Chapter 13
Tiny, Adorable, And Categorically Dangerous
The silence was excruciating.
The section leaders and banner captains had stopped arguing and were all looking to Chasin, waiting for his word.
Despite the people surrounding her and the chaotic reactions all around them, he hadn’t once taken his attention from Eiko.
He released his grip on his dagger one finger at a time, reminding her of how he had released his grip on her neck after she stumbled from Blackreach.
His dark eyes traced her face, digging into her eyes, and then he assessed her entire body, drinking in every line of tension, witnessing every tremble and shift.
He was categorising her as thoroughly as the bubbling mineral had, giving her a designation of his own. The intelligence in that darkly assessing glare was harrowing. It made her feel stripped bare in the worst way.
“Stubborn stoneborn fools,” Cairn cursed beneath his breath, as Chasin slowly walked towards them.
He stopped just out of reach and calmly motioned Kaito and Ren to move out of the way.
They both hesitated. There was no violence in Chasin’s expression.
There was nothing at all. He had donned a stoic, impenetrable mask.
His power and that chilling scent of death washed over them all, weighing on their bodies.
It threatened to force Eiko to bow, so she wasn’t surprised when Ren and Kaito finally, reluctantly, stepped away, allowing Chasin to step directly in front of Eiko.
Rion and Ky also moved back slightly, like they were physically repelled by the power that radiated from the commander.
Eiko wondered how he could possibly have known that this was the only way her friends would allow him to approach her: slowly, and alone. No weapons drawn. Waiting out of reach and giving them the choice to step aside rather than trying to force them.
She wondered if he was smart enough to use that knowledge to get close to her. To slit her throat quickly and deal with the problem she apparently presented as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Instead of drawing his dagger, he signed something to her. She had no idea what he said, but one of the motions was similar to the other signs for a monster class, where he touched his lips briefly before making a gesture.
“Whisperings are classless,” Cairn translated, shifting closer.
“Their appearance signals catastrophic danger. Nobody has ever survived a Silencing attempt. There have only been two sightings, where a Whispering has clung to a human just long enough to get to a heavily populated area. Both occasions ended in mass death and destruction.”
Eiko’s mind stalled, and then raced, and then stalled again.
Hymn?
I didn’t lie to you, Eiko. He sounded miserable. I was trying to run away. You saved me. I didn’t lie just to get here. I don’t want to hurt anyone.
“How did you know they were Whisperings if they broke free before the lace ceremony?” Rion asked. Alessandra hurried over, like she might need to drag off her recruit before she said something stupid in front of the commander.
But Rion wasn’t like that. She was the only one there thinking logically.
Alessandra answered before Chasin or Cairn could speak up. “We test all of the bodies that monsters break free from with the mineral. It’s imperative that we track and categorise the monsters who escape, even if they were dealt with swiftly.”
“He’s not dangerous,” Eiko said, feeling Hymn tremble behind her rib cage. “He’s not here to hurt anyone.”
Chasin stared at her, his shadowed eyes eventually falling to her hands, where the lace reached her elbows like his. He shook his head slightly and then signed something else that had Cairn’s bushy brows jumping up and Alessandra’s mouth dropping open.
Eiko frowned at the gesture of him making a circle over his chest, over the Eclipse emblem there.
“Welcome to Eclipse banner,” Cairn translated, shock momentarily smoothing his gruff tone. “No mercy.”
There was a sudden, succinct flurry of sound—over as quickly as it started, making Eiko and her friends all jump in shock.
It had been the black-garbed soldiers, all repeating the very last gesture Chasin had made, all at the exact same time, almost like they were breathing the exact same breath. The gesture ended in a solid fist to the chest, the sound echoing around the arena.
No mercy.
Chasin turned to Cairn and began to speak with his hands far more rapidly, but Cairn didn’t seem to be struggling to understand.
The older man gave a short nod, and then Chasin backed away, signing briefly to everyone in what was probably a “congratulations on not getting your arms burnt off” closing remark before he stalked from the arena.
“Come with me, blind girl.” Cairn grabbed her arm, his sigh gruff and annoyed as her friends trailed after her, but he didn’t snap at them to stay put.
