He pours the water when it steams, no comment, lets the tin warm his hands.
“You keep trying to quit like it’s a vice,” he says mildly. “It isn’t. It’s a vow. Either keep it or say out loud that you won’t.”
“I’m keeping it by staying away.”
He looks at me then—no wing-bright pity, just a man who has had to learn humility like a second language.
“That sounds like fear dressed as virtue.”
“I am afraid,” I snap, more honesty than I meant to hand him. “You want the full scripture? I wake with her name in my mouth like I bit it in my sleep. When she cries, the mark under my ribs feels it like a blade turned in slow. I can smell her before I see her and I know the exact weight of that ribbon in my palm without touching it, and if I touch her again I won’t—” My throat locks. “I won’t want to stop.”
“Good,” he says simply. “Then don’t.”
The stove ticks. The wind shoulders the window and thinks better of it.
“What if the thing I am breaks her?” I ask, quieter now. “What if the room goes wrong and the old training chooses for me?”
“Then you say her name and let it choosewithyou,” he says. “Rheon taught me that. Seori made it law. Yuna will make it real. Or don’t. But stop pretending the bond is a leash you nobly refuse. It’s a line back home. If you won’t take it, say you prefer the dark.”
He pushes the cup into my hand. My fingers remember heat means alive and close around it.
“North wall,” he repeats, softer. “Rheon needs you.”
He leaves before I can decide whether gratitude would land or shatter. The door closes, and the room feels bigger and emptier in the same breath.
I unwrap the band around my chest. The skin beneath is a map—old sigils faded, Seori’s clean cut she made getting a demons claw out healed into a sign that refuses to stop being bright. I lay my palm over the bond and breathe slowly until the hurt quiets into a hum.
“Stay quiet,” I tell the mark.
It doesn’t. It warms like a mouth on the edge of my palm sayingdon’t lie.
Outside, the camp is awake enough to pretend it slept. I pull on my coat and go. The night is iron-cold; frost scrawls low across the flagstones and dares boots to argue. Sentinels nod. I answer with my chin. The north wall rises where the palace stops being story and starts being stone—old, high, mean enough to survive another war.
Rheon is a dark cut against darker sky, shadow tethered to the parapet like a steadying hand. He says nothing when I step into place. Saying nothing is my language; it’s generous when someone speaks to you in it.
“Wards held?” I ask.
“For now,” he says. “They hold better when the people behind them remember what they’re for.”
I scanned the tree line. The miasma is low tonight, hugging the ground, too tired to climb. My eyes pick out the wrong shadows on instinct. My hands rest easy on the parapet like they’ve finally found something harder than their questions.
After a while Rheon says,
“She asked about you.”
My body goes still the way prey does when it hears a hunter and can’t tell if it belongs to it.
“What did you tell her?”
“That you are learning to be aimed.” He tips his chin my direction. “That and the truth.”
“Which is?”
“That you are terrible at pretending you don’t look at the balcony before you turn in.”
I huff once. Not laughter. An admission.
“You think this ends if I stop pretending?”
