Chapter Twenty Mathias #2
That evening, she said nothing when he came for her.
She simply rose as he unlatched the door and allowed him to lead her out beneath the bruising sky, the rope hanging loose between them.
By the broken beams, she sank to the stone without a word, legs drawn up, arms looped around her knees, the draught tugging strands of her hair like thread slipping from a loom.
Mathias settled beside her – not close, not far – the rope tracing a soft arc between them, forgotten for now.
The sea outside rolled in its endless rhythm, and for a long time, they just sat there, their eyes upward, scanning the skies.
Then she said, “Your people think I’m going to gut this town in its sleep.”
Mathias glanced at her with an unintentional smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Are they wrong?”
“I haven’t a knife to gut anyone right now.” She adjusted her grip on her knees. “They think you’re dangerous too. One of them called you a ‘Seer bastard’.”
His jaw tightened. “That’s… pretty accurate, actually.”
“So, you are one?”
Mathias paused before answering, his shoulders tensing. His voice, when it came, was rough and edged with effort. “Yes.”
Her eyes measured the stars above them; then slowly, they turned to measure him, as if she were weighing his words. “What’s it like?”
The question caught Mathias off guard, not because it was cruel, but because it was the first time anyone had thought to ask.
And because no one had, he’d never had to put it into words.
Never had to explain what it was like, carrying something that kept stealing pieces of his life, little by little, leaving less of himself behind each time it came.
“It hurts,” he said. “Sometimes it’s a sharp, sudden pain, like a punch or something driving through the side of your skull.
But more often, it’s a kind of heat. A pressure.
A fire pressing in behind my eyes. Some days, I can feel it building for hours.
Other times, it’s there all at once without warning. ”
He let out a breath and dragged a hand down the side of his face.
“And it never asks. That’s the worst part.
You don’t call for it. You don’t prepare for it.
It just comes – in the middle of a sentence, while you’re walking, or half-asleep with your pants still on.
You’re in one place, and then you’re somewhere else, and the world keeps moving without you. ”
His voice didn’t rise, but there was something tight in it now, stretched thin between memory and confession.
“What you see isn’t always the same. Sometimes it’s something that’s happening, somewhere far off.
Sometimes it’s something that might come to pass – or might not.
And most of the time, you don’t know which is which.
They don’t come with designations. Just flashes, scattered and unfinished, like pages ripped out of someone else’s story. ”
His last words came out with a shuddering breath: “Except the first one. That’s always clear. You know exactly what it is.”
He suddenly felt her eyes – those oval pools matching the midnight sky above them – on him, intense and awed. “What’s the first one?”
“The first vision every Seer has,” he said quietly, “is how they die.”
She went still, her face unreadable in the half-light. “And there’s no way to guide it? No choosing what comes?”
He exhaled, the sound dry and worn at the edges. “If there is, no one’s told me. It comes when it wants. Shows what it wants.”
After a moment, she said, “That’s a shame. Could’ve made things easier.”
Mathias let out a dry breath of a laugh. “Would’ve made a lot of things a lot easier.”
“I meant for you.”
She shifted beside him, not touching, but close enough that he felt the shape of her warmth against his shoulder – not her, exactly, but the space she took up in the cold.
“Oh. Yeah. Me too.”
That pulled something close to a smile from her, brief and sharp. The wind shifted. The moment loosened.
She was quiet for a while after that, gaze drifting back to the sky. Then, softly – almost like she was speaking to the stars, not him – she said, “I know something about people only seeing what they think should be there.”
Mathias turned but didn’t interrupt.
“They used to look at me and expect to see fire. Said it would come with time.” Her mouth pulled to the side – not quite a smile, just something crooked and bitter that didn’t last. “And when it didn’t, they looked again—and all they saw was the absence of it.
As if the lack made me smaller. As if that was the only measure that ever mattered.
Turns out, even the right blood isn’t enough when it runs quiet. ”
She didn’t look at him when she spoke next. “You’re hoping keeping me here will change something.”
Mathias didn’t answer, but she wasn’t expecting him to.
“For the war. For your town. Maybe even the whole cursed continent, if you’re feeling ambitious.” Her tone was almost careless, but there was steel under it – not cruel, just tired. “You’re betting a lot on someone who couldn’t even master her own birthright.”
Her words lingered, settling into the space between them like ash—the kind that clings long after the fire’s gone.
Wind scraped along the stones at their backs, pulling their warmth from them.
Somewhere behind the cloudbank, the moon had begun to rise, pale and misshapen.
She didn’t shift again, didn’t pull away.
Just sat there beside him, quiet now, the weight of expectation and consequence pressed into the space they shared.
“General…” Mathias started, not really sure what he was about to say but determined to say it nonetheless.
“Ara,” she said, before he could finish. “You should call me Ara.”
The name fell into the shadows like something placed, not given – deliberate, unadorned. Mathias held it for a moment, then nodded once, slow.
“Ara.”
Behind them, just beyond the broken threshold of the temple, Maeve stood without sound.
Her face was unreadable in the dark, the wind tugging at the edge of her sleeves.
She hadn’t meant to linger. But when their voices had carried – low, stripped of performance – something in her had stilled.
She remained there long after they fell silent, her gaze fixed, her fingers curling slowly around the pearl hilt hidden deep in her pocket.
Each day she had tended the soldier—seen the mark, heard her voice, watched the way she moved through pain with the control of someone who’d had to learn it early.
And each day, the sharp end of certainty crept closer.
It wasn’t fear that held Maeve back, but the knowledge that if she spoke too soon – if she was wrong – the cost would be immeasurable.
So, she waited, still as the stone beneath her feet, the weight of the dagger grounding her hand, the truth not yet ready to be spoken aloud.