Rionne rose out of the morning like a memory that hadn't learned how to fade. Low roofs still wore their ribbons of chimney smoke, the well rope creaked once and settled, and sparrows stitched quick seams across the pale sky. Elira slowed without thinking at the path's last turn, letting the village arrange itself in the order her bones remembered: the baker's crooked sign, the healer's herb racks, the anvil under the eaves that had weathered into the color of rain.
Her hand brushed the old hammer as she passed. The iron had kept the warmth of too many summers to count and none of the sound. She drew a breath, let it out, and went to the door.
It opened before she could knock. Rho stood there—barefoot, hair a dark tumble, eyes the color of garnets held up to a lamp. Surprise flashed into joy so fast it made both of them laugh.
"Elira!"
Arms closed around her. For a breath, the mountain, the Sanctum, the rules about what could be said and what could not—all of it set its weight down somewhere else and left Elira lighter by precisely one sister.
"You're early," Rho said into her shoulder.
"Left before the lamps were out," Elira answered, and felt Rho smile at the joke of it.
"Come in. You look… you look different." Rho leaned back to study her, not unkindly. "Steadier. And tired underneath."
"I'm all right." Elira meant it, even with the travel still in her legs. "I can stay today. I have to leave at dawn."
Rho's mouth did a quick strange thing—brave, then not. "Then we'll make today heavy enough to last."
They did small things first, because small things are how you make a day. Rho heated yesterday's soup and cut a heel of bread; Elira filled the basin and hauled the water they'd use for washing, because muscle remembers what helps. They spoke about safe things: the sheep that had figured out the gate latch again, the baker's wife who had acquired a cat and then the cat had acquired a chair. When Rho laughed, Elira let herself look directly at her, the way you do with sun only when it isn't trying to blind you.
After the soup, silence came and did not feel unfriendly. Rho had always been better at letting quiet sit at the table without worrying it would take offense.
"You're sure?" Rho said at last, low. "You're… all right?"
Elira set the bowl down very carefully, as if the question were made of glass. "I'm not alone," she said. "That's the most honest answer I have."
Rho's gaze flicked to the door and back, measuring danger out of habit, the way village children do when they've grown up near soldiers and stories. "Not the way most people mean it?"
"Not the way most people mean it." Elira rose, crossed to the window, and drew the shutters in until the light stood thin and private. She set the latch on the door and turned the iron key that had begun to wear to the shape of their hands. Then she came back and sat opposite her sister with her knees almost touching Rho's.
"I want to show you something," she said. "Only you."
Rho swallowed, once. "All right."
Elira didn't know any words that would make this safer. That had to be enough. She closed her eyes and put two fingers to the pendant at her throat, not pressing, not tugging, only acknowledging. She made space inside herself the way you make space at a crowded table—by shifting a plate here, a cup there—until there was a place for someone to sit.
Help me, she thought. Please.
Light did not flood the room. It decided to stand up.
A woman stepped from the rearranged brightness by the hearth. Gold hair fell like morning; her presence made the air remember how to be polite. She did not glow. She belonged to the light already present and arranged it around herself without fuss.
Rho's breath caught. Her hand jumped toward her mouth and flattened there, as if she were catching a word before it could startle the neighbors. She stood and then remembered to sit. Her eyes were very wide and very alive.
Elira kept her voice even. "This is the one who steadied me. She is my contract spirit."
The woman inclined her head, not theatrically, simply as a person salutes a person. "I was entrusted to her," she said, the sentence placing itself where it could be heard and not overheard. "I stand with her when she asks. I do not take her hands to use my own."
Rho looked from one to the other, questions colliding and choosing not to spill. When she spoke, it was the right one. "Do you… ride her? Control her?"
"No," the woman said, and the refusal was clean and kind. "I am a companion, not a master. She remains herself."
Rho let out the breath she'd been holding. Her shoulders lowered by a small and honest measure. Then, because she was Rho, she reached for manners. "I'm Rho," she whispered, as if a name might be too heavy for a room like this, and then she flushed because she had whispered. "Sorry. I—sorry."
"You are welcome in your own house," the woman said, which was exactly the sentence Rho needed.
Elira's fingers had stayed at the pendant without her noticing. She let them drop. "There are things I can't say," she told her sister. "Not because I don't trust you. Because there are rules on me and rules on her. She's… part of what Father left for me." The word father made the room tilt and then find its balance. "There are pieces I can't know yet. Pieces I can't say aloud even if I know them. If I try to make a door where there isn't one, it might hurt the person who's holding it."
