Page 43 of Add To Hoard

I know why.

The why is not comfort and it is not excuse and it is not something I am going to set aside because the logic of it is internally consistent. Soryth has spent seven centuries with one priority and that priority is not me and it has never been me. It is the island. It has always been the island. I have always known this and I have always valued it because a guardian who prioritizes his own interests over his charge is a guardian who will eventually fail the charge, and Soryth has kept me honest about that distinction for four hundred years.

He made the calculation that the island required.

She nearly died because of it.

The silence in the archive is load-bearing. Neither of us speaks because speaking would force a confrontation that neither of us can afford right now and both of us know it. If I name it, I have to act on the naming. If he defends it, he has to defend it out loud, in the open air, where the defense would require him to say that her life is worth less than the island’s stability, which is what he believes and which I cannot hear said aloud in a voice I have trusted for four centuries.

So we do not say it.

He picks up the record. He goes back to work. I stand in the doorway for a moment longer and then I turn and walk down through the Spire, and what I carry with me is not forgiveness and it is not fury. It is the weight of knowing exactly what the thing I have built my life around is capable of, and choosing to keep building anyway, because the alternative is a thing I cannot yet fully see the shape of.

I can almost see it.

At the water’s edge when I reach the beach. Standing with her boots in the tide, weight forward, chin up, eyes on the middle distance. She hears my footsteps on the sand and turns, and I see the bound arm before I see her face, and it does something in my chest that I do not catalogue because cataloguing it would mean giving it a name and the name is too large for the middle of a beach in the afternoon with the work of the Spire still waiting at my back.

She looks at my face. She reads it with the accuracy she has developed over eleven days of reading me across distances I have been trying to maintain and failing to.

“Ysara found me,” she says. “I’m all right.”

“I know.”

“The arm is fine. It’ll scar.” The corner of her mouth moves. “Adding it to the collection.”

I sit beside her on the sand because my legs have decided this is what we are doing and I am not in a position to argue with them. We are both looking at the water. The ‘Tenacious’ rocks in its lines with the steady patience of a hull accustomed to waiting. The afternoon light does what it does here, diffused and even, turning the dark sand gold at the tideline.

She does not ask me who. I do not tell her. The shape of what we both know sits between us with the weight of the thing in the archive, and neither of us picks it up, and the tide moves in and out with its ordinary indifference to the things humans and dragons carry on beaches.

“I’m not going into the forest alone again,” she says. “Ysara was very clear about that.”

“Ysara is usually clear.”

“She’s good. You didn’t tell me she was good.”

“You didn’t ask?”

She snorts.

The sound of it lands in the afternoon unexpected, specifically, more welcome than I have words for. I look at her profile. The salt-tangled hair, the line of her jaw, the bound arm resting across her knees. Alive. Sitting here on this beach alive and complaining about my failure to enumerate Ysara’s qualities, which is the most Nerina Ashvale thing that has ever happened, and I have been on this beach for eleven days watching her be exactly herself in every condition the island has thrown at her and I am still not accustomed to it.

Accustoming seems unlikely.

I think, with the sudden clarity of a conclusion arriving rather than being reasoned toward, that I do not want to become accustomed to it. That the not-accustomed is the thing. That six centuries of the same walls and the same window and the same work has produced, in me, a capacity for this specific kind of surprise that I did not know I still had, and she is the only thing that has found it, and the thought of it going back to sleep when she leaves is the most clearly I have understood, in eleven days of understanding things I was not prepared to understand, what the next thing is.

We sit until the light changes. Neither of us moves toward the brig. Neither of us mentions the morning. We are two people on a beach in the late afternoon and she is alive and I am beside her and the island is still around us both and for now, for this hour, that is sufficient.

It is not going to be sufficient for much longer. We both know this. We are not saying it yet.

22

NERINA

Igo to the spring in the afternoon, two days after the forest.

Not impulsively. I have been thinking about it since I sat at the fire with my hands flat on my knees waiting for them to stop shaking, since I looked at the shelter wall and knew what I was going to write on it. The thinking has not been complicated. It has been the kind of clarity that arrives after everything else has been stripped away — after the arithmetic and the arrangement and the one more day and Vaelka’s precise accounting of what my presence here costs. What is left, when you remove all of that, is simple. Simpler than I am usually comfortable with.

I take the path I know, not northeast, and I move through the trees with the careful attention of a navigator who learned this forest matters and carries the scar to prove it. The spring announces itself ahead of sight — thermal water and mineral warmth on the air, the smell of the island’s deep heat rising through the rock. I follow it.