Chapter 12
Valen
I’m awake before the fortress is, dressed while the corridor outside is still dark.
The bed they gave me is the softest thing I’ve slept on in years.
I slept, deep and dreamless. I turn that over while I lace my boots.
I sleep light in strange places. I’ve done that in strange places longer than I can remember.
One night under this roof and my body let go without asking me first.
Some part of me spent last night wanting to cross the hall too. I want more mornings like this one, under this roof, with her down the corridor instead of down a trail. That’s new.
I keep circling back to yesterday. I watched her walk into a hall full of people who love her without having to earn a single one.
I watched what that did to her face, something I hadn’t seen before.
Her uncle took her in both hands like she’d never left.
Her cousins pulled her into a table too loud for me to follow half of it.
She laughed the kind of laugh I don’t think she lets herself use anywhere else.
I sat at the edge and watched. For once nothing in the room needed watching.
Footsteps come down the corridor, light and unhurried.
I know whose they are before the knock. I’m already moving to the door.
She’s there, hair braided back, the gold in her eyes brighter for a night’s rest. She holds the look a beat longer than a good morning needs and doesn’t say anything about it.
I still think about what she told me on that walk in. She doesn’t hand people the truth about her feeding. She handed it to me. I don’t know what to do with being the one she chose for that. I’ve been turning it over since.
I step out into the corridor to join her instead of making her wait in the doorway. Her scent follows us both down the hall.
A steward meets us with iron keys the size of his hand. Two guards walk us down through the sleeping fortress. I count the turns out of habit. The steward makes a joke about the age of the doors. She laughs. I turn to catch the tail of it and lose my count.
The vaults sit deep in the fortress, behind doors so heavy the steward puts his shoulder into each one to swing it open.
Chests and shelves and long cases run back into the dark, dust thick over most of it, the air full of cold stone and old oil.
The things in here are older than the stone around them.
I take stock out of habit. One way in. Clean lines.
Nothing worth a guard. Then I make myself ease off it.
Two days in this realm and nothing has needed guarding yet.
There’s nothing in here for me to track. No scent, no ground sign, nothing my years in the field are any use for.
“How do you want to run it?” I ask her.
“I’ve never had to look for something without knowing what it is either,” she says. It’s a small thing to admit. I keep it anyway.
“Then we’ll do it in quarters,” I say. “Corner to corner. Nothing handled twice.”
“Fine.” She takes the first corner.
The work settles fast after that. I lift lids and open cases and set each thing within reach of her hand.
Her hand hovers over each piece, close but never touching.
The stillness that takes her when she listens is total.
Light comes down from the high slits and catches the silver in her hair, dust turning slow in it.
I catch myself watching her hand instead of the shelf I’m supposed to be clearing.
I want to watch her all morning. That’s exactly why I go back to the shelf.
Hours in, the dust is in everything, my collar, her braid, the back of my throat.
“You’re running a family attic like hostile ground,” she says, a laugh under her voice.
“Hostile ground never buried me in dust.” It startles a real laugh out of her, quick and unguarded. I go back to work with that laugh still in my ears. I’d get the words wrong on purpose to hear it again.
“Anything?” she asks, three cases later.
“Dust. You?”
“Dust, and a very old opinion about someone’s taste in silverware.”
We end up at the same long case, reaching past each other.
Her shoulder settles against my arm and stays there while she works, warm through two layers of cloth, her scent closer than it’s been since the walk in.
I hold still instead of leaning into it.
Her hair has fallen forward over one shoulder, baring the long, graceful line of her neck.
What I want is that neck under my mouth, to know what sound she’d make if I kissed just behind her ear.
I move down the case instead and put space between us. The work goes on. The scent of her stays with me long after.
A low run of cases sits in the far corner, under a lifetime of undisturbed dust. I cross to it without knowing why and start clearing the lids.
“Why that corner?” she asks.
“Instinct.” It’s the answer I’ve always given for the things I get right with no way to explain how.
It’s always been the true answer. It’s never explained a thing.
Every pack I’ve run with took the results and kept their distance from me anyway.
I learned to stop offering more. I just keep clearing lids.
I open the last case and my hand goes straight to a broken piece of gray stone near the back, the same instinct that brought me to this corner in the first place. It’s cool and ordinary in my palm, nothing about it different from any other rock. I set it down in front of her anyway.
