Selah
Corvin leads us through the cellar entrance before dawn, a lantern held low, his voice quiet and unhurried the way it always is when the situation is serious. Brinna follows behind me with a second light, her usual commentary stripped down to nothing. That alone tells me how bad the rumors are.
“Three villages east of here,” Corvin says, ducking beneath a low crossbeam. “Dark elves are moving door to door, asking questions with the promise of coin.”
“And when neither works?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to.
The tunnel opens into a wider chamber beneath the inn, stone walls slick with moisture, barrels stacked in careful rows along one side.
Smuggler infrastructure, built over decades by those who understood that survival often required moving things quietly in the dark.
It is, I think, the most honest room in Gullhaven.
Droza has to fold himself nearly in half to fit through the entrance. He straightens once inside and surveys the space with the particular stillness of someone cataloguing exits. He has been doing that since he woke. Old instinct, I’m learning.
“You’ll stay below during the day,” Corvin says to me. “Brinna will bring food down. At night, the upper rooms are safer, but only with escort.”
He glances at Droza when he says it.
Droza says nothing. His silence has a way of functioning as agreement.
I have come to learn about the wardens in pieces. Corvin knows some of what gargoyle wardens were before the stonebound sleep took them. He talks while we share a meal by lantern light, speaking the way men do when they’re filling silence rather than lecturing, and I listen.
Droza doesn’t offer details about himself, but he doesn’t stop Corvin either. He sits along the outside of the chamber with his back against the wall, arms crossed, golden eyes catching the light in a way that makes them look like something lit from inside.
The wardens protected the western coast for generations.
Trade routes, fishing settlements, small human townships that existed too far from dark elf cities to matter politically but close enough to water to matter practically.
The gargoyles took no payment for it. Territory, Corvin says.
That was the arrangement. The coast was theirs to protect because it was theirs, and anything that moved through it moved under their watch.
I look at Droza when Corvin says that.
He is looking at the wall.
Later, I find him on the roof of the storage building that night, which is the closest thing Gullhaven has to a vantage point above the harbor. He doesn’t hear me climb up. Or he does and simply doesn’t react, which is more likely.
He faces the water. Wings folded, shoulders dropped just slightly from their usual rigid line. In the dark, with the sea spread out below the cliffs and the harbor lights scattered like embers across the black, he looks exactly like what the town believed him to be for a century.
A monument. A thing carved from stone to endure.
I sit down on the roof and don’t say anything.
The wind off the water is cold enough to sting. Below us, a few lights still burn in the inn, and I can hear the muffled sounds of the last drinkers being persuaded toward the door. Somewhere further down the harbor, rigging clicks against masts in slow, uneven rhythm.
“You’re supposed to have an escort,” Droza says.
“You’re my escort.”
He looks at me then. His expression shifts, briefly, before settling back into its usual controlled stillness.
“You’re mourning them. You’ve been staring at the sea every night since you woke up.” I keep my voice even. “I’m not trying to pick at it. I see it.”
The silence stretches long enough that I think he’s going to close down entirely, but then he exhales and says, “There was a family. In the cove settlement south of here. A woman and her three sons. The youngest used to leave dried fish at the statue. As an offering.”
I don’t say anything.
“He would have been an old man before I went into the stone.” His voice carries nothing. That’s somehow worse than if it carried something. “Whatever he became after that, I will never know.”
The wind moves between us. The sea does what the sea always does, which is continue.
“I’m sorry,” I say finally. My apologies won’t fix anything, but that’s not why I say it. I want him to know I understand.
He doesn’t respond, but he doesn’t move away either. After a moment he sits, which is its own kind of answer, and we stay there until the harbor goes fully dark below us.
Vaedrin makes his move on the market the following morning.
I hear about it from Brinna, who hears about it from three separate people before the hour is out, because Brinna has built an information network that would embarrass most professionals.
Vaedrin walked through the harbor square in broad daylight, she says.
Stopped at stalls, spoke pleasantly, spent money he didn’t need to spend.
And then, at some point in each conversation, he mentioned a woman: human, dark curly hair, green eyes, and traveling alone.
The gold he left behind was enough to make the asking feel like an opportunity rather than a threat.
“How many talked?” I ask.
“None that I know of yet.” Brinna’s expression is precise. “But he’ll be back tomorrow with more gold and less patience.”
She means he’ll start with threats next. I know it without her having to say it.
That evening, I’m moving through the lower corridor toward the cellar stairs when I hear voices near the back entrance.
Two of Corvin’s dock runners, talking in the loose, easy way of men who think they’re alone.
One of them says my name. The other laughs and says something I can’t fully make out, but I catch the shape of it well enough.
Then I hear Droza.
I can’t see around the corner but I don’t need to.
His voice drops to the register he uses when he means to be understood clearly by everyone in a room, and he says, with unhurried calm, “If I hear your name and hers in the same sentence again, I will personally ensure that you have fewer fingers than you do now.”
Brief silence.
The sound of two men finding somewhere else to be.
I lean against the wall and stare at the ceiling for a moment.
The thing I cannot explain, and refuse to examine too closely, is that my first reaction is not irritation. It should be. I’ve told him twice that I can manage my own situation, and I meant it both times.
But there’s something about standing in the dim corridor, hearing him deliver a quiet threat on my behalf with the complete confidence of a man who never once doubted his right to do it.
I press the back of my hand briefly to my mouth.
It is not funny, I tell myself.
The warmth in my chest disagrees.