It wasn’t because he trusted her, because he didn’t. It was because it mattered that she knew he saw her trying and chose not to stop her. That was the line he had drawn: not indulgence, not leniency – just deliberate permission, carefully extended. He could have shortenedthe rope. Could have bound her tighter, barred the passage, looked away when she asked. But he didn’t. Perhaps because he hoped the gesture would mean something. Or perhaps – though he would not say it aloud – because somewhere beneath the weight of what must be done, he could not bring himself to be like the townsfolk in the square, calling for the gallows with foam-flecked mouths and eyes bright with the thrill of it.
When she asked to see the stars, he knew what she meant – and what she didn’t. That it was never really about the sky. It was about what flew beneath it, what might still be watching from above. She didn’t disguise her intent, and so neither did he. He cleared the beams, opened the way, and offered her the sky as she asked.
If it was a game, then this was his move. If it was trust, then this was how it began. He had no illusions that she wasn’t searching for escape, for allies, for signs – but something in him refused to drag her down into the same pit the people from Tirn’Vahl had dug with their spite. He gave her the stars because she asked and because he wanted to see what she would do when offered something without chains.
When he had crouched beside her, rope in hand, he hadn’t meant to linger. But his hands had slowed at the knot – a pause, simple and sharp-edged, like the moment before a thread is pulled tight. He had looked up, and her gaze had already been there, fixed and alert. And it struck something in him he hadn’t prepared for.
It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t anger. There was no mask to it, no armour – just a person, meeting him with the kind of look that held firm and gave nothing away. Her eyes, blue like the midnight sky just before a storm, held something fierce and exhausted, something scraped raw by all the things that had led her here, to this moment. And for a heartbeat that dragged too long, he had met it without turning away. It lodged somewhere deep, and even as he looked away, he felt the weight of it shift something inside him – subtle, but certain.
He told himself the feeling would pass. That it was nothing more than proximity, the strange intimacy of shared breath in a place that wasn’t built to hold tenderness. But it didn’t pass. And in the days that followed, that shift – small as it was – began to alter the rhythm of things between them.
It did not happen all at once. There was no single glance that shifted the air, no specific moment where the walls came down. But over the days that followed, something in the tone of their exchanges began to shift. She spoke more often – not with warmth, but with the dry, clipped candour of someone long unaccustomed to kindness, who had long since stopped performing civility. And yet, there were fractures in the stonework – brief, unguarded, all the more human for how carelessly they surfaced. A wry comment about the lentils. A scoff when Maeve muttered about his terrible firewood stacking. A faint twitch of her mouth when he asked if she wanted to keep staring at gulls or come back inside before her fingers froze. They weren’t conversations, exactly, but they were something. And that something held.
He began to look forward to the walk down the old temple. To the scrape of the door, the tug of the rope, the breath of sea air that came before her voice. It wasn’t that he forgot what she was or what she had done—Haedor still burned at the back of his mind every time he looked at her hands, the echoes of blood and fire impossible to scrub clean. But she made no effort to soften herself. Didn’t beg, didn’t bluff, didn’t mouth false repentance. She simply existed—sharp-edged, unyielding—and somehow that made her easier to stand beside.
He found himself listening when she spoke – more than just hearing her words; he turned them over, wondering what lay beneath. And for the first time in what felt like years, he found his mind drawn outward —towards the flicker of someone else’s thoughts, rather than toward fire or ruin or the ache that came with the Sight.
It startled him how easily his days began to revolve around themoments she was in them. Her presence no longer felt like an intrusion but something expected – like the sea air or the salt worn into the stone. She never pressed for more than was necessary, and when she did ask, he answered – maybe even more easily than he had meant to. The shirt, the barley, the basin of water Maeve forgot – small things, but ones he gave freely. He stayed when Maeve tended her wounds, watching the way she met pain with the same composure she brought to everything else, how she tensed slightly when Maeve’s hand steadied her arm, as if the touch itself unsettled something deeper. Mathias didn’t speak of the change he felt; he didn’t try to define it—he only recognised the way their days had begun to bend around each other, drawing close in a way that felt fragile but real enough to leave a hollow behind when it was missing.
But beyond the frail ease of those hours, the pressure mounted. The Elders came often, impatient behind their careful words, their civility thinned by urgency. They asked the same things over and over, each time more tightly wound: had she spoken yet? Had she given her word? Would she send a message to her armies, to the Queen, to whatever force waited just beyond the reach of their hills? Mathias gave them the same answer each time – no. She had not. And no, he had not asked her to. That part always landed sharpest, as if restraint were its own betrayal.
