Page 15 of Add To Hoard

“Nerina Ashvale,” I say. “Blackwake. Docks, mostly.” I tilt my head. “The name doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m sorry, is it supposed to?”

The gold eyes go very still.

I have the sudden and vivid impression of standing at the edge of a drop, and the impression is informative rather than frightening, which tells me something about the state of my threat-assessment faculties after two days without proper sleep. I know I should be more afraid of this man. I know it the way I know the centipedes were probably venomous, as a fact I have filed and chosen not to let change my immediate behavior.

“Leave,” he says. One word, flat and final, with six centuries of authority behind it.

“No,” I say. One word, equally flat, with twenty-four years of having nothing left to lose behind it.

The silence that follows is the kind that has weight and temperature.

Maelor Vhastyr, guardian of this island and everything on it, looks at me across ten feet of black volcanic sand with those gold predator eyes and I look back at him with the knife still in my hand and my feet planted and the brig at my back, and neither of us moves, and the island breathes around us both with the patient attention of something that has been waiting a very long time to see how this particular situation resolves itself.

It does not resolve itself today.

He turns, eventually, and walks back around the northern rock formation and out of sight. I listen until his footsteps are gone and then for a while after that.

Then I turn back to the provisions chest and find food, because whatever comes next, I am not facing it on an empty stomach.

8

MAELOR

Iwalk back through the forest at a pace that falls short of purposeful and stops short of directionless and is, if I am being precise about it, the pace of a dragon trying to outrun a conversation I am having with myself.

The trees close in behind me as I move away from the coast, the black-barked canopy thickening overhead until the light becomes the thin columnar kind that does not illuminate so much as suggest. I know this forest the way I know every part of the island, not consciously, not by memory exactly, but in the way the island knows itself and shares that knowledge with me through the connection that six centuries of guardianship has built between us. Every root formation, every thermal vent, every path the centipedes use in the wet season.

I know all of it.

I do not know what to do with a woman who looks at my eyes, clocks what they are, and asks me if I have anything to eat.

I replay the conversation with the detached analytical attention I apply to council disputes and territorial negotiations and every other situation that requires clear assessment uncontaminated by reaction. She had been unafraid. Not performing fearlessness, not the brittle bravado of someone suppressing terror — structurally unafraid, in the way of someone for whom fear has become a background condition so constant it no longer registers as a distinct sensation. She had looked at me as a problem she had not yet solved, not as a threat she needed to flee.

I had told her to leave.

She had said no.

One word. Flat. Final. No.

I had been told no before. I am not so isolated from reality that I imagine myself beyond contradiction. But there is no and then there is no said to my face on my own shore by someone who came to this island through the Varak Fog in a storm in a damaged brig alone, and whatever that second category is, I have not encountered it in six hundred years and it is sitting in my chest in a place I cannot locate precisely and refuse to examine directly.

I walk faster.

Soryth is in the upper archive when I find him, where he spends his mornings — surrounded by six centuries of accumulated records, the contented air stale around him of a politician who has found the one environment that fully suits him. He looks up when I enter and reads me in the first second with the thoroughness of four hundred years of practice, long past needing more than a glance.

He says nothing. He waits.

I cross to the window and stand with my back to the room, unusual for me, and Soryth will note and file it.

“The intruder has made landfall,” I say. “Western beach. She has secured her vessel and established a position. I made contact this morning.”

A pause from behind me. Paper being set down.

“In what form.”

“Human.”

Another pause, longer, with a quality of careful neutrality that I recognize as Soryth deciding how to handle what he has just been told.