He finds me watching.
It happens mid-verse. His gaze moves across the room, reading, and then it stops. Just for a beat—half a second, maybe less—where the song keeps going but his focus slips slightly sideways, his attention splitting between the music and the table near the wall where I’m sitting. He pulls it back. The song continues exactly as it was.
He schools his expression. He is not entirely successful. There’s a tension in the set of his jaw, in the way his next breath comes and goes, that a person who didn’t know him wouldn’t catch. I know him. I catch it.
He’s glad I’m here. He’s trying to be cool about how glad he is, and he’s not quite pulling it off, and he knows I can see it, and he keeps playing anyway.
A glass appears on my table. I glance up. The bartender—older, human, the kind of face that has been watching rooms for decades and misses nothing—is already turning away. He doesn’t acknowledge me directly. His attention went to the stage first. