Targesh pushed back from the table. "I have correspondence to review."
"You always have correspondence to review. The correspondence will keep until morning."
"Nonetheless."
He crossed the hall without looking at the archivist again. He could feel her presence anyway, a prickling along the back of his neck, the awareness of her voice still carrying from the long table like a sound he could not stop tracking.
Primal, he told himself. Biological.
Humans and orcs were not so different beneath the surface. Both species responded to fertility markers, to evidence of health and vitality. The archivist was built for bearing young, with wide hips, full breasts, and the soft abundance that indicated resources and survival. His body recognized this whether his mind engaged with it or not.
It meant nothing.
He would file it away with all the other things that meant nothing, and in three months she would return to Valdara with her notes and her questions and her quill perpetually tucked behind her ear, and this strange unsettled feeling would subside.
He had weathered worse.
He had buried friends. Buried warriors. Made decisions that sent young orcs to die because the alternative was worse. He had absorbed all of it, filed all of it, kept moving because stopping was not an option.
One small human archivist who laughed too easily and asked too many questions and took up more space than her body accounted for—
He pressed his tongue against his tusk and kept walking.
Chapter 5
Sleep would not come.
Verity lay in her narrow bed, staring at the stone ceiling, and listened to the fortress settle around her. Northwatch made sounds at night—the groan of ancient timbers, the distant clang of a guard changing post, the wind finding crevices in the mountain to whistle through.
Her mind would not stop.
It never stopped, really. This was the fundamental problem with being Verity Dunmore: her thoughts had no off position. They simply ran, cataloguing and connecting and questioning, and the only way to quiet them was to give them something to do.
She sat up. The room was cold, and she wrapped the rough wool blanket around her shoulders before swinging her feet to the floor.
Her brother's letter was in her traveling case, folded into a square no larger than her palm. She had carried it for four years.She had memorized it within the first week, but she still carried it, because the paper was something he had touched. The ink was marks he had made. It was the last piece of him that existed in the world, and she could not leave it behind.
Verity —
We made good time through the lower pass. The weather's held, which Sergeant Maren says means it will be terrible by the end of the week.
The mountains here are beautiful. You would love them. You would have questions about everything. The rocks, the snow, the plants that grow where nothing should grow. I keep thinking I should take notes for you, but you know me. I can never sit still long enough.
The twenty-third of Harvestmoon. Thornfield Pass. I'll write again when we're through.
— Corvin
He had not written again.
The official report had been three paragraphs long. Corvin Dunmore was one name in a list of eleven, a skirmish at the edge of a war that most of Valdara had already decided to forget. She had written letters, visited offices, stood at counters while tired clerks searched records filed in the wrong sequence by someone who no longer worked there.
Everyone had been perfectly willing to help, but no one had been able to tell her what she actually wanted to know: how it had happened, how quickly, whether he had been alone. Whether anyone had been with him at the end. There was no body, no burial site, no account of his last hours.
Just a form filed in triplicate and a name on a list.
Just the letter. The date. The location. The silence after.
She had not yet learned what to do with a question that had no answer at the end of it, but somewhere in the archives beneath her feet, there might be an answer.
