Thyran
Ireach for her before I open my eyes.
My hand finds furs. Cold furs. The space beside me has no warmth in it, no weight, no breathing. I spread my fingers across the empty surface and my body knows before my mind catches up.
I open my eyes.
The hall is pale with early light. Fire burned to embers. The air is still warm from last night but it’s cooling. The stone walls giving back what I put into them, slow and steady, and nothing feeding it from the inside.
I sit up on the platform. She is not beside me. She is not by the fire. She is not in the storage alcove or the side passage.
Her coat is gone from the hook by the door. Her boots are gone from the place where she lines them up every night, side by side, the toes stuffed with rags to hold their shape. The knife she kept under the furs is gone.
The book is on the table. The ice flower in its dish. The blanket she slept under folded at the foot of the platform. She folded it before she left. Organized her own departure the way she organizes everything.
I swing my legs off the platform. The stone floor is cold under my feet, and my body heat warms it as I walk, leaving footprints of warmth that fade behind me.
I go to the door. Open it. Wind. Snow moving in low streams across the ground. I scan the terrain in every direction. Nothing. The Wastes stretching flat and white and empty.
Tracks. South of the hall. Boot prints in the packed snow, already softening at the edges where the wind is filling them. Small boots. Fur-lined. The ones I gave her.
She has been gone for hours.
I stand in the doorway. The cold means nothing.
Before she came, the cold was all there was.
I was cold like the rest of my kind. Frozen in my chair for seven years, ice in my veins, dead as the stone walls.
Then I carried a dying woman out of the snow and something lit inside me that hasn't gone out since.
The fire inside me is hers. She started it. And she left it burning.
I go back inside. Close the door. Stand in the middle of the hall.
The quiet is different. Before she came, the silence was mine. It fit. That silence was punishment and I wore it the way I wore my own skin.
This silence is hers. It has her shape cut out of it.
The space by the shelves where she stood and argued about where the fish go.
The spot by the fire where she sat and combed her hair while I gripped the armrests and cracked the wood.
The place on the platform where she curled against me and breathed and slept and told me not to let her dream.
My chair.
The comb is on the armrest. In the groove where my hand has rested for seven years. Bone handle pale against the dark wood. Small carved birds catching the light from the embers.
I pick it up. It disappears in my hand. My fingers close around it, and I feel where her thumb wore the birds smooth.
She held this comb every night. She braided her hair with it while I watched and burned.
She ran her fingers along the handle and I saw her face go soft in a way she never let it go at any other time.
She left it.
She left everything I gave her. The blanket, the flower, the comb. Took the boots because she’s practical and the knife because she’s a soldier and nothing else. Nothing that would remind her of this hall or of me.
I close my hand around the comb.
She left because she thinks she doesn't deserve it. Because three villages and the mud and the bodies. Because she’s carrying her dead the way I carry mine, and she looked at what I was offering and decided the weight of it was too much for someone who destroyed the world once.
I know this. I know her. I've watched her for weeks. I know the way her eyes go flat when the memories surface and the way her hands grip her own knees when the guilt rolls through and the way she looks at me and then looks away fast, as if seeing me hurts.
She ran because I gave her something she wants, and she believes she can't keep it.
She’s wrong. But she won't know that until I tell her.
I put the comb in my pack. Then I go to the back of the hall.
Vortek’s trophies are in the chest where I've kept them for seven years. I opened it for her. Now I'm opening it to empty it.
The pale claw of the ridge bear. I can still hear him laughing, holding it up to the light. I told him he was exaggerating. He threw it at my head.
A pelt of white fur. Mountain cat. His best kill. He wore it across his shoulders for a season, strutting, insufferable. I buried him without it because I couldn't stand to put it in the ground.
More. Teeth and claws and small bones from a dozen hunts. Seven years of his memory, preserved in fragments.
I pack them all. I don't hesitate. I don't hold each one to the light and grieve over it. I pack them the way she would pack them: quickly, everything in its place.
Vortek would have told me I was an idiot for letting her leave in the first place. He would have been right.
I take my coat. My spear. The pack with the trophies and the comb. I fill a waterskin and wrap dried meat in leather. I bank the fire because I plan to come back.
Her tracks lead south. I follow them at a run. Eight feet covers ground faster than five, and I know this terrain — every ridge, every valley, every place where the wind scours the snow down to ice.
The tracks end at the trading road.
The portal station. The stone arch at the crossroads, humming faintly, the air around it still disturbed. She had coins in her jacket.
She’s not walking to Lakthgrad. She’s already there. Or she will be before I can catch her on foot.
The bride market. She’s going to stand on a platform and let some creature buy her and take her away to a place where I can't find her. She’s going to trade herself for safety because she thinks safety is all she’s worth.
A tool, a pair of hands, a body that knows how to work.
Not a person. Not someone worth following across the Wastes.
I don't have coins. I have two legs and a fire in my chest that she put there.
I lengthen my stride. The wind pushes against me and I push back. The fire inside me is not banking down. It’s climbing. Feeding on the empty space where she was.
I head southeast. Toward Lakthgrad. Toward her.