Page 39 of Beds and Blades

Before Zhor, Mytharo had been divided into kingdoms, languages, customs, and rival theologies. During the war, the book argued, those divisions became luxuries no one could afford. The kingdoms were forced into alliance, and the alliance became something larger—armies serving together, refugees crossing borders, temples adopting shared rites, families intermarrying, dialects blending under pressure.

The text also referred, with absolutely no warning, to elves, orcs, and something called the Isvael.

I stopped reading. Then I went back and read the sentence again.

Elves. Orcs. The Isvael, apparently.

I sat there with one finger on the page, experiencing the particular academic disorientation of encountering a footnote to reality itself.

There were not only other kingdoms in Mytharo. There were other species. The book mentioned them with the casual confidence of a writer who assumed the reader already knew the basic categories of existence and did not need to be eased into the concept.

I had not been eased.

I made a note in the margin: Elves/orcs/Isvael????

The book presented Zhor not merely as a sorcerer but as a servant of Druven—the anti-divine principle of refusal, preservation, and all things that could not bear to end. Druvenfall, I learned, literally meant Druven’s Fall.

From the crucible of war came a common devotion to Yravel and a shared tongue. The common tongue. This was apparently the tongue now spoken across much of Mytharo, which was useful, given that it also happened to be the exact language I spoke. I still had no explanation for that.

The unification did not last in its political form. Once Zhor was defeated and the immediate threat was gone, old borders reasserted themselves. Courts remembered their rivalries. Kingdoms remembered they preferred ruling themselves.

But some things did not separate again. The language remained. So did Yravel’s central place in Mytharo’s theology.

As engrossing as the book was, my mind kept returning to one thing.

Skip.

Then, in the margin beside a passage about an empress of the Elven Sovarith Imperium, I realized I had written his name.

Skip.

Just his name.

I stared at it for a moment. I did not cross it out.

After the sun went down, I changed into one of the garments Skip’s soldiers had delivered while I slept the day before—a linen nightgown, pale and soft from wear, loose through the sleeves, with a neckline that was not particularly modest.

There was also a belt. Leather. Worn. Stubborn. I cinched it low at my hips because otherwise the gown had too much fabric and not enough structure.

I was aware of what it did.

I tried to return to the book.

I read the same paragraph about Zhor’s second campaign three times and retained nothing except that Skip was tall, broad, covered in hard-earned muscle, and had the kind of jawline that made historical analysis feel temporarily unreasonable.

Eventually, I closed the book.

I took the candle, went down to the Great Hall, and sat near the hearth because it was warm and because I was not going to pretend, even to myself, that I was not hoping he would come.

The Great Hall at night was a different place than it was during the day. The operational noise of the garrison—boots on stone, the ring of equipment, voices carrying across the yard—had retreated into silence.

The main hearth provided most of the light. Fire moved across the stone in amber shifts, throwing shadows up the walls and over the old banners hanging from the rafters. The stones seemed to hold warmth, not only from this fire but from years of fires before it, years of people coming in from cold walls and colder nights to sit where I was sitting now.

The hall smelled of woodsmoke, old stone, and leather.

Nothing decorative. This was not a hall built to impress. It was a hall built to endure.

Skip entered without announcing himself.