He left that job to Alessandra, who barked at them with enough force to show that her tolerance had officially run out.
“The commander doesn’t run his banner the same way the others do.” Cairn began to explain, both of their canes echoing against the stone as they re-entered the courtyard. “There’s no breaking-in period. You’re just in. And you’re expected not to break. It’s harsh. It’s brutal. People die.”
He paused at the bottom of the first set of stairs, glancing back to Eiko, who was growing dizzy with the sudden light shift, her second sight struggling to make out all the details with only the illumination shafts from the windows.
“You’re the first woman he’s accepted,” Cairn admitted. “But don’t expect him to go easy on you.”
She was sure she had seen women in black inside the arena, at least two of them, but she supposed they did look quite seasoned, older than Chasin. They must have been trained by the previous commander, whoever that was.
She expected Cairn to lead her back to her room and lock her inside, taking up a guard position outside, but instead, he skipped the staircase and kept walking, winding his way through the barracks until they seemed to reach the very edges of the building, as she began to catch glimpses of the cliffs and the ocean through the windows.
He kicked open a door and motioned her into a huge hall with blessedly looming windows, allowing sunlight to stream into the room, stroking shelves and furniture into focus.
A library.
It was enormous: the hall long and rectangular, with stone columns running through the centre and walnut desks set between each row.
Honey-coloured timber beams crossed high overhead, interacting with the skylights to throw patterned light down over the desks.
The windows were set deep into the walls, the glass imperfect, slightly rippled, catching sunlight in uneven sheets of brightness that spilled across the floor in warm, crooked stripes, merging with the glow from the skylights overhead.
Shelves lined every wall from floor to ceiling, each looming piece of furniture broken up by one of the tall windows. Heavy velvet curtains were outfitted to every bookshelf, some of them drawn to protect the books.
The books weren’t what she would have expected from a library so grand.
There were no gold-embossed tomes with gilded page edges and silken page ribbons.
There were so many of them, but they were all clearly well-used.
They looked to have been repaired and re-stitched; the spines faded.
Some weren’t even bound, piled around a cluttered, complicated station at the back of the hall that must have been set up for binding.
The long tables filling the centre of the room were softened around the edges from years of use, with shallow grooves and ink stains marring the wood.
A few smudges of wax dotted the surface from late-night candles, but there were also lanterns lining the shelf that separated each set of two benches.
Cairn walked to one of the windows, where a desk had been lodged. He rapped his cane against the worn wood.
“Sit,” he ordered.
The table was washed in soft, angled light. The air smelled faintly of leather, old paper, and the clean, salty tang the wind carried up from the ocean.
Had she died during the lace ceremony, and now she was in heaven?
She sat obediently as Cairn limped off, returning a few minutes later to see that she hadn’t moved so much as an inch, just in case he changed his mind and dragged her back down to the arena for some new horror. He dropped a stack of books in front of her with a grunt.
Some were wrapped in thick leather, darkened with age. Some were bound unevenly; the pages clearly copied by hand. A few had illustrations of dark, winged beasts stitched onto the covers, done in ink washes, painstakingly detailed drawings by someone very patient and very skilled.
“These,” he said, sliding several handwritten volumes forward until they bumped her right hand, “are on the commander’s language. Made during his training. After his Silencing. Over the years. Mostly by him. Some by me.”
He patted the stack with something that might have been … affection?
“And this,” he added grimly, separating a pile of notebooks and vellum bundles beside it, moving them to bump her left hand, “is everything we know about Whisperings. Which is almost nothing. The rest of these are on the monster classes in general.”
Eiko stared at him. She didn’t have to pretend she couldn’t focus on his face, as he was standing just out of the shaft of light from the window in front of her, and he wasn’t moving.
“I’m blind,” she said. “I can’t read.”
He scoffed. “I know when someone needs a cane and when someone’s faking it. That wee monster in your skull is helping you see, isn’t he? Not all the time, but sometimes. I can tell when you don’t really need the cane. Don’t insult my intelligence.”
She froze. Hymn skittered to her neck, almost like he was peeking out at the soldier from the collar of her uniform. His curiosity had been piqued.