Wrayne doesn’t bother finishing her sentence. She can hear the transmission cut out, and she knows that Cerrit can’t hear her anymore. So she takes a moment, just one, to close her eyes and breathe, before Kir speaks up, his voice much quieter than usual.
“Mom? Why’d you stop talking?”
She swallows, opens her eyes, and looks at her children. Kir’s eyes are wide, frightened and confused, and Maya is still clutching that strange orb like it holds the answers to all of life’s problems, and maybe it does. “Sometimes,” Wrayne says, “when there’s powerful magic where you are, it can stop other kinds of magic from working. Your father is in a place with a lot of magic right now, and that magic got so strong that it broke his sending stone.”
Kir nods, and Wrayne can see Maya’s eyes narrow a bit as she processes that, trying to decide if she believes it. And Wrayne isn’t lying- that is a simplified version of the truth, or at least what she believes the truth is. “Do you think he’s really coming home?” Maya asks, voice small, hands still tight around the orb.
Wrayne kneels down in front of them, puts one hand on Kir’s cheek and the other on Maya’s shoulder. “He promised that he’d try. So we’re going to be patient, and we’re going to trust him, and we’re going to hold onto our hope, alright?”
Both children nod, their eyes shining with tears that she’s sure will be shed in the coming days.
Later, after both children have fallen into an uneasy sleep, Wrayne grabs a piece of parchment paper and sits down at the kitchen table to do some math.
She writes down her own top speed, and how many miles she can cover in a day before needing to rest. And then she thinks for a second, about how far and fast she could really fly, if there was danger behind her and maybe ahead of her, if she was trying to reach her family before that danger did, and she scribbles out those numbers and writes two more, higher this time. And then she thinks again, about Cerrit’s training, of all his years flying and fighting through the city of Avalir, and she scribbles again, makes them just a little bit higher.
Next, she moves through the home, checking on the children for a moment, making sure that they’re still asleep, until she finds a map of Exandria. She lays it out on the table, and then she draws an X over Domunas, where Cerrit was, and another over her own location.
And then Wrayne starts drawing a line.
She curves it, over islands and coastlines, knowing that even Cerrit will need to pause to rest. And when she’s done, she measures it, and she goes back to those two numbers that she wrote, and she calculates.
Maybe four, if he’s injured or didn’t have time to plan out a route like she did and has to backtrack, or…
Wrayne drops her quill and sits back in her chair, letting out all of the breath in her lungs in a long exhale. Three weeks, maybe four. She doesn’t know what the coming days will look like, doesn’t fully understand yet what the children needed to run from, what Cerrit is trying to run from. But she will hold onto these numbers. They will be her strength, they will give her what she needs to make sure the three of them, her and Maya and Kir, are ready for Cerrit when he returns.
Because he has to return.
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