Edria
The new men are wrong from the moment I see them.
Velis usually brings two, sometimes three — rough men, but familiar.
These four are different. Cleaner boots.
Eyes that move in patterns rather than reactions.
They stand apart from Velis's group with the quiet confidence of people who don't need to posture because they've already decided how the night ends.
I stop six feet back from the exchange point.
"Who are they?" I ask Velis.
"The buyers I mentioned." He gestures vaguely. "They wanted to meet you."
"You didn't tell me they'd be here."
"I'm telling you now." He keeps his voice easy, but his shoulders are set in a way I've seen before — a man who has already made a deal he's not sure he can keep. "They want to discuss terms directly."
The tallest of the four steps forward. He has a pale scar running from his left ear to his jaw and the flat eyes of someone who stopped finding things surprising a long time ago.
"Your work is exceptional," he says. "We want more of it."
"I'm already at capacity." I keep my eyes moving between him and the other three. "Whatever Velis told you I could deliver, that's the ceiling."
"We're prepared to pay well above what he offers."
"It's not about the money." I shift my weight back slightly. "I'm one person. I have a legal forge to run alongside the rest of it. I can't fill a larger order without drawing the kind of attention that shuts down everyone in this forest."
The scarred man looks at Velis. Something passes between them that I don't like.
"We're not asking," he says, turning back to me.
I go still. "Then we don't have anything to discuss."
"Your family runs the forge." His voice stays pleasant. "Your father. Your younger brother. He has a health condition, I understand." He cocks his head. "Supply our order or we make the forge unworkable. Permanently."
My hands are cold inside my gloves. "You don't want to threaten me."
"We're past wanting." He takes one step forward. "You'll fill our order, and Velis's, and you'll stop complaining about capacity."
"Enough." Velis steps between us. "She sets her own terms. That was agreed."
The scarred man looks at Velis with the patient expression of someone about to demonstrate how little agreements mean. "That was before."
"Before what?" Velis asks.
What happens next is fast.
One of the buyers shoves Velis's nearest man, and then it's not a conversation anymore.
Bodies crash through the undergrowth, someone's lantern goes over, and the forest fills with the sounds of a fight that has no clean edges.
I back away from the exchange, moving toward the creek path, keeping low.
A hand closes on my arm.
I spin and drive my elbow back, connecting with ribs. The grip doesn't break — bigger than I estimated, and he uses my momentum to swing me sideways into the underbrush, away from the fight, away from Velis, away from the path.
I hit the ground hard and scramble upright. He's on me before I'm fully up, one hand in my coat, dragging me further into the dark under the trees. I rake my boot down his shin and go for the knife at my hip but he pins my arm.
"Stop fighting," he says, ragged and gruff.
I don't stop. I twist and bite down on his forearm through his sleeve, hard enough to feel the muscle compress. He makes a sharp sound and his grip shifts—
Then something hits the side of my head.
White and then dark. I go down on my hands and knees, the forest floor tilting. My mind is fuzzy and my arms tremble and give out. His hands are at his belt, loosening his pants.
“You’ve got a lot of fight in you and a smart mouth.” He grins, showing gapped teeth, and leans closer, his sour breath on my face. “I know what to do about that.”
I try to push up and my arms don't answer right. Get up. My own voice, distant. Get up right now.
A shadow crosses the moonlight above me.
Then the man is simply gone — lifted and removed with a speed and force that doesn't leave room for doubt about what it was. A sound follows. Solid, final.
I push up onto one knee.
Nyrius stands over the crumpled buyer with his sword drawn, his pale violet eyes sweeping the tree line. Two more men break from the undergrowth at a run and he takes three steps toward them — not chasing, just stepping into the space between them and me — and they recalculate. Fast.
They run.
He turns back to me, but my eyes darken.
I wake up in his camp on a narrow cot, a rough wool blanket over me and a damp cloth on the side of my head that's already gone warm. The tent smells of leather and cold air and the smoke of a low camp fire.
I sit up too fast. The tent tilts.
"Slowly." Nyrius is sitting on a camp stool two feet away, elbows on his knees, watching me with a very controlled and very angry expression.
I hold still until the tilting stops. "How long was I out?"
"Less than an hour." His voice is even. "You have a cut above your ear. It's not deep."
I reach up and find a cloth bandage tied neatly around my head. I leave it alone.
"Do you want to tell me what happened?" He tilts his head.
"Velis brought new people. It went wrong." I swing my legs to the floor. "I'm fine."
"You were on the ground and someone was removing his belt."
"I know what was happening." My voice comes out harder than I intend. "I was there."
He stands up. Not aggressively — just standing, because sitting has run out of room to hold whatever he's containing. "This is what I warned you about."
"You warned me about patrols."
"I warned you about the risk." He stops a few feet away. "This is what it looks like when the risk stops being theoretical. That man outweighed you by four stone. You had a knife you couldn't reach and no one within earshot." His jaw works. "You could have been killed before I found you."
"But you did find me."
"That's not the point, Edria." His voice rises, briefly, before he pulls it back. "You were lucky. And luck runs out."
I stand up. My head protests. I ignore it. "You want to keep me safe — I understand that. But there's a version of keeping me safe that looks exactly like controlling what I do and how I do it."
"I'm not trying to control—"
"You want me to stop the deliveries. Stop the only income that keeps Finn medicated and the roof patched." I take a step toward him. "You came back here twice while I was filling an order you told me to abandon. You show up in my forest in the middle of the night—"
"Because you were in danger—"
"Because you decided my choices were wrong." My voice holds. "There's a difference between protecting someone and overriding every decision they make for their own survival."
His eyes linger longer than they need to. The fire outside throws faint light through the tent canvas, and the camp around us is quiet.
"I couldn't find you," he says finally. It comes out low, stripped of everything except what it actually is.
"Finn said you hadn't come home. I tracked the creek path all day before I heard the fight.
" He exhales through his nose. "I'm not trying to override you.
I'm telling you that watching someone I—" He stops.
Starts again. "I don't want to find you like that again. "
The tent is very quiet.
I want to hold onto the argument. It's easier than what's underneath it—the fact that his hands had been shaking slightly when he'd crouched over me in the underbrush, and I'd noticed, and it had mattered to me.
"I hear you," I say. Not a concession. Not an apology. Just the truth of it.
His eyes stay on me another moment, then nods once and goes to fetch fresh water for the bandage.
I sit back down on the cot and let him.