The Dismissed Saint Became the Beast King's Healer novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: In Our Own Language

The Greywater ran loud and brown under the bridge, and the far end of it was Aurelmark.

Shiori stood at the stone rail with her satchel at her feet.

She had been looking south for most of an hour.

The sun was low.

She had thought the road home would hurt more to look at.

It was only a road.

Somewhere past it lay a city with a Temple in it, and past that, nothing she could walk to.

Nothing that anyone had ever walked to.

A boy had stood at this rail twelve years ago, with snow in his hair and a burn on his back.

He had not had a rice terrace or a woman who could say his name.

She picked up her satchel.

She turned north, and he was already there.

He had run the whole road on foot.

His coat was open, his silver hair was stuck to his temples, and his ears stood straight up.

He had stopped ten paces away.

"I'm not going anywhere," she said.

He did not seem to hear.

"I'm coming back," she said. "I only needed to look."

His shoulders came down an inch.

"And?"

"It's a road."

She walked up to him and stopped at arm's length.

"I'm still angry."

"I know."

"You should have told me the first night. In the dark, in half a blanket."

"You said you'd tell me in a better place, and then you made one."

"Yes."

"But I'm not angry that you were scared. I'd have been scared."

She drew a breath and said the next part in Japanese.

"Hanazono Shiori. Twenty-two. Sendai."

The language sat strange in her mouth after so many months.

Every vowel was soft, and every sound was home.

His face broke.

For a while he could not answer.

Then he said, hoarse, in the same language, in an accent from another city, "Sakimori Haruto. Thirty-one. Nagoya."

They were standing on a border bridge at dusk, with the wind coming off the river, and she was crying again, and so was he.

"Your Japanese is old," she said, laughing. "You say it like my grandmother."

"Twelve years without anyone to correct me."

"I'll correct you."

"Please."

She took his hand, and they walked back up the road together.

The seals did not burn.

Behind them the sun went under the ridge, and nothing changed in him at all.

In the tower room he lit one lamp and she shut the door.

They stood facing each other, close enough to feel each other's breath.

"Say something else," she said in Japanese. "Anything. Say what you'd say if no one was listening."

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