Droza
The tether does not sleep. That is the thing no one warned me about.
I spent nearly a century suspended between stone and silence, and now I am awake with a human woman’s heartbeat living inside my chest alongside my own.
Her fear moves through me like smoke through cracks in mortar.
Her relief loosens something behind my sternum.
I feel everything. I cannot close it out.
I have not slept since awakening.
I tell myself it is because I do not require sleep the way soft creatures do. I stand atop the storage building at the harbor’s edge. It’s all I can do during these restless nights.
The offer comes three hours before dawn.
He steps out of the shadows at the far end of the dock road as if he has simply materialized there, which perhaps he has.
Dark elf sorcery has always favored the theatrical.
He is elegantly dressed, silver-black hair loose over his shoulders, pale eyes carrying the particular calm of a man who has never genuinely feared anything in his life.
I recognize what he is before he speaks. He’s a noble enforcer, someone’s useful instrument in fine clothing.
“Stonewing,” he says, which tells me he has done his research.
“Dark elf.” I do not move. My wings are folded but not relaxed.
“Vaedrin.” He offers his name like a credential. “I represent interests that extend considerably beyond this coast.” He stops at a comfortable distance and looks at me the way men look at architecture they are considering acquiring. “I’ll be direct. The woman is not what she appears.”
“She appears human,” I say. “I am aware she is more than that.”
His face twitches, but only for a moment.
“Then you understand she is dangerous. Not in any way you can protect her from. The artifact she carries has the potential to destabilize several of the most powerful houses in Protheka. What she represents, if that information reaches the wrong parties, could start a war. We are not the monsters in this, warden. We are the ones trying to prevent bloodshed.”
“By hunting her.”
“By containing a problem before it becomes catastrophic.” He pauses, and his voice drops into something almost reasonable. “Gullhaven is a small town. The people here are not involved in this conflict. Give her to us quietly, and they stay that way.”
The tether pulses.
It is not Selah waking or fearing or reacting to anything specific. She is asleep, and her pulse slow, her presence in the connection a low steady hum.
His voice, his words, what he is proposing, reaches into me. It reminded me of the century I spent watching people I was sworn to protect die anyway, one by one, until there was no one left to protect.
My hand closes around his throat before I consciously decide to move.
I have him off the ground in a single motion, his feet suspended, his elegant composure stripped to nothing in an instant. He does not make a sound. I respect him slightly for that, the way you respect any predator for understanding when it is caught.
“The people of this town,” I say, very quietly, “have nothing to do with your business. That is because I am still standing between you and them. Remove yourself from this coast.”
His hands come up but he does not fight. His eyes calculate.
“Killing me accomplishes nothing. There are more—”
“I know there are more.” I set him down. The effort of releasing him is considerable. “Which is why you are still breathing. You are worth more to me as a message than a corpse.”
He straightens his collar and smooths his hair. The calm returns to his face like a mask resettled into place, but his pulse is still elevated. I can hear it.
“We will not stop,” he says.
“Neither will I.”
He leaves the way he came. I stand in the dark and press my hand flat against the dock railing until the wood splinters quietly under my palm.
Selah finds me in the storage room below the inn an hour later.
I do not hear her coming, which tells me more about my current state than I want to acknowledge. She stops in the doorway with a lantern held low, her dark eyes moving over me the way they do when she is cataloguing damage and deciding whether to argue about it.
“Your arm,” she says.
“Gargoyles heal quickly.” The gash along my forearm where Vaedrin’s blade caught me during the moment I set him down is deeper than I registered. Stone skin does not bleed easily. When it does, it takes longer to close than it should.
She crosses the room and crouches beside me without asking permission. I do not stop her, which is its own kind of answer. She sets the lantern on the floor and opens the small kit she carries, revealing herbs, cloth, things Corvin keeps stocked in every room of this inn out of long habit.
“This was Vaedrin,” she says. It is not a question.
“He came to negotiate.”
“And you told him no.”
“I was direct.”
She makes a sound that is not quite a laugh. Her fingers press the cloth against the gash with steady pressure, and the contact moves through me in ways that have everything to do with the fact that no one has touched me with careful hands since before the stone.
I watch the top of her head. The loose coil of dark hair, the small scar behind her ear she has never explained. I have memorized her without intending to.
“You don’t have to do that,” I say.
“I know.” She does not stop.
The lantern light catches the planes of her face when she glances up. Whatever she sees in mine makes her go still for a moment. Her hands don’t move, but she stops pressing and simply holds.
“How long?” she asks. “Before they went stonebound. When was the last time anyone —”
“Before the sleep.” The words come out flat. I do not dress them. “I did not allow it. Attachment is a complication in protection work. You learn to manage the distance.”
“And after?”
“There was no after. There was stone. Then there was you.”
The silence that follows is not uncomfortable. The truth has been said and we are deciding what to do with it.
She goes back to the wound. Her touch is lighter now, more careful, as if she is handling something she has reassessed. When she ties off the cloth, she does not immediately move away.
“Droza.”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything significant.”
“You were about to say something compassionate. I recognize the pause.”
She turns her attention to me. Her expression is careful and open, and I understand, in that moment, what Corvin saw that I have been refusing to name.
I was never lonely because I was always useful. Suddenly, I am useless and have been stationary for a century. Now I feel another presence within me that matters more than my own life. It is the only thing that has felt like being alive since the stone cracked open.
She doesn’t say it. I don’t say it. She finishes with the bandage and sits back on her heels, and I watch her in the lantern light.