Her palm passes over it. She stops. Her hand comes down on it instead of hovering. The gold in her eyes brightens. She lifts the point out. It fits in one closed hand.
“This is it.” Barely above a whisper. The look on her face is new to me, lit and young. It’s the best thing I’ve seen since we crossed into this realm.
“What exactly is it?” I ask.
“It carries the same resonance as the marks. Whatever they’re pointing to, this is part of it. I’ll know more once I read it.” She wraps the stone and carries it out herself, the guards at the vaults nodding us past.
I’ve paid my way into every room I’ve ever stood in. Watch, fight, guard, earn it again when the faces changed. Nobody’s ever handed me anything. She walks out of the king’s vaults with a treasure in her pocket because all she had to do was ask.
We take it to a small room off the vaults, a table, two chairs, light from one high window.
She sets the piece between us and lays her hands over it, the same way she found it.
What it holds comes to her a little at a time.
She tells me as it comes: names older than the fortress, the first dragons of Drakoria, the line that runs down through the centuries to Niko and to her own mother.
Her voice fills the small room. I’d listen to that voice read grain tallies.
There is nothing duller than grain tallies.
“Keep going?” I ask when she stops for breath.
“Keep going.”
The history goes back and back and then quits. When the account picks up, the first dragons of Drakoria are already alive and ruling. Where they came from, how the line began, is missing. She tries twice more to reach past the stopping point and gets nothing. She sits back.
“It wasn’t lost to rot or time. Someone took it out on purpose, ages ago. Careful work.”
“Someone went to a lot of trouble to hide where the dragons came from,” I say.
She says the rest of it quietly. “The line the account follows is the royal line itself. Niko’s. My mother’s. Rhonan’s and Evren’s. Mine, through Auriella.” The missing beginning is the beginning of her own family. Her hands go still around the stone.
I’ve spent as long as I can remember putting my body between people and the things that mean them harm.
This threat lives in her family’s own history.
My hands curl on the edge of the table with nowhere useful to be.
There’s nothing here to stand in front of.
There’s no door to put my back against. I take my hands off the table and hold still.
While she reads the piece, something in the stone around us catches at her too, a thread of magic that doesn’t belong.
She lays her free hand against the wall to follow it, working back through the old magic laid into the foundations when Briarstone was built.
Her fingers spread wider against the stone. Her breath goes short.
“There’s another magic woven in among the fortress’s own. Faint with age. Placed with care.” She recognizes his signature the moment she touches it. “It’s Faelan’s. He was inside Briarstone long ago. Nobody ever knew.”
Her eyes go distant, fixed on nothing, mouth pressing into a hard line. I hate seeing that on her face. I hate that there’s nothing I can do to take it away.
“Months ago,” she says, “the family caught one attack. A sabotaged portal. It threw Rhonan clear to Earth.”
“I’ve heard the story.”
“They repaired the damage they found and stopped there. Faelan’s magic was already laid into the foundations before that attack happened.
Nobody knew to look deeper than the damage.
He walked through this fortress once, planted his work, and left.
Nobody ever knew he’d been inside these walls at all. ”
If he got into this fortress once without anyone knowing there’s nothing to say he isn’t still watching.
I check the door. There’s one way into this room,two blind turns between here and the stairs.
I stay on my feet. Whatever ease this place gave me is gone.
I’m back on watch. The realm that looked safe is the proof no realm is.
She’s still at the table when I come back, both hands around the piece. The woman who arrived here as family last night is holding proof that the start of her mother’s line was cut out and hidden. Her face gives me nothing I can read. For once she’s the closed one.
I take the spot at her side, between her and the door, closer than guarding her requires. I can’t fight what’s already inside her blood. Guarding the door is what I have left. She leans until her shoulder comes to rest against me. I don’t move; I’d stand here all night.
“Niko has to know before we leave,” she says. “Not just what’s in his foundations, all of it.”
“Yes.”
We stay where we are a while longer, the two of us and the stone.
From here I can hold the door in my sight line and her weight against my arm at the same time.
Somewhere else in the fortress the midday meal carries on, her family’s voices reaching us only as a faint hum through the old stone.
Nobody out there knows yet. All of this sat far off an hour ago, now it’s here in the room with us.
I had one morning of being just a man beside her.
I’ll want it back for a long time. Everything in me that isn’t watching the door is pointed at her, that isn’t going to change.