“Gargoyles heal quickly.” The gash along my forearm where Vaedrin’s blade caught me during the moment I set him down is deeper than I registered. Stone skin does not bleed easily. When it does, it takes longer to close than it should.
She crosses the room and crouches beside me without asking permission. I do not stop her, which is its own kind of answer. She sets the lantern on the floor and opens the small kit she carries, revealing herbs, cloth, things Corvin keeps stocked in every room of this inn out of long habit.
“This was Vaedrin,” she says. It is not a question.
“He came to negotiate.”
“And you told him no.”
“I was direct.”
She makes a sound that is not quite a laugh. Her fingers press the cloth against the gash with steady pressure, and the contact moves through me in ways that have everything to do with the fact that no one has touched me with careful hands since before the stone.
I watch the top of her head. The loose coil of dark hair, the small scar behind her ear she has never explained. I have memorized her without intending to.
“You don’t have to do that,” I say.
“I know.” She does not stop.
The lantern light catches the planes of her face when she glances up. Whatever she sees in mine makes her go still for a moment. Her hands don’t move, but she stops pressing and simply holds.
“How long?” she asks. “Before they went stonebound. When was the last time anyone —”
“Before the sleep.” The words come out flat. I do not dress them. “I did not allow it. Attachment is a complication in protection work. You learn to manage the distance.”
“And after?”
“There was no after. There was stone. Then there was you.”
The silence that follows is not uncomfortable. The truth has been said and we are deciding what to do with it.
She goes back to the wound. Her touch is lighter now, more careful, as if she is handling something she has reassessed. When she ties off the cloth, she does not immediately move away.
“Droza.”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything significant.”
“You were about to say something compassionate. I recognize the pause.”
She turns her attention to me. Her expression is careful and open, and I understand, in that moment, what Corvin saw that I have been refusing to name.
I was never lonely because I was always useful. Suddenly, I am useless and have been stationary for a century. Now I feel another presence within me that matters more than my own life. It is the only thing that has felt like being alive since the stone cracked open.
She doesn’t say it. I don’t say it. She finishes with the bandage and sits back on her heels, and I watch her in the lantern light.
7
SELAH
We wait in the watchtower. One of the support beams along the far wall has split clean through, and the ladder to the upper platform is missing three rungs. The narrow window slits face the harbor road, which means we can see the torchlight moving below without being seen ourselves.
Droza is crouched near the window with his wings folded tight, and even then his shoulders nearly touch both walls. I sit on the floor with my knees drawn up and the relic tucked into my pocket. Every muscle in my body is still, convinced it should be running.
Below us, six scouts pass in a slow column. They carry spelled lanterns that cast violet light, which means they are searching for magic signatures rather than people. I watch one of them pause near the tower and hold his lantern up toward the door. They see nothing and turn back down the road.
In the dark, Droza’s gold eyes catch the faint light from below and hold it. He watches the window.
