Page 41 of Add To Hoard

He said the arrangement holds. He said it twice. He sat beside me on the southern spur and watched the water and did not tell me what it cost because telling me would have meant letting me carry it, and he has not once, in all the time I have been on this beach, let me carry something he thought he could carry instead.

My hand has the knife in it. I do not remember taking it out. I am looking at the shelter wall and the knife is in my hand and the stone is warm in my pocket and Bren is across the sea and the healer is paid for and there is nothing keeping me here except the thing that has been keeping me here for days that I have been calling one more day one more day one more day as though the arithmetic of it might eventually produce a different answer.

It is not going to produce a different answer.

I know the answer. I have known it since the warm day when the island played my own words back to me and I heard the true one without the cover I had put over it. I have known it since the spring. I have known it with the certainty of things that are going to cost you something significant, from a slight distance, without looking directly, until the looking away becomes more effort than the looking.

I look at the wall.

Not yet.

But I look at it, and when I finally put the knife away I do not put it far.

20

NERINA

Igo into the forest the next morning because I want to. Still new enough that I notice it.

Not for materials. Not for the spring, not yet. I am not ready for the spring, not with everything Vaelka left on the beach still settling in me like sediment finding the bottom. I go because the forest has become, over the past ten days, a place I know, and knowing a place is not nothing. The root systems and the thin light and the mineral smell of it. Different twenty yards in than it sounds at the treeline. I go because I want to be inside something familiar that is not the beach, and that is reason enough.

I am moving roughly northeast, not quite toward the spring, following a root formation I have used before, when I hear the sound.

It is small. That is the thing about it. It is a very small sound, a displacement of air and leaf matter that is a fraction of a second wrong, and my body is moving before the sound has finished arriving. Eight years on the Blackwake docks, working before dawn in the dark among people who did not always have good intentions and a woman alone was a specific category of target — my body has been educated by that in ways my mind does not always have access to. I drop and turn and the thing that was behind me hits the root formation where my head was.

I run.

Looking back costs a step and a step is not available. The forest is dark and the root systems are uneven and I know this stretch but I do not know it well enough to run it flat out without watching my feet, and watching my feet means not watching what’s behind me, which is a problem I am managing by simply being faster than the alternative.

I am not, as it turns out, faster than the alternative.

A branch catches my left arm from behind, not a grip, a rake, something with edges, and opens a line of fire from elbow to wrist that tells me the damage is real before I have time to assess it. I keep running. The arm works. That is the information I need. I change direction by thirty degrees, cutting south toward where the beach should be, and the forest closes around me differently — denser, the root formations higher, and I realize with the cold clarity of a person who has just made a navigational error under pressure that I have gone the wrong way.

I stop behind the largest root formation I can find and put my back against it and get the knife out and breathe.

The forest is quiet. Not the ordinary quiet, the quiet of a creature that has also stopped moving and is now listening. I press my back into the root and look at my left arm and the damage is a long shallow rake, bleeding freely but not arterial, the kind of wound that will be a significant problem in an hour and a manageable one right now. I press my sleeve against it and hold it and think about direction.

I do not know which way the beach is.

This is, I think, with the flat clarity of a person past adrenalin and running on something thinner, a bad situation.

I hear her before I see her. Not the wrong sound this time — deliberate footsteps, unhurried, the particular quality of something moving through the forest that has no reason to be quiet because nothing in the forest is a threat to it.

She comes around the root formation and crouches in front of me with matter-of-fact efficiency, already past the part where she decides what to do about it.

She is young — young for what she is, which I am learning to read differently than young for what I am. Gold eyes, the same shade as his, the Vhastyr line running true. Smaller than him by a considerable measure, with the quick economy of movement of someone the world was not built to scale and who has made her peace with this. She looks at my arm, then at my face, then at the knife still in my hand.

“My cousin has told me very little about you,” she says. Her voice is warm in a way that nothing else on this island has been warm to me. “Very little, actually. But you’re human, you’re bleeding, and those are two different problems.” She reaches into the satchel at her hip without looking away from me. “Let me see the arm.”

I let her see the arm.

She works quickly and without fuss, the way people work when they know what they are doing and do not need you to know that they know it. Clean cloth, pressure, a salve from a small jar that stings considerably and smells of the island’s thermal water. I watch her hands and do not watch the treeline and after a moment I realize I have made the decision to trust her and cannot remember making it.

“Ysara,” she says, without looking up. “In case you were wondering.”

“I know who you are,” I say. “He mentioned you.”

She looks up at that, briefly, with an expression I cannot fully read. “Did he? That’s more than I expected.” She goes back to the arm. “It’s not deep. It will hurt for a week and then it will be a scar and then you’ll forget it was ever anything else. You’ve done this before.”