Droza
The sailor’s face stays with me longer than it should, but it isn’t about him. It’s the half-second before I moved, the moment the tether pulled tight with her fear and every rational thought I possessed went quiet.
I know what I am. I have always known. Gargoyles are not gentle creatures. But there is a distance between what I am capable of and what I nearly did to an unarmed man standing too close to a woman who is not mine to protect with that kind of violence.
Except the tether does not know the difference between a dockhand and an assassin.
That is the problem.
I sit on the shingles of the roof long after Selah has gone back inside, my wings folded close, watching the harbor move through its evening routines.
Fishing boats return. Lanterns are lit along the market stalls.
Rennic crosses the south dock for the third time today with his collar turned up and his eyes moving too fast. He is running another message.
I track him without meaning to and then stop because tracking Rennic is not the same as tracking the unease that has been settling over Gullhaven for the past two days like sediment.
Something has shifted in the town’s texture. I have been awake long enough to recognize the particular quality of silence that precedes an organized threat.
Corvin has noticed. He has said nothing to Selah.
I am still on the roof when Corvin comes out through the rear door below me and stands in the alley for a moment. He does not call up to me. He waits.
I drop down beside him without sound.
He hands me a folded piece of cloth. Inside is a wax seal broken cleanly in half, the insignia of a dark elf noble house pressed into black wax. It’s one of the houses that operates beside Vaedrin’s, the kind that doesn’t send its own representatives anywhere.
“She wants to meet with you,” Corvin says. He takes me inside.
Ilyra, white hair and crimson markings make her stand out from other dark elves. She sits at Corvin’s kitchen table with her hands flat on the wood.
She doesn’t waste time.
“Vaedrin has moved his remaining force inside Gullhaven. Not the harbor road, the eastern fishing quarter, scattered across four separate properties, none of them registered with the town. He is not waiting for reinforcements. He is waiting for the gambling night, when the inn is packed enough that a coordinated entry through multiple doors looks like chaos instead of strategy.”
She gives Corvin the addresses. She gives him the names. She’s been feeding us information about Vaedrin for days now, but there is one thing I don’t understand.
“Why?”
“I watched him order the execution of a family in Prentavar who had done nothing except exist. A mother. Three children.” She pauses. “The youngest was four. This is a slaughter, nothing more. I won’t stand by and do nothing.”
I believe her, which does not mean I trust her. But I believe her.
Corvin begins moving before she has finished speaking.
I find Selah near the cliff path an hour later. She has gone out for air again. The tether told me before I started looking, a low hum of restlessness rather than fear. I follow it out past the harbor road to where the path curves along the cliff and the wind comes in cold off the water.
She hears me before she sees me because I let her. I have learned that appearing without warning behind her produces exactly the reaction I don’t want.
She doesn’t speak first. Neither do I, for a while. We stand together at and watch the last light go out of the western sky.
“You’re quieter than usual,” she says eventually. “That’s how I know something is actually wrong.”
“Corvin has information about the timeline.”
“I figured.” She pulls her coat tighter. “Is that the only thing?”
I consider lying. The mechanics of it are simple enough, but the tether carries too much. She has learned to read what it carries even when I say nothing.
“I nearly killed that sailor,” I say. “I spent nearly a century believing I knew exactly what I was capable of. I am less certain now.”
“You think that makes you like them.”
“It should concern you more than it does.”
“I’ve seen what they do,” she says. “I know what cruelty looks like when it enjoys itself.” She steps closer, which she has started doing when she intends to make a point that she knows I will resist. “You stopped.”
“Because you were there.”
“You stopped,” she says again, as though that settles it.
It does not settle anything, but I don’t argue.
She asks me, quietly, how it happened. The stonebound sleep. The war before it.
I have not spoken about this to anyone, because there has been no one to speak to since I woke. But the cliff and the dark and the particular steadiness of her attention make the words come without effort.
There was a coastal crossing. Civilians moving east through the raider conflict, families and traders and children who had no part in the politics of what was happening around them.
My unit was supposed to hold the northern approach.
We held it. I made a tactical decision. I split the formation to push a flanking group back before they reached the crossing.
The southern approach went unguarded for eleven minutes.
Forty-three people died in those eleven minutes.
I survived because the elders sealed me rather than let me die from the wounds I took afterward. I did not ask them to.
“You’ve been carrying that for a century,” Selah says.
“It hasn’t become lighter.”
She reaches up and takes my face in both hands—a gesture so entirely unexpected that I go perfectly still—and kisses me. It is not impulsive in the way her first kiss was, urgent and startled by itself. This one is deliberate.
When she pulls back, she doesn’t flinch.
“Then let it be lighter now,” she says.
I have no answer for that. I am not certain one is required.
Rennic’s voice cuts up from the harbor road before I can find one. Three short bird calls echo, the signal we agreed on.
I look past Selah toward the water. Beyond the dark horizon, moving without lights, are the silhouettes of ships slide out of the black.
Dark elf rigging. Four vessels. Maybe five.
I spread my wings and take the cliff in a single bound.