Page 27 of Add To Hoard

It makes him look less like authority and more like a person.

I find this significantly more dangerous than the authority.

“You know,” I say, “I get that you’re used to being the one who gives the orders. But this shelter isn’t building itself and you’ve got those broad shoulders doing nothing useful. There’s driftwood behind you.”

He turns and looks at me with an expression I have not seen on him before. Not the authority register. Not the recalibration. Something that is slower than both of those, and warmer, the expression of something that has been very still for a very long time beginning to move.

“Broad shoulders,” he repeats.

“Structurally,” I say. “I’m making a practical observation.”

“Of course.”

“About load-bearing capacity.”

“Naturally.”

His voice has dropped into a register I have not heard before and the rain is loud on the rock above us and the shelter is small and the warmth coming off him is doing something to the cold of the air between us and I am looking up at him because there is nowhere else to look and he is looking down at me with those gold eyes that have stopped doing the recalibration and started doing something else entirely and the practical observation I was making has entirely vacated the premises.

I become aware that my back is against the rock face.

I become aware that I put it there.

I become aware that I am not moving away from it.

“Nerina,” he says. Just my name. Not ‘little lass’. Not ‘you’. My name, in that dropped register, with the rain running off the rock above us and the storm making its case outside and the firelight from the rebuilt fire catching the wet bronze of his skin and the silver of his hair and the gold of his eyes all at once.

I have been rained on and worked half to death and this island has been trying to discourage me since I arrived and I am on the wrong side of three days of insufficient sleep and I am looking up at Maelor Vhastyr, Lord of the Black Spire, who came back to the beach when he didn’t have to and fixed my wedge and ran my stern line in a storm and said my name like it was something worth saying, and the dormant thing that woke up in the hot spring yesterday is no longer dormant and is no longer a thing I am managing.

I reach up and put my hand against the burn scars at his throat.

He goes very still.

Not the controlled stillness of authority. The stillness of something that was not expecting to be touched and has stopped everything it was doing to be present for it.

“How far down do they go,” I say. Quietly. Not a challenge. Just the question I have been not asking since the first day on the beach.

His eyes do something I have never seen them do before.

“Further than you can see from here,” he says.

I reach for the lapels of his coat and push it back off his shoulders. Not a request. He lets it go. The shirt underneath is dark and simple and I take the hem of it and pull it over his head and he raises his arms and lets me do that too, and then he is bare to the waist in the firelight and I look at him the way I look at things I am trying to understand properly.

The burn scars run further than I thought. From the jaw down the throat, across the left collarbone, branching into the chest in the way of old fire damage that had time and reach before it was stopped. I reach out and trace the line of them with my fingers, not tentatively, not with performance, the same calm directness I bring to everything — following the raised skin from his throat down past the collarbone and flat against his chest where the scarring fades into the bronze of him.

My fingers rest there.

“Does it hurt,” I ask. Sincerely.

“Not anymore,” he says. “But I recall the pain sometimes.”

I lean in and press my lips against the scar at his throat. Hold them there for a moment. Then I pull back and look at his eyes, the gold of them shimmering amber in the firelight, and my expression has come down from the register I usually keep it at.

“The phantom pain,” I say. “I know it well.” My hand moves to my forearm without my directing it, thumb finding the hook-catch scar the way it always does.

He looks at me. Something is building in his eyes that I have not seen there before and do not have a name for and do not need one.

My hand returns to his chest, palm flat against the skin. “Any others.”