9. Ursa #2
The blade is heavier than I expect, the handle warm from the elder’s hand.
I place it and cut along the line he indicates.
The meat resists, then gives. The motion is awkward but clean enough that no one groans.
I pass the blade correctly to the next guest, handle first, and do not relax until it leaves my fingers.
The elder tears a piece from the section I cut and places it on my plate.
“You take first from your work,” he says.
I eat.
The meat is dense, smoky, and rich with fat that coats my tongue. It tastes of salt, iron, and char. My jaw aches by the time I swallow, but I manage it without disgracing myself, which is rapidly becoming my definition of success.
The gray-bearded warrior lifts his cup. “To the small scholar.”
My table answers with raised cups, table strikes, and rough calls of approval.
Someone farther down repeats the title. Then someone else takes it up.
The phrase travels badly through the hall, changing shape through dialect and liquor until I hear three different versions at once, but the meaning is clear enough.
Small scholar.
My cheeks heat more than the third bitter managed.
“I have a name,” I mutter.
Rikka hears me. “Earned names arrive when they wish.”
“I didn’t apply for one.”
“Good. Names hate begging.”
Cal looks as if he may choke on envy and broth. “This is absurd.”
I lean toward him just enough to keep my voice conversational. “You could still try respecting the room.”
“I don’t need performance advice from you.”
“Clearly.”
His mouth tightens, but he has no useful answer, which is my favorite kind from men like him.
Another ceremony begins at the high table.
I try to watch without being obvious, though subtlety becomes difficult when the entire room seems larger and closer than before.
Gnash sits at the head beneath the banners, immense in formal armor, his long silver hair loose over black shoulder plates etched with ship names and old victories.
Firelight turns the red of his eyes almost molten.
He has been present all night the way gravity is present, felt even when ignored, shaping every orbit in the room.
I have avoided staring at him because staring is foolish and because I am not here to behave like another correspondent dazzled by proximity to power.
That has become harder.
The first time I saw his image in a file, he looked like every warning ever given physical form.
In the Blood Hall, he looks like something more difficult to define.
Brutal, yes. Nobody could mistake him for gentle.
But he is not lounging in mindless savagery while diplomats squirm.
He watches everything. Every course, every insult, every hesitation, every servant’s route, every ambassador’s reaction.
When Gobold laughs too loudly, Gnash measures who laughs with him.
When Theryki compliments a ritual, Gnash notices which aide fails to hide revulsion.
When the Helios proxy raises his cup, Gnash’s expression becomes pleasant enough to make three Reapers near him stop smiling.
Power sits on him heavily, but he does not seem crushed by it.
He seems accustomed to carrying weight.
The thought irritates me because it sounds too close to admiration.
A new round of cheers rises around me as the last of the shared blade challenge completes at our table.
The gray-bearded warrior calls for someone to bring “the small scholar a proper cup,” and Rikka argues that no human of my size needs a proper cup unless the goal is entertainment followed by medical documentation.
Vesk remains near the wall, but his face has moved beyond resignation into something like pained satisfaction.
“You see?” I call to him over the noise. “No one is dead.”
“Dinner is not over,” he calls back.
“Encouraging as always.”
“I protect morale by limiting it.”
The warriors around me love that. The noise grows again, warmer now, more inclusive, and the attention spreading from our section of the table becomes impossible to ignore.
Reapers from farther down lean to see me.
An elder lifts his cup. A young warrior thumps his chest in acknowledgment.
A server brings me a smaller portion of the next course without being asked and murmurs, “For soft-finger survival.”
“Thank you,” I say.
He looks pleased enough to trip over the bench on his way away.
The hall’s energy shifts in visible ripples.
Outsiders look irritated or confused by the approval surrounding me.
Reapers look delighted that a human woman has forced the room to adjust its expectations.
I understand the danger in that. Approval can be another kind of stage, and stages can collapse under arrogance.
I keep my movements measured. I ask before touching unfamiliar dishes.
