Page 13 of Beyond the Fracture

His head turned, as if he did not expect her reaction. “Do you speak because you believe it,” he asked softly, “or because you want to?”

“I saw it,” she said. Her throat was dry, but she forced the words out and some unhinged part of her seized on saying it. “The crowd struck first. He didn’t fight back. That isn’t monstrous.”

Something flickered across his face as he sighed. “Your people see the shape of shadow and assume it hides teeth. I could bleed in their streets and they would call the blood their own.”

Her fingers hovered before she could think better of it, drifting toward the chain at his wrist almost in sympathy, stopping just short of contact. She could feel the cold coming off the silver before her skin ever reached it. Yet somehow her fingertips felt on fire. She had never stood this close to something she had been taught to fear.

He looked at her hand, sharp and with warning. His fingers flexed once against the links, but he didn’t pull away.

His lack of reaction made her pull back abruptly, her breath audibly shaking. She hated when she could hear herself hesitate.

Caelith turned back to the fragments, as though she were no more than another scribe hovering at his shoulder. The hall settled into stillness, and the heat stayed in Maia’s face. She could feel his gaze lingering on her, even after it was gone.

***

By nightfall, that stillness had deepened.

The lamps burned low, their flames thin and restless beneath the glass, shadows trembling along the marble floor. The other scribes had long gone, but Maia had felt obliged to stay.

The Umbralyn stood apart at the far table, his pale skin still shimmering slightly in the dim lamplight.

Maia’s quill scratched a line across the parchment, meaningless. She set it aside as she watched him again.

“Why are you still here?” she asked at last. The question slipped out, small and human, swallowed quickly by the vaulted dark.

Caelith did not look up at once. When he did, his eyes gleamed like cut metal. “To read what you cannot.”

Her throat tightened. “But why you? Why, when you’re— Surely one could have come without—” her eyes flicked to the chains “—these.”

There was a pause long enough for the flame to waver.

“The Elders prefer a leash on anything they do not trust,” he said. The words carried an old bitterness that made her feel something unfamiliar.

She thought for a moment. “And what is it they do not trust?”

He tilted his head up to look at her fully, but then he looked back down at the fragments, continuing to study her translations.

The lack of reply felt as heavy as a dropped stone. She flushed in embarrassment and looked back to the fragments. “Can you read what they say?” she asked, quieter this time.

He regarded her in a silence that felt deliberate. At last, he spoke. “They speak of the bleeding of glass. Of vows faltering. Of what stirs within the scar.”

Maia’s skin pricked. It was what she had thought.

She looked back down at the fragment in front of her. The same four marks she’d been circling all week, the ones that refused to resolve into anything her eye could hold.

The spelling follows the mouth, not the page.

She sounded the marks out under her breath the way her father had made her do with the coastal contracts. Not reading them, only letting her mouth find the shape the hand had left. The first two came out as nothing at all. The third caught somewhere behind her teeth and became a sound she had not intended to make.

The chains stopped.

She looked up. Caelith had gone still. “Say that again,” he whispered.

She said it again, worse the second time, self-conscious now. He listened with his head slightly turned.

“Where did you learn that?”

“I just guessed.” Her face was hot. “I—I don’t think it’s a word, it’s only how the strokes—”