humid air. After several conversations, if rather one-sided, with horse and donkey, Ansley returned to the house. Mam was up, a woman he would've never dreamed he'd ever call Mam, but that had never been anything else, never Mrs. Dertien, not even Zasha. She'd prepared porridge, and left a steaming clay bowl in Ansley's cool hands. He looked at her and heard himself ask:

'What is it?'

Because it was something. A hesitancy. A topic that had been coming for quite some time. A willowy thing, indefinite, proposing, able to stop the strongest warrior where he stood. Intuition failed him but for this subtle combination of phrases, that it was important, that it had to do with Zero…

'I want to ask you something,' Mam began. 'And you don't have to answer if you think I'm prying, but it's only that I don't want to see him hurt…'

Now he understood. And when she asked, he found no surprise. He was able, with all the vigour and reason that such an abstract emotion as love transferred to magniloquence, to convey the supreme extensiveness of his brief friendship with Zero.

-x-

Late in the afternoon, an hour near gloaming, a trio crossed the bridge and entered the Dertien land. Nitten raced through the garden loam, waving frantically at Diat and Thiatu, and Vier shouted their names. Uncle Pip jogged behind them, through the last remaining knells of slush, across sloppy, reedy ground, to the house. But the front door, void now of the hexing sticks, was thrown open before they reached it. Calls and hugs and kisses were aplenty. And, behind it all, a subdued emotion, a sorrow so new that it had not yet found its voice. A reunion not as they had wished, but a reunion minus one, and that was better than a reunion of none.

-x-

Nitten did not wish to oust Ansley from her under-roof chamber; it had been his for the last week and a half, and he was comfortable there. But he gratefully handed it back to her, just as she had left it, old dolls and herringbone quilt. That night was balmy enough to allow him a space in the barn. Under the cover of darkness, with the far moon fattening and the near moon waning, Ansley removed himself, and his things, once the household showed signs of tiredness.

Zero tracked him down, lantern bright against the beams, just as Ansley was preparing to exit. But Zero held him from breaking away. While he had his family, Zero was torn about the prospect of losing a friend.

'I can't believe you're going.' His intonation was sewn tightly by humiliation and hurt, a ripple of jealousy and agony. 'And I can't believe you were going to leave without saying goodbye.'

'But that's not really what's bothering you. Because you know that if you were me, in my position, you would've done the same thing.'

Zero let this sway into oblivion without a retort. The poison of fact numbed his tongue. Ansley smacked him at the shoulder, a brief brace, and a twist around him. Zero followed, out the door, into the garden, the slosh and squish of their feet the only sound.

'What bothers me is that you're so willing to submit to their command. Why are you going?'

'If I don't,' Ansley's brow furrowed in confusion and annoyance, 'they'll hunt me down, to the ends of the realms if they have to, and take me away in chains. How is that any more heroic than surrender? And you know how easy I am to find. If I go now, it'll be over soon.'

'Look, Ansley, I don't know what's going on in this country of ours, I have no idea. But it isn't good. I can't shake off this feeling that once you leave, you'll never be heard from again.'

'I have to take that risk,' Ansley said, 'and so do you. Yes, it's probably a ruse to arrest me—me and all the other mystics. Why? I don't know. If I am allowed pen and paper, yes, I'll write to you. Will I be able to tell you what I know? Absolutely not. I will not fight against the establishment.'

'The system is collapsing; there is no establishment worth dying for! Not anymore! What good will it do? Why would they kill the mystics? Except the Mystic Man, of course! Lob off his head and they'll have instant rebellion, instead of this slow and steady undercurrent of hatred! And you're bowing to their whim! YOU!'

'STOP YELLING AT ME!' Ansley yelled back.

Silence, save for the panting of breath from their laden lungs.

'Please,' begged Ansley, 'just stop yelling at me. This isn't my fault. It's just the way things happen.'

Zero chewed his lips and huffed, disgusted at the rise of tears. Over the post of the paddock fence, Zero let the lantern hang. His arms folded, tightly at first, and then— He took a long step and engulfed Ansley in a tight embrace.

