He heard what she was saying. He also heard what she was not saying.
I want to see you again. I missed you. I don't know how to say those things in my own language, so I am building a bridge out of methodology, and if you make me translate it I will not forgive you.
He was not going to make her translate it. Her vocabulary was hers. The architecture she erected around her wanting was not a barrier; it was the wanting itself, expressed in the only form she trusted. He would no sooner strip it away than he would strip armor from a warrior mid-battle and call the skin beneath more honest.
"You are proposing," Targesh said, "further engagement."
"I am proposing further—yes. Engagement. For the purposes of acquiring sufficient data to—to reach reliable conclusions regarding—"
"Regarding what is between us."
Her breath caught. Her hands went still at her sides.
"Yes," she said.
He uncrossed his arms. Let his hands hang open, visible.
He could have said a dozen things. He could have told her he had not slept properly in four days. That her scent lingered in his quarters, saturating the furs, the chair where she'd sat, the air near his hearth, and he had not opened the windows. That he had stood at his own window at the third watch, every night, looking toward the archive building and the faint amber glow that told him she was awake too.
He could have taken her by the arms and kissed her in the training yard in front of every warrior at Northwatch, and not one of them would have been surprised.
Instead he gave her something she could hold. Two words. In her register, not his.
"Tonight, then."
Her eyes moved across his face before she said, "Yes."
Then, she turned and walked away.
He watched her cross the training yard. Her stride was quick, slightly uneven on the packed earth, her hair already shedding another pin. She did not look back. She passed through the gate toward the archive building, and the morning air closed around the space where she'd been standing, cold and thin and entirely insufficient.
Tonight.
He had carried the loss of warriors for decades without breaking stride. He had absorbed the weight of every decision this clan demanded and kept moving.
Standing in a training yard with the taste of that single word—yes—still ringing in his skull, he understood that none of it had prepared him for this.
Targesh picked up a practice sword and called the next drill.
He hit harder than necessary. Nobody said a word.
Chapter 13
The corridor to his quarters was longer than she remembered.
Verity counted the torches as she passed them. Seven. Eight. Nine. Her footsteps echoed against the stone, too loud in the evening quiet, announcing her approach to anyone who might be listening.
No one was listening. The fortress had settled into its after-dinner rhythms—warriors in the great hall, guards at their posts, the distant clang of the smithy working late. She was alone with the torchlight and the thud of her own pulse and the growing certainty that she had no idea what she was doing.
She had read about this. Extensively. The Royal Archive contained a surprisingly comprehensive collection of personal correspondence, medical treatises disguised as philosophy, and even a few scandalous illustrated manuals. She knew in precise, anatomical detail what happened between bodies. She could recite the stages of arousal, the mechanics of penetration,the average duration of male refractory periods. Theory was comprehensive.
Theory was not going to prepare her for seven-and-a-half feet of orc warchief.
She stopped outside his door. The same heavy oak, the same iron bands. She raised her fist to knock, but the door opened before her knuckles connected.
Targesh stood in the frame, and the sight of him drove every prepared sentence out of her head.
He had bathed. His hair was damp, loose around his shoulders, and he wore a simple tunic unlaced at the throat. The firelight behind him caught the wet strands and turned them copper-dark. He looked less like a warchief and more like—
