CHAPTER 74: 74: THE STRANGER RETURNS XVI

---

The white robe was simple to the point of austerity, yet something about the line of it and the way she moved made the room feel different, like a chapel after someone had sung inside it.

Sera stopped, taking in his stillness, and looked down at the floor as if to apologize for the fact of her own face.

"Where are Fizz and Gael," she asked, keeping her tone strictly ordinary because nothing in her posture was ordinary at all.

"In the side room," John said. "Eating. Watching the back door in case the merchant’s coin grows legs and tries to leave."

"That would be a trick," she said. She came to the bench and sat beside him, leaving enough space between them for decorum and not enough to pretend they were strangers. Her damp hair smelled faintly of herbs and something clean that reminded him of a morning that had not happened yet.

"I will be leaving soon," she said. "One or two days. My work here is done. I am waiting for word from the temple headquarters. When the order comes, I go to the next place."

He looked at his hands because it was easier than looking at her beautiful body and face. "Of course."

"I did not tell the man at the door that," she said, a rueful edge at her mouth. "Because it was none of his business and because he would have used it to make a little victory in his head."

"He brought his own victories," John said. "He can keep them."

She smiled at that. "You do not like men who wear symbols on their cloaks."

"I have learned to judge a house by its servants," John said. "I try not to be fair about it."

Sera watched the shutter for a moment, then said without turning, "Will you be all right when I leave."

"Yes," John said. Then he allowed a better truth. "Less all right than I would like."

She nodded. "I asked the question for myself, not for you."

He let the simple honesty settle between them. It did not need a reply. It needed the kind of quiet that tells two people they are hearing the same thing.

They spoke of small matters first because small matters are how people cross a river when the bridge is not finished. Sera asked about the glazier and whether John wanted frosted panes or clear. John asked about the temple’s next work and whether she knew the road. She did not. Orders came like weather, she said. Sometimes with warning and sometimes with lightning.

He told her he would build the lab even if the glass took a month to arrive. She told him not to test fire on a table that had not asked for it. He promised he would be careful. She promised she would worry anyway.

At some point their hands shifted on the bench. John reached to adjust the ledger that was not quite straight and Sera reached to set the comb she had used on the table. Their fingers brushed. The contact was a small thing. It ran like a wire to a bell he had not known existed. The sound it made did not happen in the room. It happened in his chest.

Sera’s breath shortened by a fraction he might have missed had he not been listening to his own. She did not snatch her hand away. Neither did he. It was a fingertip against a knuckle. It felt like both a question and an answer.

He turned his head. She turned hers. The space between them condensed as if the air had decided it had been doing the wrong job all night. He could see the pattern of water along her hair, the tiny quiver at the corner of her mouth she did not allow most people to see, the resolve that had met doors like the one earlier and decided to remain a person anyway.

"John," she said, barely sound, almost a thought.

"Yes," he said, barely more.

They leaned. It was slow because rushing would have broken the fragile invention they had made together by not speaking. Their eyes slipped shut without orders. Their foreheads nearly met before anything else. Their breath found a shared rhythm, unsure, too fast for a heartbeat and too slow for panic. A handful of centimeters remained. Those centimeters felt like a country.

Their lips are about to touch each other.

SLAM!

Suddenly the door banged open with a boom that would have cheated a drum out of its wages.

Fizz burst in, half a meat pie skewered on a wooden fork like a flag. "I come bearing noble snacks for the doom master..." He stopped mid sentence, midair, mid bite. His eyes went as round as coins. The fork wobbled like a tiny banner in a very surprising wind.

"Oh Shit! Scandal!!!"

The boom shattered the moment the way a stone shatters a reflection. They jerked apart, as if someone had replaced the air with cold water. Sera’s eyes flew open. Color rose to her cheeks so quickly the room felt a degree warmer. John stared at the ledger as if he had never seen paper.

Fizz lowered the fork by a very small distance and then, being Fizz, raised his voice to fill the hole where silence had been.

"I see," he announced with burlesque solemnity. "A human ceremony. An exchange of breath licenses. Two citizens attempting to merge faces without a permit. When will the baby arrive? Should I knit a tiny hat for your baby?"

"Fizz," Sera said, mortified, half hiding in the angle of her shoulder and the edge of her damp hair. "Nooo."

"I am an honest witness," Fizz declared, floating in an aggrieved circle. "I interrupt for one pie and find a whole romance scandal. He is seventeen and suddenly a man. She is a priestess and suddenly a hungry bird. I am betrayed by narrative structure."

"It was not what you think," John said, which was the most foolish sentence a human can choose and he knew it the moment it left his mouth.