Chapter 1224: A Familiar Path (3)

Lucavion let the click finish before he stepped closer.

Up close, the display was less cheerful than its banner. The paint said picnic. The table said campaign.

Maps covered the back panel, previous expedition routes traced in three colors of ink through forests, river valleys, and a stretch of coastline annotated tide-dependent. Jars of preserved ingredients lined the front edge, each labeled by region and season: pickled roots, dried river fish, a salt the color of rust.

Beside them sat bound records of unfamiliar dishes, drawn in careful ink, with margin notes on who had cooked them and which village had permitted it. A notice board listed travel equipment, field preparation, and escort requirements, the last underlined twice.

Cuisine, fieldwork, and hazardous travel. It struck him as an elaborate method of becoming hungry somewhere inconvenient.

’Escort requirements. For soup.’

He smiled at that for about three seconds.

The society had begun, in the novel, as one of its gentler corners. It was a place where Elara could set down lectures, noble disputes, and the weight of her name, and spend a few days somewhere that cared mostly whether the stew was good. Its excursions had also put her among people outside their usual Blocks.

Varen had been one of them.

Then the memory turned. One later expedition had not stayed gentle. Lucavion could not find the where or the what, only the outline of it: Elara and Varen among the participants, circumstances that left them no choice but to rely on each other, and a Varen who trusted her noticeably more afterward. It had been serious enough that he could not file the society under recreation.

The smile went somewhere else.

He searched the maps for a mark, a date, anything with a departure written beside it. Every posted route was an old one. The coming expedition appeared only as to be announced, in handwriting that seemed pleased with the uncertainty. Nothing there could tell him whether the original excursion would happen at all.

Only then did he look at the man in front of the table.

Varen had been standing there the whole time. Lucavion had merely overlooked him, an accomplishment that took real effort with a man built like a furnace with opinions, and one he was prepared to blame on the maps.

’A whole tournament of that man charging at me, and I nearly walk past him like a signpost. Either my instincts are dulling, or he has learned to arrive quietly.’

Varen was not merely reading the display. A form lay in front of him, and he was listening to the society’s representative explain something with the same grave attention he might give a tactical briefing.

This was his own decision.

Lucavion’s gaze dropped from the route maps to the application beneath Varen’s hand.

He had expected to find a remembered location.

Instead, he had found one of the remembered participants already signing his name.

The representative was still finishing with a student ahead of him, a nervous second-year with strong opinions about mushrooms, and Varen waited. He did not hover. He did not loom, though looming would have cost him no effort at all. Hands at his sides, he let the student’s questions run their full length, listening to each answer as if it had been meant for him too.

When his turn came, he asked practical things, one at a time. Whether the proposed destinations had been confirmed. How members were assigned to traveling groups. Whether those groups mixed students from different Blocks. What a member owed the society beyond a sword.

The routes were provisional, the representative told him. Groups were assigned after applications closed. They did mix Blocks; that was rather the point.

Somewhere around the second question the representative had recognized him, and now arrived at a conclusion with visible relief.

"The society would certainly welcome the Silver Flame’s protection on the longer routes."

"I’m applying as a member."

Varen said it without heat, the correction of a misspelled name.

The representative blinked, recovered, and carried on. Members prepared supplies and gathered ingredients. They kept the records, negotiated with local communities for the right to do either, pitched camp, and attended the communal meals, which were mandatory. Combat ability was useful. It exempted no one from the dishes.

Varen accepted every condition without asking for a separate role.

That was what caught Lucavion: the question Varen never asked.

He drifted over, and the queue’s interest sharpened accordingly.

"You cook?"

Varen glanced at him. His shoulders eased a fraction, resignation more than welcome. "Naturally."

"Really? I thought rich kids didn’t like to cook."

The corner of Varen’s mouth twitched. For a moment nothing else happened. "Before Andelheim," he said, "I might not have."

"Heeeeh..."

Lucavion let the sound stretch until it was rude. "So this is a concealed devotion to regional cuisine."

"Traveling through a place without learning how its people live would make the journey incomplete."

It was said plainly, practically, with no sentiment attached. Lucavion respected that more than he wanted to admit.

