25. Maelor
MAELOR
Ispend the night working through every reason to refuse.
She would be in the chamber. Twenty-odd dragons in human form, all of them with six centuries of accumulated instinct about humans in rooms where they do not belong, and Drazik at his wall with his broken horn and the third ground written on the filing and his very good understanding of how to use a room.
She would be visible and she would be real and everything Drazik has been making abstract — ‘personal interest,’ ‘compromised judgment’ — would have a face.
I also work through what her testimony does.
She crossed the Varak Fog alone in a damaged brig with no charts and found the approach corridor by a route the survey records have never accounted for.
She repaired a structural failure the island had been carrying for two seasons in three days of work.
She survived the barrier weather and the island’s deterrent system and an assassination attempt in the western forest and she is still on the beach, still useful, still entirely herself.
Drazik’s ‘personal interest’ argument requires that my judgment regarding her is impaired.
A woman who walks into the council chamber and testifies with the calm precision of a woman who has navigated worse rooms than this one is not evidence of impaired judgment.
She is evidence of exactly the kind of judgment a guardian is supposed to exercise.
She removes the abstraction. She becomes real. And real is the one thing Drazik cannot easily argue against.
I go to the beach before she is fully awake.
She is at the fire, sitting with her knees drawn up and her coat around her shoulders and the stillness of a woman who did not sleep as much as she intended to. She hears me on the sand and looks up.
“I accept,” I say.
“I know,” she says.
“You couldn’t have known?”
“You were going to?” she says. “You just needed the night.” The corner of her mouth moves. “I’ve watched you work, May Lord. You always get there.”
I feel it in my chest and do not examine it in the cold morning air of the beach with the session three days out and the case still being built.
I examine it later, alone at the table, with the survey records in front of me and her voice in my head saying ‘you always get there’ in the tone of someone certain enough to mean it.
It is, I think, the most useful thing anyone has said to me in a very long time.