12. Maelor
MAELOR
Ifind the beach empty.
The fire has burned down to cold ash. The provisions chest is open, meaning she has eaten.
She has been up for some time. The mooring lines on the ‘Tenacious’ have been checked and re-tensioned.
I can see it in the angle of the bow line, tighter than it was yesterday, someone who knows rope having assessed them in the early light and made adjustments.
The basalt chunk I had seen her drag toward the treeline yesterday is gone from where she left it. She has already been working.
I follow her trail into the forest without deciding to.
The marks are easy enough to read — disturbed ground where something heavy was dragged, a heel print in the soft soil near the first root crossing, a broken stem on one of the broad-leafed plants at the point where she turned north.
I have tracked things in this forest for six centuries.
I am not tracking her. I am simply moving through the trees and reading what the trees record, which is a different thing.
The distinction stays unexamined.
I smell the spring before I see it. Thermal water and mineral rock and something else underneath that I register and do not name. I come around the root formation at the eastern edge of the depression and stop.
She is in the water.
She has her back to me, head tilted back, hair dark and loose and spreading across the surface of the pool around her shoulders.
The steam rises around her in the cold morning air and the water is dark enough that it gives nothing away except the pale line of her arms resting at the surface and the absolute stillness of a body that has finally, after days of relentless motion, stopped.
I should leave. The thought is immediate and correct and I turn to act on it.
It is in the turning that I see the scar.
Her left forearm, resting at the waterline, angled toward me as she shifts slightly in the pool.
A hook-catch scar, old enough to have silvered, running three inches along the inside of the forearm in the specific shape of a wound received from below rather than above, the kind you get when something catches you from underneath and you pull away before it can take more.
I know the shape of it because I have seen it before, on dock workers and sailors and people whose bodies are their primary tool and who cannot afford to be precious about what that costs.
She has not been precious about it. The scar sits in her skin with the same settled quality as all the others I have catalogued without meaning to, the rope burn on her right wrist, the three knuckles on her left hand that healed slightly wrong, the line along her palm that is still pink and recent.
A body that has been used hard and has continued regardless.
A feeling moves through my chest that I do not have clean language for.
I turn and walk back into the trees.
I go thirty yards before I stop. Stand in the forest with my hand against one of the black-barked trunks and the sound of the spring behind me and the sound of my own breathing, even, because I am six hundred and forty years old and my breathing does not betray me.
Other things apparently do.
I think about Aevyn. I do this carefully, the way you handle a blade, not avoiding it, just aware of the angles.
Aevyn had the spring too, in the years when we were still in the years, when the wars were not yet the wars and the island was younger and so was I in the ways that mattered.
Aevyn had found it the same way — following the thermal smell into the trees, returning to it, making it a place.
I had known about the spring for two centuries before Aevyn came to it and it had simply been a feature of the terrain.
After Aevyn it had been grief. After the wars it had been its own different thing.
and I have not gone near it in longer than I have been counting.
Nerina Ashvale has been on this island for one day and she has already found it.
I do not know what to do with that. I am going to set it down and not look at it and go back to the Spire and the survey records and the political situation, which requires my attention, which I am capable of addressing without my chest doing whatever it is currently doing.
I go back to the spring instead.
I make enough noise this time that she hears me coming, a deliberate heel strike on the root formation at the rim, a pause, and I stop at the edge of the depression and look at the canopy and tell her about the stone grain on the shear face near the overhang, which is true and useful and the only thing I trust myself to say.
I do not look at her directly.
She says thank you in a voice I do not examine.
I leave.
The Spire receives me as it always has, with the cool mineral certainty of old stone and the smell of a building inhabited for centuries by creatures that run hotter than most. I go to the war room and do not sit down and do not look at the survey records and stand at the west-facing window for an unmeasured while.
The island spreads below me. The western forest is dense and dark and gives nothing away. Somewhere in it a hot spring steams in the morning air around a woman who has been on this island for one day and has already found the one place I have been avoiding for a century.
Soryth finds me still at the window.
The elder comes in without announcement, his right and his habit, and he reads me in the first second with the thoroughness of four centuries of practice. Then he looks at the table and sets down the report he is carrying.
“Drazik has filed a formal motion,” he says.
I turn from the window.
“A motion to remove the intruder by clan force.” Soryth’s voice is even. “Filed this morning with the council recorder. It requires a session within twenty-four hours under the emergency provisions. He has seven signatures.”
Seven. The same number who came into the last session already knowing what Drazik was going to say.
He has been busy since yesterday’s session and he has been busy in the right rooms with the right dragons, and the motion is not going to pass.
I have the numbers against it if it comes to a formal vote, but that is not the point of it.
The point of it is the session itself. The point is putting me in front of the full council and making me defend an arrangement that I made unilaterally without council consultation on a security matter that Drazik has successfully framed as an island-wide concern.
The point is making me say, in front of everyone, why I have not removed her.
“He knows the arrangement I made,” I say.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Kael was on the northern approach this morning. Early.” Soryth pauses. “Earlier than his rotation requires.”
I look at the report on the table. Kael had been in the trees.
On the northern approach, which runs close enough to the spring depression that a dragon with good hearing would have caught the conversation.
The stone grain comment. Her thank you. Enough to confirm not only that I had been to the beach again but that the arrangement involved me going to her, which is a different and considerably more useful piece of information than the arrangement itself.
Drazik will know how to use it.
Kael’s rotation transfer is processed before the hour is out. No explanation given in the filing. None required. He will know why, and Vorath will draw the correct inference from it, and Drazik will draw his own inference from both of those things, which I am content for him to do.
“The session,” I say. “When.”
“Tomorrow midday. Which gives you —”
“One day.”
“One day,” Soryth confirms. “Before you must stand in that chamber and account for what you’ve decided and why.
Whatever you intend to say, I would suggest knowing the answer before you are in the room being asked it.
” He picks up the empty report folder with the unhurried air of an administrator who has delivered what he came to deliver and considers the rest my work to do.
“The motion will not pass. You have the numbers. But Drazik is not trying to win the vote. He is trying to win the room.”
He goes.
I stand in the war room with one day on the clock and Drazik’s motion on the table and the image of a scar on a forearm resting in warm water sitting in my chest where my certainty used to be, and My mind is already in the chamber tomorrow, in a room full of dragons who are watching to see whether six centuries of leadership has finally produced a crack wide enough to matter.
I think about her voice saying thank you in the steam above the spring.
What it means that of all the things currently demanding my attention, that is the one my mind returns to.
I do not reach a conclusion I am willing to write down. I pick up the survey records instead and open them to the western approach corridor and read the same degradation data I read yesterday, and this time I am not thinking about anything else at all.
Or so I tell myself.
The telling gets less convincing each time I try it.