Chapter 52: Stay for Dinner

Chapter 52: Do Your Horns Catch on Things?

Maelin had read the invitation three times before deciding that Silas probably meant it.

Now she stood outside his door with a bag of bread in one hand and Professor Arden’s latest message open in the other. She had meant to answer the professor before coming. Instead, she had spent twenty minutes rewriting the first sentence and arrived with nothing sent.

Silas opened the door before she could put the communicator away.

"Sorry," Maelin said. "I was reading something."

"Come in." Silas stepped aside, then looked at the bag. "You didn’t have to bring food."

"It’s bread," Maelin said.

"I recognize it," Silas said.

He took the bag when she held it out. Maelin stepped inside, glanced toward the new chair, and stopped.

A small dark cat was sitting on the desk beside an open book.

There hadn’t been a cat last time. There had been a recently discharged patient pretending he didn’t care whether she stayed, and a room that smelled faintly of new furniture.

"You got a pet?" she asked.

"No," the cat said.

Maelin’s hand tightened around her communicator.

Silas looked apologetic. "That’s Nim. He’s a spirit."

For a moment, Maelin could only stare. Then the little creature turned his head and studied her with exactly as much interest.

"Do your horns catch on things?" Nim asked. ℯℯ𝘭.

"Sometimes," she said.

He considered this, then tucked his paws together as though she had answered something important.

Maelin looked at Silas. "How long has he been here?"

"Six days," Silas said.

She had spent those six days going to classes, practicing, and wondering whether she should stop rereading her father’s last notes before bed. Silas, apparently, had found time to acquire a spirit companion.

He explained the invitation exercise and their agreement while he took bowls down from the cupboard. He was careful with the word agreement. Nim could come and go, he said. Nim didn’t belong to anyone.

Maelin knew enough to understand how unusual a bond was. A spirit choosing to stay here was a completely different thing from a stray cat climbing in through the window. She watched Nim follow a floating spoon with his eyes and wondered how much else had changed without her noticing.

"Who knows?" she asked.

"Elyra. My mother. You." Silas set a bowl in front of her. "I’d like to keep it that way for now."

Maelin nodded. Being trusted with it pleased her more than she wanted to show.

Then she caught herself reading significance into being told about a cat, however extraordinary, and went to help with the bread.

The stew was still hot when they sat down.

Silas had ordered far too much. He claimed the portions had looked smaller, though Maelin suspected he was remembering how often she’d turned up with food for him. His bandages were gone. There was color in his face, and he no longer paused before reaching above his shoulder.

She was glad to see it.

For a while, they talked about his assessment. He described Rovan’s staff hitting him right after he’d stepped inside its reach, and she laughed before she could stop herself.

Silas pointed his spoon at her. "You’re enjoying the wrong part."

"I’ve done it," Maelin said. "The first time I sparred against a polearm, I thought getting closer would solve everything."

"Did it?" Silas asked.

"Briefly. Then I got hit," Maelin said.

He laughed, and some of the tension she had carried in through the door eased. She told him about snagging her coat on a training rack that morning. He wanted to know whether she’d used Shadow Passage to escape. She admitted she had just stood there swearing until someone freed the fabric.

Her communicator buzzed against the table.

Maelin turned it facedown without looking. Silas carried on describing his new course, but she lost part of what he said while thinking about the unsent reply.

He noticed.

"Do you need to take that?" Silas asked.

"No. It’s probably a class message," Maelin said.

"All right." Silas reached for the bread.

He didn’t ask anything else. The silence gave her time to decide whether she wanted him to.

"Arden sent an update," Maelin said eventually. "About the lower chamber."

Silas put the bread down.

Maelin turned the communicator over and opened the message. The professor had arranged a further engineering review of the damaged return system. It wasn’t a recovery date. Before anyone went below, they needed to know whether the chamber could be reached without exposing the team to another discharge.

There was a separate request for her permission to share selected passages from her father’s notes with the specialists doing the review.

She passed the screen across.

He read it without a word. Maelin watched his eyes reach the attachment, where the proposed excerpts ended just before her father’s final entry.

"They need the measurements," she said. "I understand that."

Silas handed the communicator back. "What part are you unsure about?"

"None of it. Until I try answering."

The words annoyed her the moment she heard them. She sounded helpless. She already knew what she wanted to say, and a simple reply should not have taken most of an evening.

She pushed her bowl aside to make room for the device.

"Every message has the chamber in it. Or the records. Or the equipment they need." Maelin stared at Arden’s neat list. "I know that’s how they get him out. I don’t want to make it harder. But I keep wanting to ask whether anyone remembers why I want that door open."

Silas was quiet for a moment.

"You can ask about your father," he said.

"I know," Maelin said.

"I wasn’t sure whether you wanted someone to say it," Silas said.

She looked up. He seemed genuinely unsure, and she was suddenly very glad she had come here instead of trying to finish the reply alone.

Maelin pulled the communicator closer. "I want them to keep his belongings together, if they find any. Even things that aren’t useful to the investigation. And I want them to tell me before they move him."

"Then put that in," Silas said.

She did. Her hands steadied as the sentences became specific. She authorized the selected technical excerpts, asked for his possessions to be kept together, and requested advance notice once a recovery became possible.

There was one more question she had been avoiding.

She typed T. Dace’s name and asked whether anyone had found the man who had last seen her father alive.

Maelin read the message once and sent it before she could start over.

For several minutes afterward, they ate without saying much.

She hadn’t expected a few lines to leave her so tired. The stew had gone lukewarm, but she found she was hungry again. Silas offered to reheat it and accepted her refusal without arguing.

Nim climbed onto the empty chair beside her.

"May I look?" he asked, studying her horns.

"Looking is fine," Maelin said. "Don’t climb on them."

He drew himself up, deeply wounded. "I wasn’t going to."

Across the table, Silas suddenly became fascinated by his bowl.

Maelin let Nim examine the curve of one horn. He leaned close enough that she could see his whiskers twitch, then sat back, apparently satisfied. He asked whether all people had them. She explained that some did, and that people without horns weren’t all the same kind either.

That lesson kept him busy until he noticed the spoon again.

When Maelin reached for her bag later, Silas glanced toward the door.

"Leaving already?" he asked.

"Did you need something else?" Maelin asked.

"No." Silas hesitated. "You could stay a while."

She studied him. There had been a time when she would have looked for the favor hidden behind an invitation like that. Even now, the habit hadn’t completely gone. But the meal was finished, the lantern was at home, and he hadn’t asked her to do a single thing.

"I have work," Maelin said.

"So do I," Silas said. "Apparently learning to move my feet doesn’t exempt me from explaining mana circulation in writing."

She smiled and took her course reader out of the bag.

Silas cleared a space at the desk. When she sat down, he moved to the bed with his own notes, leaving her the better light without saying anything about it.

Arden hadn’t answered yet. The chamber was still dangerous, and her father was still down there.

Maelin opened her reader anyway. A few minutes later, she realized she had reached the bottom of a page without once checking her messages.

Beside her elbow, Nim carefully set down his blue bead.

"You can look at this," he said.

She thanked him and kept her hands to herself.