"And you’ll attend every expedition?"

"I will decide after I see the routes."

Lucavion had, at some point, acquired a strip of dried river fish from the sample tray. Varen’s gaze dropped to it, then rose to him. "You appear more interested in consuming the society’s work than contributing to it."

"Quality assurance."

The exchange had the slightly stiff rhythm of two men who had always spoken more fluently with steel. Varen stayed reserved, and Lucavion supplied the humor. It was an arrangement that worked better than either of them would have guessed.

"Are you applying?" Varen asked.

Lucavion looked toward the route maps. "I’m deciding whether the food justifies the walking."

Varen nodded once, as though that were a complete and reasonable answer, and did not invite him. He turned back to the form, finished the remaining lines, and handed it across the table, because he wanted the experience and needed no one standing beside him to justify it.

He thanked the representative. Then he left.

Remaining beside the recruitment table with a strip of dried fish and the map of a route no one had announced yet, Lucavion watched him go, broad shoulders parting the crowd without seeming to ask it to.

The Varen of the novel would have volunteered as the society’s escort within a breath. A man walking at the edge of the group, sword ready, useful and slightly apart, relied upon by everyone and dependent on no one. Dependence had been a wound waiting to happen, and distance had been the bandage.

This Varen had just signed a form promising to wash dishes.

He had not turned friendly. He had not turned trusting either, and nobody was going to catch him confessing anything over a shared pot. But he had chosen to stand inside a group whose members would have to lean on one another, and no one had made him.

Lucavion’s chest loosened a notch, and he declined to examine why. The duel had cracked something open, but cracking was the easy part. Walking through the gap with a pen in hand had been Varen’s work. Whatever came between him and Elara later, she would not have to carry that particular lesson alone.

He turned to the representative instead.

He asked when the routes would be announced, how soon the first expedition would depart, whether any destinations had been chosen, and whether a nonmember could accompany one.

The answers came out generous and unhelpful. Routes waited on membership numbers, Academy approval, weather, arrangements with local communities, and whichever escorts could be found. Some destinations had been discussed. None had been confirmed. Nonmembers were seldom permitted, unless they possessed a needed skill or won special authorization.

Lucavion had asked lightly, testing each answer before he put weight on it, and the representative, having decided that curiosity was a symptom of interest, produced an application form.

He took it and read the obligations. Preparation. Gathering. Documentation. Camp duties. His first impulse arrived at once and very simply: join. Membership would put him close enough to watch the routes take shape, and to step in if the wrong one did.

He held the impulse up to the light.

What he knew was that something dangerous might happen. It did not prove the same danger would come, on the same route, with the same people. Varen had given him no present reason to interfere.

Treating him as a hazard merely because the novel had cast him as Elara’s first romance would ignore everything Lucavion had just watched him do. Varen was no character bolted to his old progression. He was a man making choices the book had never allowed him, and Lucavion respected him too much to supervise him without cause.

Elara could decide whom she trusted and which risks she accepted. Joining merely to stay near them would turn protection into permission to insert himself where he had not been asked.

Keeping watch. It was a flattering name for following people who never asked to be followed. He knew the sound of that argument. He had made it before, to himself, about other people, and it had never once sounded like a bad idea while he was making it.

Jesse had taught him that recently: deciding for someone else never became harmless because the intentions were kind.

Joining would have given him immediate access, and with it the comforting sense of holding the reins. Refusing meant trusting Elara and Varen to use their own judgment, and accepting that he might see the danger later than he liked.

So he chose something narrower. Monitor the announced routes. Identify the remembered destination. Confirm the participants. Step in only when the specific danger began to form.

It felt correct. It also felt like setting down a rope in the dark. Part of him kept its grip on the form anyway.

For now, membership was unnecessary.

He set the form back on the table and squared its corner against the edge. His fingers began to lift from the paper.

The representative reached for it.

"I wouldn’t return that yet."

He knew the voice at the first word. It was soothing, and it tangled his heart anyway.

His fingers pressed flat against the paper again, and for a moment the rest of him did not move at all.

Then he turned.

Right there, pale lavender eyes looked back at him, lashes fluttering.