Page 14 of Beds and Blades

At her throat, resting in her open collar, was a pendant. A spiral. It glowed a soft, steady blue-white.

I will admit, she undid me a little.

She seemed like someone who had decided, a long time ago, to be seen, and never went back on it. At some point, she had stopped: stopped shrinking, stopped softening, stopped arranging herself to take up less space than she needed.

A woman who stood in a room like she owned it, like she had built it, like she might or might not let you in. She was the kind of woman you wanted to become, even if you weren’t sure how.

This was not the kind of wizard I had been prepared for by any prior cultural reference. Gandalf had a hat and a staff and the aesthetic of someone who had stopped caring about their appearance around the start of the Second Age.

Merlin, depending on which version you consulted, had a beard down to his knees and robes that had not been updated since Arthur was in short trousers.

The entire tradition of fictional magical authority had led me to expect someone who looked like wisdom and smelled like old books.

Nobody had prepared me for this.

Merlin, I thought, had gotten the aesthetic wrong.

I found myself imagining what the male equivalent of this looked like. The same leather. The same pendant. That deep V, reimagined along a broader, muscled chest.

I drew in a careful breath and locked the thought away, forcing my expression back into something neutral, something controlled.

“May I?” she asked, gesturing for me to come closer. “I need to read you. It will not hurt, and it will not take long. You will feel nothing except, possibly, the awareness of being seen clearly. Some people find this uncomfortable.”

Skip looked at me with an expression I was beginning to learn to read: I will not ask you to do anything that will harm you, and this will not harm you.

“Go ahead,” I said.

She stepped closer. She did not touch me. She closed her eyes and went very still. The pendant at her throat began to respond. A slow brightening, blue-white intensifying and then steadying, pulsing.

I understood, watching it, that what she was doing had a cost. The pendant was not an ornament but an instrument, and that the instrument was currently being applied to the question of whether I was telling the truth.

I tried to look like someone who was telling the truth.

Chapter four

Mytharo

Caen had been still long enough that I had started to worry about what the stillness meant.

I had once taken a lie detector test for a graduate-school psychology study. Twenty dollars and a coffee shop gift card, nothing sinister.

The technician had attached sensors to my fingers and instructed me to relax, which is precisely the kind of instruction that makes relaxing physiologically impossible.

I had spent the entire session so acutely aware of my own cardiovascular system that I almost certainly registered as deeply suspicious despite telling the truth about everything, including my breakfast.

This felt very similar, except with a glowing pendant instead of finger sensors and significantly higher stakes than a coffee shop gift card.

Caen stood perfectly still with her eyes closed. I sat where she had indicated and attempted to project the calm confidence of someone with nothing to hide.

This was difficult because I had always looked guilty under scrutiny.

I was the person who broke into a visible sweat when a professor asked whether anyone had done the reading, even though I had. I was the person who looked suspicious at customs despite having only an undeclared pack of Twizzlers.

If Caen’s methodology involved anything in the vicinity of heart rate, pupil dilation, or the micro-expressions of someone whose nervous system interpreted being observed as a predator event, I was done for.

I was also, if I was being honest with myself, not certain that whatever Caen was doing constituted a reliable methodology. I believed in evidence. I believed in peer-reviewed research, replicable results, and the rigor of conclusions that had survived scrutiny.

I had been in this world for approximately three hours. I had not yet had time to establish whether standing very still with a glowing pendant met the evidentiary standards I usually applied to things.