Chapter 8
Verity became a ghost.
It was not a conscious decision. She did not wake on the morning after her tea with Delia and think: Today I will begin a systematic campaign of avoiding the Warchief of the Mountain Clan.
She simply... adjusted her routines.
She rose earlier and took the back stairs to the archives, the ones that creaked and smelled of damp stone but did not pass the great hall or the training yard or any of the common spaces where she might encounter—
Anyone. She might encounter anyone. This was not specifically about him.
She ate at odd hours. Very early, when only the kitchen staff were awake, or very late, after the evening meal had concluded and the great hall had emptied. Kira gave her strange looks but said nothing. The food was just as good cold.
She kept to the archives.
This part, at least, was not a change. She had been keeping to the archives since she arrived.
The only difference now was the quality of her attention.
Sharper, more focused, more determinedly fixed on the documents in front of her rather than the memory of dark green skin gleaming with sweat, of iron-colored eyes finding her across a crowded space, of that slow tilt of his jaw, the one that said he already knew what she was thinking—
Stop it.
She was here for the archives. For the centuries of orc documentation that would rewrite half of what the Royal Archive thought it knew.
She was here for Corvin. For answers.
She was not here to develop inconvenient physical responses to an orc warchief who could apparently smell every flutter of her pulse.
The work helped. Varresh's web continued to reveal itself in fragments, and Verity lost herself in the pleasure of meaning emerging from apparent chaos.
She found a cluster of documents related to border patrols from twelve years ago.
Not the right timeframe, but close. She found references to Thornfield Pass in a trade dispute from two decades back.
She found the edges of the shape she was looking for, and the hunt consumed her, drove everything else from her mind.
Almost everything.
At night, alone in her narrow bed, her thoughts betrayed her.
She'd be reviewing the day's discoveries, cataloguing connections, planning tomorrow's approach, and then, without warning, she would see Targesh's bare chest. The scar that slashed diagonal across his ribs.
The way the muscles of his back had shifted when he pivoted.
The dark trail of hair descending from his navel.
He could smell you wanting him.
She pressed her face into her pillow and willed herself to sleep.
The strategy worked for nearly two days.
On the evening of the second day, Verity was deep in the third archive room when she heard footsteps on the stairs.
Her breath came short, one sharp catch she couldn't quite control.
Perhaps he's going somewhere else. Perhaps he's simply passing through. Perhaps—
The footsteps stopped at the doorway.
"You have been hiding." Targesh's voice filled the small stone room.
Verity did not look up. She kept her eyes fixed on the patrol report in her hands as though it contained the secrets of the universe.
"I have been working." Her voice came out steadier than she expected. "The archives are extensive. There is much to do."
She could feel him watching her. The weight of his attention pressed against the back of her neck, her shoulders, the curve of her spine as she hunched over the reading table.
She had a quill tucked behind her ear and ink stains on her dress and she had not bathed since yesterday morning and she was suddenly, viciously aware of every way she must appear to him: small, disheveled, ridiculous in her determination not to meet his eyes.
"Verity."
Verity looked up.
Targesh stood in the doorway, filling it as he always did, blocking the torchlight from the corridor so that his features fell into shadow. He was dressed simply, and his arms were crossed over his chest in a pose that might have been casual if not for the tension in his shoulders.
"You are hiding," he said. "Why?"
Verity set down the patrol report. Her hands were trembling slightly, and she folded them in her lap where he might not notice.
"I am not hiding." She lifted her chin. "Hiding implies fear. I am not afraid of you."
"No," he said slowly. "You are not."
He moved into the room, and the space contracted around him. Two steps brought him to the edge of the reading table, close enough that she had to tilt her head back to maintain eye contact.
"So what are you hiding from?"
You. Your chest. Your eyes. The way you looked at me in the training yard like you could see straight through my skin. The fact that you could smell—
She could not say any of that.
