I watch her leave and the understanding creeps in.
Yesterday she was all, Let’s go get coffee together!
And now that she knows I’m just the weird girl, she’s done with me.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN – PELL
When Pie disappears through the tomb door, I get an overwhelming feeling of heaviness. I’m getting used to her. I’m becoming accustomed to having her next to me. I was busy most of yesterday and concentrating on my current ring problems, so I didn’t really notice the heaviness. But when she came back, yeah. The lightness was there. The feeling of a great burden being lifted.
Today though, I sense that heaviness the moment she’s gone and I don’t like it.
“Divvy up what problems?” Tomas asks.
I turn him, still distracted by these new feelings. “What?”
“What problems are we divvying up?”
I don’t want to discuss any of this with him, so I turn away and call out over my shoulder, “I’ll be in the blacksmith shop.”
I weave my way through the maze of tombs, searching for the forest’s edge. Of course, it takes me almost as long to find the shop today as it did yesterday because I’m pretty sure some of these tombs have moved. But once I’m there, I feel better. I put on my apron, light my forge, and pass the time waiting for it to heat up by weaving the rings from yesterday into a small section of mail by connecting and closing the rings.
Then I study that, absently fanning my fire with the bellows. The rings are far from perfect. It has been too long since I last forged for them to look anything but amateur. But it’s good practice and I take notes of where I need to improve.
I will do better today.
Eventually the fire is ready so I start fabricating new rings. I get lost in the work. My mind wanders to Pie, of course. I can’t imagine a life without her now. She’s part of me. And she’s perfect. I liked her as a human but I love her as a wood nymph. As upsetting as it initially was for Pie, it felt like the gods blessed me when she came back from Tarq’s with hooves and horns. It’s like they finally decided I deserved more than a curse.
I also like that she can’t really leave the sanctuary anymore. Not easily, anyway. Not without chancing discovery by the outside world. But she’s not a prisoner because she has Tarq’s world now.
If only I could travel through tomb doors. Then we could do these things together.
I would like to see Tarq’s world. I would like to go to that city. Take Pie out for coffee at that place she mentioned. To dinner, or concerts, or festivals.
It would be the closest thing to a normal life I’ve had since I was a boy and went to the Roman parties. Even if we never break this curse, we could live like that.
We could live within it.
My mind wanders through thoughts of a new life with Pie. A long life. Years would go by. Decades, then centuries. And we could spend them all together.
Partners.
When I pull back from the fantasy I’m imagining in my head I realize I have made hundreds of rings and the sunlight outside is different. It’s noon, I think. Time just flew by and I am thirsty and hot.
I put my tongs down, wipe the sweat from my brow, and walk over to the water pump to grab a drink. Then I take it up onto the roof and let a light breeze cool me down.
I stand there, overlooking the sanctuary, and ponder what it all really means.
Is it what I’ve been told?
Or might there be more to the world than petty gods and prison walls?
Pie started questioning things immediately. Why are the tombs here? Where did they come from? Who’s inside them?
And I have to admit, it’s a little bit embarrassing that I haven’t spent all of my two thousand years of imprisonment trying to get to the bottom of these things.
I just didn’t care, I guess.
No. I just didn’t want to care.