10. Gavriel
Gavriel
The shield is wrong, and I don’t know how to tell them.
I feel it as we walk, the morning after the camp, the others loose and warm and stupid on the bond, Tabby half-asleep on her feet and refusing to be carried.
The Auric Shield sits at my belt, and where it should be a steady weight, a clean hum, it’s gone strange.
It pulses when it shouldn’t. It reaches towards her, always, that I’m used to, that’s the Guardian bond doing its work.
But now it reaches towards something else too, out past the horizon, towards the cold thing I’ve felt building at the edge of the realm for weeks and said nothing about, because what is there to say.
A feeling isn’t a threat you can put an ax through.
I don’t like feelings. I like problems with solutions. This is a feeling.
“You’re quiet,” Tabby says, dropping back to walk with me. She’s learned to do that, to notice when one of us goes still, to come and stand in it with us. It undoes me every time and I’d never tell her.
“I’m always quiet.”
“You’re extra quiet. Loud quiet.” She squints up at me, blue eyes bloodshot.
She didn’t sleep. I know she didn’t sleep.
I heard her breathing change in the night, felt the cold spike of the other one through the shield, and I lay there useless because there’s nothing I can put an ax through inside her own head.
“The shield’s behaving oddly,” I admit, because I don’t know how to lie to her and I’ve stopped trying. “Since the lair. It’s pulling two ways.”
“Two ways how?”
“Toward you. And towards whatever’s coming.”
She stops. “You feel it too. The cold thing. The darkness the Oracle went on about.”
“I feel it.” I look down at her, my Queen, this small fierce woman who dies and comes back and dies again and keeps walking.
“And I feel the link, Tabby. Yours and mine. Every time you’ve died, I’ve died with you.
Every time you’ve come back, so have I.” I make myself say the rest, because she should know, because she’d want to know.
“If your lives run out, love, I’m the one who has to watch it happen from the inside.
And I don’t know if I come back from the last one. I don’t know if either of us does.”
She’s quiet for a long moment. Then she slides her hand into mine, careless of the shield’s heat, and holds on.
“Then we sort it,” she says. “Along with everything else on the list. Alex, the book, the ancient cow in my skull, the doom cloud on the horizon, and one grumpy demon who’s stuck to my soul.” She squeezes. “Busy week.”
“You’re not funny.”
“I’m hilarious. You just hate joy.” She bumps her shoulder into my arm, and doesn’t let go of my hand, small fingers laced through my scarred ones like it’s nothing, like a Queen holding a Demon’s hand in the middle of hell is the most ordinary thing in the realms. “You’ll see.
We’ll get through the list. We always get through the list. It’s a long list, granted.
But I’ve got the best grumpy Guardian in any dimension, so. ”
“Second-best,” I say, because I can’t help it, because she brings something out in me that three centuries never touched. “There’s a lad two realms over.”
She laughs, bright and startled, and the sound of it does more for the wrong feeling in the shield than anything else could. “Was that a joke? Gavriel. Did you make a joke?”
“No.”
“You did. I’m telling the others. Gavriel made a joke, mark the date, put out a decree.”
And there, at last, is the Palace, its black spires clawing up out of the crimson murk, home if any of this hell is home. The shield gives a hard, wrong pulse against my hip, reaching past it, out towards the cold.
I say nothing. But I keep her hand in mine the rest of the way, and I don’t let go.