Vows To The Void Moon

Chapter 8: The Distance Between Two Bodies

Saoirse P.O.V

We left at dusk because dusk was the only hour that belonged to no one. The Riftlands checkpoints changed shift at last light, and for a window of maybe eleven minutes the sector lines went soft, unmanned in the specific way that only scouts and smugglers ever learned to exploit. I had used that window a hundred times to slip supply runs past bureaucratic delay.

I had never used it to smuggle a disgraced Alpha-Heir past a High Warden's assassins.

Cadryn moved better than he should have. Not well, I could see the cost in the careful way he placed his right foot, the small hitch every time his side twisted, but well enough that I stopped offering to slow down after the second time he declined without looking at me. Pride, I thought.

Then I felt it, that low atmospheric read settling into my chest like weather, and understood it wasn't pride at all. It was calculation. He was rationing his pain the way I rationed water on long sweeps, because he'd already decided how many hours he had before his body sent him an invoice, and he intended to spend them somewhere useful.

That was the first time I understood how loud he'd become to me.

It hadn't been like this in the Sanctum. In the Sanctum I'd read him in flashes, grief here, restraint there, isolated readings I could categorize and set down.

On the move, in close proximity, for hours, the readings didn't stop.

They layered. I could feel the exact moment fatigue started arguing with his resolve. I could feel a thin thread of something that might have been fear when we crossed the exposed ridge above Sector Six, gone as fast as it arrived, replaced instantly by something colder and more disciplined, and I understood that fear was not an emotion he allowed himself to keep.

'You're staring,' he said, without turning his head.

'I'm reading terrain.'

'You're reading me.' He said it flatly, not an accusation, just an observation delivered the way he seemed to deliver everything, examined first, then spoken. 'I can feel you doing it. Like a hand pressed against the outside of a door.'

I hadn't known he could feel it. That should have alarmed me more than it did.

'I don't know how to stop,' I said, and it was the truest thing I'd said to him yet.

'I didn't ask you to.' He glanced at me then, brief, and something moved behind his eyes that I didn't have a category for. 'I said I could feel it. That's different from wanting it gone.'

We walked for a while without talking after that. The forest here was older, the black-pine giving way to broadleaf stands that hadn't existed this far into the Riftlands when the border maps were drawn, and I found myself grateful for the cover even as the ground turned treacherous with root and shadow.

Cadryn navigated it like a man who'd studied maps of a place he'd never been permitted to visit in person, correct in his instincts, hesitant in his confidence, checking my face after every decision like he expected me to overrule him.

'I know this ground better than you do,' I finally said, when he stopped for the third time at a fork that wasn't actually ambiguous.

'I'm aware.' He didn't move. 'I'm testing whether you'll correct me when I'm wrong or wait for me to find out badly.'

'That's an insulting thing to test.'

'It's an informative one.' The almost-smile again, there and gone. 'You corrected me.

Noted.'

I didn't know what to do with a man who ran quiet experiments on the people around him and then told them he was doing it. I decided, for the time being, not to examine that either.

We made camp two hours before the moon reached its zenith, in a hollow formed by a collapsed shelf of granite that broke the wind and, more importantly, broke line of sight from the ridge above. I built the fire small and short-lived, more for his body's sake than mine; I'd gone without in worse cold. He sat with his back against the stone and watched me work with an attention that had stopped feeling like assessment sometime in the last hour and started feeling like something else I didn't have a name for and didn't want one for yet.

'Renna answered,' he said, once the fire had settled into its economical burn.

'She confirmed movement toward Duskfen within the week.

She has eyes on the ward compound already.'

'And Thessaly?'

'Alive. Monitored, not yet moved to the priority holding cells.' He watched my face while he said it, reading me back, I realized, with whatever ordinary human instrument he had for it, since he didn't have my instrument.

'That's not nothing, Saoirse.'

'It's not enough either.'

'No,' he agreed. 'It rarely is, in my experience, until suddenly it's everything you have.'

I looked at him across the fire and felt, without wanting to, the specific weight of what was sitting behind his composure, something that had been carrying grief so long it had learned to walk like ordinary tiredness. I thought of the Sage's words.

Your mother went to him. He protected what she gave him. I thought of the compressed, fixed-location grief I'd felt in him at the Sanctum, and understood, with a cold certainty that had nothing to do with instinct and everything to do with arithmetic, that whatever he wasn't telling me yet was going to cost more than either of us had accounted for.

'You're doing it again,' he said quietly.

'I know.'

'Do you want to stop?'

I considered the honest answer for longer than was comfortable. 'No,' I said finally. 'I want to understand what I'm reading before it decides to understand itself without me.'

Something in his face went very still, the way stone goes still, not from calm but from load-bearing necessity.

'That's a good instinct,' he said. 'Hold onto it. You're going to need it before this is finished.'

Above us, cut through gaps in the broadleaf canopy, the moon was three nights from full, and closing.

Neither of us said its name. We didn't need to. It sat in the space between us the whole night, the largest thing in the hollow, louder than the fire, louder, for once, than the current running quietly beneath my sternum that I had stopped pretending I didn't feel.