TWO HUNDRED THIRTY-FIVE: Here-to-There XV

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Finding Stuart was more difficult than Alden had anticipated. Before he was halfway back to the street where the bors lived, his sense of his entruster’s position began to shift. At first, he worried he’d taken a wrong turn, but after a quick check of the local map through his interface, he was sure he wasn’t lost.

Stuart was on the move.

Not heading toward where Olget-ovekondo was.

Not toward the park either.

Alden adjusted his own route to the right and sped up, crossing one of the narrow streets that flowed between the buildings like rivers. There were no traffic lights or dedicated pedestrian crossings around here. You were supposed to avoid stepping out in front of approaching public transports or any vehicle painted a specific shade of green.

“There he is again!”

“Chhhch. Not so loud.”

Alden was aware when people spotted him and stopped what they were doing to look or comment. It was fewer than he might have guessed, but still a lot. These two were sellers of traditional brushes and papers, sitting together in a pocket-sized shop he was passing. The front of their store and several others nearby lifted up to become roofs over the sidewalk.

“But I want to sell a human something. Imagine something we made being on Earth!”

He would have stopped to buy from them if he wasn’t wondering why Stuart was suddenly in such a rush to be somewhere. Alden kept going, but when he thought he was getting close, that pull between him and his entruster shifted again. He hurried.

What if Stuart was tailing Olget, and that was the reason for the sudden movement?

He soon reached the corner of a large market full of food sellers. Standing beside a table that held stacks of flatbread higher than his head, he looked down the street. It felt like Stuart should be right in front of him, but on the walkway, all he saw were Artonans with full heads of hair and normal clothing.

To my left! he thought.

He saw nothing but more people who weren’t Stuart, crossing between the slow-moving cars and carts.

Behind me now.

And then Stuart seemed to be moving away again slowly. As if they’d somehow passed each other without noticing. Is my skill having a breakdown, or is Stuart in disguise?

He kept walking and looking.

[Where are you?] he texted. [I’m following you, but I can’t see you. Could you hold up a hand or something?]

The small car that kept blocking his views suddenly stopped, and the door opened. The passenger leaned out, his brows drawing together. He had red sauce on his chin, and his mouth was so full that it took him several hasty chews before he could swallow and say, “Alden? What are you doing here?”

“You were in the car. Of course. Ryada said you wanted me to stay. Didn’t she send you a message?”

“Not one that said you were on your way here.”

“You expected me to go with Kon!” Alden exclaimed. “That’s fine. I’ll—”

“Since you’re here, come in.”

“No. There’s probably a teleportation point right down the street.”

“Come in.”

“I—”

“My food is wilting while we discuss this. Enter the car.”

Alden got in the car. It was his first time riding in one like it, but there was nothing too surprising. Bench seats covered by a textured tan fabric faced each other. The windows wrapped around seamlessly once the door was shut. The vehicle was probably intended for six passengers, given the width of the benches. There weren’t any seatbelts

A control panel was displayed on the window beside Stuart, and as soon as Alden was in, Stuart tapped it. The car’s motion was hardly noticeable as it resumed its journey, and the dark windows darkened even more, until the city was difficult to make out.

Stuart had loaded most of the bench opposite him, so Alden sat beside him, taking a minute to determine what was going on in here. The outer layers of Stuart’s votary outfit were folded beside his belt and a rolled case that must have held the enchanted jewelry and some of the casting supplies he’d had with him since they left Rapport I more than an Artonan day ago.

Like Alden, he’d removed Leeter-zis’s artwork from his face. And he was almost finished eating a hand pie. The crust was stuffed with something shredded and coated in a marinara sauce lookalike. Alden couldn’t guess at what it might taste like, since the car was full of a mix of sweet, savory, and smokey smells from the metal dishes arrayed in front of Stuart. They looked like they would all fit back together into a single carrier.

He’d presumably gotten all of this food from the market, and Alden didn’t see how he could have been selective about it. He hadn’t left the bor house long ago at all.

Must’ve walked straight in, acquired the lunchbox, and filled it with one of everything nearby.

“You’re catching your breath now that the others are gone,” Alden said.

Stuart swallowed the last of his pastry and reached for a container full of vegetables that had been cut into spaghetti-shaped strands. “I had a three-potion headache, and I need to think about how to manage this situation.”

He crushed a greenish ball resting in the center of the dish with the back of a utensil. It fell into crumbs that he stirred rapidly into the vegetable spaghetti before he started inhaling the meal.

“Do you want something to eat, too?” He didn’t ask until he was about six bites in. “You could get something from the manybaskets.”

“Manybaskets” was a word for shopping places, so Stuart wasn’t offering to share his own meal.

“I don’t need anything. I ate at the train station while Kon was buying gifts for people on Anesidora. Enjoy your food. I’ve got enough to contemplate for several days, so I don’t have to talk.”

Stuart didn’t need permission. He made his way through all the dishes, emptying each one completely before reaching for the next, while Alden tried to settle into his seat and collect his thoughts.

