Chapter 65 Sixty eight
Ryder didn’t answer. He looked at the wolves and let something in him rise just enough to lower every head by an inch. The crimson eyes stayed high, unblinking, and he saw it and accepted it without surprise.
“Take them out of the square,” he said to the air behind the wolves, which is to say to the man who wielded them. “You can have the fields. You can test the fences. You cannot have houses.”
“You don’t get to draw lines.” The courier’s voice was pleasant. “You erased them.”
Ryder stepped forward once. The nearest crimson-eyed wolf flinched and then stood its ground like a religious man facing daylight. “You don’t get to write scripture,” Ryder said. “You took dictation for a dead king and learned the wrong lessons.”
The courier moved a fraction, ready to slip, measuring exits that weren’t doors. “We learned that love makes poor law.”
“Then you weren’t in the room,” Ryder said.
Sienna felt the words where her ribs met. She didn’t let the feeling show. She set her shoulder against his and felt how heat ran under his skin, slow and banked. He didn’t glance at her. He didn’t give her the name she wanted. He stood as if he were a door and she were a room that needed one.
The courier sighed, a little theatrical himself. “This village bores me.” He lifted a hand. Wolves tensed. “Let’s go write our sermon somewhere with more firewood.”
“Go,” Ryder said, and added the smallest push with a voice that had learned a god’s octave. Wolves moved. The line melted, not in fear, in obedience to a power that was not theirs. The crimson-eyed lingered and then retreated in a slower, insulted trot.
“If you come back,” Eamon called after them, because courage is sometimes a habit, “bring a broom. You made a mess.”
The courier glanced back and laughed, honestly delighted. “Keep him,” he said to Sienna, as if she had a choice. “He makes better jokes now.”
He vanished into smoke the way men vanish when the person they serve calls them by a short name.
Silence spilled. Then sound came back all at once: crying, metal falling, a woman saying thank you thank you to nothing visible, a man sinking to sit on the step as if it had been a chair meant for him. Sienna felt her power recede like tide and left in its wake the ache that comes afterward. Her knees said their piece. She breathed past them.
“Your Majesty,” Eamon said, gentler than he had been all day, “you’re white as the church paint.”
“I’m well,” she answered, which was also what you said to men who had watched you bleed.
Ryder stepped away from her shoulder and went to the man who had gone down. He put his hand to the wound he could not fix and closed the man’s eyes with a courtesy that could break a woman’s heart. He wiped his palm on his sleeve and looked at the village as if he had been hired to repair a roof and found rot down the beams.
Sienna crossed to him and stopped a foot away, too close for dignity, not close enough for comfort. “Where did it put you?” she asked again, because her mind could not move until it had that shape.
“Between,” he said. He sounded tired enough to tell the truth and careful enough to keep it from being all of it. “Not far. Not near. I could hear you.”
She didn’t reach for him. She reached for the nothing between them and filled it with words. “Say my name.”
He looked at her. The gold warmed a degree and did not soften. “We have work.”
“You always do,” she said, and smiled without humor at how neatly that sentence held both of them.
He turned. She let him.
At the edge of the square, a window closed quietly. At the church, a child cried and a woman said shh shh into hair that smelled like sleep. Eamon took stock and started demanding bandages and water, his voice rolled in order. The guards found their hands and their breath at the same time and began to move.
Sienna felt the weight of the shard in the forest like a storm remembered by bone and knew this had only been the first answer to a question she had not yet been bold enough to ask aloud.
“Captain,” she said.
“Majesty,” he answered, wiping his blade and sheathing it, as men have done since blades were made.
“Put eyes on the fields. Two on the well. Three on the road. No fire unless I call it.”
“And him?” Eamon’s gaze flicked to Ryder.
She held his gaze. “He saved us. That’s all.”
“For now,” Eamon said, not arguing, not agreeing, in the old soldier’s way of keeping two truths in one jaw.
Sienna looked back to where Ryder stood with his back to her, speaking low to a woman whose door had been marked by claws and who could not get her hands to stop shaking. He bent his head to hear her better, as if the crown he had never worn were heavy today and he had learned to bow by surviving it.
She had the sudden, ridiculous thought that if she said his name now, the square would hear it and decide something for both of them. She closed her mouth and turned instead to the work of counting the living.
On the far ridge beyond the last house, wolves lined the crest, dark notches against a bruised sky. They did not howl. They watched. The courier had kept his promise about firewood.
Ryder looked up and looked away and began walking toward the fields without waiting for her order.
Sienna followed.
And in the trees behind the village, something old remembered how to open its eyes.