Page 42 of Add To Hoard

“Different circumstances.”

“Usually are.” She ties the binding off and sits back on her heels and watches me with eyes the same gold as his and not like his simultaneously, the same color, a different temperature. His look at you like an assessment. Hers look at you like a welcome. “Do you know what happened?”

“I have a working theory.”

“As do I,” she says. “And I’m not going to say it aloud because saying it aloud means having information I would then have to act on, and acting on it would make a complicated situation considerably more complicated.” She holds my eyes. “What I will say is that you should not go into the forest alone again. Not until this is settled.”

I want to argue with this. No argument.

She walks me back to the beach. At the treeline she stops, as though the boundary between forest and shore is one she has decided not to cross, and she looks at the cove with an expression I recognize from a different face, a dragon who has been watching the situation change from a distance and is not entirely sure how to feel about what it has changed into.

“He doesn’t talk about himself,” she says. Not to me exactly — more to the air between us. “He never has. Even when we were young, which for him was a very long time ago, he held things at a remove. The wars made it worse. Losing—” she stops. “There are things he lost that he has not put down. That he carries the way the island carries the old barrier damage — built into the structure, not a wound anymore, just… architecture.” She meets my eyes then. “You are the first thing in a very long time that has made him look like someone who might put something down.”

No words for this. I don’t try to find them.

“Whatever you decide,” Ysara says, “I’m glad you came here.” She says it simply, without decoration, the way true things are said when the person saying them is not trying to do anything with the truth except give it to you.

She goes back into the trees.

I walk down to the fire and I sit with my hands flat on my knees and wait for them to stop shaking, and they do, eventually, and the stone in my pocket is warm and the bound arm aches and the shelter wall is twenty feet behind me and I do not look at it.

I do not need to look at it. I already know what I am going to write.

21

MAELOR

The rider finds me at the table mid-morning. Young, nervous, with the careful language of a junior officer who spent the walk from the western patrol post deciding exactly how much to say.

He says enough.

I read the account once. An incident in the western forest, northeast quadrant, early morning. Signs of pursuit through the root systems — disturbed ground, a direction change, evidence of contact. Blood on a root formation, human blood in the quantity of a wound that was serious but not fatal. The trail ends at the beach treeline.

I set the account down.

I know what it was. I know who would have had to not-prevent it. These are not two separate conclusions that require working toward. They arrive together, fully formed, in the space of a breath, because I have known since the archive doorway that Soryth and I were carrying something between us that had not yet been named and would eventually need to be.

“She is on the beach,” I say. Not a question. The rider would not be standing in my war room if she were not.

“Yes, my lord. Ysara found her. The wound has been dressed.”

“You will say nothing of this to anyone. The account does not go to the general record. Bring it to me directly if anything further develops from the western patrol.” I keep my voice even. “That will be all.”

He goes.

Kael and Vorath are removed from the western patrol rotation before the hour is out. The filing notes a scheduling conflict. It does not note anything else. They will know why. Drazik will know why. That is sufficient.

I stand in the war room and I breathe. My hands are not to be trusted with objects just now, and I keep them off the table.

I find Soryth in the archive.

He is at the long table with the barrier survey records, which is where he always is, the work continuing because it does not pause for anything. He looks up when I appear in the doorway. He reads me in the first second, thoroughly as always, and what he reads makes him set down the record in his hands with a deliberateness that is itself a kind of answer.

We look at each other across the archive.

Four centuries. Four hundred years of the same work in the same rooms, the same arguments and the same concessions, the same island held between us, jointly responsible for it and jointly afraid of losing. I know this dragon the way I know the barrier records, not just the surface, the pattern beneath the surface, how the degradation runs and where it started and what it will cost if it isn’t addressed.

I know what he was willing to do.