Page 12 of Fierce Highland Guardian

I turned around.

She was at the mouth of the stair, white, her hand out toward me, already shaking her head—she’d seen the page, she’d read it upside down, she was quick, she was always so quick.

“Craig —”

“You led them here.” Four words. Flat. Cold as the rock. “You put it in writing and you sent it out to be found.”

“I didn’t—that was months ago, I didn’t know you existed—”

“You never do.” I heard the thing come out of me and could not stop it, three centuries old and cruel as the grave. “The clever ones. You measure and you catalog and you send it out into the world, and you never once think what comes walking up the road behind it.”

It struck home. I watched it go into her like a blade finding the exact old seam, some wound I’d never been told about splitting clean open.

I didn’t stop.

I stepped away from her. Toward the Stone, toward the thing I was made to guard, and I put the whole cold width of the chamber between us—between me and the one soul down here who’d never once wanted to take a thing from me.

Behind me, Locke murmured to the man at his shoulder, “Now, Reeve.”

And boots came down the stair in a flood, lamps swinging, and I turned back too late—too far, too slow—as a torch beam swept the emptied floor and stopped, and pinned her there.

Alone. In the middle of the chamber. Exactly where I’d left her.

CHAPTER NINE

The Map She Drew - Fiona

Fortwoyearstherefrain of my marriage was that I was too careful to really be alive. Now a three-hundred-year-old dragon faced me across a cave and called me reckless enough to have killed him.

Both of them can’t be right. That’s the thought that broke something. Both of them can’t be right, and I’ve spent my whole life believing whichever one was in the room.

“Those readings were routine.” My voice came out shaking and too fast. “I upload everything, I upload it before I’ve even looked at it properly, it’s the archive, it’spublic, I did it months before I ever—”Before I ever saw you come out of the sea. Before any of this had a face.“I didn’t draw anyone a map. I did my job, and I put it where I put everything, and I would never—”

“Enough.” Locke, mild as a man declining a second cup of coffee. “Reeve.”

The grip came, and then didn’t quite arrive—sliding, a hand reaching for a handle that wasn’t where his eyes said it was. At my throat the little silver thistle went from cool to hot, a coalagainst my collarbone, and Reeve frowned at his own hand and adjusted and took my elbow instead, harder.

They walked me to the edge of a chalk circle I hadn’t seen them draw. Salt at its border, white and coarse. Locke opened his notebook on his knee and began to read, not Latin exactly, older, uglier words that hurt the ear like a wire drawn across teeth.

And here is where the training I’d spent fifteen years hating finally earned its keep, because I looked at what they were doing and Iunderstoodit, the way I understand a trench section—layer on layer, cause under effect. The salt to break a boundary. The circle to bind what the boundary held. The invocation not to summon anything but toturnsomething already here, to take the wards Craig had spent three centuries anchoring and crank their own force backward against the thing they protected. It was elegant and it was obscene and it was, unmistakably, working. Fifteen years of being told I saw too much, that I read meaning into stone that wasn’t there—and the one time it would have been a mercy to be wrong, I was dead right. I could read this the way I read everything. That was the curse of me, and it had never once felt more like a curse than now.

The Stone answered wrong.

Its slow red pulse stuttered, quickened, went shrill. And across the chamber, Craig—

Craig flickered.

I want to be precise, because it’s the last thing I have. He didn’t stagger. Hethinned—for half a second he went to smoke at the edges, the torchlight showing through him, and then he was solid again and gasping, and the Stone shrieked its wrong note, and he thinned again in perfect time with it.

In perfect time with it.

And every strange thing I’d filed and refused to read finally spoke at once. The sour note under the floor. The flicker in the light when I’d reached for the Stone and his jaw had gone tight.It’s souring because I’m not enough, and I never could have been.The sentence with its worst half bitten off. He hadn’t been guarding a treasure. He’d beenchainedto it. They were one thing—one pulse, one life—and it had been drinking him down in the dark for three hundred years, and I’d stood in front of that wall of grief and never understood I was reading a man being slowly buried alive.

He was dying. He’d been dying the whole time. And the ritual wasn’t stealing the Stone.

It was tearing him out by the root.

Here is where the woman I’d been for a decade laid it out for me, cool and clear as she always did.Look at the door. There it is. The passage is open, the track is clear, and seven hundred miles south there’s a small safe life with your name on it. Comply. Go small. Get out. Be alive to grieve him later.