Page 20 of Add To Hoard

Aevyn.

I do not say it aloud. I have not said it aloud in longer than I have been counting. Not an accident. Some names become load-bearing over time, the longer you do not say them the more weight accumulates around the silence, and eventually the silence itself is the memorial, and disturbing it feels like disturbing something that has finally found a way to rest.

But the current is running and I cannot stop it now that it has started.

Aevyn had amber hair. Not the same shade as the woman on the beach — Aevyn’s had been lighter, summer-warm, the color of the sky at the horizon before dawn when the dark has already started to give way and the light has not quite arrived. Nerina Ashvale’s is darker, richer, the color of autumn bark or deep-steeped hearthwater, salt-tangled and practical. They are not the same. I am not confusing them. I am aware, with the precision of six centuries of careful attention, that they are two entirely different people separated by an expanse of time and circumstance so vast it should make comparison impossible.

And yet.

Aevyn had also said no to me. That is the thread. Not the hair, not the face, not any physical resemblance, the no. The flat, unornamented refusal delivered without apology or performance, the refusal of a person who has decided and does not require my agreement with it. I had not known what to do with it then either. I had been younger, which for a dragon means a different thing than it means for anything else — younger in the sense of having centuries still ahead that felt different from the centuries already behind, years that had not yet accumulated the particular weight of things lost inside them.

I had not managed it well, the no. I had pushed. I had used the full authority of what I was and what I commanded, and Aevyn had looked at me with those clear eyes and said the word again, simply, and then the wars had come and the wars had not cared about the argument we were in the middle of or about anything else I had been in the middle of, and afterward there was no afterward to return to.

There is a version of the grief that I have carried for so long it has become structural, not a wound, not an ache, simply part of the architecture of who I am, the way the burn scars are part of the architecture of my body. I do not feel it sharply most days. I feel it the way you feel the weight of a coat you have been wearing for so long you have stopped registering it as separate from yourself.

I am feeling it sharply today.

I do not examine why. I already know why, and knowing is sufficient. Examination is a luxury I am not going to extend to myself.

I close the survey log and stack the records and go to find Soryth.

The elder is in the lower corridor outside the council chamber, meaning he has been near the council chamber. Monitoring the situation. I fall into step beside him without preamble.

“Drazik,” I say.

“Drazik,” Soryth confirms. “He held a gathering in the eastern hall this morning. Informally. Eleven attended. Kael and Vorath were there, as expected. Three others from the outer patrol rotations I would not have predicted.” He pauses. “He is framing the intruder situation as evidence of systemic failure. The argument is gaining texture.”

“The barrier degradation is real,” I say. “I’ve been through the survey records. Two hundred and forty years of it. The pattern is consistent.”

Soryth absorbs this without visible reaction. He already knew and has been waiting for me to arrive at it independently. “What will you do?”

“Address it directly. Before Drazik can use it as a platform. If I bring the degradation data to the full council with a remediation proposal, I remove his ammunition.” I keep my voice level. “It also requires me to acknowledge that the maintenance has been insufficient, which he will use regardless. But acknowledged openly it is a problem being solved. Left for him to surface it becomes a failure of leadership.”

Soryth nods slowly. “And the human woman.”

“I’ve made an arrangement with her.” I say it without preface because preface would suggest I am uncertain about having done it, which I am not going to perform in a corridor. “Three days. She works, demonstrates good faith, and at the end of it I assess whether the terms she proposed are viable. Labour in exchange for a single stone from the outer hoard cache.”

Soryth lets our footsteps fill the silence between us, unhurried on the stone floor.

“And when the three days are finished,” he says. His voice is even. Procedural. “The arrangement concludes. She goes. Cleanly, without incident, without the council requiring a formal resolution.”

It is not a question. It has the shape of something being confirmed.

“She goes,” I say.

“Good,” the elder says.

Soryth looks ahead, settled and unrevealing, having said exactly what he intended and intending nothing further on the subject. His ember eyes are forward, calm, giving nothing. I have known him for four centuries and I cannot read, in this moment, whether the ‘good’ is for her staying three days or for the certainty of her going at the end of them. Both, perhaps. Soryth has always been comfortable holding two things at once when the island requires it.

“You’re not going to qualify that?”

“No.”

“Or explain it.”

“No.” Soryth glances at me sideways with those four centuries of accumulated accuracy. “You already know what I would say. I see no reason to use words on something you’re already thinking.” He turns toward the archive stair. “Get some sleep. You look like a dragon who has been reading survey logs for three hours and thinking about something else entirely for two of them.”

He goes up the stairs without looking back.