I laugh when laughter includes me, not when I am uncertain of its target.
I decline nothing out of contempt. When I cannot stomach more of a dish that tastes like fermented engine grease and lightning, I say, “My body is less honorable than my intention,” which makes Rikka laugh so hard she has to brace herself on the table.
Then the sound changes.
I feel it before I identify it.
The noise around me does not stop, but it thins in my perception, as if the room has become a long tunnel and every voice is moving away from the center of me.
The table pounding, the music, the scrape of dishes, the crackle of fire baskets, and the deep laughter of warriors all recede beneath one sudden awareness pressing against my skin.
Someone is looking at me.
Not glancing.
Looking.
I turn toward the high table.
Gnash is watching me.
Whatever thought I was forming disappears.
His eyes meet mine across the crowded Blood Hall, and the galaxy opens under my feet.
For one impossible instant, I am nowhere and everywhere at once.
Firelight bends into memory. The smell of blood and spice becomes smoke from Horus IV, then cold metal from a dead refugee colony I have never seen, then the salt of tears swallowed by a child too angry to die.
Pain moves through me, but it is not only mine.
Hunger. Rage. Loneliness so vast it feels like open space.
A boy standing among bodies in a settlement abandoned by everyone who had promised help.
A girl crouched behind a burned transport with a compad in shaking hands.
The two images strike each other and fuse into something too intimate to be witnessed and too powerful to be private.
My breath leaves me.
Heat floods my body. My injured hand throbs, then the pain vanishes beneath a deeper pulse that rolls through my blood from throat to belly.
Every nerve wakes at once. My skin tightens.
My heart slams so hard it seems to shake the plate in front of me.
A pressure opens behind my eyes, not painful exactly, but immense, like a door in my mind has been thrown wide before I knew there was a room behind it.
Gnash.
I do not say his name aloud. I feel it.
The connection surges again, and this time I sense him sensing me.
Shock, fierce and immediate. Recognition like a blade drawn clean.
Possession tries to rise with it, dark and ancient and terrifying, but something else catches it before it can become command.
Restraint. Awe. Disbelief. A question formed without words.
You.
The table in front of me blurs.
I hear Rikka say something close by, but her voice comes from too far away. The gray-bearded warrior stands so abruptly that the bench scrapes behind him. Cal curses. Vesk moves. The hall is still full of sound, yet all of it arrives muffled, secondary, unimportant beside the red eyes holding mine.
I understand what this is before my rational mind can assemble the word.
Jalshagar.
One soul with two bodies.
The phrase flashes through everything I know about the Athenaverse, everything I have reported, read, dismissed as romantic mythology, and treated as an interesting sociocultural fact rather than a condition that could reach across a hall and seize my entire life by the roots.
No one is compelled, I remember absurdly.
Free will remains.
The thought is technically useful and emotionally ridiculous because my body has not yet agreed to return jurisdiction to my brain.
Gnash rises at the high table.
The movement sends a new wave of reaction through the hall.
Reapers quiet first, then diplomats, then the press, confusion moving outward as people realize something has happened without knowing what.
His size was imposing while seated; standing, he becomes the axis of the room.
Firelight catches along his bone spurs and the etched armor across his shoulders.
His face has changed. The warlord’s polished amusement has vanished, and what remains is raw enough that a part of me wants to look away to spare him exposure.
I cannot look away.
My knees threaten to forget their profession.
Rikka’s hand closes around my elbow, steadying me with surprising care. “Breathe, small scholar.”
I drag air into my lungs.
It tastes like blood, smoke, spice, and fate.
“What is happening?” Cal demands, his voice thin with panic or envy or both. “What the hell is happening?”
Vesk reaches my side, and whatever he sees on my face drains the humor from his. He looks toward Gnash, then back at me, and his expression shifts into something almost reverent.
“Oh,” he says.
I swallow. “Vesk.”
He lowers his voice. “Do not move unless you choose to.”
That sentence anchors me more than any reassurance could have.
Choice.
I grip it with everything I have.