Page 30 of Beds and Blades

The sky was beginning to lighten when I found Skip at the eastern wall. I had no analysis to deliver. I walked to the wall and stood beside him.

He was looking at the mountains.

I followed his gaze to the dark outline of the Zhaduun peaks.

The wind that came off the Zhaduun Mountains was nothing like the air around the outpost. It carried something with it, an edge that set my nerves on end. The wind felt like a message, as if it had passed through unspeakable things and brought something back with it. Not a scent I could understand, but a warning I could feel.

I looked at the castle on the peak. My eyes kept finding it the way your tongue finds a sore tooth. Not because you want to, but because the wrongness demands acknowledgment. In the dark, it was simply a shape. Angular, patient. It looked like it was carved into the mountain itself.

When I had first seen it, the sight had unsettled me for reasons I could not yet name.

Now I could name the reasons.

Morvanna and her vampire army lived there.

The castle had been frightening when I did not know what occupied it. Knowledge had not improved the situation.

After a while, Skip said, “She saves everyone she can.”

“I know.”

I had seen it in the infirmary. Not just the magic, though that had been impossible enough. I had seen the part after. The cost, the dark pendant, the exhaustion in her face. She had looked like she had not slept in two days, and still she kept working because there was one more person in the room who needed her.

“She pushes herself.”

“Yes,” he said. “She does.”

Neither of us said anything after that.

The garrison had gone quiet in the strange way a place goes quiet after surviving the night. It was emptied of urgency and left with the low sounds of aftermath—distant footsteps, a door closing somewhere below, the murmur of voices kept soft out of respect or exhaustion.

The sky had begun its slow shift toward morning. A thin gray spread over the walls, the particular color that belongs to the hour between one thing ending and another beginning.

At some point, the space between us disappeared.

His arm settled around my shoulders.

I did not comment on it.

He did not explain it.

The kiss was still there between us, present and unaddressed. So was the look from the courtyard. So was everything else about him I had been gathering since the moment he found me in the field.

There would be time for all of it.

For now, the sun was coming up.

Chapter seven

Crypt

My room was exactly as I had left it.

I removed the boots first. This required more effort than I appreciated. Then the belt. Then the coat. The corset presented a brief logistical challenge.

The bed was even more comforting than the night before.

When I opened my eyes again, the light had changed. Later. Brighter. The clean light of a day that had apparently continued without consulting me.