Magic. “Yes, Sir, so we are taught. But it is not a place that exists in this world.”
“No?”
“No, Sir.”
Leopold shifted on his mattress. “Are there not things that come in trade from the north, beyond Lachen? Fantastical jewels, thick, soft furs? Healing potions?” Leopold hesitated. “Amulets that grant access to Heaven?” His words became a murmur. “Regardless of how a life is lived.”
Death tokens. Myth.
But . . . once, as a young man, Orville had seen a raw sapphire of fabulous size. Traded, in the dark corner of a yak herder’s hut, high up on a mountainside. “Maybe from Nepal? Or Bhutan?”
Leopold was quiet for some time, and then, as it had many times over the day, the coughing took him.
The suffering in the older man’s eyes. Leopold’s ailment—whatever it was—was not a passing one.
