7. Corrine
CORRINE
The storm comes in above us. Natural storms build from the west along this range, pressure dropping in stages that give travelers enough warning to make decisions.
This one comes from the north with no transition—clear sky, then wall of white, and wind that cuts through the tower's mortar like it's made of paper.
One of Leoric's men says it feels like ward-weather.
I think he's right. There's a charge in the cold that presses behind my teeth, and I've been in enough war-touched territory to know when the land is remembering what happened on it.
Leoric chose the ridge road to keep us above the routes.
The storm makes that clever for about an hour before it makes it stupid.
We take the watchtower because there's nothing else.
Four walls, partial roof, a fireplace that still functions in its lower half.
The upper floor is missing its northeast corner entirely, open to the sky where something heavy came through it and no one ever returned to repair the damage.
War architecture. You can read the moment of impact in the stone.
I take a circuit before anyone tells me to settle.
Three ground-level points where the mortar has crumbled to the width of a finger.
One window on the south face with a drop I could manage in the dark if I had to.
The stairs to the floor above groan on the third step, which is useful information for different reasons depending on whether you're trying to move quietly or hear someone coming.
I don't share any of what I've found, I just go back to my position near the wall and watch the fire catch.
One of the men distributes watches. Theren assigns himself the door.
Leoric takes the other end and lowers himself onto a section of fallen beam with his back to the wall, and that's when I see it.
It's not obvious. He controls it well—the slight adjustment of his left arm when he sits.
He doesn't lean back completely, there's a half-second of stillness before his expression levels out.
I've moved enough injured people across borders to recognize when someone is managing pain that has become so routine they've stopped expecting anyone to notice.
The burns along his left side are not old damage that healed and settled.
They're ongoing. Every drop in temperature, every cold night, every morning he wakes up and starts again.
I don't look away fast enough. His eye cuts to me across the fire. Not sharp exactly. Sharpened. There is a difference.
"You have something to say?"
"No."
"That was almost convincing."
I pull the cloak tighter around my shoulders and stare into the fire like it has become deeply interesting. "You sit like someone is holding a knife between your ribs."
One of the men near the stairs goes still. Theren's attention shifts without his head moving. Leoric doesn't answer, and the storm fills the space between us.
"Old damage," he comments.
"That kind of thing usually stops bleeding."
His mouth barely moves, but something colder passes through his face. "Not all wounds have the decency."
I should leave it there. I know I should. Pushing at pain is how people lose fingers in rooms like this. Instead, because apparently survival has made me clever but not sensible, I speak, "Cold makes it worse."
"Most things do."
That should be the end of it. He clearly means it to be.
But I remember bodies under blankets in border safehouses, people trying not to make noise while their skin tightened in winter air.
I remember boiling water in cracked pots because I couldn't give them back what fire had taken, only make the next hour less cruel.
I reach for the spare wool roll beside the wall and toss it toward him.
It lands near his boot. He looks at it. Then at me.
"For your back," I pass it him. "Or don't use it and continue impressing everyone with how well you suffer in silence."
Theren makes a sound that might be a breath and might be disapproval. Leoric picks up the wool, slow enough to make it clear he is choosing to, not obeying. He folds it once and sets it between his left side and the stone, but says nothing. Neither do I.
It should feel like a victory. It doesn't. It feels like noticing a locked door has hinges.
The storm worsens as time goes on. Wind comes through the gap upstairs in a sustained pitch that makes sleep difficult and conversation worse.
Two of the escorts manage it anyway. Theren doesn't bother trying, and Leoric hasn't moved from his position, and how he holds himself tells me he stopped waiting for sleep a long time ago.
I add wood to the fire and settle back, and he speaks before I've decided whether I wanted him to.
"You've been in my life since Blackwater.
" Not to the room—to me, in the tone of someone finishing a thought they started long ago.
"Every scar that pulls wrong in the cold.
Every time someone uses your name in my presence to watch my face.
Every question I couldn't close because the person who could answer it was—" He stops. "Gone."
My eyes stay on the fire. "I didn't know you survived."
