Clara had described it as fishing.
Seren had imagined something more structured than this.
They sat at the edge of a narrow river half an hour from the cottage, boots off, feet near the water, two poorly assembled fishing lines dropped into the current with the kind of confidence that suggested Clara had done this many times and the kind of suspicion that suggested Seren had never done it once.
The morning was cold but clear. Pale sunlight moved through the trees in long uneven strips across the water. Somewhere upstream a bird was making a sound it clearly hadn't rehearsed.
"Nothing is happening," Seren observed.
"That's fishing."
"You said we were going to catch something."
"I said we might." Clara adjusted her line without looking up. "There's a difference."
"A significant one."
"Welcome to patience."
Seren looked at her line.
The line looked back.
Nothing happened.
She lasted approximately four more minutes before shifting position, which caused a small splash, which Clara acknowledged with a look that communicated an entire paragraph without using a single word.
"I didn't move that much."
"You moved enough."
"Fish can't hear."
"They can feel vibrations."
Seren looked at the water with genuine offense.
"That's excessive sensitivity for something with no opinions."
Clara laughed - the quiet kind that she sometimes didn't seem to notice herself making. She pulled her knees up slightly and rested her arms across them, watching the current move.
Seren watched her instead of the water.
There was something different about Clara outside the cottage. Inside she was always doing something - sorting, preparing, organizing. Here she simply existed without agenda, which was rare enough that Seren found herself studying it the way she studied unfamiliar terrain. Trying to understand the shape of it.
"You come here often?" Seren asked.
"Used to." Clara's eyes stayed on the river. "During the worst of the progression. When I needed somewhere that wasn't the village."
Seren didn't respond immediately.
"Did it help?"
"Sometimes." A pause. "Mostly it just gave me somewhere to be tired without anyone watching."
Seren understood that more than she said.
The morning passed slowly and without urgency. At some point Clara produced bread and dried fruit from her bag and distributed it without ceremony, and they ate in the particular comfortable silence that had developed between them gradually over weeks - the kind that didn't require filling.
Seren's line moved once.
She grabbed it with immediate focused attention.
It moved again.
"Clara-"
"Don't pull yet."
"It's pulling."
"Wait."
"It's really-"
"Seren."
She waited approximately one more second before pulling anyway.
The line came up empty.
She stared at it.
"You pulled too fast," Clara said.
"It was leaving."
"You panicked."
"I made a tactical decision."
"You panicked," Clara repeated, with the calm certainty of someone who had already written the official record.
Seren set the line back down with great dignity.
The bird upstream made its unrehearsed sound again.
"Terrible," Seren said, about the bird or the fish or herself — she wasn't entirely sure.
Clara smiled at the water.
An hour passed. Then another. The sun moved across the sky in its unhurried way and the river continued its indifferent progress and nothing was caught and neither of them mentioned leaving.
At some point the conversation drifted into smaller things. Clara talked briefly about a plant she had been trying to cultivate for two years without success. Seren mentioned, without meaning to, that she had once spent three weeks learning a sword technique she ultimately decided wasn't worth using.
"Why learn it then?" Clara asked.
"I didn't know it wasn't worth it until I learned it."
Clara considered this.
"That's either very wise or very inefficient."
"Can't it be both?"
"With you, probably yes."
The light had begun shifting toward afternoon when Clara finally pulled her line from the water and began wrapping it with the methodical care she applied to most things. Seren watched without moving.
The river caught the later light differently - warmer, slower somehow, the current looking almost gold in certain places.
She didn't want to leave yet.
That realization arrived quietly, without drama, and sat beside her like something that had been there for a while waiting to be noticed.
Clara set the wrapped line in her bag and leaned back on her hands, looking up at the tree line above them.
"We caught nothing," she said.
"We were robbed."
"By fish."
"By the river's incompetence."
Clara tilted her head slightly, still looking upward.
A comfortable silence followed.
Then, without particular urgency, without looking at Seren directly:
"Can I ask you something?"
Seren looked at her.
"You've been here almost two months now," Clara said. Her voice was even. Careful in the way it sometimes was when she was choosing words without making it obvious she was choosing them. "The village is recovered. The curse is gone." A pause. "You don't have any unfinished reason to stay."
The river moved quietly between them and the opposite bank.
"So," Clara said, still not quite looking at her.
"What are you planning to do next?"
The question settled over the afternoon like the light - gentle, unavoidable, illuminating everything it touched whether or not you were ready for it.
Seren opened her mouth.
Then closed it.
The river kept moving.