“You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Thinking loudly.”
I settle opposite him, headache dulled, pulse still traitorous.
“Then stop giving me material.”
10
VAEDROS
Night settles over the ridge with the grave patience of something ancient lowering itself across the world, dimming the vast canopy below into layered shadow while the last bruised light withdraws from the horizon in slow bands of violet and iron.
Our fire becomes the only warm color for miles, a contained pulse of amber breathing against the dark, and I sit beside it with a whetstone in hand, drawing steel across steel in measured strokes that produce a clean rasp almost soothing in its regularity. The blade requires little attention. My thoughts require more than I prefer.
Aeryn sleeps, or performs another convincing approximation of sleep, on the far side of the flames wrapped in one of the travel blankets, white hair spilled over folded arms, face softened by exhaustion into something younger than the woman who meets me word for word each day.
I no longer trust appearances where she is concerned. Frailty conceals teeth. Humor hides calculations. Pain arrives real enough, yet even suffering becomes selective information when she chooses how much of it the world is allowed to witness.
I have spent years shaping outcomes through pressure points obvious to no one but me. Fear, ambition, pride, hunger, desire, debt. Every person carries handles if one studies them long enough. Pull correctly and they call it choice while moving exactly where intended. The method has failed nowhere worth remembering.
Until now.
Threats sharpen her resistance. Confinement teaches her new angles of escape. Interrogation feeds the part of her that enjoys refusing. Every attempt to compel produces a narrower, more elusive version of the same woman. She does not break in expected directions.
Control through conventional means is a closed road. The admission tastes strange.
The forest answers with a distant cry from somewhere below, too low for birds, too brief for wolves. The beasts shift restlessly at their tether line. Resin pops in the fire, releasing a bright scent that mingles with woodsmoke, damp moss, and the mineral chill rolling up the ridge after sunset.
I set the blade aside. A new approach begins where old certainties end.
By morning clouds have thinned to white scraps moving high and fast above the trees. Cold clings to the stones. Dew beads silver along every blade of grass pushing through cracks in the ridge. Aeryn wakes before dawn and says nothing about the blanket I placed more fully over her shoulders during the night. I say nothing about the fact that she noticed.
We descend by a narrow track cut through heather and scrub pine until the forest closes around us again, trunks rising like pillars slick with old moisture, their bark furred in moss soft enough to bruise under a fingertip. I let the first hour pass without asking for direction. She notices. She noticeseverything that concerns her and pretends otherwise only when it entertains her.
“You’re unusually quiet,” she says at last, stepping over a root polished smooth by water and age.
“I’m conserving inferior questions.”
“How disciplined of you.”
“I try to offer you opportunities for growth.”
She glances sideways, eyes pale in the green-filtered light. “Then begin with yourself.”
I smile.
Instead of asking where to turn at the next split, I ask, “What would you have become if no one had discovered your gift?”
The change in her expression is slight, though significant enough to reward the risk. Surprise first, then caution settling over it like frost on glass.
“That sounds dangerously like curiosity.”
“It sounds like data collection.”
“It sounds like loneliness.”