'You're the only friend I've ever had,' Zero whispered, 'and you're going to become another casualty of this—whatever it is.'

'I believe the word eluding you is war, priest. This is the beginning of it. If I could say something right now that would make you go to Academy and join the Stellate, I would say it. But I know your path now, so do you.'

'The army's the only place I can fight against whoever's doing this.'

'Remember your promise?'

Zero nodded. 'I'll wait until I'm seventeen. But what I do in the year and half before then, well, that's undecided.'

'It's a long walk to Central City.' Ansley rubbed away a drip from his eyes and nose with the sleeve of his coat. He brushed a tear from Zero's cheek.

'Didn't know having friends would hurt so much,' said Zero. 'Now I remember why I didn't have any before.'

The thought unsteadied Zero. He studied Ansley in the lamplight, a touch of silver from the moons, a gentle umbra of spirit around him. Of all that he'd gone through in the last two weeks, what had it meant, what had it brought him? Grief and sorrow, certainly that. Hope and friendship, however, those mellow songs of all humanity. And his friendship with Ansley of Stirbane, the mystic, the Yellow Finch, was the zenith of humility for Zero.

Wearied by the wave of emotions, Zero drooped, wilted, and found the only thing he could do was fix Ansley's scarf knot. 'Why do you think we met?'

'It's fine, leave it,' Ansley spoke of the knot. He pushed Zero's hand away. They went through another examination of the other. Ansley's conclusions, Zero believed, had on their side intuition. Zero had nothing like that, and even hope began to dim.

Suddenly, Ansley lifted his hand, and a long yellow feather came up with it. He tucked it into the pocket of Zero's coat.

'Just as you said, priest,' Ansley turned away, the crunch of gravel deteriorating his voice, 'I needed you.'

Ansley didn't look back. It was bad luck.

-x-

Zero entered the house and shut the door behind him. The lantern returned to its place on the table. Odd, it was, to return to life after such a moment… He found his family. Mam fashioned a ball of yarn from a skein, and Nitten mended sheets. Uncle Pip was telling tales of bygone days, remembering his brother, their father. The only vacant chair had belong to him, the brother, the father, Joff Dertien, and Zero did not want to sit in it. But Mam patted its seat invitingly. Zero had no choice.

He sat and stared fixedly into the fire's stark red coals. Vier crawled over. His head rested on Zero's thigh, though he listened raptly to Uncle Pip, and laughed, and simpered; the calm after the storm. Zero was roused from a miasma of thought when Mam splayed her hand against his shoulder.

'Is he gone then?' she asked in a low hum.

Zero must've answered, though he recalled nothing of it. He was left with the impression that time, from that point, quickened its pace. And it sent him, without a stop, down an everlasting slope.

'Uncle?' He spoke up during a lull of conversation. Uncle was near to dozing.

'Yes?'

'Do you think…'

How to express it? But it was time, he knew it was time, to take up the mantle that had been given to him, somewhere in the last two weeks, between the plague and the mystic, between the snow and the heat; time to understand what he wanted, what he would do, and what he would fight against. He knew, already, what to fight for.

'Do you think this is the start of civil war?'

Uncle Pip's round eyes emoted a fragment of sadness. 'You know, Zero, my nephew, I think that is what it will be called—eventually, someday. A civil war.'

'You boys shouldn't talk so,' chided Mam. She glanced nervously at the two of them. Vier, thankfully, was sleeping, tucked into the hollow of Zero's feet. 'Talk of war! And the poor Queen lost in her grief… Shame on you.'

Uncle Pip wouldn't allow her to censor such a topic. 'But it's true, dearest Zasha, war is on its way. It will change the O.Z. forever. I can tell you now, that's exactly what it will do. And I can tell you now that I will always be a royalist.'

'So will I,' proclaimed Zero. 'The House of Gale will always have my support.'

'And what if,' said Nitten, not raising her head from her work, 'just what if—it's the House of Gale that's the enemy?'

But Zero would never have an answer to that question.