Beneath The Blood Moon

What He Wanted

"He's right there," Sofia said. "At the mouth of the ravine."

Zayn's head turned before she'd finished the sentence, and she watched the fury move across his face like weather, fast, total, and immediately controlled back down into something usable.

"Hold position," he told Sera, and broke from the fighting toward the ravine mouth at a dead run.

Voss didn't move.

He stood with his hands folded behind his back, pale eyes tracking Zayn's approach with the same unhurried attention he'd given the whole engagement, and when Zayn closed the final distance and reached for his blade, Voss simply raised one hand.

"Before you do something regrettable," Voss said, "you should know that killing me here accomplishes nothing. I'm not the strategist behind tonight. I'm the observer."

Zayn's blade stayed drawn, but he stopped moving. "Explain that before I decide it isn't worth hearing."

"Your response to a direct threat against your own safety," Voss said, gesturing loosely at the chaos still resolving behind him, at Sofia's silhouette on the ridge above. "How fast you moved to protect her. How willing you were to be separated from the column to do it. How the vessel responded when the threat became specific to you rather than to herself." He smiled, thin and cold. "Every piece of that is useful information, Your Majesty, and I've gathered a great deal of it tonight for a price considerably lower than an army."

"You sacrificed eighteen men to learn how fast I run," Zayn said, disbelief edging into his voice despite himself.

"I sacrificed nothing. They were paid, and most of them will survive to be paid again." Voss's eyes moved past Zayn, up to the ridge, finding Sofia even at that distance with unsettling precision. "She used a new frequency tonight. I don't believe she's used it before. That, too, is useful."

Sofia had made her way down from the ridge by then, Eli close behind her, and she arrived at Zayn's shoulder in time to hear the last of it, and something cold settled into her chest that had nothing to do with the gold's spent reserves.

"You're studying us," she said.

"I'm studying you," Voss corrected, mild. "The king I understand completely. Six years of watching him make the same category of decision under pressure taught me everything useful about him a decade ago. You, however, are new. Unpredictable. I find that I need considerably more data before I can plan around you properly."

"Then you've wasted your night," Zayn said. "Because the only thing you've confirmed is that we survive whatever you send."

"Tonight, yes." Voss inclined his head, almost courteous. "I don't expect to win tonight. I expect to learn, and I have learned a great deal, and I intend to keep learning until the picture is complete enough to act on." His eyes flicked once more to Sofia's wrist, to the dimmed gold there. "The new frequency interests me particularly. I wonder if you know yet what it means that it appeared."

"Get out of my sight," Zayn said, low, dangerous.

"I'm already leaving." Voss stepped back, unhurried, into the tree line's shadow. "Give my regards to the palace, Your Majesty. I hear it's lovely this time of year, and I understand you'll be arriving there rather soon."

He was gone before either of them could decide whether pursuing him was worth the ground it would cost.

Sera reached them a moment later, breathing hard, a shallow cut along one forearm that she hadn't bothered to acknowledge yet. "Six of theirs dead, four of ours wounded, none critical," she reported. "They broke off the moment Voss called them back. This wasn't meant to be a real fight."

"No," Sofia said. "It was meant to be a test."

Eli had gone very still beside her, the particular stillness that meant his mind had already moved three steps ahead of the conversation.

"The new frequency," he said quietly. "I need to know what that was. Voss noticed it before I could even name it, and if he's already building theories around it, we're behind before we've started."

Sofia looked down at her wrist. The gold sat low and quiet now, spent, ordinary again in the grey morning light, giving no indication of what it had produced in the ravine or why. She thought about the light that hadn't been silver and hadn't been quite gold, something that had made grown men stagger back with their hands over their eyes, something she hadn't consciously chosen and couldn't yet name.

"I don't know what it was," she admitted. "I asked it for a point, and it gave me something I've never used before."

Zayn's hand found the small of her back again, no calibration in it this time, no hesitation. "Then we find out what it was before Voss finds out first," he said. "Because if he's right that it means something, I'd rather understand it than discover it the way he intends to."

They regrouped the column within the hour, tending the wounded, burying nothing because there was nothing left of Voss's dead worth burying, only the specific unease of having survived a fight that had never actually been about winning.

The road to the palace resumed at midday, shorter now by the two days they'd already lost, and Sofia walked it with her wrist still faintly warm, still carrying whatever the ravine had woken in her, and the growing, unshakeable certainty that Voss's true plan hadn't even begun yet.

Somewhere behind them, watching from a ridge they'd already passed, a man who had spent nine years learning patience folded his hands and began, calmly, to write down everything he had learned.