Kael's POV
He gave his cloak away.
That was the thought that followed Kael all the way back through the dark trees, across two miles of dead ground, up the steps of the Citadel and through the front gate. He'd stood outside Thornwall's fence in the cold, and listened to make sure she was inside and safe, and then he'd taken off his cloak and sent it in with Dren, because she'd looked cold and he'd had a cloak and that was apparently all the reasoning he was capable of now.
Two hundred years. Two hundred years stuck.
One night.
He sat at his war table, staring at the maps of the borders, feeling the bond humming in his chest like a second heartbeat that wasn't his. The forest had been noisy. Inside the Citadel it was louder. Which made no sense at all. Distance should make it weaker. Distance should make everything hush.
Instead it sounded as if the walls were echoing it.
He took a breath, pressing two fingers hard into the center of his chest. In. Out. The bond didn't care. It pulsed right through his hand as if it was trying to remind him of something he already knew and was trying very hard to forget.
He told it to halt.
It did not stop.
He phoned Corden.
His general was there in under a minute. That meant he'd been waiting nearby, and that meant he'd already heard enough from the scouts to know something was up. Corden was just like that. He knew it before they told him. It was his greatest quality on some days and his most exhausting on others.""Report," said Kael.
Corden laid a map on the table and pointed at the border line in the northeast. The mana signature from last night, the silver-green activation in sector four, has already penetrated to the outer sensor range of the empire. Their monitoring stones are passive, not active, so they won't get a good reading. But they'll know something rose in the Wastes."When do you think they're sending someone to investigate?3 days ago. Maybe five if their court is distracted."
Kael examined the map. Three days was nothing at all. Five days was hardly more. "Pull our visible patrols off the northeastern line. No open fires in border sectors. "Void-beasts remain south of the ridge."And the origin of the signature?'
Kael's eyes remained on the map. Our affair is not.
Corden didn't say anything.
Nothing was loud."She's in Thornwall," Kael replied. "She is safe. She is guarded. "The situation is under control.""Of course," said Corden, in the voice he used when he disagreed utterly but didn't want to say so outright.Dismissed."
Corden took the map, tucked it under his arm and headed for the door. He came to a stop with his hand on the frame. "Dren returned without his cloak of patrol," he said, without turning round. And Kett says you were standing outside Thornwall's fence for an hour after you delivered her.
The silence was thick."There's a weak spot on the fence, on the east side," Kael said. "I was appraising it." "For 40 minutes."It was a complete evaluation."
Corden departed without another word. The door closed behind him with a click.
Kael sat alone at the war table and stared into nothing for a long moment.
Then he got up and went to the highest room of the Citadel.
- He hardly ever came here.
It wasn't exactly painful, the room. The thing was that this was the only room in the entire fortress where the silence was of a different quality. Every other room was empty. He had made it empty. Cleared it out, locked it down, kept it cold on purpose. This room was empty because it was once full, and he could still feel the shape of everything that had been here. Furniture? No. Not things.
People.
His people had had this room. A long time ago. Previously.
He stood in the window and gazed out over the Wastes. Gray grounds. Dead trees. The ash-colored sky, that in two centuries had not changed its hue. He'd stopped noticing it long ago—it was just background now, like the cold, like the quiet.
But tonight it seemed different.
He stood there trying to understand why and then he did. He was looking for a light that was not there anymore. Soft as moonlight under skin, silver green. For twenty minutes he had watched it moving through his forest before he stepped out. He told himself he had been evaluating whether she was a threat.
She'd been talking to a void beast.
She had named it Ash.
He laid his forehead on the cold glass of the window and closed his eyes. The bond shook. He fought back against it like he had been fighting back against things for two hundred years — hard, deliberate, total.
The bond hummed more loudly.
Good enough, he figured. Okay. She's interesting. She's a surprise. "She awakened a bloodline I thought was extinct. Tamed a border beast with garden vegetables. Such qualities are rare. I can say it with no meaning.
The bond, not impressed by this argument, continued to do exactly as it pleased.
He opened his eyes.
And breathed in.
- There was something on the windowsill.
He hadn't put it there. He hadn't been in this room for a week. The windowsill had been empty - he knew it had been empty because he always checked, old habit, old survival instinct, always know what's in your space.
It was a single dried leaf.
Little. Fragile. Silver tipped leaves that curled a little bit on the edges like they had been dried very carefully by someone who knew what they were doing. He took it up between two fingers, and held it to the dim light.
His chest was quite still.
He recognized this plant. He had known it two hundred years before, when his people had grown it in the courtyards of the old city. He'd watched it burn. He'd seen every last one of these plants go up in flames.
Silverleaf. Dead since the Night of Burning. Gone from the world for good -- no seeds, no roots, nothing left.
And it was on his window sill.
It's still a little warm.
Like it had been growing somewhere near by and had just been picked.
He gazed out the window into the dark. Thornwall. Towards the place where a girl was sleeping with a pendant of impossible things and mana that should not be.
And slowly, for the first time in two hundred years, something opened in the walls he had bu
Not a lot.
Just enough to get the question in.
What else does she have that I don't know about yet?