"I learned something," she said instead. "About orcish physiology. About—" She gestured vaguely, a motion that somehow managed to encompass the entire mortifying situation. "Scent."
"Ah." His arms loosened a fraction where they crossed, his chin dipping. "Delia told you."
"She mentioned it. In passing. While I was—" Verity stopped. Breathed. "It was not a deliberate concealment on your part. I understand that. I simply did not realize that I was—that you could—"
"That I could smell your desire."
Verity wanted to sink through the floor.
She wanted to disappear into Varresh's web of documents and never emerge.
She wanted to be anywhere, anyone, other than a Valdaran archivist sitting in a pool of candlelight while the Warchief of the Mountain Clan stated, with absolute matter-of-fact calm, that he had been aware of her desire from the beginning.
"Yes," she said. "That."
Targesh studied her. "You are embarrassed," he said.
"Deeply. Catastrophically. To a degree that may require years of recovery."
A low rumble from deep in his chest. "Why?"
The question startled her. "Why am I embarrassed? Because I have been—" She waved her hand again. "And you have been aware of it the entire time, and I have been blundering around thinking my internal responses were private when they were nothing of the sort—"
"That is not what I asked."
Verity stopped.
"I asked why you are embarrassed," Targesh said. "Not why you feel exposed. Those are different things."
She opened her mouth. Closed it.
He was not mocking her. He was not amused at her discomfort, or using her attraction as leverage, or any of the things she might have expected from a powerful male confronted with evidence of a woman's unwanted desire.
He was asking a genuine question.
Why am I embarrassed?
Because desire was private. Because wanting someone was vulnerability. Because she had spent years building walls of scholarly detachment, and he had walked through them without even noticing they existed.
Because he could see her, and that was terrifying.
"I don't know," she said finally. "I don't—it's not—" She pressed her palms flat against the table. "In Valdara, these things are not spoken of. Attraction, desire—they are private matters. Hidden. To have them known without your consent feels like—"
"Violation?"
She met his eyes. "I am not accustomed to being seen."
"No," he said quietly. "I imagine you are not."
He said it carefully, as though he could see the shape of all the years she had spent unseen and understood what it had cost her.
"I did not intend—" Verity started, then stopped. What had she not intended? To find him attractive? To stand in the courtyard cataloguing his muscles like a scholar examining artifacts? To feel her pulse quicken every time he entered a room?
She had intended none of it.
"I know." Targesh's voice was low. "You did not intend. Neither did I."
She turned his words over in her mind, examining them from different angles.
Neither did I.
"What does that mean?"
"It means," he said, "that you are not the only one who has been exposed. That you have been hiding for two days, and I have been—"
He stopped.
"You have been what?"
Targesh exhaled. "Aware of your absence," he said. "More aware than seems appropriate."
Verity swallowed against the tightness in her throat.
She should say something. Something wise, or diplomatic, or at least coherent. Something that would defuse the tension, restore the comfortable distance of their previous interactions, allow them both to pretend this conversation had never happened.
Instead she said: "Oh."
Brilliant. Truly. The Royal Archive trained you well.
"I am not certain what to do," Targesh said, "but I am certain that you hiding in the back corridors does not improve the situation for either of us."
"I was not hiding in the back corridors. I was taking a preferred route—"
"You were hiding."
"I was strategically avoiding—"
"Also hiding."
Verity pressed her lips together to keep from smiling. This was not amusing. This was a serious and mortifying situation that required serious and mortifying responses.
And yet.
"Fine," she said. "I was hiding. What do you propose as an alternative?"
Targesh considered this. "A truce," he said.
"A truce?"
"You stop hiding. I stop pretending not to notice." He held her gaze. "We acknowledge that there is—something. Between us. And we proceed with that acknowledgment, rather than around it."
"And what does proceeding look like?"
"I do not know," he admitted. "But it cannot be worse than the past two days."
She thought about this. About two days of back corridors and cold meals and the ache of avoiding someone she had not even realized she wanted to see.
