Day Patrol #3
She examined me with the brisk, impersonal care she gave everyone, which I was beginning to understand was not coldness. It was competence without decoration. Her hands found the bruises along my hip and shoulder where the ground had introduced itself with enthusiasm.
“Nothing broken,” she said. “You fell well. Or luck briefly impersonated skill.”
Caen laid her hands over the worst of the bruising.
I had seen her heal before, but I had not felt it. It was a slow, deep settling, as if the pain had been making an argument and Caen had calmly presented better evidence. The ache loosened. The sharpness went out of my shoulder. My hip stopped broadcasting its grievances quite so loudly.
Then Caen looked at the glasses in my hand.
I had been trying to decide how to ask. Whether it was possible. Whether asking made me ridiculous. Whether it was better to pretend I could function indefinitely in a blurred medieval war zone.
Caen simply held out her palm.
I put the two broken pieces into it. She turned them over, studying the cracked lens and the snapped bridge.
“These let you see?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Glass shaped to correct the eye,” she said. “Your world makes fine things.”
“I cannot replace these here, can I?”
“You are thinking about the wrong problem. Your problem is not the broken glass. It is the eye itself. The glass only compensates for it.” She set the broken pieces on the table with surprising gentleness. “I do not need to mend the compensation. I can mend the cause.”
I went still.
“You can fix my eyes?”
“I can correct what is bent in them.”
“Hold still,” Caen said. “This will feel strange, and you will want to pull away. Do not.”
She placed her thumbs lightly at the outer corners of my eyes.
“Keep them open.”
I kept them open.
There was pressure. A sensation of something inside me being measured, adjusted. The warm blur of the room tightened.
Resolved.
Caen’s face, very close to mine, snapped into a focus I had not had from my own eyes since I was eleven years old.
I sat there and looked at the world with naked eyes.
And saw it whole.
“Oh,” I said.
Apparently that was becoming my entire vocabulary for the genuinely astonishing.
“Better,” Caen said, sitting back.
She looked tired. Drained. The skin around her mouth had gone pale, and one hand stayed on the edge of the table a moment too long before she let go.
I blinked. The room stayed clear. I blinked again, because replication mattered. Still clear.
“It will hold,” Caen said. “The eye does not bend back quickly once it has been reminded of its true shape.”
“Thank you,” I said.
Caen nodded, tired but satisfied.
I looked down at my broken glasses. I would miss them. They were the last working machine I had carried across worlds, and they had broken in the dirt in front of a thing with red eyes. I put the two pieces in my pocket anyway.
Some things you keep.
Caen went to the fire and poured deeproot for both of us.
“The vampire in the ruin spoke to me,” I said, taking a sip of the deeproot.
She did not look surprised.
“It said Morvanna knows I crossed. That she has known since the moment I arrived. That she is patient and looking for me.”
“That part is true,” Caen said.
“It said something else.” I turned the cup in my hands. “It seemed aware that I had been claimed.”
Caen was quiet for a moment.
That worried me more than an immediate answer would have.
“The dead are very interested in the bond,” she said at last. “They are things that refused their own ending. The claiming is the opposite of that. It is life choosing life, and accepting that life ends.”
“That is a cheerful design feature.”
“It is an honest one.”
I looked down at the ring.
It sat on my finger, warm and gold and impossible. Proof of belonging. Proof of exposure.
I asked her about the ruin before I left, because apparently even trauma had limits against professional curiosity.
“The old stones in the western draws,” I said. “Gaius said no one knows who built them. That they are older than the records. Is this true? Do you know anything about them?”
Caen refilled my cup. “They are older than Newardia. Older than the line. Older than the war with Morvanna. Older than Yravel’s order. There was something here before us.”
“A civilization?”
“Perhaps.”
“That is a deeply irritating answer.”
“It is the accurate one. A people. A power. A kingdom. Something else. We do not know whether our categories fit what they were. They left stones. Deep places. Doorways no one built in any history we still possess. No name. No books. No gods we can identify. They cut stone better than we do now, then vanished so completely that even the mages argue over whether they died, left, or became something else.”
I thought of the cut blocks in the hillside. The worked angles. The arches I had seen in the valley on my first day in Mytharo. The ruin of a doorway sinking into dark.
“Thank you,” I said. “For the eyes. For all of it.”
“Go find your soldier and let him comfort you,” Caen said, sipping her deeproot with dry amusement. “He has felt fear and pain from you across the bond all afternoon and has managed not to ride out and burn down a ruin about it. That restraint has a limit.”
“He felt all of that?”
“The body and heart carry more than people think.” Caen picked up her cup. “Let him see you whole.”
I stood.
The room stayed sharp. The herbs, the table, the stone floor, the narrow stairs, all of it clear without glass between me and the world.
I went to find Skip.
I could see every step of the way there.