Edria
Sleep stopped coming reliably after the night in the forest.
It's not dramatic — no nightmares, no cold sweats.
Just an inability to stay under, a restlessness that has me awake at the second hour staring at the ceiling until I give up and go light the forge.
Working helps. The rhythm of it fills the space that sleep won't, and by the time Papa rises I've usually finished enough to justify the dark circles.
Nyrius figured it out without being told.
He started appearing in the forge doorway three, four nights running — always late, always quiet, always alone.
The first time I asked how he knew I'd be awake.
He said he'd seen the light from the lane.
I didn't ask after that, because the honest answer to why he keeps coming is something neither of us has said out loud yet.
Part of his purpose is keeping me inside the forge rather than the forest. I know that. He knows I know. We've reached a silent agreement not to make it a conversation.
What it's become instead is something I didn't plan for.
Tonight, he arrives after midnight with mud on his boots and takes his usual spot on the stool near the wall — close enough to talk, far enough to stay out of the heat. I'm working a set of decorative brackets for a farmer’s hoe, clean legal work, nothing to hide. The fire is low and steady.
"You fought in the Denvara campaign?" I ask. "Sorella mentioned it once. Someone passing through told her."
He glances up from the cup of tea he's been nursing for the last hour. "The barkeep? She must hear a lot."
"She's good at it." I turn the bracket over and check the edge. "Did you?"
A pause. "Yes."
"How long ago?"
"Forty years." He sets the cup down on the floor beside the stool. "It lasted three seasons. Territorial dispute along the eastern range — two dark elf houses claiming the same river corridor."
"Were you a commander?"
"A captain. My brother held the senior command." The fire draws his attention. "He was better at it than I was. Better at most things, if I'm honest."
I put the hoe down and look at him. He's not performing grief, not angling for a response. Just saying it. But his voice is raw, vulnerable.
"He didn't come home, did he?" I ask.
"No." The fire dances in his eyes. "It was the last engagement of the campaign. Two days before the armistice." He rubs his thumb along the rim of the cup without picking it up. "He'd have governed these territories instead of me. Done a better job of it, probably."
"I don't know about that."
He glances at me sideways. "You've seen what my governance produced for thirty years."
"I've seen what you did when you actually paid attention." I go back to the hoe blade. "Two months in Oxwood and you caught what thirty years of distance missed. That's not nothing."
He doesn't answer, but he doesn't look away either.
"My mother died when I was nine," I say.
I've told him this before, in the back yard during our first real argument.
But that version was an accusation. This is different.
"Papa never said she was the one holding us together, but after she was gone, I understood it pretty fast. He kept working.
He kept the forge running. But something went quiet in him that never came back. "
"You started filling the space."
"I started trying to." I fit the blade on the handle to check the angle.
"I've spent a lot of years expecting powerful men to disappoint me.
My father because he had nothing left to give.
The magistrates and overseers because they never pretended to care in the first place.
" I set the handle aside. "You kept not doing that.
It took me longer than it should have to notice. "
From across the low fire, his eyes meet mine. The forge light catches the silver in his hair and the tiredness behind his eyes, and he looks older than he usually lets himself look.
"You're not easy to disappoint," he says. "Your expectations are low enough that just showing up counts for something."
"That's a depressing thing to say."
"It's accurate."
"Maybe. But it gives my station in a life a poor outlook." I pick up the next order, window hinges. "You should aim higher."
"I'll keep that in mind."
We work through another hour like that — talking in pieces, comfortable in the gaps between.
He tells me about the eastern range in winter, the cold so sharp it frosted the inside of tents.
I tell him about the summer I was twelve and learned to temper steel by ruining forty consecutive pieces before something clicked into place.
He laughs at that, a real one, low and quiet, and it does something to the inside of my chest I choose not to examine too carefully.
He leaves near the fourth hour, when the forge has burned down to coals and I've run out of excuses to keep working.
At the door, he pauses with one hand on the frame. It's become a habit — the slight delay before he goes, neither of us making it obvious. I step close enough that I have to look up at him.
He leans down and kisses me, soft and unhurried, one hand coming up to my jaw. I lean into it before I decide to, my fingers curling briefly into the front of his coat.
When he pulls back, the night air comes back in with the distance.
"Go to sleep," he says quietly.
"I'll try."
He goes.
I stay in doorway for a moment longer than I should, watching the lane, and then I close the door and turn around.
Finn is sitting on the bottom step of the interior stair with his elbows on his knees, watching me with wide eyes and a careful expression, like he saw something he shouldn’t and is worried he’ll get scolded.
My stomach drops.
"Finn—"
"How long?" he asks.
"It's not—" I stop. Start again. "It's complicated."
"How long, Edria?"
I press the heel of my hand to my forehead. "A few weeks. Loosely."
He doesn’t say anything right away, turning it over. "I knew he kept coming by. I didn't know it was—" He gestures vaguely at the door. "That."
"No one can know." I step toward him, lowering my voice even though Papa's room is at the end of the second floor hall. "Finn. No one."
"Your secret is safe with me." He looks up at me, less startled now, more thoughtful. "But I'm going to say you're asking for a lot of trouble."
"I know."
"More trouble than the weapons."
"I know." I sit down on the step beside him. "Are you going to lecture me?"
He thinks about it with genuine consideration. "No," he finally says. "But I am going to worry."
"That makes two of us."
His eyes land on the closed forge door, then at me. "He's not what I expected."
"No," I agree. "He's not."
We sit there for a moment in the quiet house, the forge coals ticking behind the door as they cool.
"Go to bed," I tell him.
"That's what he said to you."
"Finn."
He unfolds himself from the step with a grin he's trying to suppress and pads back upstairs without another word.
I sit alone with the cooling forge and the dark house around me, and I think about who else might have been watching the lane tonight.
The patrols Nyrius assigned are his own men, loyal to him.
But Malrec has eyes in Oxwood too, and a man who sends warning letters doesn't stop watching just because his letter went unanswered.
I go upstairs and lie down, and this time sleep actually comes — but it takes a while, and the arithmetic running in my head while I wait for it is not the comfortable kind.