Chapter Nineteen The Mark Holds #2
She hated and loved that.
Riksa poured wash over his shoulder.
Torren did not flinch.
Willa did.
He saw and looked briefly pleased, the impossible man.
“Do not be smug while bleeding,” she said.
“You were.”
“I was heroic.”
“Catastrophic.”
“You learned that from Riksa.”
“She is occasionally right.”
Riksa made a sharp sound. “Occasionally?”
Torren wisely said nothing.
For a while, the pass became a place of copying, binding, guarding, and quiet arguments.
Red Creek lamps burned low. Moonlight silvered the cord. Rauk sat bound between two guards, watched by Torren often enough that his smile did not return. Redjaw wounded were dragged from the trees and bound when possible. The rest had fled into the dark west, carrying Rauk’s defeat ahead of them.
But not ending Redjaw.
Willa knew that.
Everyone did.
Rauk was a hand, not all hunger.
At the central table, Orla and Anis copied Edran Pike’s record. Selka stood beside them, reading Davra’s brought pages and marking omissions with such cold pleasure that Willa suspected she had found a life’s work in being inconvenient.
Marek stood a few feet away, watching her.
Not expecting.
Not approaching.
Just watching like a man seeing the woman he had been bonded to for the first time and understanding too late that she had always been sharper than the knife he had mistaken for ornament.
“Do you want me to tell him to stop staring?” Willa asked when Selka came to the wagon for more ink.
Selka glanced toward Marek.
“No.”
“You are sure?”
“Yes.”
“Bond?”
Selka’s face tightened.
“Hurts.”
“Bad?”
“Clear.”
Willa waited.
Selka looked down at the ink bottle.
“That is worse in some ways.”
“Because?”
“Because when it was only sour, I could hate the taste and not the ingredients.”
Willa leaned back carefully.
“That sounded like something Riksa would say.”
“I am horrified.”
“Reasonable.”
Selka’s mouth almost moved.
Then she looked toward Marek again.
“He did not save me.”
“No.”
“He did not even save himself.”
“No.”
“But he spoke.”
“Yes.”
Selka nodded once.
“I do not know what to do with barely.”
Willa thought of Torren’s hands bleeding.
She thought of the cabin. The old bond breaking. The first chosen thread. Torren saying barely was not nothing when she had needed the phrase to hold more than either of them could.
“Neither did I,” Willa said.
Selka looked at her.
“What did you do?”
“Let it be barely until it became something else. Or didn’t.”
Selka absorbed that with a grimace.
“Unhelpfully honest.”
“I learned from bad influences.”
Hessa, nearby, said, “Good.”
Selka’s almost-smile vanished when Marek took one step toward her.
Everyone noticed.
Marek noticed everyone noticing.
To his credit, he stopped.
“Selka.”
She turned.
Not fully.
Enough.
“What?”
He swallowed.
“I did not know about my mother.”
Selka’s face changed.
“That is not an apology.”
He closed his eyes.
Opened them.
“No.”
“Good. I dislike badly named things.”
“I am sorry.”
Selka’s mouth tightened.
“For which?”
Marek flinched.
Hessa, listening shamelessly, muttered, “Excellent question.”
Marek looked as if he deserved that and knew it.
“For making you my shelter when I should have been standing.”
Selka went still.
That one landed.
Willa felt it in the way Selka’s fingers tightened around the ink bottle.
“Better,” Selka said.
Not forgiveness.
Not welcome.
Better.
Marek nodded, eyes wet.
“I will sign Frostmere’s copy.”
“You will sign every copy Orla puts in front of you.”
He almost smiled.
It failed.
“Yes.”
Selka looked at him for one more breath, then returned to the table.
Willa looked away because not every wound needed an audience, even if the whole lower pass had become one.
Torren shifted on the stone beside her.
Riksa was stitching his shoulder now.
His eyes were on Willa.
“What?”
“Barely,” he said.
She knew exactly what he meant.
“Not nothing.”
His gaze softened.
Then hardened.
Ah.
The other thing still waited.
Her arm.
Her reopening it.
She sighed.
“You are angry.”
“Yes.”
No hesitation.
Good.
“Now?”
“Later.”
She blinked.
He looked down as Riksa tied off a stitch.
“You are hurt. I am hurt. The pass is full of enemies. If we fight now, Riksa will win.”
“Riksa always wins,” Riksa said.
Torren ignored her with great bravery.
Willa studied his face.
“You are learning timing.”
“I hate it.”
“Yes.”
“Later, I will say what I think about you tearing open a wound while Rauk watched.”
“And I will say what I think about you nearly springing for his throat before I did.”
His jaw flexed.
“Yes.”
“It will be unpleasant.”
“Yes.”
The mark warmed.
Unpleasant but chosen.
She could live with that.
Preferred it, actually, to silence that pretended not to have teeth.
At last, the copies were made.
Dawn had not come, but the eastern sky had begun to think about it.
Orla sealed the original record in Red Creek wax, then bound that wax with thread from each witness party: Pike brown, Frostmere green, Stonewatch gray, Marr red, Bluebank blue, trader black, Red Creek white.
“Ugly,” Mara said.
“Good,” Orla replied.
“Harder to pretend it belongs to one house.”
“Exactly.”
Varric received Stonewatch’s copy from Orla’s hand.
Derren, shaking, pressed his bloody thumb beside Varric’s mark under Red Creek guard.
Varric smiled while it happened.
That unsettled Willa more than anger would have.
He had lost tonight.
But men like Varric did not experience loss as ending.
They experienced it as revision.