They did not understand. Or perhaps they did but dismissed it because it didn’t suit their purpose. To them, she was a blade waiting to be turned, a lever that might halt the war before it reached their gates. But Mathias saw no lever when he looked at her. Only a soldier – bruised, proud, and unbending – who had tied her life to a Queen he could not fathom serving. He didn’t believe she would betray that. Not for them. Not for him. Whatever had shaped her loyalty, it ran deep, carved into her spine. And though he could not understand it, he had stopped expecting her to be anything other than exactly what she was.
Rumours came, thin and wind-worn, riding in on the backs of traders and passing through the market like dust on the wind: someone asking questions in the Twin Cities, looking for her. No word yet on the armies. No movement from Irongate. By rights, it should have been good news – no banners stirring in the distance, no drums in the night. But the stillness had stretched too long. Mathias knew the difference between peace and a pause before a blow landing, and this had the stench of the latter. Something was coming. The air tasted of it. The Sight hadn’t stirred in days, but that only deepened the weight pressing at the edges of his mind, a tension that felt like the moment that comes after lightning – just before the thunder rolls.
He hadn’t told her about the rumours. The whispers from the Twin Cities, the shadowed questions being passed from market stalls to barracks, always circling back to her. She didn’t know; she was still waiting. He could see it in the way her gaze lingered on the clouds each morning, scanning for a flicker of black wings against the white – and again at night, when she searched the stars for signs that someone was coming. And some part of him, the part that hadn’t yet decided what side he stood on, was glad for that ignorance. It gave him time. Time to find the shape of her loyalty and to see whether it might bend before it broke. Time, perhaps, to shift the course she was set upon before the Queen’s loyalists would arrive and turn her back into something unreachable.
That evening, she said nothing when he came for her. She simply rose as he unlatched the door and allowed him to lead her out beneath the bruising sky, the rope hanging loose between them. By the broken beams, she sank to the stone without a word, legs drawn up, arms looped around her knees, the draught tugging strands of her hair like thread slipping from a loom. Mathias settled beside her – not close, not far – the rope tracing a soft arc between them, forgotten for now. The sea outside rolled in its endless rhythm, and for a long time, theyjust sat there, their eyes upward, scanning the skies.
Then she said, “Your people think I’m going to gut this town in its sleep.”
Mathias glanced at her with an unintentional smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Are they wrong?”
“I haven’t a knife to gut anyone right now.” She adjusted her grip on her knees. “They think you’re dangerous too. One of them called you a ‘Seer bastard’.”
His jaw tightened. “That’s… pretty accurate, actually.”
“So, you are one?”
Mathias paused before answering, his shoulders tensing. His voice, when it came, was rough and edged with effort. “Yes.”
Her eyes measured the stars above them; then slowly, they turned to measure him, as if she were weighing his words. “What’s it like?”
The question caught Mathias off guard, not because it was cruel, but because it was the first time anyone had thought to ask. And because no one had, he’d never had to put it into words. Never had to explain what it was like, carrying something that kept stealing pieces of his life, little by little, leaving less of himself behind each time it came.
“It hurts,” he said. “Sometimes it’s a sharp, sudden pain, like a punch or something driving through the side of your skull. But more often, it’s a kind of heat. A pressure. A fire pressing in behind my eyes. Some days, I can feel it building for hours. Other times, it’s there all at once without warning.”
He let out a breath and dragged a hand down the side of his face. “And it never asks. That’s the worst part. You don’t call for it. You don’t prepare for it. It just comes – in the middle of a sentence, while you’re walking, or half-asleep with your pants still on. You’re in one place, and then you’re somewhere else, and the world keeps moving without you.”
His voice didn’t rise, but there was something tight in it now,stretched thin between memory and confession. “What you see isn’t always the same. Sometimes it’s something that’s happening, somewhere far off. Sometimes it’s something that might come to pass – or might not. And most of the time, you don’t know which is which. They don’t come with designations. Just flashes, scattered and unfinished, like pages ripped out of someone else’s story.”
His last words came out with a shuddering breath: “Except the first one. That’s always clear. You know exactly what it is.”
He suddenly felt her eyes – those oval pools matching the midnight sky above them – on him, intense and awed. “What’s the first one?”
“The first vision every Seer has,” he said quietly, “is how they die.”
She went still, her face unreadable in the half-light. “And there’s no way to guide it? No choosing what comes?”
