“I’ve only ever raised elves. Here—” She tossed him a towel. “You do it. And clean yourself up while you’re at it!”
Storne caught the towel without flinching. “I’ll endure your horror a little longer, dear.”
She sniffed and shuffled away, muttering about bearded elves.
Viktor tried to sit tall, but his eyes fell, the weight of exhaustion pulling at him.
“With your permission, Commander, I’ll see to it later.”
Storne shook his head.
“No need.”
He dipped the razor into the steaming water, then wet Viktor’s face with careful fingers. He drew the blade over his jawline, steady as a surgeon.
Only when their gazes caught did the intimacy of the act unsettle them both. Commander and captain, father and soldier, bound by the same woman’s eyes.
Storne cleared his throat.
“You only need suffer the ride to Fyreglade,” he said, dragging the razor along Viktor’s skin. “I have a healer who can ease your wounds once we arrive. Can you manage that, Captain?”
Viktor swallowed. “Yes.”
Bootsteps scraped against the floor. Evander went to the window without a word, his shoulder braced against the frame, staring out at the pale light. Gabriel followed, dragging out a chair and dropping into it hard enough to rattle the table. He leaned back, arms crossed, eyes fixed anywhere but Storne.
The air thickened with their silence.
Storne’s eyes flicked to Evander. “Couldn’t sleep?”
Evander twisted in the chair, his forehead pressed hard to the pane. He caught Viktor’s gaze from over his shoulder and pulled his arms in tighter.
“It was a dragon that burned you, Viktor,” he said, barely above a whisper. “But it was only an invocation. What will we face when the real ones come?”
Storne looked down at Viktor’s bandages, then at the young elf.
“It will take time for your mind to heal from what you saw last night. I was about your age in my first entrapment in the Vykenraven. I still remember the visions.”
Evander’s brow furrowed, but he said nothing more.
Gabriel broke the silence with a grunt. “We shouldn’t have gone.”
Storne rinsed the blade, finished the last stroke along Viktor’s cheek, and set the razor aside. He flipped through a sheaf of notes spread across the table.
“Amerei has brought me the names of five nobles pledging fealty to her. Their support alone will bring coin enough to cripple Zeporah’s war chest. Where we cannot rouse soldiers by honor, we will buy their swords.”
Gabriel tilted his head, glaring.
“Buying favor? Is that what we’ve lowered ourselves to?”
“Yes,” Storne said without hesitation. “Men fight for pay as much as principle. And we’ll need both.”
Gabriel went quiet. He sat with his arms folded, shoulders hunched forward, his stare fixed on the table’s scarred wood. Viktor knew that look—and the scrape of Storne’s quill only seemed to grate against it.
Evander shifted, uneasy, but Gabriel didn’t look at him. He leaned forward instead, the chair groaning under his weight, elbows braced on the table. His stare cut through the clutter of papers, pinning Storne like a nail.
“So,” he said at last, voice hard as flint. “We’ve started a war then?”
A pause—deliberate.
