Journeying Through Sky Village
Micah 6:8 (NIV)
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.
They left Mahogany at dawn, a small procession that felt less like an army and more like the beginning of a promise. The village clustered at the edge of the field to watch them go, faces turned to the road as if to hold their light steady with their eyes. Children ran along the way for the first few yards, then peeled off when duty or hunger tugged them back to chores. Evelyn stood on the threshold of the Living Word and watched, hands folded over the warmth of the wooden lintel, and when the bell rang once more it sounded less like a goodbye and more like a benediction.
Elena walked at the front, the Canticle tucked inside her cloak, its leather rubbing familiar against her ribs. She kept her eyes on the path, but she noticed everything: the way the sun struck a blade of grass and made a bead of dew hang like a lantern, the small, courteous bow the village smith gave Ye without words, the way Kaelith's shoulders tightened whenever a hawk crossed above them. Ye carried the heavier pack as if it were a natural shape for his shoulders. Ashley walked with an awkward grace, half prayer and half apology in every step. They had no map beyond a vague knowledge of the Falcon Kingdom's roads and a trust in whatever road felt like truth.
The first day was almost ordinary. They moved through a landscape that thought itself simple, rolling fields edged by low hedgerows, a slow river that kept company with a line of trees. Conversation came in fits and starts. Ye asked practical questions about repairs and food. Ashley talked about recipes that did not require ceremony, things that fed a body without demanding a price. Kaelith kept to herself, eyes scanning, hands finding odd stones and weighing them in her palm like a soldier testing a weapon he did not intend to use. Elena listened to everything and answered infrequently, the reserve of someone who had learned to let the flame settle before speaking.
When the sun dipped and the first night pressed cool and wide on them, they made camp in a clearing beside the river. Ye laughed at his own cooking when the stew turned out tastier than he thought possible over the little fire he coaxed from wet wood and patience. Kaelith, who had survived on strict rations and skills, discovered that she could sit without waking into commands. Ashley, cheeks still pink where ash had dusted her hair, watched Kaelith with a careful, hopeful curiosity, as if daring herself to believe the woman could change.
Elena rose before dawn and walked alone to the riverbank. The water moved soft and sure, carrying leaves in slow procession. She set two hands into the chill and felt the little presence that had become a companion since last they prayed together in Mahogany. The Breathlight hung low over the water like a promise, faint gold threading the surface. She did not pray with furious words. She only breathed thanks and opened her lips to hear the echo of the Canticle. A line of the Fourth Song came into her mind, not as text but as an impression.
She bowed her head and asked for a road that would do the least harm. Then she walked back to wake her companions.
The second day they found the village of Sky by the bend in the road, small houses perched on the slope of a hill, whitewashed and smelling of boiled roots and sheep. A crooked bell tower leaned over one end of the main street. Men mended nets near the river. Women gutted morning's catch. Children ran with a kind of reckless brightness that made the travelers smile. If Sky had any ceremonial center, it was a low stone well whose lip had been worn smooth by generations.
They arrived with no fanfare. Elena did not demand attention. She walked to the edge of the square and simply stood, the Canticle in the crook of her arm. People paused, curious. The mayor, a heavyset woman with knobby fingers and a laugh that did not find its way to her eyes, stepped forward. "What brings you?" she asked, polite and blunt.
Elena told her simply. "We travel. We bring words. We bring what we have."
The woman considered them for a long moment, then shrugged. "There is always room for bread. There is always room to hear. We have a child sick in the next lane. You can rest by the well until noon. Come then and say what you will."
It was not at all the dramatic invitation that some stories gave to holy feet. It was human, small, deliberate. The group sat in the square and took their shoes off to wash in the well. Ye and Kaelith fixed a broken wheel for an old cart while Ashley spoke to a woman about how to braid hair the way she used to in the House of Blood, careful not to sound like it was a lesson in submission. People watched them doing ordinary things and began to ask ordinary questions.
By midday the crowd settled into a rough semicircle beside the well. Elena closed her eyes for a breath, then opened them and read a passage from the Canticle that had been a balm to her since she first learned the words. She did not shout. She did not call down flames. She spoke like someone telling a story, the cadence of her voice soft but sure, as if reading an old letter to a friend who needed reminding.
The words did something quiet. A hush fell that was not fear. Children stopped their games, a dog ceased scratching, and the heat seemed to tilt in the light, as if listening. After she spoke, a woman from the front of the crowd rose and told of a boy who had not risen from bed for three days, a fever that sapped his color and made his breath small. "The herbs fail," she said. "We'll not bury him yet. Will you pray?"
Elena did not ask them to bring the boy. She asked to be shown to him. The child lay on a pallet near an open window where the morning sun streamed but could not warm him. Elena knelt and touched the boy's forehead with the back of her hand. The skin was hot, the breath ragged. She closed her eyes and began to pray, not a ritual, not a list of claims, but a simple sound, slow and deliberate. The Canticle's lines rose in her head like a remembered tune. She asked for mercy, for healing enough to let the boy wake and laugh and throw dirt at his sister again.
