Seven

"I see." He nodded and refrained from asking difficult - or at least what he considered awkward - questions about family. To his annoyance, the question he had been wanting to ask escaped him, and Sebastian ended up concentrating on the game for a while instead.

"I don't sound like clergy, do I?" he finally asked with an amused smile.

"I guess not. I don't think I've talked to a priest here for that long."

"Good," he said and snatched the single seed from a pit with no apparent intentions to say why was a good thing.

Sylvie looked puzzled for a moment, but then turned to the game again.

The only questions she could come up with at the moment were ones she did not want to ask for various reasons.

A few turns later the game was over, and she won, albeit by a narrow margin.

"I'll need to practice if I want to beat you, it seems," the half-elf said, pointing out the obvious in a slightly playful tone as he glanced up at the sun. There was very little tension at all in his body language, nothing to suggest that he might have taken offense or begun to worry about something.

"Shall we have another game, or is it maybe time for something else?" Sebastian asked as he glanced toward the fire, making note of the firewood.

"Well, you learn more quickly than I did," Sylvie threw back, matching his tone.

She poured a couple of beads from one hand to the other and back again. Noticing his look, she said, "firewood's no problem; there's dry driftwood clustered a bit that way," and pointed downstream. "And days are still long. I wouldn't mind another game."

"Thank you. But that's because I have a lot of blank mind to fill," he replied with a smile and glanced downstream as he set beads pack into the pits. "Though to be honest, I usually learn basics well enough. It's the advanced things that elude me - I never stop to practice."

Seeing as he had lost last time, he started by picking from the first pit this time and made a thoughtful sound. "What's the religion on Eodea like, or Yrn alone?" he asked and looked up, eyes wide with curiosity. Religion was, for some reason, a topic that appealed to him right until the conversation turned to who was right and who was wrong. "If you don't mind me asking, of course."

He smiled.

"Not at all." She started with the same move, and considered for a moment.

"One thread that's common in a lot of places is a concept of two forces that make up everything... matter and spirit; body and mind. Some people spend their lives arguing about the meaning of it, and what bearing each has on people" - her tone made clear her opinion of that was not very high - "but most just figure there should be a certain balance in life."

She watched Sebastian's reaction as she went on. "Some people pleaded or bartered with spirits for help. There were also patrons. People invoked them before certain deeds, or they founded orders or organisations in their name. Say, Gawenya Mabé was the first to create - or at least complete - and spread sea charts of the waters between the islands, and in her honour a cartographer's school was founded.

"But those patrons were born as people. In Yrn and most places I've been, there were no gods as people describe them here."

Sebastian nodded, barely paying attention to the game as he watched Sylvie and listened. His eyebrows rose briefly at the mention of patrons, but he offered no other special reaction to that. Neither did the mention of having no god of any sort appear to confuse him, let alone surprise him.

He crossed his legs again and reached for his satchel between moves. "Is there a certain etiquette to follow when it comes to dealing with the spirits? Most spirits I've met are only interested in the world directly around them or have some specific goal or purpose."

Sylvie felt a slight relief this wasn't going worse. She had for quite a while avoided talking about religion to people because it had led to bad reactions in the past. But then, she maybe shouldn't have been surprised, considering Sebastian had travelled a lot.

"Yes, they are local. It depends a lot on the spirit in question." She looked through Sebastian, trying to remember. "It's very uncommon in Yrn, so I'm not that familiar with it.

"Some spirits are more like minor forces, with little in the way of a mind, and can be steered by people with a certain talent. Some spirits have a specific goal, and the aware ones may help someone who promises to help them reach it. Others, well, they will have their own reasons for dealing with people, just like people of flesh and blood."

She shrugged and smiled wryly. "Maybe some of them have been around a long while and would just get bored otherwise."

Sebastian responded by first blinking twice, faintly amused, and then by smiling. "I wouldn't rule that out at all," he said. "And I understand. I haven't really ever dealt with spirits on a regular basis. I couldn't tell you the first thing about how to deal with the spirits of my home."