Since the Here-to-There had begun, there’d been no opportunity to resolve his feelings about any of it. Things that would have been important enough to occupy him for hours if they’d happened during a less busy time had been left behind, like they were everyday occurrences. Kon was at the forefront of Alden’s mind right now, as were Ryada’s scarily insightful parting words. But if Stuart was about to say they needed to go investigate Olget, those would be pressed down to join the other topics waiting to be considered.

Like home being something he might build instead of find.

And the way he’d used his skill with Stuart’s help on the hauler.

The bonds between knights, the desirability of that special bond that Esh-erdi and Lind-otta had, the talk with her on the train, and the one with Boe hours ago.

I need to spend a week on the inward path just to look at it all slowly. I wonder if Yenu-pezth would let me.

That reminded him it was early Saturday morning on Anesidora now, and he’d missed a whole night of the sleep he was supposed to be getting. He didn’t feel tired because the broken wand and summoning Kon had been such a jolt.

Stuart not bringing it up was probably an indicator that the Artonan boy was too brain fried to keep every little detail straight in his head anymore. He’d been going for ages at this point. Alden watched him eat the final piece of his desperate feast. It seemed to be pink rice, smashed into a pancake shape and fried until it was crunchy on the outside.

So that was how I was supposed to be cooking that stuff for me and Kibby.

Stuart devoured it, looked at the empty metal dishes like he hoped they were going to refill themselves, then neatly stacked them together and lidded them.

He sanitized his hands with a spell.

I know that one. Alden had seen him use it before, but that was still the first thing he thought.

Stuart finished tidying himself up, then looked over at the conundrum Ryada had sent his way.

“I really don’t mind leaving if you’ve got to do something that my presence would complicate,” said Alden.

“I like that you’re here. But all I’m going to do right now is sit and make decisions about how to respond to the crime that has been committed. I told Emban and Bithe they had to go because they were both very upset and likely to act with recklessness they would later regret. And they both actually left, so they must trust my judgment…or be so upset they couldn’t deny it. And Veln Dad said I should continue to act as votary even through a problem like this if I felt like I could do it well. I hope to do it well.”

“I have things I can work on quietly,” Alden offered, “and if you want to bounce an idea off me, you can.”

“If I present ideas, I prefer for them to be absorbed, not bounce.”

“It’s an idiom that doesn’t mean the right thing in Artonan? I mean that I’ll listen and comment when you’re ready.”

Stuart nodded and folded his hands in his lap.

“Before you start decision making, though,” Alden said, “where is the car taking us?”

“It’s on a tour of all the streets in this section of the city.” Stuart tapped the control panel again, and what must have been the map of their route appeared as a web across the window for a few seconds. “I wanted privacy, but I also want to be near Tass-ovekondo in case speaking to her once more in person is necessary.”

“She’s here now?”

“She chose to teleport here to replace the damaged wand with the other one, so that she can restrengthen her connection to it. She’s gone to the park to see everyone who’s lingering there. Since the Here-to-There is now over, a visit won’t break tradition.”

“I bet they’re all happy to see her.”

“They are. And she was very grateful.” Stuart slumped in his seat. “To all of us and Kon. And her children, except for the obvious one, are all grateful as well. Birget-ovekondo called again to tell me so.”

Alden caught the slouch and the unhappy tone. “So what’s wrong?”

“He called to tell me that after he and his sister removed their brother from this city. They swiftly cleaned up the house he was in and replaced the shenav he drank. And they had an acquaintance come to search for signs of the spell he cast, using a method that will make future attempts by others to do the same thing <<prohibitively difficult>>. They say the acquaintance found nothing.”

So they’re trying to cover for him. “Do you believe that?”

“It’s likely they really didn’t find anything. The spell Olget-ovekondo cast wasn’t profound, and it had been a while since it was used. But they had someone search so that I wouldn’t have someone better search. Because they love him. It’s natural. Despite what he’s done, he’s their brother. And her son.”

“They hope you’ll do nothing.”

“I think they expect me to do nothing. And that is worse. Because it means they believe his behavior is tolerable as long as the problems it causes are repaired.”

He fell quiet.

After waiting a minute, Alden tucked his questions about wizard justice away for later and dug his tablet out of his bag. Both of them staring blankly ahead in a silent car while they thought their separate thoughts seemed too awkward, so he would scribble on this.

Intentions to make himself a preliminary to-do list for next week disappeared as soon as he opened the writing scroll feature and wrote the word “yell” on it instead of “To Do.”

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He ended up spilling anything even remotely related to his yells onto the endless page, writing in coded language and doodles. Sometimes, he was connecting ideas or reprioritizing them; sometimes he was just dropping them there because he didn’t know what else to do with them.

More than an hour later, he had a large document that might charitably be called a mind map, and he was looking through it, trying to decide if he was normal enough still. The doodle of the kidney with the smiley inside it, connected to a stick figure holding a sword and another stick figure with devil horns would probably lead a stranger to conclude otherwise.

Moving on from demons, knights, and favorite kidneys…he’d written the words “cat to Anesidora” and circled it several times.

“Cat” meant Boe, in this case, not Victor. Alden circled it again.

I need to talk to him about this.

Or rather, he needed to ask Boe to explain himself clearly.

He’ll love that.