The breath of the room seemed to gather itself into a single, tangible presence. A thread of warmth moved from Elena's chest, not as an outward force but as a gentle current, and for the first time since her calling, she felt something like a return. The fever broke like a thread cut. The boy's eyelids fluttered and the color in his cheeks returned. He opened his mouth and coughed, then laughed when his sister made a face and reached for him.
The woman wept quietly, hand pressed to her mouth. People around them whispered, some in incredulous joy, some in a cautious disbelief that folded quickly into gratitude. There were no fireworks, no dramatic declarations. The light had answered like a neighbor returning a long loan. Ye, who had watched everything with his usual reserve, felt something loosen at his throat and laughed, unexpectedly and without self-consciousness. Kaelith, who had not meant to move, felt a strange tightness behind her eyes, like a door that had never opened before.
They stayed in Sky two nights. It was not an invasion. It was a presence that did work, repaired the wheel, taught a woman to stitch a torn sail, held a child when the mother needed a moment to wash. They ate simple meals and slept under a sky smeared by the twin moons, Vareth clear and blue, Lunara soft and amber, crossing once in a sweep that made the elders compare it to omens and to reasons to hold a festival. Elena's power was not a show. It was a steady heat in small things: a wound that would not fester, a cup of water that tasted like cool secrecy, a tired man who found the strength to stand and sing. People began to gather not out of awe, but because the work needed hands and because the smallest mercies had become contagious.
Kaelith did not know what to do with gratitude. Her hands, which had once built altars and bound ropes, now carried food to an old man and helped him cook porridge without ever speaking of duty. At night she would sit outside the small house the villagers lent them and rub the place where her palm had been burned, feeling the smooth, stubborn scar. Ashley sat beside her and told her about small, ordinary things she had learned in the village. "We kept certain recipes poison-free," Ashley said, and Kaelith snorted into her hand for the first time in days. Laughter felt strange and not entirely unwelcome.
On the third day a man from a neighboring hamlet arrived in Sky. He was thin, wind-creased and worked hard for the little he had. He had a tale that made the town murmur. A patrol from the Falcon Church had come through his fields the day before and taken two men for questioning about a relic that had gone missing from a noble's house. The patrol rode east, toward the road the travelers planned to take. The story altered the mood in the square, like the first long shadow across a bright field.
Elena listened with her hands folded. Her face did not harden. She only looked toward the east, where the road vanished into a ribbon of heat on the horizon. The Canticle lay open at her feet. She felt the pull of the Fourth Song again, as if some line were being drawn between the mercy in Sky and the patience of Mahogany. The road would not be free of danger. She had not expected it to be. She had expected, perhaps, the slow, patient erosion of superstition, not the sharp claws of a Church that mistook its power for divinity.
That night, around the small fire, Ye and Elena talked quietly. Ye wanted to know how she could be certain that the thing she felt was a gift and not some trick of memory and hope. Elena admitted that she did not know, in the way a field does not know the will of rain but only that it grows in its presence. "I do not trust wonder," she said, "but I do trust mercy when it keeps returning." Ye nodded and said, "Then when mercy calls, we answer."
Kaelith and Ashley walked further into the dark and listened to the moaning of the river. Ashley told Kaelith about the House of Blood, the long days and the rituals that had taught her to be both cruel and small. Kaelith listened with a curious, almost clinical interest. "I did what I was trained to do," she said finally. "It made me useful. It made me important. But it never made me quiet at night. This quiet—" she gestured at the way the moon glanced off the river "—makes me uncomfortable because it does not demand anything." Ashley's voice was soft. "Maybe it is asking less of you than you asked of yourself."
They walked until their feet ached and looked up at the moon. Vareth and Lunara crossed, shivering the stars, and the Breathlight thinned along the treetops. The night smelled of green things and wet earth. For the first time Kaelith let herself admit she was tired of being dangerous. She let herself admit, quietly and without drama, that she might want to be more than a weapon.
While they stayed in Sky, news began to move ahead of them. A girl who had sung when the fever lifted wrote a note to her cousin in a market town, and a trader took it the next day along with his cart of barley and told the story to anyone who would buy. Word is its own currency, and soon there were folk on the road who had heard of the woman who read from a book and whose presence healed a child. Not all of what was told was true, but there was enough truth to pull eyes and ears toward the road.
On the morning they left Sky, the mayor came to the well where Elena stood and pressed a small woven charm into her hand. It was the kind of thing made without much thought and given with the care of someone who would never see the traveler again. "For the road," she said. "So you will not forget us."
Elena accepted it with a smile so soft the woman said she saw the edges of peace in it. Ye shouldered the packs again and Kaelith strapped her small spare blade, worn dull by missions no longer given. Ashley tightened the scarf around her neck with more careful fingers than the day before. They stepped onto the road, shoulders bared and steps measured, and the village of Sky receded into the green.