He snatched seeds again and stared at them for a while, watching the light reflect off the beads while mulling over what he had just heard. "I'm not sure if I can think of anything else to ask about that particular subject," he then said. "Anything else that comes to your mind about spirits?"

After a slight pause she shook her head. "As I said, not that common in Yrn. Maybe people thought if there are really powerful malicious spirits in the old walls, it would be a bad idea trying to call any."

"Perhaps. It makes sense," Sebastian said, then paused when he realised a part of him had wanted to say 'certainly'. It was a curious thought. "That's that, then," he said, smiling a little when he realised he would have gone into the old walls despite of all that - or maybe even because of it.

Right now the stupidity of the urge hit him with full force. Was this lucidity? He hoped not. "You still don't mind questions? I know I don't, but..." he blinked at her absent-mindedly, slowly focusing his gaze.

The question amused her. "I think I'm capable of telling you if a question bothers me after you pose it. But thanks for asking."

She looked down at the board and made a move.

"Hm, if you don't mind... Is there any reason why you don't want to settle down?"

She realised it was a somewhat different class of question, but asked anyway.

Sylvie's amused response was received with a faint grin that turned into a faintly amused smile. Her move on the board did nothing to dim the smile, nor did the question.

It did cause a silence that lasted a bit too long to seem healthy. "It never compares to my memories of home," he finally said, squinting at the board. "But I don't want or need to go back there, either. Settling down in a world I wasn't born in is..."

I've tried. "I've tried," he repeated out loud. "I never stay, not even once I learn to appreciate local culture, the food, the scenery. So I don't think about it much anymore because it seems so impossible to me." It wasn't the entire truth, and he couldn't hide that he wasn't telling everything. The question may not have dimmed his smile, but answering had - though not to the point where it was completely gone. "Of course, it might be nice. But unlikely."

Don't want or need... For a moment Sylvie considered asking why, but then it occurred to her that if "home" was centuries in the past, returning may well be impossible.

She didn't want to make things worse either by prying further or jumping to the first trivial thing coming to mind, so she kept quiet.

And then he smiled. "Of course you could say this is a lot more exciting, and there's no tax collector or aspiring young landowner trying to ask me why I haven't paid them or what I'm doing in their barony, county, duchy or whatever." He made a move. Most of the time, anyway.

Then he looked up. "Why are you on the road?" He couldn't believe he was actually talking about something like this.

That gave her a slight pause, but only because she wasn't sure what he referred to.

"Right now because I had a chance to raise some money doing something I'm at least moderately good at as well as interested in. Why I, left Eodea originally..."

She rubbed her throat, uncomfortable with the memory for a moment, but shrugged the feeling off. "It was an accident, really. I told you that it's customary to travel for a while after completing schooling - as far as that's possible inside a school only, of course. I eventually came across a mage in a really backwater area working on a fascinating project. He wanted to manipulate a deserted fae gate so it would connect two points in Eodea, instead of liking it to a minor world. I didn't have much to with the process, but I was curious enough to stay around until it, well, went wrong." With an ironic smile and raised eyebrows she made a gesture that could have indicated an explosion.

There were significant points missing in that story, but it would be easy to mistake the little cues as signs she just didn't really want to talk about a failed experiment, or bringing herself into trouble.

He nodded and made no attempt to pry more about how it went wrong, but smiled at the ironic gesture appreciatively. "How long ago was that?" he finally asked carefully - in a quieter voice - but without masking his interest in the topic. He went so far as to stop his incessant fiddling with the beads (seeds) he had alreacy collected and just watched and listened, head slightly tilted.

She closed her eyes considering that, a look of calm concentration on her face. A couple of months here, a couple of months at the Cross'd Roads, and considerably longer where she'd originally been thrown to...

"It's confusing because the calendars don't match up." She opened her eyes and shrugged, frowning slightly. "About four years, I guess."

She finished her move before looking at Sebastian again, at which time she had found her smile again. All things considered, things were not so bad.