Page 102 of Beds and Blades

I stood.

The room stayed sharp. The herbs, the table, the stone floor, the narrow stairs, all of it clear without glass between me and the world.

I went to find Skip.

I could see every step of the way there.

Chapter eighteen

Kolveth

Iwoke before Skip that morning, which was unusual.

He was usually gone before I fully surfaced. His day as High Commander often began in darkness, while I lingered in the last soft warmth of sleep, wrapped in the afterglow of a body that had been very thoroughly tended the night before.

For once, he was still beside me, his breathing slow and steady. I slipped from the bed without a sound and crossed to the window, not bothering with clothes.

We always slept that way. Sleeping nude was comfortable, but more than that, it meant there were no barriers when we reached for each other in the middle of the night, half-awake and wanting.

Beyond the glass, the snow fell in soft, endless sheets.

The Zhaduun Mountains were washed white beneath a dull gray sky. They were usually dark and forbidding. Now, softened by snow, they looked almost serene.

Inside, the fire roared, filling the room with heat. It felt almost unreal to stand there naked before a winter world, untouched by the cold, my skin still warm from the fire and the lingering comfort of the night.

Outside: the first snowfall of winter. Inside: the fire he had tended, still burning.

It was now Kolveth, the twelfth month of the Elven calendar. Caen had explained the system when I had been in this world for only a month. That felt like another lifetime.

The calendar comprised twelve months of thirty days each. Three hundred and sixty days in total. The names came from the Elves’ ancient tongue and predated the Great Unification that followed the last great war. I memorized them immediately; imprecision irritated me.

There was a clean elegance to it. Every month exactly thirty days. No stunted Februaries, no leap years, no uneven alternation between thirty-day and thirty-one-day months. Just symmetry. Consistent, orderly, perfect.

I had arrived in the month of Telvorn, which was just before autumn. Now, it was Kolveth. Four months gone. One hundred and twenty days.

And every night, without exception, winter waited on the other side of the wall while we ended the evening sweaty and entirely unconcerned with the temperature outside.

The training yard was white. So were the walls. Everything lay covered, silent, and still.

On Earth, I had always thought there was something beautiful about the morning after a snowfall. Snow muffled the world overnight, swallowing the ordinary sounds of human life until everything became quiet in a way it never was otherwise.

The beauty of it. The stillness.

I had always loved the sense that the world had reset, temporarily, to a cleaner and more honest state.

The problem, in Philadelphia, was that it lasted approximately two hours. The plows arrived. The cars started. The salt trucks came through with their grinding industrial persistence. Within an hour, the white was gray, and the gray was brown, and the brown was a miserable slush. The silence was gone before you had finished appreciating it, replaced by the noise of a world that did not believe in silence.

Here, the silence held.

There were no cars in Mytharo. There were no plows, no salt trucks, no engines of any kind converting the clean white into brown municipal misery. The snow lay where it had fallen, and the world was quiet.

The only sounds were the distant creak of leather and the shuffle of boots as the watch changed on the walls. Beyond the walls lay the deep silence of a place that had never once been crossed by a combustion engine.

I stood at the window for a long time. Behind me, Skip slept on. The ring on my finger glowed. Quiet, warm gold against the gray morning light.

Four months.

Long enough that this no longer felt like a place I had arrived in. Long enough that it felt like somewhere I belonged.