Chapter 4: Grey Eyes and Guard Up
857 Words
Saoirse P.O.V
He woke before I expected him to.
I had my back to the table, I was at the window, watching the Riftlands morning assemble itself out of fog and pine shadow when I heard the quality of breathing in the room change. Not the sound of it. The weight. Something in the air redistributed itself and I knew, without turning, that he was conscious.
I gave him thirty seconds. Let him take inventory of his situation without me watching him do it. It was the kind of courtesy that costs nothing and buys a more honest first reaction.
When I turned around, he was looking at the ceiling. His face was the particular stillness of someone who has woken in an unfamiliar location many times before and has long since stopped letting it show on them.
Then his eyes moved to me.
Dark grey. Focused, this time. Completely.
I had the irrational thought that I was not prepared for how awake he would look. Fever-broken, blood-depleted, an arrow wound professionally closed, and he looked at me like he was reading a document he'd been expecting to receive.
'You moved me,' he said. His voice was rougher than I expected — not from the injury, I thought, but from disuse. Like he hadn't spoken to anyone in a while.
'You were dying in my sector.' I kept my position near the window. 'It was a liability.'
'A liability.' Something that was not quite a smile moved across his face and was gone.
'What sector?'
'Nine. Eastern edge. Near the contested markers.'
His eyes did not change. But something behind them reorganized. 'You're Riftlands.'
'Scout. Six-year posting.'
He processed this. I watched him do it, watched the calculation move through him, what I was, what I might want, whether I was a threat or a tool or something else. I was accustomed to being assessed. I was not accustomed to assessments that felt this precise.
'Who else knows I'm here?' he asked.
'The Sage. His assistant. No one I've told.'
'Your unit?'
'Filed a routine all-clear. They expect nothing from me for forty-eight hours.'
Another reorganization behind those eyes. 'You lied to your unit to shelter someone you didn't know.'
'I lied to my unit to avoid a political incident in my sector,' I said. 'There's a difference.'
He tried to sit up. Made it about thirty degrees off the table before his body informed him that was not the agreement, and he settled back with the controlled expression of someone absorbing pain that had briefly exceeded their management of it.
'Don't,' I said. 'The wound is closed but the muscle around it hasn't decided anything yet.'
'I need to…’
'You need to be horizontal for at least another six hours. Whatever you need to do will still need to be done in six hours.' I pulled the chair to the table's edge and sat down. 'And while you're horizontal you can explain to me why Soveth Draal is using Hollow Court's enforcement arrows to kill you unofficially.'
The name landed. I saw it land. He didn't flinch, he wasn't the kind of man who flinched, but there was a microsecond of absolute stillness that told me I had found the right pressure point.
'Where did you hear that name?' he asked.
'The Sage.'
'What else did the Sage tell you?'
'That my brother's treaty ward has been elevated to priority hold without my notification.' I kept my voice even. I was good at keeping my voice even. 'And that the reason for that and the reason someone tried to put an arrow through you come from the same place.'
He looked at me for a long time. Long enough that I catalogued the details of his face without meaning to the scar above his left eyebrow, the particular set of his jaw that suggested he made decisions with it before his mouth got involved.
'Your name,' he said. Not a question, he already knew it. I was certain of that even before he said it. 'Saoirse Vael.'
My chest did something strange. That low, persistent pressure I'd felt since I first saw him quiet since the moment I'd touched him shifted. Just slightly. Like something turning over.
'Yes,' I said.
'I know who you are,' Cadryn Voss said. 'I knew before I woke up. I knew when you were carrying me.' He paused. 'I'm not going to tell you everything. Not yet. But I need you to understand that you were already in this before you found me.'
It was not a threat. That was the most unsettling part. It was something closer to a warning, the kind you give someone when you actually want them to be careful.
'Define this,' I said.
He closed his eyes. 'Give me the six hours,' he said. 'Then we'll define it together.'
I sat back. Outside, the Riftlands fog was burning off in thin strips. Somewhere in Duskfen, my brother was being held under a designation I hadn't been told about, and the man who might know why was asking me for six hours.
I gave him six hours.
- Writer
