“Don’t.” I stand. “You’re alive. That’s the relevant fact.”
“The mark?—”
“Is what it is.”
He looks at it. Then at me. His amber eyes are red-rimmed, waterlogged, doing the thing they do where they hold more than he intends to show.
Three days ago I would have found that irritating.
“You went in after me.” He says it like he’s still working out whether it’s true.
“You were drowning.”
“You went in after me,” he says again. Different emphasis. Like the first time was practice and this is the actual sentence.
Whispen settles on a rock between us, his light drifting back toward gold. He looks at Orion. Then at me. Then back at Orion with the particular expression of a creature who has watched a lot of history and found most of it predictable.
“The flame lord,” Whispen says, “would like to express gratitude but has been informed that gratitude creates obligations and is therefore searching for a different word.”
“I wasn’t—” Orion stops. “How do you do that?”
“I am very old,” Whispen says. “And you are very obvious.”
Orion makes a sound. Not quite a laugh. The surprised kind that gets out before you can stop it.
I look at the pool. The surface has gone still and mirror-flat again, giving nothing back. The siren is gone. Dead or fled, it doesn’t matter. The water reflects the canopy above, the blue-dark of the forest, Whispen’s gold at the edge of the frame.
The bond at my wrist pulls.
She’s close.
Closer than she was this morning. The silver-blue of it pulling with a steadiness that has been driving me quietly insane for four days, the only proof that she’s alive and breathing and hasn’t become another thing I failed to protect.
“She’s close,” Orion says.
“I know.”
“The bond went warm again.” He drops his wrist. His voice has the specific careful quality of a man who has decided exactly how much to show and is holding the line. “When I was…it went cold. And then it came back.”
I think about what that means. About what it felt like on my end when his shadows went under. The half-second between the pool going dark and my shadows finding his wrist. The particular sensation of something I hadn’t acknowledged being important suddenly being at risk.
I don’t say any of that.
“Can you walk?” I ask.
Orion tests his legs. They hold. Barely. He grabs the nearest tree without shame, which is either pragmatism or exhaustion, and I’ve stopped distinguishing between them.
“Give it a minute,” he says.
I give him three.
Whispen spends the three minutes examining the pool’s edge. He finds something in the moss that interests him. I don’t ask what.
“The bond is pulling north,” I say.
Orion looks up. “Waterfall?”
“Something like that.” I hold out my arm.
