Droza
It has been too loud since the moment I stepped back inside the common room. Chairs scrape against stone floors. Voices overlap in uneven currents of conversation and laughter. Someone drops a dish in the kitchen. A sailor near the window laughs at a volume that makes my jaw tighten.
I stand at the borders of the room with my back to the wall and count the exits the way I did during the war. Knowing the shape of a room often bought enough time to survive it.
Old habit. Useless now. There is no enemy here worth tracking.
Except that is not entirely true.
The tether pulls low and steady, a constant pressure I have spent three days learning to read like weather. Selah is calm. Above me in the upper rooms, she moves at the unhurried pace of fear temporarily leaving her thoughts. She was fearful of returning to Gullhaven, but decided to follow my lead.
The absence of her fear should be a reassurance. Instead, it feels like a different kind of distraction.
I was not built for this. I was built for open cliffs and salt wind and the silence above crowded places where danger was spotted ahead of time. A century in stone did not prepare me for how loud living has become.
An old woman with silvery braids and dark robes finds me before I notice her approach.
She is old as coastal cliffs are old. Weathered by time and storms, and she had nothing soft left about her except the strange patience in her eyes. She plants herself in front of me without the slightest hesitation, which puts her in a category of people I can count on one hand.
“Sit down,” she says. “You’re making everyone nervous standing like that.”
“Let them be nervous.”
“Sit down anyway.”
I sit. She settles across from me and sets both hands flat on the table.
“It’s not often we have someone like you come around,” she says.
“I can see that.” Selah comes down the stairs, and my eyes are immediately drawn to her. When she sees me, she comes over. She slows when she sees the other woman at the table, but takes the seat next to me.
“I am Mother Sevra,” says the old woman with a half-smile. She studies the air between Selah and me with those clouded eyes that should not be able to see what they clearly do.
“The tether,” she says. “How long has it been?”
Selah hesitates. “A few days.”
Sevra nods once, slowly, as if this confirms something she already suspected. The noise of the common room drops away from me.
“The blood that woke you was not an accident,” Sevra says. “I heard what happened in Gullhaven. The binding that held you is older than the harbor itself. It was waiting for the correct bloodline to awaken it.”
A cold weight settles in my stomach. “It was waiting for her.”
“Your predecessors designed the runes of your binding to recognize bloodlines. Generations have gone by, and the noble houses have been trying to bury any unions that violated bloodline law. These are the mixed unions between gargoyles and dark elves. These families carry proof that the bloodlines dark elves call pure were never pure at all.” She folds her hands.
“The warden binding at this site was keyed to the same magic. If anyone carrying that bloodline ever needed protection, the nearest surviving warden would wake.”
Selah presses her hand over her pocket, where the relic she stole sits.
“It’s all connected,” she whispers so softly I barely hear her.
“If you have any questions, you can come visit me,” said Mother Sevra as she stands. “I hope you enjoy your evening.”
When Selah looks at me, exhaustion sits heavy beneath her expression.
“They’re not hunting me for the relic alone,” she says quietly, before I can ask. “They’re hunting me because of what my blood is. Because of what I prove exists.” She exhales. “I’m the evidence. If I survive, the relic doesn’t even matter.”
I say nothing. The tether sits between us, steady and warm and entirely too honest.
“So,” she says. “That’s the problem.”
The evening crowd fills the common room in waves. By the time Brinna’s gambling tables pull noise from every corner, I have already catalogued every man who has looked at Selah too long.
Most of them look once and think better of it.
The sailor at the bar does not. He is broad through the shoulders, loud in the way men are when they want to be noticed, and he has been working his way down the bar toward Selah for the better part of an hour.
I watch him from my position near the wall.
The tether is quiet. Selah is not afraid of him.
She is barely paying attention to him, which he clearly mistakes for invitation.
He leans against the bar beside her and says something I cannot hear over the noise of the room.
Selah glances at him briefly and looks away.
He says something else. His shoulder drops toward hers.
The tether tightens.
I cross the room before I have made the decision to move.
The sailor turns when my shadow falls across him. To his credit, he does not immediately run. He looks at me as if recalculating every choice that led him to this moment.
“Move,” I say.
“I was only—”
“Move.”
Selah steps between us. Her hand finds my arm just below the elbow, which is the only reason the sailor keeps his jaw intact.
She applies no real pressure. She does not have the strength to hold me in place and she knows it.
What she applies instead is intent, and somehow that is enough to make me go still.
“We’re going outside,” she says.
The cold air off the harbor hits the moment we clear the back door. Selah releases my arm and rounds on me with the expression she reserves for when she has run out of patience and is not bothering to hide it.
“You nearly put your fist through that man’s face.”
“He was bothering you.”
“He was talking to me. There is a difference.”
“You looked away from him twice.”
“I was not interested in having a conversation with him, and I think I made that perfectly clear by turning away.” She crosses her arms. The wind pulls at her hair and she ignores it. “You cannot do that every time someone speaks to me. I will never leave the inn again.”
“That would solve a significant number of problems.”
Her eyes sharpen. “Droza.”
The way she says my name lands somewhere beneath argument. I look away from her, out toward the dark line where the harbor water meets the night sky. My hands are still too tense. The tether has not settled.
“It is the tether,” I say finally.
She waits.
“Every time you are afraid, I feel it. Every time someone comes near you and the fear spikes—” I stop.
The words are not ones I reach for easily.
“It does not stop. I cannot close it off or set it aside. It is simply there, and I have no way to determine whether the threat is real until I am already moving toward it.”
Silence stretches between us.
“That sounds exhausting,” she says quietly.
“It is.” I look at her then. “I cannot tolerate it. I have tried.”
The honesty of it clearly catches her off guard. She holds my gaze for a moment longer than she means to, and when she looks away, it is not out of discomfort.
Neither of us goes back inside.