Rho nodded before Elira had finished, that quick, decisive nod she'd had since she was six. "Then don't. I don't need names to know what something is. I can see… you're less alone in your eyes. That's enough for me until later."
Elira had to close her own eyes for a heartbeat. It was either that or water would find its way out. She opened them at once because she wanted to see Rho saying the next thing.
"You've always done it," Rho went on, softer. "Put the worst parts somewhere I couldn't see them and then stood between me and the rest. I used to pretend I didn't notice so you'd think you were doing a good job." She managed a small, lopsided smile. "I noticed."
"I know," Elira said, and the admission made her feel younger instead of smaller. "I know you noticed."
"I still want to be a magic swordsman," Rho added, as if confessing a crime and a prayer at once. "Not just 'good with a blade'—the other kind. But I'm not ready. So for now I can be good at this." She tapped the air, indicating the room, the secret, the two of them. "Keeping quiet. Watching the door."
The woman by the hearth regarded Rho with something like approval. "A guard who understands which threats arrive first is a rarer thing than most armies will admit."
"Then we make rules," Rho said briskly, because plans are what you make when you can't make the world behave. "For letters and for coming and going. If I send a page with a single straight line at the bottom, it means I'm safe. Two lines crossed means don't write back. Someone's reading. A little circle at the end of the line means we need to see each other."
Elira felt her mouth curve. "All right. And if I see a feather mark carved on the inside of the door frame—small, where only I'd notice—I come home without asking permission."
Rho's eyes brightened, grief and relief trading places behind them. "You remembered."
"I remember the best parts." Elira reached over and took her hand, not because it would help either of them with anything practical, but because touch is a kind of sentence. "And this: if I don't answer in a week, send two words to the Sanctum's east gate clerk—'spare thread.' Mira will know it means watch the road and not the rumor."
"Mira?" Rho repeated, tasting the name as if it might be a spice. "I haven't—"
"You haven't," Elira said, and then smiled because she could be glad about that. "You'll like her. She argues with libraries. And Kael can lift a log with one hand and still tell you the smart way to stack it. They're good."
"Are they…" Rho began, then paused, finding the right edge for the question. "Do they know about… this?" She glanced gently toward the woman.
"No," Elira said. "Not yet. When they can carry it without it harming them, I will tell them. Not before."
Rho accepted that like a soldier accepts the weather report. She held Elira's gaze, and something moved between them that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with the lives they had already kept alive together.
The woman's presence softened, as if she were making herself less visible out of courtesy rather than necessity. "Your rules are sound," she said. "I can keep them safer when you keep them small."
"Thank you," Rho said, earnest and a little fierce. She hesitated, then added in a rush: "I'm glad you're with her."
"So am I," Elira said, and the simplicity of it surprised her with its accuracy.
Afternoon thinned into amber. They went outside for a while and did nothing very urgent: Rho hung laundry and Elira hammered two nails back into a doorframe that liked to work itself loose. Children ran in the lane and were, for once, ordinary. When a cloud crossed the sun and the air cooled, Elira felt the world lean the same direction all at once and lean back again. It was the kind of day that leaves very little to tell and a great deal to keep.
They ate on the threshold when evening came—bread with a little cheese, apples cut into uneven crescents. Rho tipped her head onto Elira's shoulder the way she had when she was small and the stories were longer. The room behind them collected the last of the heat; the street before them pretended not to eavesdrop.
"I'll walk you to the road in the morning," Rho said, already sounding like she would not be dissuaded.
"Only as far as the hawthorn stump," Elira bargained. "If you follow past that I'll start issuing orders."
Rho snorted. "As if you ever stopped."
They fell quiet again, not because they had run out of words, but because some conversations are best delivered to the body without syllables.
Inside, the air shifted once. The woman's outline was only a suggestion now, a thought the light was holding in the corner so it wouldn't fall. She inclined her head and let herself become entirely part of the room.
"Rest," Elira said softly, not sure which of them she meant it for.
Rho gave her hand one last squeeze. "You'll come back."
"I will." Elira smiled into the dusk so her sister could hear it even if she couldn't see it. "Until the day you're the one marching out with a pack and I'm the one pretending to be calm."
Rho lifted her chin. "I'll be good at it."
"You will," Elira said. "You already are."
Night settled without ceremony. In the small house, promises arranged themselves where they could be reached, and a new kind of quiet set its hand on the door. When Elira lay down on the old mattress, the pendant lay warm against her skin like a watchfire reduced to ember. In the morning, she would shoulder her pack, kiss Rho's hair, and walk back toward the mountain with the kind of steadiness that had a name now, even if she couldn't speak it.