Page 7 of Beds and Blades

He stopped his horse at roughly twenty feet. Looked at me. Looked at the space around me. Looked at me again.

The sword went back.

He swung down from the saddle and walked the horse closer by the reins. Then he was next to me, and he opened the visor of his helmet, and I performed an involuntary recalibration of everything.

He looked like Calloway.

Well, he looked like Calloway if Calloway had been subjected to several additional years of wind and sun.

The jaw was the same fundamental structure. Strong, slightly clenched, carrying the expression of someone who had been making consequential decisions long enough that the concentration had become architectural. The eyes were darker. The stubble was more serious. The grime of recent combat still lingered in the lines of his face.

This was, objectively, a problem. I had constructed a mental template for the kind of man I wanted, based substantially on James Calloway, and the man currently crouching in front of me was making Calloway look like a rough draft.

He had the same essential structure but it was weathered into something more final. The way a building looked better after it was around for a few decades.

He had earned his face. Every line of it.

My pulse had shifted into a register that had nothing to do with the three cans of NeuroXCore 8000 still pumping through my system.

He looked at me with total focus. He was genuinely trying to understand what he was looking at.

“I can tell you are not undead,” he said. His voice had deliberate precision. “How did you survive the night out here?”

I took a breath. “I don’t know. I just arrived. I’m not sure how. Where am I?”

He studied me for another moment. “You are outside Outpost Ely. The Zhaduun Mountains are behind you.” He said this like I should have already known this.

He looked at my sweater, my jeans, and my clearly not-armor and recalibrated. “Where are you from?”

“Philadelphia,” I said. “Pennsylvania. Which I’m recognizing, from your expression, is not a place you’ve heard of.”

He had not heard of it. His face was doing what faces do when they receive information that doesn’t fit their existing framework. He was not dismissing it, exactly, but filing it away while he dealt with the more immediate situation.

“You are four hundred miles from the Kingdom of Newardia,” he said carefully. “At the outpost line. Most people…” He chose his next words carefully. “Most people found outside this outpost do not survive the night.”

“I didn’t come here willingly. I woke up in this field with no memory of how I got here.”

The expression on his face was one I hadn’t seen before. He was confronted with something that fit nowhere inside his understanding of the world.

“You are not undead,” he said again, as if returning to the facts he could confirm was a reasonable organizational strategy.

He crouched to my eye level, close enough that I could see his attention fully shift into the mode of clinical assessment.

He looked at my neck. Both sides. He examined me with careful focus.

“What exactly,” I said, “are you looking for?”

He stopped.

Then he looked at me.

The look had changed.

Earlier, he’d been measuring risk. Then it shifted. His attention lingered. It moved to my mouth, then back to my eyes, then dropped briefly to my hair where it had fallen across my shoulder.

He looked at me the way men look at women they want.

Every woman knows that look. From a stranger at the end of a bar. From a man on the street who moves his gaze as you pass. Sometimes it’s welcome. Sometimes it isn’t. I don’t even think most men consciously realize they’re doing it.