BLOOD,CURSE&CROWN

The Past Has Teeth

The woman arrived at the settlement's eastern gate on a grey morning, riding a horse that had clearly been pushed hard and carrying the particular expression of someone who had rehearsed what they were going to say for three days and had arrived to find the words inadequate. Riven saw her before the gate guards did. He was on the practice ground when the sound of hooves reached him — not the patrol's usual rhythm, something more uneven, a single horse pushed past its comfortable pace and pulling up short at the sight of the settlement's perimeter markers. He'd been running a group of twelve through defensive formations, the kind of training that had become his primary contribution to what Caelan had built here. Not strategy — that was Caelan's territory, not healing — that was Soren's, but the specific, practical knowledge of how to make a body into something that survived contact with violence directed at it. He was good at that. He'd been good at it since before he understood what he was. The twelve he'd been training were a mix — three who'd arrived in the last six months with some prior military experience, four who'd been farmers and craftspeople with no combat background whatsoever, and five who fell somewhere in between, people who'd survived things that had given them the instincts without the technique to back them up. He liked working with all three types for different reasons. The experienced ones needed to unlearn bad habits as much as learn good ones. The complete beginners needed to overcome the fundamental human reluctance to use their bodies as weapons before anything else could be taught. The in-between ones were often the fastest learners, their survival instincts already calibrated and simply waiting for a structure to operate within. He'd learned to teach by doing it, which was how he'd learned most things. His own training had been informal — self-directed, born of necessity, refined through experience rather than instruction. The borderlands had sharpened him considerably, and he'd tried to pass that sharpening on without also passing on the specific, difficult qualities of personality that the sharpening had required him to develop in order to survive the process. He set the group to drilling on their own and walked to the gate, because the instinct that ran through him like a current had been humming since the hoofbeats reached him, and the instinct, in his experience, was rarely wrong about things that mattered. He recognized her when she was still forty feet away. Petra. He stopped walking. She saw him at approximately the same moment, and her face did the thing faces did when they encountered something they'd been bracing for and found it was both exactly as expected and entirely different from the anticipation — the simultaneous confirmation and surprise of a thing finally arriving after too long in transit. For a moment, neither of them moved, the forty feet between them doing the particular work that distance sometimes did when what it contained was too large for immediate approach. Then she started walking, and he started walking, and they met in the middle with the specific, slightly awkward precision of two people who'd once known exactly how to occupy space around each other and had spent five years losing that knowledge through the particular attrition of absence. She looked the same. That was the first thing he processed, with the particular quality of assessment that had become involuntary after five years in the borderlands — cataloguing threat levels, reading physical states, determining what a person's body was telling you before their words had the chance to. She looked the same as she had five years ago, which meant she looked like someone who'd been surviving rather than living, which had been true five years ago too, and which he'd spent a considerable amount of the intervening time trying not to think about. The horse beside her was blowing hard, its flanks dark with dried sweat, its head low with the particular exhaustion of an animal that had been asked to give more than it had comfortably available. Riven noticed this with the specific attentiveness he gave all animals — a quality of the wolf nature, he'd always thought, the awareness of other creatures as things that communicated honestly if you knew how to read them — and noted that she'd ridden genuinely hard, not the careful pace of someone making a planned journey but the urgent, sustained speed of someone with a deadline. She slid off the horse with the slightly stiff movement of someone who'd been riding for too long, and walked toward the gate, and stopped when there were ten feet between them, and said his name. "Riven." "Petra," he said. The gate guard looked between them with the particular expression of someone who'd understood, very quickly, that this was a conversation they should not be part of, and found something urgent to attend to on the other side of the gate. "You look well," Petra said, which was the kind of thing people said when they were buying time. "You rode hard to get here," he said. "Three days, maybe four, from the look of the horse. What happened?" Something moved in her expression — the particular relief of someone who'd been dreading small talk and had found, instead, that the person they'd come to see was going to skip it entirely. This had always been, he remembered, one of the things she'd said she appreciated about him, back when she'd been saying things like that. He could read a situation without requiring it to be explained to him first. "My brother," she said. "He's been arrested. Kingdom soldiers, two weeks ago. They're holding him in the garrison at Thornwall." She paused. "The charge is sedition. He was caught with documents — letters from someone in the borderlands." Riven was quiet for a moment, processing this. "From me," he said. "From you," she confirmed. "Three letters, over the past year. He kept them. I told him to burn them, Riven, I told him—" Her voice caught, briefly, and she pressed it flat with the practiced control of a woman who'd learned that composure was a survival skill rather than a luxury. "He thought they were worth keeping. He thought your letters were worth keeping." He felt the weight of that settle somewhere in his chest — not guilt exactly, something more specific and more difficult, the particular feeling of a thing you'd done with good intentions producing consequences you hadn't adequately calculated. "Come inside," he said. "Tell me everything." --- Her full name was Petra Vane, and she was thirty-one years old, and she was the only person from his previous life who'd known where he was for the past five years. He hadn't planned it that way. When he'd been expelled from the kingdom — marched to the eastern border by soldiers who'd kept their eyes averted and their hands on their weapons in the specific combination that meant they were ashamed of what they'd been ordered to do and frightened of what he was capable of — he'd had no intention of maintaining contact with anyone from the life that had just been taken from him. He'd arrived in the borderlands with the particular ferocious clarity of a man who'd decided that looking backward was a luxury he couldn't afford, and he'd thrown himself into the work of surviving with the same total commitment he'd thrown into everything he'd ever done. He'd written to Petra six months later, because six months had been long enough for the ferocious clarity to develop, at its edges, the specific texture of loss that came with having been cut off from the few genuine connections he'd made in a life that hadn't offered many. He'd written to her because she'd been the person he trusted most completely in the kingdom, the person who'd understood, better than anyone else, what he actually was beneath the reputation the kingdom had built around him. She was a physician's assistant, which was how they'd met — he'd been brought to her employer's practice after an incident that had left him with injuries that should have been considerably more serious than they'd turned out to be, and she'd been the one to document the treatment, and she'd looked at the healing that was already happening and then looked at him with the particular expression of someone encountering something outside their training and deciding to be curious about it rather than afraid. He'd been twenty-three at the time, newly arrived in the capital from the borderland province he'd grown up in, still learning the specific vocabulary of a city that had entirely different rules than the places he'd spent his childhood. The borderland province of his childhood was called Ashford, which was a name that sounded pastoral and was in fact one of the harder-edged places the kingdom contained, all rocky terrain and difficult winters and the specific, weather-beaten resilience of people who'd learned that softness was something you preserved carefully rather than deployed carelessly. His mother had been a healer of a sort, in the informal way of borderland communities that didn't have regular access to trained physicians — the person who knew which plants did what and how to set a bone and when to send someone to the city because what they had was beyond her capacity. He'd inherited some of that knowledge, and the wolf nature besides, the two things arriving in him from different directions and combining into something that the kingdom had, eventually, decided it didn't know what to do with. He'd grown up understanding that he was different without having the language for why. The healing happened too fast — a cut that should have taken a week to close was gone in a day, a bruise that should have lingered for a fortnight was gone in three. He was stronger than he should have been, faster, more durable, the defensive capacity that was his wolf nature's primary gift manifesting as a body that was significantly harder to damage than any ordinary body had a right to be. He'd learned to hide it with the particular, exhausting discipline of someone who understood from a young age that the visible evidence of being unusual attracted the wrong kind of attention.