Page 84 of Thexan

“Brynn.”

I turned at the sound of my name and found Callie Raines coming up the path from the lower houses with her youngest balanced on one hip and concern written plainly across her face. Callie had been in the settlement for almost two years, long enough that I trusted her judgment and long enough that she felt entitled to say what other people only whispered.

“I heard your last few weeks have been difficult,” she said.

“That’s one way to put it.”

Her gaze moved past me toward Thexan, then returned to my face. She didn’t ask the question directly, which told me how much restraint she was using.

“He’s not going to hurt anyone here,” I said.

“I believe you believe that.”

I almost smiled, though there wasn’t enough humor in the moment to carry it. “That’s not quite the same thing.”

“No,” she admitted. “It isn’t.”

Her little boy twisted in her arms to look toward Thexan, his eyes wide with the open curiosity adults learned to disguise. Callie adjusted her hold on him, not turning him away, but keeping him close.

“He looks like the old stories,” she said quietly.

I knew what she meant without asking. Everyone had stories from the war, even people who had been too young to remember the worst of it clearly. Mesaarkans were enemies in those stories, invaders, monsters from above, the faceless force that had broken cities and left survivors to build lives out of scraps.

Thexan was not faceless.

That might make this harder before it makes anything easier.

“He was hunted by his own people,” I said. “The ones who came after him would have killed anyone in their way.”

“And he stopped them.”

“Yes.”

Callie absorbed that, her gaze moving back to him with a different kind of caution now, not softer, exactly, but less simple.

“And he’s yours?” she asked.

The words were quiet enough that they didn’t carry, but they still went through me with a weight I couldn’t pretend not to feel.

“Yes.”

She studied my face, and whatever she saw there must have answered something for her, because the tension in her shoulders eased by a fraction.

“That was fast.”

“It was.”

“Are you all right?”

The question reached me more deeply than I expected. I hadn't been waiting for someone to ask, once she did I realized how much of the last day I had spent proving I knew what I was doing.

I looked back at Thexan.

He had turned slightly, not enough to break the conversation he was in, but enough that I knew he had registered the shift in me. He didn’t move toward me. He didn’t need to. The awareness between us steadied, subtle and immediate, and I found myself breathing more easily before I had consciously chosen to.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m all right.”

Callie followed my gaze, then looked back at me.