Eseld
Iwake before dawn, and he is asleep.
His arm is around me. Heavy across my waist, his hand spread flat against my stomach, his fingers reaching from one hip to the other. I'm pressed against his chest with my back to him. The heat of his skin soaks into my spine.
His breathing has changed. Slower. Deeper. The careful control gone from his body. His muscles are loose against me. His face is tucked against the top of my head and I can feel his jaw relaxed, his mouth slightly open, his breath warm in my hair.
He has not slept like this since I've been here. I've heard him in the dark, night after night. The creak of his chair. The shift of his weight. The sound of a man who keeps watch because he’s afraid of what happens when he stops.
Even after he left the chair. Even after he started sleeping on the furs beside my platform. I'd hear him shift in the dark, hear his breathing stay shallow and alert. Resting, not sleeping. Guarding something he was afraid to lose.
I did this to him. Wore him out. Gave him something warm to hold onto and let him close his eyes.
The fire has burned low. Embers and a soft orange glow. The hall is still warm from what he did to it last night. The stone walls releasing his heat slowly, reluctantly, the way stone releases anything.
I lie still and let the quiet settle.
The dead come. They always come when I'm still. I don't see the images anymore. I don't need to. The weight is enough. It sits on my chest and it doesn't care that his arms are around me.
I am lying in the arms of a man who carried me out of the snow and fed me and watched me for weeks and gave me a comb with birds carved into the handle. A man who told me his worst thing and then listened while I told him mine and didn't move his chair back across the hall.
A man who held me last night and burned so hot the ice on the windows ran and the fire climbed on its own and the whole hall filled with a warmth that had nothing to do with wood or stone.
He gave me everything he had. His silence. His food. His time. His body. His heat.
I have done nothing to earn any of it.
Three exits. I know them all. I mapped them the first week and I've never stopped updating. That should tell me something about myself.
I could stay.
Wake up every morning against this chest. Drink his bitter tea and organize his fish and argue about where the salt goes. Let him feed me until my body forgets what hunger feels like. Let him watch me with those eyes and learn me and want me and love me.
And every morning the dead would still be there. And every night I would lie against him and feel his heart beating and know that the woman he’s holding killed families in their beds. That the hands he wants on his skin are the hands that placed the charge.
He thinks I'm worth keeping. He’s wrong. But he'll keep thinking it because he wants to, and I will let him because I'm selfish, and the longer I stay the deeper this goes and the worse it will be when the truth of what I am finally outweighs what he feels.
Or I go.
I'm not walking to die this time. He took that from me. I don't know when it happened — somewhere between the tea and the comb and the sound of his heartbeat under my ear. My body chose to live and I can't undo it.
But I can't stay. Not with him. Not with someone who looks at me the way he does, like I'm something worth crossing the Wastes for. The longer I let him believe that, the worse the breaking will be.
Lakthgrad. The bride market. I can trade my hands and my skills for safety. Someone who needs a tool, not a person. Someone who will use me and house me and never shake when they touch me or heat an entire hall with the force of what they feel.
I can be a tool again.
I understand how to be a tool.
I slide out from under his arm. Slow. Inch by inch. His hand twitches against the furs where my stomach used to be. His fingers curl once, searching, then go still.
He doesn't wake.
I stand over him. The embers throw enough light to see his face. Younger in sleep. The tension lines around his eyes have gone smooth. His white hair spread across the furs. His chest rising and falling. The heat of him reaching me even from here.
I get dressed. Trousers, shirt, my coat. The boots he gave me, fur-lined, still a little too big. I lace them tight. Take the knife from under the furs where I sleep. A skinning blade with a good edge. I slide it into my belt.
The coins from my coat pocket. I almost leave them. Then I think about the trading road and what waits at the end of it and I put them in my belt.
Boots. Knife. Coins. Nothing else.
The blanket stays folded at the foot of the bed. The book stays on the table. The ice flower sits in its dish of snow, frozen and perfect, exactly where he placed it weeks ago. I leave it all.
The comb is on the table where I set it last night after braiding my hair. Bone handle. Small carved birds worn smooth from my fingers. I pick it up.
I hold it for a long time.
He found it in a dead trader’s pack on a frozen ridge. Kept it for years without knowing why. Put it on my pillow the day he watched me fight tangles out of my hair with my bare hands. He gave it to me and then retreated before I could say thank you. That’s how he gives everything.
It is the kindest thing anyone has ever given me.
I set the comb on the armrest of his chair. In the groove where his hand has rested for seven years.
I step through the door.
The cold cuts through my coat immediately. Sharp and real after the warmth of the hall. My breath fogs. The boots crunch on the packed snow.
I walk south. I don't look back.
Behind me, the hall sits solid and dark against the gray sky. Smoke still rising from the chimney. Warm inside. The man I left asleep in the furs, his arm stretched across the space where I was.
I don't look back.
I walk. The snow accepts my weight. My legs remember how to cover distance. My body falls into the rhythm of movement.
The portal station is a day south on the trading road. A stone arch at a crossroads, maintained by the trading guilds. My coins will cover the fare to Lakthgrad. I'll be there before he can find me.
I push through the first hour and then the second and the cold stops mattering and the walking becomes its own kind of quiet.
Not the same quiet I found in the snow the first time, when I was walking north to die.
That silence was empty. This one has a shape cut out of it.
A large, warm shape that I am trying not to think about.
Different direction. Different silence. Worse.
My hands are empty. My belt has a knife and coins I never meant to spend. My feet are warm because a frost giant gave me boots.
I keep walking.