Page 12 of Beds and Blades

That said, there was no way I was going to call him Scipio.

“Skip,” I said.

I found the name faintly ridiculous attached to a man a foot taller than me who commanded a garrison on the edge of what looked like a very real war. I enjoyed that more than I should have.

He looked at me, perplexed.

“I’m going to call you Skip,” I said. “It suits you.”

He considered this like he had never once in his life been nicknamed by anyone, let alone by a woman he had found in a field.

His smile arrived unmanaged.

“Skip,” he said, as if weighing it, testing the sound of it against whatever he had been called for the past thirty-odd years.

As he looked at me more closely, something shifted in his expression. He was encountering something he had not anticipated. His world was being revised at a fundamental level.

He looked at me the way you look at something that has stopped you. He looked like a man whose mind had not yet caught up with what his body already knew.

“Your name?” he asked.

“Meghan.”

At my name, his breath caught almost too softly to hear. His attention sharpened, and for one strange second he seemed to forget the courtyard around us.

“A beautiful name,” he said, and then his eyes stayed on mine for a moment longer than the words required.

He looked at me the way someone looked at a document they thought would be straightforward, but that had turned out to contain something worth reading more carefully. He was looking at me with intense focus.

It was the most seen I had felt in a very long time. Possibly ever.

“Your account of where you’re from,” he said, his voice dropping into something more careful.

“Something in me believes it. But I need to be certain. We have a mage at this outpost. Her name is Caen. She will be able to verify.”

The courtyard had not stopped moving around us. Soldiers crossed between the keep and the wall with purposeful indifference.

The forge was still roaring.

One of the soldiers nearby spoke up.

“She could be a spy. For Morvanna. How else did she survive out there?”

Skip turned his full attention on the soldier.

“She could not have survived the sunrise if she were one of them,” Skip said.

Could not have survived the sunlight. So, the vampire theory from earlier had not been entirely off.

“That’s not true. It takes longer than one night for them to turn. Remember the man who took days? We thought he was sick, but…”

Skip cut him off. “We are going to see Caen. She can verify. That is the end of this.”

Skip talked to him as if the decision were already behind him and the conversation were a formality he was being courteous enough to complete.

I noted that the way he spoke was doing something significant to my ability to think clearly.

I had spent my entire academic career surrounded by men who couldn’t order lunch without a committee vote.