High Commander #2
He considered this like he had never once in his life been nicknamed by anyone, let alone by a woman he had found in a field.
His smile arrived unmanaged.
“Skip,” he said, as if weighing it, testing the sound of it against whatever he had been called for the past thirty-odd years.
As he looked at me more closely, something shifted in his expression. He was encountering something he had not anticipated. His world was being revised at a fundamental level.
He looked at me the way you look at something that has stopped you. He looked like a man whose mind had not yet caught up with what his body already knew.
“Your name?” he asked.
“Meghan.”
At my name, his breath caught almost too softly to hear. His attention sharpened, and for one strange second he seemed to forget the courtyard around us.
“A beautiful name,” he said, and then his eyes stayed on mine for a moment longer than the words required.
He looked at me the way someone looked at a document they thought would be straightforward, but that had turned out to contain something worth reading more carefully. He was looking at me with intense focus.
It was the most seen I had felt in a very long time. Possibly ever.
“Your account of where you’re from,” he said, his voice dropping into something more careful.
“Something in me believes it. But I need to be certain. We have a mage at this outpost. Her name is Caen. She will be able to verify.”
The courtyard had not stopped moving around us. Soldiers crossed between the keep and the wall with purposeful indifference.
The forge was still roaring.
One of the soldiers nearby spoke up.
“She could be a spy. For Morvanna. How else did she survive out there?”
Skip turned his full attention on the soldier.
“She could not have survived the sunrise if she were one of them,” Skip said.
Could not have survived the sunlight. So, the vampire theory from earlier had not been entirely off.
“That’s not true. It takes longer than one night for them to turn. Remember the man who took days? We thought he was sick, but…”
Skip cut him off. “We are going to see Caen. She can verify. That is the end of this.”
Skip talked to him as if the decision were already behind him and the conversation were a formality he was being courteous enough to complete.
I noted that the way he spoke was doing something significant to my ability to think clearly.
I had spent my entire academic career surrounded by men who couldn’t order lunch without a committee vote.
This was a man in charge.
This was a man who made decisions. No lukewarm “maybes” or “have you considered.” This was command.
“Yes, High Commander,” the soldier said.
High.
Commander.
I liked that.
I turned the title over in my head. In my world, titles like that had been replaced by things like Senior Vice President of Transformational Strategy and Executive Director of Organizational Synergies.
Titles that were long enough to sound important without ever saying anything as direct as High Commander.
In contrast, High Commander was two words that did exactly what they said and left no room for discussion.
***
Caen occupied the east tower. Her own space, separate from the keep.
The tower door was heavy oak, iron-banded. The iron fittings were dark with age and use rather than neglect. Maintained, but not polished. Nobody had been trying to make this door look inviting.
Inside, a winding stone staircase climbed in tight spirals, torches set into iron brackets at intervals that suggested someone had calculated the minimum number of light sources required and installed exactly that. The torches smelled of tallow.
There were doors off the staircase. Two of them, at different levels, both closed, both secured with hardware that went beyond a simple latch. I did not ask what was behind them. I noted them and kept climbing.
Skip knocked once at the top and pushed the door open without waiting, which told me something about the general hierarchy of patience in this outpost.
The room was not what I had been expecting. This was a scholar’s workspace overlaid with the functional reality of someone who was also a field practitioner: manuscripts stacked in organized chaos.
There was a small fire with a pot suspended over it.
Nearby, candles had burned down to stubs.
Bundles of dried herbs hung from the ceiling beams, their smell layering over the tallow from the staircase into something more complex.
A worktable near the window held instruments I couldn’t name.
Glass vessels, a set of scales, small bottles arranged so they could be found quickly in the dark. The window faced toward the mountains.
The woman standing at the table was not what I had been expecting, either.
She was probably in her late forties, and the years had done something interesting to her. Not softening, not diminishing. Sharpening. The sharpening that comes from many years of doing what matters.
Her dark hair, heavily threaded with silver, was bound back in a practical knot.
Strong, angular features. High cheekbones, defined jaw. She commanded attention without requesting it.
Her eyes were the kind that had already finished the sentence you were still forming. Amber-brown, very still.
She was wearing leather. It was not armor exactly, but something more supple than armor.
Her fitted dark cloak fell nearly to the floor, structured across the shoulders and chest in a way that suggested it had been made for her specifically and worn long enough to become an extension of her. The cloak parted in a long slit at the front, revealing one thigh when she moved.
It was belted at the waist with a wide leather belt carrying several pouches. I could not identify the contents, though their shapes suggested tools rather than supplies.
The cloak was open at the collar, the lapels falling back to reveal the throat and the upper chest. The leather had darkened and compacted with years of wear, molded to her body without looking frayed.
Leather boots to the knee, practical and worn.
On the ring finger of her left hand was a warm, glowing ring.
She was lean and tall.
The cloak fell open at the chest in a deep V, and what it revealed was not what I had been expecting from a woman who spent her days surrounded by manuscripts.
Full, generously so. The kind of natural abundance that a deep V cloak could not conceal. Long legs visible where the cloak split at the front.
At her throat, resting in her open collar, was a pendant. A spiral. It glowed a soft, steady blue-white.
I will admit, she undid me a little.
She seemed like someone who had decided, a long time ago, to be seen, and never went back on it. At some point, she had stopped: stopped shrinking, stopped softening, stopped arranging herself to take up less space than she needed.
A woman who stood in a room like she owned it, like she had built it, like she might or might not let you in. She was the kind of woman you wanted to become, even if you weren’t sure how.
This was not the kind of wizard I had been prepared for by any prior cultural reference. Gandalf had a hat and a staff and the aesthetic of someone who had stopped caring about their appearance around the start of the Second Age.
Merlin, depending on which version you consulted, had a beard down to his knees and robes that had not been updated since Arthur was in short trousers.
The entire tradition of fictional magical authority had led me to expect someone who looked like wisdom and smelled like old books.
Nobody had prepared me for this.
Merlin, I thought, had gotten the aesthetic wrong.
I found myself imagining what the male equivalent of this looked like. The same leather. The same pendant. That deep V, reimagined along a broader, muscled chest.
I drew in a careful breath and locked the thought away, forcing my expression back into something neutral, something controlled.
“May I?” she asked, gesturing for me to come closer. “I need to read you. It will not hurt, and it will not take long. You will feel nothing except, possibly, the awareness of being seen clearly. Some people find this uncomfortable.”
Skip looked at me with an expression I was beginning to learn to read: I will not ask you to do anything that will harm you, and this will not harm you.
“Go ahead,” I said.
She stepped closer. She did not touch me. She closed her eyes and went very still. The pendant at her throat began to respond. A slow brightening, blue-white intensifying and then steadying, pulsing.
I understood, watching it, that what she was doing had a cost. The pendant was not an ornament but an instrument, and that the instrument was currently being applied to the question of whether I was telling the truth.
I tried to look like someone who was telling the truth.