Nadia #2
I laid one hand on the ground. Then I spoke his name. “Soren Velin. Captain of the Queen’s Guard of the House of Mracha.”
My voice held. Barely. “You served well. You died well. Be released from the binding that has held you. Return to the deep.”
Nothing happened. Of course nothing happened. Because why would the universe suddenly decide to stop being a gaping wound with trees?
Then the shadow beneath the oak deepened. The amber marks brightened. Cold swept through the clearing, and Soren’s body slowly began to sink as if the earth had softened beneath him.
Pale remnants of the binding lifted from his skin in thin ribbons, clinging for one awful moment before the deep reached through the shadow and drew them down. The tendrils went first. Then the hands. Then the face that hadn’t been his for a hundred years but had still been enough to break me open.
Soren sank into the dark at the foot of the oak. The binding followed. The shadow closed. The release-pattern burned away.
And then he was gone.
I sat back on my heels. The grief remained where it was, lodged behind my ribs like a stone too large to swallow. Enzo’s hand closed around mine. I let him hold it.
We stayed there until the light had almost gone.
The ride back to camp was slow. Enzo put me in front of him on his warhorse and kept one arm locked around my waist the entire way, as if the trees might try to take me back if he loosened his hold.
I didn't make the obvious comment. That was either growth or blood loss. It was hard to say.
The horse picked its way through the corrupted woods at a careful walk. The scar on my cheek had closed to a pale, tight line from beneath my left eye to the corner of my jaw. His blood had healed what it could, but wraith wounds liked to leave souvenirs.
I was glad of it. I wanted the mark. I wanted to wake every morning and see Soren written on my face in a language only I could read.
I wanted Enzo to put his mouth on it the next time he kissed me and know exactly what he was kissing.
I wanted the woman who’d made the wraith to see it, when the time came, and understand what it had cost me to release the man she’d been puppeting.
The mark would tell her I was coming.
I didn't say any of that aloud. The bond carried enough. Enzo’s arm tightened around my waist. His mouth touched the top of my head once. The horse walked on.
We reached camp in the last light of the dying sky. Geren met us at the perimeter. His face didn't change at the sight of me in front of Enzo, or the dried blood on my coat, or the new scar on my cheek.
He looked at his prince and waited.
“The immediate threat is handled,” Enzo said. His voice was calm enough to be dangerous. “The woods are clear within half a mile. Double the watches. No one leaves camp tonight for any reason.”
“Yes, my prince.”
“Have Vessa strengthen the eastern ward.”
“At once.” Geren turned and began moving.
Across the camp, Aldric glanced up from his fire. His face did the same careful thing it had been doing since breakfast: attention arranged into loyalty, concern arranged into respect, every expression set precisely where it belonged.
He bowed his head. Enzo didn’t return the courtesy.
Something had changed in Enzo on the ride back. I felt it through the bond as a decision settling into bone. He was finished pretending. Whatever happened between him and Aldric before we reached the seat would happen without the comfort of courtesy.
I let him have that.
He dismounted, then lifted me down after him.
“I can walk,” I said.
“I know.”
He kept his arm around me anyway, and I let him. Mostly because I was tired. Partly because the entire camp was watching. A little because some traitorous, exhausted part of me wanted the support and didn't have the energy to stab myself emotionally for accepting it.
Inside the tent, alone at last, he released me for about three seconds. Then he turned, caught my wrist, and pulled me back to him.
The fury had arrived. Enzo’s fury didn't need volume. It had weight. It had precision. It had four hundred years of command behind it and one very fresh memory of finding me with a tendril against my face.
“You promised me you would come back,” he said.
I stilled. “I did come back.”
“No.” His voice stayed flat. “I brought you back.”
The words landed cleanly. I hated that. I hated worse that he was right.
His hand remained around my wrist tight enough that neither of us could pretend this conversation was anything but what it was.
“I found you on your knees with that thing trying to climb into your skin,” he said. “A second later, Nadia, and you wouldn't have come back to me at all.”
“It was going for the column.”
“I know.”
“It would have reached you by full dark.”
“I know.”
“I was the only one who could reach it silently.”
“I know.”
“Then why are we doing this?”
His eyes darkened. “Because you’re still explaining why the work mattered as if that’s the part I am furious about.”
My mouth shut. His didn’t.
“You went alone. You put your body between my people and a working that infects through contact. You stayed in the fight long enough to take a wound to the face. You let the tendril touch you.”
“I didn’t let—”
“You looked at Soren instead of the working.”
The words cut because they were true. I turned away. He caught my chin and brought my eyes back to his.
“Don't look away from me for this.”
My breath caught. The bond was full of him. Terror burned down into fury. Fury sharpened into something far more dangerous than anger alone.
“I wasn’t prepared to see his face,” I said.
“I know that, too.”
“Then stop talking to me like I was being careless.”
“I am talking to you like you still believe usefulness is the same thing as worth.”
The silence after that had teeth.
I hated it.
Enzo said nothing.
He simply waited, calm and relentless, because he knew if he gave the silence enough room, I would fill it. Unfortunately, he was right.
“I don’t know how to be valuable like that,” I said.
His expression didn't change, but something in the bond seemed to freeze.
“I know how to be useful. I know how to survive. I know how to look at a threat and decide whether my body is the cost of stopping it.” My voice thinned.
I hated that, too. “I don’t know how to look at a working with my face inches from a tendril and think, ‘No, my face matters more than the kill.’ I've never had to think that way.”
“Nadia.”
“Soren died for my mother. He was hers. I should have come back. I should have done the work he died trying to do. I didn’t, because I was nine and terrified and the woman who killed my mother would have killed me, too.
” My throat tightened. “I’ve been running for a century, Enzo.
I haven’t been a person whose life mattered.
I’ve been a person who survived. There’s a difference. ”
He didn't move. The bond carried what passed through him in slow, brutal waves. Grief. Understanding. Fury. Absolute refusal of every equation I had just laid at his feet.
“Nadia.”
“What?”
“You aren't less valuable than I am.”
“I’m a mercenary. You’re a prince.”
“That's not what I'm asking you to weigh.”
“Then what are you?”
His hand slid from my chin to the side of my neck, his thumb resting just beneath the new scar. “What you are to me.”