Elowen
The noise coming from somewhere in the manor reaches me before I understand it. Not the usual estate settling — a low, effortful sound, familiar in the way that makes my chest pull toward it before my mind names it. Someone's in pain.
I'm out of bed before I've finished the thought, satchel in hand.
The slippers Nyssara left are where they always are, and I push into them without slowing.
The noise leads me west to a door at the end of the passage that stands open, lamplight spilling out across the flagstone in a warm, uneven stripe. I stop in the frame.
The room is stone-shelved along one wall with supplies: clean linen, sealed jars, a row of instruments on a cloth. Three guards are laid out across the center tables. A fourth sits against the rear wall, one hand pressed hard to his upper arm.
Nyssara is at the first table. Her sleeves are already turned back, hands moving through an assessment I recognize — pressure points checked in sequence, not at random. She glances up when I enter.
"East patrol," she shouts. "Two hours ago."
I'm already crossing the room. "What did it?"
"Claws. Deep on the first two. The third took impact to the ribs." She moves to give me room. "The fourth is waiting. I haven't reached him."
I go to the fourth without being asked. He's a dark elf, broad through the shoulder, a scar already mapped across his jaw from something older than tonight.
I crouch. "Let me see."
He reluctantly lifts his hand from his arm. The wound is deep, the tissue around it already darkening in a way that tells me something transferred through the claw.
"It's not just the cut," I hesitate. "Something transferred." I open my satchel, find the cloth packet of powdered blackwood moss, and look at him. "This is going to pull. You can brace or you can not. Either way works."
He braces. I pack the wound and watch him not flinch. Nyssara is binding the first, and I move to the second. This one is worse. Three claw marks slash across the chest beneath torn armor, deep enough to expose muscle.
I lay out what I need. Nyssara's supplies are good — better than what I have — and I reach for the stitch needle without asking because there isn't time to ask.
"Elowen." Nyssara's voice is even. "The one on the left first. He's losing more than he looks."
I shift without argument. She's right. This one has a wound that's smaller at the surface but tracked deeper into the side. I get two fingers against the edge of it and feel the pulse of the bleed, and I pack it with my whole hand, firm and sustained, and hold there.
"Talk to me," I tell him.
He looks at me sideways. "About what."
"Anything. Keeps you from going somewhere else."
He talks about the forest. About the patrol route. When I finally feel the bleed slow, I exchange the packing for a compress and begin the closure. Nyssara finishes her suture and appears at my shoulder.
"You use the two-layer technique," she comments.
"The surface pull holds better." I tie the first stitch. "But you have to match the tension or you get scarring."
"Where did you learn that?"
"A water-damaged journal and a lot of trial and error." I move to the next. "The journal was missing half the pages. I had to guess the rest."
She's quiet for a moment. "You guessed correctly."
We work far longer than necessary, and at some point the room narrows to the next wound, the next stitch, the next problem to solve.
They've all stopped watching me with distrust somewhere between the second and third hour. I don't register when. I just notice, eventually, that the ones who are well enough to sit up have stopped looking at me like an anomaly and started looking at me like someone they are in a room with.
The one whose arm I packed — the one with the jaw scar — says, when I check the binding a second time: "Tighter than Nyssara does it."
"Nyssara is gentler than I am."
"It's better tighter."
Around the fourth hour, I hear the voices. Nyssara has gone to retrieve more linen from the floor above. The guards who can sleep are sleeping. I'm cleaning instruments at the stone shelf, methodical, working through the sequence by memory.
The voices come from the corridor. Two of them, both dark elf. A door between us and them is mostly closed, and they don't know I'm here.
"—a human woman in the east quarters. Under his protection. For how long."
"Until he tires of the novelty, presumably."
A short silence.
"The eastern lords are already talking. It looks like a weakness."
"It is a weakness. Whatever he claims otherwise."
"Someone should say it plainly."
"I said it plainly to Mirelle. She told me to take it up with the lord himself."
Then, dryly: "I have not done that."
I set down the instrument I'm holding, and feel the familiar pull of being talked about like I'm a problem to be managed. Beneath that, something more complicated. They're not wrong. A lord placing a human woman under his protection is a political liability.
I think about Draekir's expression in the corridor on my first day. The complete absence of explanation.
I have no idea what to do with that. So I go back to the instruments. Then his voice arrives behind them. Not raised. Not rushed. Just — present, in the way a sudden drop in temperature is present.
"Repeat that."
The in depth silence that follows is different from the ones before it.
I move, without deciding to, until I can see through the gap in the doorframe.
Two nobles stand upright. Both, very still.
Draekir, in front of them — hands at his sides, and the whole shape of him carries the stillness of settled intent.
Neither of them speak.
"She is my responsibility, and under my care." He remarks — without emphasis, which makes it worse. "The next person in this manor who treats that as a point of discussion rather than a fact will leave Mournhold without a conversation first. That is not a warning. It is a threat."
He doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't need to.
The nobles incline their heads, and leave.
He watches them go, then turns back the way he came.
I pull my head back from the doorframe, and my pulse is doing something I don't plan to examine closely.
The ease of it unsettles me more than shouting would have.
There is also — and I record this with some irritation — something else underneath.
I go back to the instruments. I am very thorough about cleaning the last one.
When I finally get back to my room, everything is where I left it. The candles have burned low. I sit on the bed for a moment and let the tiredness arrive, now that there is nothing else for it to wait behind.
The knock, when it comes, is quiet enough that I almost miss it. I stare at the door. It comes again. Twice, even-spaced.
"Come in," I call.
Draekir opens the door the width of a person and stops there. He's still dressed, coat still on, which means he hasn't slept either. His eyes glance at my hands first — the bandaged palm, the arm — and then to my face.
"You were in the treatment room," he asks.
"Yes."
He goes quiet. Then: "The rib injury. You used compression before closure."
"The bleed was internal. Surface work first would've been decorative."
He looks at me. Something about it is different from the other versions of the same look — those are assessment, categorization. This is neither. It is just — looking.
"You're in pain," he inquires.
"I'm tired."
"Your shoulder."
I don't respond to him. He crosses to the table without asking, picks up the small ceramic pot of salve Nyssara left, and sets it beside me. He doesn't open it. He doesn't offer to apply it. He just puts it where I can reach it and then stands there.
"Sit," I instruct him for a change. Because the alternative is him looming over me while I'm exhausted, which I find unreasonable.
He sits, but at the chair next to the window, slightly toward me, and folds his hands and glances at them for a moment.
"The guards," he starts. "The ones you treated."
"What about them?"
"Vuldren will hear about it by morning. He'll say nothing about it."
"That's a very Mournhold way of saying thank you."
He lifts his head. There is something around his eyes that I haven't seen before. "Ninety years. And I have never once heard someone say to an injured guard: talk to me. Any topic. Just — talk."
"It keeps them awake."
"I know. That's what I mean."
The candle nearest the window gutters. Neither of us moves to fix it.
Outside, the forest still waits. But in this room, the silence between us has softened into something else. He stays until the candle goes out. Then leaves before I have to ask him to.