Page 123 of Beds and Blades

His emotions carried the same deliberate not-naming I was doing. We were holding the same line together, the two of us, by unspoken agreement. Holding it because the alternative was something that we didn’t want to face.

Not long afterward, the sun went down.

***

I was in our quarters when it happened.

The watch arrived before dusk.

The fire was burning. I had been reading a book from Caen’s library called The Rise and Fall of the Sovarith Elven Imperium. This was an effort to distract myself from Varia, and it wasn’t working.

Through the bond: Skip.

It was sharp and immediate.

Anger.

Then the anger became fear.

I was at the door before I had finished processing what I was feeling. The soldiers outside straightened when I opened it.

“Stay here,” one of them said. His voice was not unkind. It was the voice of a man following an order he had sworn to and intended to keep. “The High Commander ordered us to remain with you after dark.”

“I’m not leaving the walls. I need to search the outpost. There is something wrong with the High Commander.”

He nodded. “Then we go with you.”

Skip’s fear arrived in steady waves.

“Something has happened to him,” I said. “We move now.”

***

The infirmary door was open.

The bed was empty. The abrupt emptiness of a fast departure, the sheets disturbed by sudden movement. The oil lamp on the side table had been knocked over, its oil spreading across the floor in a dark, unlit pool.

The guard lay across the threshold, his sword still sheathed. The night orderly lay beside the bed.

I went to the orderly first. He was alive. I found the pulse at his throat and watched his chest rise and fall in the shallow rhythm of unconsciousness.

At his throat: twin punctures.

Clean. Deliberate.

The mark of feeding rather than killing.

I checked the guard. Dead.

The guard had been watching for a monster. Varia had still looked like his lieutenant until she was close enough to kill him.

I sent one soldier to find Caen. The other called for the watch, then remained with me as I went to find Cato.

***

Cato was at the eastern wall. I told him what I had found.

“Where is Skip?” I asked.