Something has shifted in the town’s texture. I have been awake long enough to recognize the particular quality of silence that precedes an organized threat.
Corvin has noticed. He has said nothing to Selah.
I am still on the roof when Corvin comes out through the rear door below me and stands in the alley for a moment. He does not call up to me. He waits.
I drop down beside him without sound.
He hands me a folded piece of cloth. Inside is a wax seal broken cleanly in half, the insignia of a dark elf noble house pressed into black wax. It’s one of the houses that operates beside Vaedrin’s, the kind that doesn’t send its own representatives anywhere.
“She wants to meet with you,” Corvin says. He takes me inside.
Ilyra, white hair and crimson markings make her stand out from other dark elves. She sits at Corvin’s kitchen table with her hands flat on the wood.
She doesn’t waste time.
“Vaedrin has moved his remaining force inside Gullhaven. Not the harbor road, the eastern fishing quarter, scattered across four separate properties, none of them registered with the town. He is not waiting for reinforcements. He is waiting for the gambling night, when the inn is packed enough that a coordinated entry through multiple doors looks like chaos instead of strategy.”
She gives Corvin the addresses. She gives him the names. She’s been feeding us information about Vaedrin for days now, but there is one thing I don’t understand.
“Why?”
“I watched him order the execution of a family in Prentavar who had done nothing except exist. A mother. Three children.” She pauses. “The youngest was four. This is a slaughter, nothing more. I won’t stand by and do nothing.”
I believe her, which does not mean I trust her. But I believe her.
Corvin begins moving before she has finished speaking.
I find Selah near the cliff path an hour later. She has gone out for air again. The tether told me before I started looking, a low hum of restlessness rather than fear. I follow it out past the harbor road to where the path curves along the cliff and the wind comes in cold off the water.
She hears me before she sees me because I let her. I have learned that appearing without warning behind her produces exactly the reaction I don’t want.
She doesn’t speak first. Neither do I, for a while. We stand together at and watch the last light go out of the western sky.
“You’re quieter than usual,” she says eventually. “That’s how I know something is actually wrong.”
“Corvin has information about the timeline.”
“I figured.” She pulls her coat tighter. “Is that the only thing?”
I consider lying. The mechanics of it are simple enough, but the tether carries too much. She has learned to read what it carries even when I say nothing.
“I nearly killed that sailor,” I say. “I spent nearly a century believing I knew exactly what I was capable of. I am less certain now.”
“You think that makes you like them.”
“It should concern you more than it does.”
“I’ve seen what they do,” she says. “I know what cruelty looks like when it enjoys itself.” She steps closer, which she has starteddoing when she intends to make a point that she knows I will resist. “You stopped.”
“Because you were there.”
“You stopped,” she says again, as though that settles it.
It does not settle anything, but I don’t argue.
She asks me, quietly, how it happened. The stonebound sleep. The war before it.
I have not spoken about this to anyone, because there has been no one to speak to since I woke. But the cliff and the dark and the particular steadiness of her attention make the words come without effort.