The words sour around us. I have thought about them before. In pieces. In the private corners of nights when sleep wouldn't come and the past decided to be at the front of my mind. I didn't know. It never sounds like innocence. Not even inside my own head.
Leoric watches the flames. "Would it have changed anything?"
My answer should be quick. Yes, because that is the answer a decent person gives.
Yes, because no one wants to admit there are moments in their life where knowledge might not have stopped them from becoming exactly what grief had already made them.
But he is not asking for that. He is asking for truth.
"I'm not sure," I admit.
His gaze moves to me then.
I hate that I can't give him something cleaner. "I was twenty-four. Angry. Stupid enough to think anger was the same thing as courage. If someone had told me there were prisoners, I would have believed it. If someone said monsters were inside, I would have believed that too."
"And if someone had told you men like me were inside?"
"I already believed that."
The words leave ash behind. He gives a small nod, like the answer confirmed something he had already put a blade through years ago.
"Then we were both useful," he claims. "You to the rebellion. Me to the council. Different hands. Same purpose."
Part of me wants to argue, and the old me reaches for it fast, hungry for the familiarity of blame. But the words don't come cleanly. Not here. Not with the storm pressing against us.
"That doesn't absolve either of us," I state.
"No."
The quiet after that is worse than arguing.
"I know." A pause that has weight to it. "That's the part I kept returning to. You didn't know. You lit it and you left and for years after you were a name and a face in an inked likeness and a reason I couldn't sleep a full night. And you didn't know."
There's no accusation in it. That's what makes it harder to sit with than anger would be. It's just the shape of what happened, delivered plainly, and I don't have anything to put across the space of the plainness of it.
"I left the cell the morning after." I look to the floor. "The rebellion. I walked out and I didn't go back."
"Why."
"Because victory did not feel the way they promised it would." I turn the wood in the fire with my boot. "They were singing about Blackwater in the streets, and I realized I could not stand beside them anymore."
"The smuggling," he starts.
"Refugees. Medicine. It didn't fix anything, of course. But it was something I could do with my hands that wasn't—" I don't finish it. "The victory songs made me sick. Still do."
"That's not an apology."
"No," I agree. "It's not."
Another silence. Theren shifts at the door and goes still again.
"I'm not asking for one." Quieter now. "I don't know what I'm asking for."
I don't answer, offering something I don't mean would be worse than saying nothing. We sit with it—not with any sense that the distance has closed, but in the way two people sit when the shared weight is too heavy to keep carrying separately and neither has figured it out.
The ceiling goes before I hear it coming.
The northeast corner—already compromised, already carrying more snow than the remaining building can hold—comes down with a sound like the storm deciding it's finished waiting.
Stone, timber and packed ice, and I'm on my feet before I've processed any of it, and then something massive hits me from the left and drives me into the south wall instead.
Leoric. His shoulder taking the impact, arm across me, body placed between me and the collapse.
The debris catches him across the back. I hear the sound it makes and feel him absorb it through the arm braced against the wall beside my head.
Then it's over. Dust and cold air and the storm screaming through the new gap.
I push out from under his arm. He straightens slowly—too slowly, with the careful movement of someone adding new damage to an existing inventory—and looks at the fallen section without expression.
"Are you—"
"Fine." He steps away and begins directing the escort toward the gap without looking at me again.
I stay against the south wall with stone dust on my shoulders and watch him work.
He didn't plan that. There was no calculation in it—no political value in shielding a human prisoner from falling debris, no advantage in taking it because his body already carries more damage than it should. He just moved.
I am desperate to bury it neatly with the soldiers he turned away in the street and the refugees he fed without a name and the children he wrote false records for, and let it mean something I already know how to hold.
But the certainty I've been standing on since Blackwater—since before Blackwater, since the streets I grew up on and everything I built on top of them—has a hole in it now that I can't locate well enough to seal.
I can't tell what frightens me more: that I might have been wrong about him, or that I'm only now beginning to care.
Hating him had been easier when he stayed the monster I needed him to be.