RONAN
1015 Words
I didn't tell Ronan about Caspian standing at my gate.
I told myself it was because there wasn't time before the morning bell, and then I told myself it was because it probably meant nothing, a crown official doing crown official things, checking on a village that had just felt the ground move under it. By the time I reached the forge those two reasons had merged into one and I'd almost convinced myself of it.
Ronan didn't believe me for a second. He didn't have to. He just looked at my face over the top of the horseshoe he was shaping and set his hammer down.
"You look like you didn't sleep."
"I slept fine."
"Ember." He said my name the way he always does when he's decided not to let me get away with something — patient, a little amused, entirely unmovable, like a boulder that's found something funny about being a boulder. "You've got the same face you had the day you tried to convince me you hadn't cried at Mira Voss's wedding."
"I hadn't cried."
"You'd cried so hard your eyes were still doing it two days later."
I sat down on the bench just inside the forge door, in the spot I've sat in since I was young enough that my feet didn't reach the ground, and let the heat of his fire do what it's always done — settle something in me that nothing else quite manages. Ronan's forge has always smelled the same. Coal and hot iron and, underneath it, something warmer, something like safety.
"I keep thinking about yesterday," I said. "The ground. The way everyone went quiet after, like they all knew something and decided not to say it out loud."
He didn't answer right away. He picked the hammer back up, turned it over once in his big scarred hands, set it down again. Ronan has never in his life been a man who thinks before he speaks — it's one of the things I love best about him, that his face always tells you what he's about to say a full second before he says it — and watching him think now, carefully, deliberately, was like watching someone I'd known my whole life put on a coat that didn't fit him.
"Sometimes the world does strange things," he said finally, "and there's no good reason for it, and asking why just makes you tired."
"That's not an answer."
"No," he admitted. "It's not."
I let it go, because pushing at Ronan when he'd decided to be careful was like pushing at a door that had been locked from the other side — you could stand there all day and all you'd get for your effort was a sore shoulder. But I filed it away, the same way I file everything, in the same part of my mind where I'd already filed Maeve's be careful with this one and the misfiled archive section and a King's Blade standing at my gate at midnight looking at my window like he already knew what he'd see.
"Tell me something normal," I said instead. "Tell me about the Hendrick order, or that mare that keeps throwing shoes, or anything that isn't the ground shaking and the elder looking at me like I'm made of glass."
And he did — he told me about the Hendrick order, and the mare, and how old Tomas had tried to pay him in turnips again like it was still a functioning system of trade in this century — and for almost an hour it was easy, it was the two of us the way we've always been, since we were children who couldn't have named half the things we now carefully avoid naming.
Ronan is the only person in this village I have never once had to be careful around. Or I thought he was, until this morning, watching him choose his words like a man crossing a frozen river one careful step at a time.
I didn't know yet that he'd been watching over me for three years on someone else's instruction — someone he'd never met, whose face he couldn't have picked out of a crowd, whose name he only knew as a signature at the bottom of letters that arrived without a return address. I didn't know that every easy hour we'd ever spent together in this forge had a second layer underneath it, a quiet vigilance dressed up as friendship so well that even I, who catalogue things for a living, who notice misfiled drawers and wrong-footed silences, had never once caught it.
I only knew that when I stood to leave, he caught my wrist — gently, the way he always does, nothing that could ever be mistaken for anything but care — and held on a beat longer than usual.
"Ember."
"What?"
He looked like he was about to say something and then didn't. Whatever it was, I watched him swallow it back down, the way you swallow something too big and too sharp to say out loud.
"Nothing," he said instead. "Just — stay close today. All right? Stay where people can find you."
"You're starting to sound like Maeve."
"Maeve's not wrong about everything." He let go of my wrist and picked the hammer back up, and the moment closed over itself the way water closes over a stone, smooth and unbothered, like nothing had happened at all. "Go on. You've got an audit to survive."
I left the forge with the uneasy feeling that I'd just watched two people who loved me — in their very different, very careful ways — arrive independently at the exact same warning, on the exact same morning, without either of them explaining what it was they were warning me about.
I didn't know yet how many people in Caldenmere had been quietly watching me for far longer than I'd ever noticed.
I was about to find out that the list was longer than I could have imagined — and that not everyone on it wished me well.
- Writer
