The way she says my name lands somewhere beneath argument. I look away from her, out toward the dark line where the harbor water meets the night sky. My hands are still too tense. The tether has not settled.
“It is the tether,” I say finally.
She waits.
“Every time you are afraid, I feel it. Every time someone comes near you and the fear spikes—” I stop. The words are not ones I reach for easily. “It does not stop. I cannot close it off or set it aside. It is simply there, and I have no way to determine whether the threat is real until I am already moving toward it.”
Silence stretches between us.
“That sounds exhausting,” she says quietly.
“It is.” I look at her then. “I cannot tolerate it. I have tried.”
The honesty of it clearly catches her off guard. She holds my gaze for a moment longer than she means to, and when she looks away, it is not out of discomfort.
Neither of us goes back inside.
5
SELAH
Corvin leads us through the cellar entrance before dawn, a lantern held low, his voice quiet and unhurried the way it always is when the situation is serious. Brinna follows behind me with a second light, her usual commentary stripped down to nothing. That alone tells me how bad the rumors are.
“Three villages east of here,” Corvin says, ducking beneath a low crossbeam. “Dark elves are moving door to door, asking questions with the promise of coin.”
“And when neither works?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to.
The tunnel opens into a wider chamber beneath the inn, stone walls slick with moisture, barrels stacked in careful rows along one side. Smuggler infrastructure, built over decades by those who understood that survival often required moving things quietly in the dark. It is, I think, the most honest room in Gullhaven.
Droza has to fold himself nearly in half to fit through the entrance. He straightens once inside and surveys the space with the particular stillness of someone cataloguing exits. He has been doing that since he woke. Old instinct, I’m learning.
“You’ll stay below during the day,” Corvin says to me. “Brinna will bring food down. At night, the upper rooms are safer, but only with escort.”
He glances at Droza when he says it.
Droza says nothing. His silence has a way of functioning as agreement.
I have come to learn about the wardens in pieces. Corvin knows some of what gargoyle wardens were before the stonebound sleep took them. He talks while we share a meal by lantern light, speaking the way men do when they’re filling silence rather than lecturing, and I listen.
Droza doesn’t offer details about himself, but he doesn’t stop Corvin either. He sits along the outside of the chamber with his back against the wall, arms crossed, golden eyes catching the light in a way that makes them look like something lit from inside.
The wardens protected the western coast for generations. Trade routes, fishing settlements, small human townships that existed too far from dark elf cities to matter politically but close enough to water to matter practically. The gargoyles took no payment for it. Territory, Corvin says. That was the arrangement. The coast was theirs to protect because it was theirs, and anything that moved through it moved under their watch.
I look at Droza when Corvin says that.
He is looking at the wall.
Later, I find him on the roof of the storage building that night, which is the closest thing Gullhaven has to a vantage point above the harbor. He doesn’t hear me climb up. Or he does and simply doesn’t react, which is more likely.
He faces the water. Wings folded, shoulders dropped just slightly from their usual rigid line. In the dark, with the sea spread out below the cliffs and the harbor lights scattered likeembers across the black, he looks exactly like what the town believed him to be for a century.
A monument. A thing carved from stone to endure.
I sit down on the roof and don’t say anything.
The wind off the water is cold enough to sting. Below us, a few lights still burn in the inn, and I can hear the muffled sounds of the last drinkers being persuaded toward the door. Somewhere further down the harbor, rigging clicks against masts in slow, uneven rhythm.