"You're right," she said. "It probably cannot be worse."
"Probably?"
"I hedge my conclusions pending further evidence."
He tilted his head in acknowledgment. "Then we have a truce," he said. "No more hiding. No more pretending."
"No more pretending," she agreed.
Targesh nodded once, sharp and final. Then he turned toward the doorway, and she thought that was the end of it. Conversation concluded, new terms established, both of them free to retreat to their separate corners and process what had just occurred.
But he paused at the threshold. "Tomorrow. Breakfast. The great hall. At a normal hour."
It was not a request.
Verity bristled. She was not a child to be ordered about, directed to meals like a recalcitrant adolescent. She was a scholar of the Royal Archive, here on diplomatic sanction, and she did not take orders from—
"Fine," she said.
He nodded again. And then he was gone, his footsteps receding up the stairs, leaving her alone in the archive with her racing heart and the document she had not actually been reading.
No more pretending.
She was not at all certain she knew how to do that.
That night, Verity tried to write a letter to Master Aldric.
She sat at the small desk in her quarters, a single candle guttering in its holder, a fresh sheet of parchment before her.
She had written thousands of documents in her years at the Archive.
Reports, catalogues, correspondence, marginalia.
Writing was what she did. Writing was how she processed the world.
Master Aldric,
I hope this letter finds you in good health. I write to report on my initial progress at Northwatch.
Good. Professional. Exactly the sort of opening he would expect.
The archives here are extensive and sophisticated in their organization.
The previous archivist developed a system of associative classification that differs significantly from our own methodologies, but which demonstrates considerable intelligence and intentionality.
I have begun the process of mapping the underlying logic and anticipate making substantial progress within—
Within what? Within the three months of her assignment? Within the uncertain future that stretched before her, no longer shaped by the clear parameters she had assumed when she left Valdara?
She set the quill down.
The problem was not the archives. The archives were rich, revelatory, and full of potential threads leading toward Thornfield Pass. The problem was everything else.
How did she explain, in the measured prose of an academic report, that the Warchief of the Mountain Clan had confronted her about her attraction to him and proposed a truce of mutual acknowledgment?
How did she describe the way his voice sounded when he said her name, or the weight she had felt lifting from her shoulders when she agreed to stop hiding?
She could not.
Master Aldric had sponsored her assignment.
He had vouched for her competence, her professionalism, her dedication to the scholarly mission.
He expected reports of documents examined, connections discovered, progress toward the official goals of cultural preservation and diplomatic knowledge exchange.
He did not expect to learn that his protégé had been—
What? What exactly have you been doing?
Nothing. She had been doing nothing. She had watched a man train and found him attractive. She had been embarrassed when she learned he could smell her desire. She had hidden for two days, been confronted, and agreed to stop hiding.
None of it compromised her work. None of it affected her mission.
But she could not write about the archives without thinking about him. Could not describe Northwatch without remembering the way he had stood in the doorway of this very building. Could not capture the texture of this place without acknowledging how thoroughly he was woven into it.
I have begun the process of mapping the underlying logic...
She stared at the incomplete sentence.
In the Archive, she had been invisible. She had moved through the stacks like a ghost, cataloguing and connecting and disappearing into the work. No one looked at her too closely. No one noticed when she arrived or when she left or whether she ate or slept or breathed.
Here, she was seen.
The warchief tracked her movements. Kira worried about her meals. Delia appeared to drag her into conversation. Even the documents seemed to watch her, waiting to reveal their secrets if she could only learn to read them properly.
It should have been uncomfortable. It should have felt like surveillance, like the loss of the privacy she had cultivated so carefully.
Instead it felt like—
Being known.
Verity pushed back from the desk.
The letter would have to wait. She would write it tomorrow, or the next day, when she had more distance. When she could separate the professional observations from the personal disruption. When she understood, herself, what she was doing here and what it meant.
She folded the parchment and tucked it into her traveling case, beside her brother's letter.