“I do that sometimes,” she said.
“That isn’t normal after casting.”
“I was not casting,” she said. “I was helping to remember.”
No self-pity. No defiance. Just a fact, spoken as plainly as if she’d commented on the weather. He clenched his jaw until his teeth stopped buzzing.
“Resh shouldn’t let you wander,” he said. “You’re causing problems.”
She looked genuinely puzzled at that. “I thought I was helping.”
He barked a bitter laugh. “Is that what you call it? Toying with Rift Wardens, rearranging mender stocks, throwing starlight at men who should be on the death list—”
“People fear what they do not understand.” She tilted her head, considering him. “You fear me.”
He snorted. “I am not afraid of you.”
“Not of me,” she said. “For me.”
Just that. Quiet. Certain. Something hot and ugly twisted in his chest.
“You aren’t afraid of what I do,” she said. “Just afraid of what it means—of what people will do to me if they see.”
The words slammed into him harder than any shield charge. His throat worked. He swallowed the first answer that sprang to his tongue, the second, the third. None of them fit.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said finally. It came out rough. Thin around the edges.
She watched him for a moment, then said, very softly, “You look at me as you may have looked ather.”
The world shrank to the narrow space between them. The camp noise faded—Reskala shouting, metal ringing, horses stampeding in their lines, cookfires popping. The sky dimmed at the edges.
He stared at her.
“I don’t—”
“You carry it here.” She lifted a hand and tapped her chest—just left of center, where his own ache lived. “Like old metal. Heavy. Rusted. You think if you hold very still, it won’t rattle.” Her gaze flicked to his face, to his clenched jaw, his grinding teeth. “It rattles when I am near.”
She had no right to say that. No right to see that.
“That’s enough,” he said. It was meant to be sharp. It came out strained.
“Zarrek…” It was the first time she’d said his name. “Bloodletter. Second to the Resh’Agar. But also…father. You must realize it before it is too late. I amnotthe pain you carry,” she said. “I am only myself. Nother.”
His hands curled into fists at his sides. “Who?” he demanded. “Who are you talking about?”
She frowned, eyes going distant for a breath. “I can’t say. In my mind, the pain doesn’t have a shape. It justis.”
As though their words bruised the sky, clouds dragged their shadows across the Moores. The wind shifted, carrying the smell of stale water and molten steel.
The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them.
“Because she was too small to have a shape when she was taken,” he heard himself say.
He hadn’t spoken of it in years. Decades. Not to Resh, not to anyone. Resh may have worn his deepest regret as the Tears of the Resh’Agar, but Zarrek had no pretty earring to mark the most profound loss of his life. The memory had been something he’d locked away with iron and runes and work.
Yet here it was, slithering out on a single, unguarded breath in front of a barefoot star-creature who forgot her shoes and healed dying men like it was nothing.
Her gaze softened. Not with pity. He would have hated that. With something quieter. Sadder.
