The Relic in the Bush

Maren’s father made baskets. Good ones — tight weave, strong handles, the kind that lasted. He had taught Maren the trade the same way his father had taught him, with patience and repetition and the occasional sharp word when Maren’s attention drifted. But baskets didn’t need two pairs of hands, and the city docks three days’ walk south always needed one more body willing to move cargo in the heat. So Maren had kissed his mother on the cheek, promised to send coin when he could, and walked south with his lunch wrapped in one of his father’s rejects.

That had been four years ago. He was good at the work now. Not beloved, not promoted, just reliable — which on the docks was worth more than either.

The day it happened was unremarkable until it wasn’t.

He was crossing between the eastern warehouse and the grain pier when he saw her. A guard-core sorcerer, face down in the narrow gap between two stacked rows of crates, one arm folded beneath her. The kind of place you didn’t look unless you were cutting through. Maren had been cutting through.

He stood very still for a moment, listening. The noise of the docks carried on without him — shouting, the groan of rope under tension, the thud of sacks meeting wood. Nobody else was in the gap.

He crouched and put two fingers to her neck. Her pulse came back steady against his hand. Alive. He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding and straightened up.

That was when he saw it.

She had been holding something. It had rolled a short distance from her open hand and come to rest against the base of a crate — a T-shaped object, the length of his forearm, cast in gold or something very close to it. Ornamental-looking. Strange. He picked it up before he understood that he was going to.

It was heavier than it looked.

He put it under his jacket and walked out of the gap and did not stop walking until he was two streets away from the docks, at which point he stood against a wall and tried to breathe normally and failed at it completely.

He told his foreman he’d been drinking.

This was not, on the docks, a remarkable thing to say. His foreman looked at him with tired eyes, told him he’d be docked the afternoon, and waved him off. Maren walked home with the object pressed against his ribs, nodding at neighbors, stopping to buy bread he didn’t eat.

He hid it beneath the loose board under his bed that he’d previously used for nothing more incriminating than a small amount of saved coin.

Then he lay on top of the bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about what he had done.

The regret was immediate and complete. Not the creeping kind that arrives later with distance — the kind that sits on your chest from the first moment and does not shift.

He turned the problem over for days. The object was gold, or gold enough, which meant it was worth something. But worth something to whom? He knew nobody who dealt in objects like that. Fences on the docks moved stolen cargo, not relics. And it was a relic — he was almost certain of that now. Guard-core sorcerers didn’t carry decorative ornaments on duty. Whatever it was, it worked in her hands in ways it would never work in his, which made it valueless to him in the way that mattered and dangerous to him in every other way.

He thought about the river.

He thought about it seriously, lying awake, working through whether the current would carry it far enough that it would never be found. Then he thought about someone finding it anyway, tracing it, finding him, and the drowning feeling returned and he went back to staring at the ceiling.

After two weeks of this he got up, retrieved the object from under the board, wrapped it in cloth, and walked to the sorcerer school.

He had rehearsed the story until it felt almost true.

He’d been visiting his father — which was plausible, the village wasn’t far. Walking the path back, he’d spotted something glinting in the scrub near the road. Picked it up, didn’t know what it was. Took him some time to find the right moment to come in. He delivered all of this in what he hoped was the tone of a man who had done a mildly inconvenient civic duty and expected nothing in return except to be left alone.

The yard was quieter than he’d expected. A few sorcerers moving between buildings, a clerk behind a desk near the entrance who glanced up at him and then at the wrapped object and then back up at him with an expression that had sharpened slightly. Maren set it on the desk and said his piece.

The clerk unwrapped it. His face didn’t change but something behind it did.

“Wait here,” he said, and went through a door.

Maren stood at the desk and looked at the wall and did not let himself look at the exit.

The man who came back was older, with the kind of stillness that Maren associated with people who had long since stopped needing to perform authority. He looked at Maren. He looked at the relic on the desk. He picked it up and turned it once in his hands and set it back down.

“You found this near your father’s home,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Which is three days’ walk north.”

“Two and a half, if you move.”

The man considered this. “And it took you some time to find the right moment to come in.”

“I didn’t know where to bring it at first,” Maren said. “I asked around.”

The man nodded slowly, in the way of someone filing information away rather than agreeing with it. He asked about the road — which stretch, which direction Maren had been traveling, whether he’d seen anyone else near the area. Maren answered carefully. He had, at least, prepared for this part, and found to his surprise that answering questions about a location he’d never been near was easier than answering questions about what had actually happened, because the actual questions never came.

The man did not ask him directly. He asked around it, in smaller circles, and Maren understood that the man knew the bush story was a bush story and had decided that this particular truth was not worth the cost of extracting it.

What they wanted was not him.

After a while the questions stopped. The man told him that objects of this kind were institutional property and that prompt reporting was a civic obligation, that there would be a fine for the delay, and that a clerk would record his name and address. He delivered this in the same quiet voice he’d used throughout. Maren said he understood. He paid the fine from the coin he had on him, which nearly covered it, and arranged to bring the remainder within the week.

The relic stayed on the desk.

He walked out into the afternoon light and stood on the street outside the yard for a moment, blinking.

The city moved around him. A cart went past. Somewhere down the road someone was arguing about the weight of a delivery. He put his hands in his pockets and found them empty of the coin he’d come in with and felt, against all reasonable expectation, something close to relief.

The board under his bed held nothing now but his savings. The fine would eat into them, but they’d recover. He was still employed. His foreman had believed the drinking story, or had chosen to. His name was now recorded in the school’s ledger, which was not a comfortable thing, but it was a closed ledger, and the entry would not mean much to anyone who read it.

He thought about the sorcerer he’d crouched over in the gap between the crates. He didn’t know her name. He didn’t know what had put her on the ground or whether whoever had done it had been found. He told himself that these were not his questions to answer, and he mostly believed it.

He started walking back toward the docks.

He had cargo to move in the morning, and the fine was not going to pay itself.