Page 18 of Add To Hoard

I set that thought aside and keep walking.

The tideline tells me things. Wreckage, mostly — old wreckage, so old it has been smoothed and darkened by decades of tide until it barely reads as wood anymore, but I know what it is because I have spent eight years on docks and know the grain of worked timber even when the sea has had years to argue with it. Ships have come here before. Not recently. Not successfully. The pieces are small and scattered and intermixed with the grit in a way that suggests the sea has been turning them over for a very long time, and I walk past them without stopping because there is nothing useful in what they tell me and no reminder needed.

I already know what happens to ships that come here.

Mine is still floating. That is the relevant data point.

Further along the northern rock formation I find the first thing worth noting, a section of the basalt face where the stone has cracked along a fault line and shifted, opening a gap at the base wide enough to lose footing in if you weren’t watching. The crack runs up the face for twenty feet and at the top the overhang has separated from the main rock by three fingers’ width. It has been like this for a while, judging by the moss colonizing the gap, but it has not been like this forever, and the next significant storm that hits this cove with the right angle will bring that overhang down onto the beach.

Onto the section of beach where the mooring lines from the ‘Tenacious’ are anchored.

I make a note of this with the part of my mind that keeps track of things that could kill me.

Further still, at the point where the northern formation meets the treeline, I find the second thing, a freshwater seep running down the rock face from somewhere above, thin but consistent, collecting in a natural basin at the base before overflowing into the sand. Clean water. Cold. I cup my hands and drink and then sit back on my heels and look at the basin and think about how long I have been here and how much water I have left in the brig’s casks and do the arithmetic that dock workers always do, the arithmetic of how long things will last.

Long enough, if I am careful. Longer, with this.

I’m on my way back to the fire when I hear the footsteps again.

He comes from the same direction as before, the northern end of the beach, around the rock formation, and I have enough warning this time to be standing with my arms crossed and my expression arranged into something between waiting and ready when he comes around the corner and stops.

He looks different in full daylight. Not less intimidating, the eyes and the height and the particular quality of his stillness are not things that daylight diminishes, but more legible. I can see the burn scars more clearly now, the silver-white of them running from his jaw down into his collar, old damage that has had centuries to settle into the geography of him. I can see where the black hair is threaded through with silver at the temples, not age exactly but close enough. I can see that his coat is well-made and very dark and is cut for a climate considerably colder than this beach currently is, meaning he dressed for the Spire and walked down anyway. Coming back here was not an impulse.

He came back deliberately.

I find this more interesting than alarming. Probably a personal failing.

“You’re still here,” he says.

“You noticed,” I say. “I’ve been busy. Did you want a report?”

The gold eyes do the thing they did this morning, that fractional recalibration, the adjustment of a creature who keeps expecting a different kind of response and keeps not getting it. He crosses the beach toward me at the same unhurried pace as before, stops at the same distance as before, and looks at me with the full weight of whatever six centuries accumulates in a gaze.

I have been looked at by men who thought their attention was a gift my whole life. I am not unfamiliar with the experience of being assessed. I wait.

“Why are you here?” Not the same question as this morning’s, that one was territorial, a statement wearing a question’s shape. This one wants an actual answer.

I consider him for a moment. The truth is the only leverage I have, and leverage is only useful if you deploy it correctly, so I take my time deciding on the deployment.

“I have a brother,” I say. “He’s fifteen. His lungs have been failing for three years and the treatments that would actually stop it cost more than I can earn in a decade of dock work. I was told, by someone who had no reason to lie about it because they were drunk and talking to someone else, that a single jewel from a dragon’s hoard could buy a harbor town.” I tilt my head. “I need considerably less than a harbor town. I need enough to pay a healer in the inland kingdoms who has a treatment that works.”

I say it the way I would state any other problem requiring a practical solution. Not performing composure, not suppressing anything — simply presenting the facts in the order they are relevant. Bren is not my wound. Bren is my reason, which is a different thing. My reason has kept me standing on docks before dawn in driving rain for eight years without breaking, and it brought me through the Varak Fog, and it is keeping my feet planted on this shore right now while a creature old enough to have watched civilizations rise and fall watches me with those predator eyes and decides what to do with me.

I am not weak because I love my brother. I am here because of it.

Maelor looks at me. Something moves behind his eyes that I cannot read.

“That is not my concern,” he says.

“I know,” I say. “I’m not asking you to make it your concern. I’m explaining why I’m here and why I’m not leaving.”

The silence has a quality of pressure to it. The island is doing the thing it does, that dense awareness, that sense of being inside something that is paying attention, and the man in front of me is doing his own version of the same thing, and I am standing in the middle of both and keeping my weight on my back foot the way my body does when it is preparing for something without asking my permission first.

He takes one step closer. Not a threat, not yet, but a renegotiation of the distance between us that he controls and I do not.

“Let me be precise,” he says, and his voice has dropped into a register that I feel more than hear, felt more than heard, the way bass notes carry in a large empty space. “I could put you on that vessel right now. I could walk you to it and put you in it and push you into the tide, and the fog corridor would close behind you, and the currents in the outer approaches would take whatever heading you set and unset it, and the sea out there is very large and very cold and very indifferent to the particular needs of one coastal brig.” He pauses. “The tides of time would forget you were ever here. I would manage it before morning.”

He says it without heat. That is the part that lands.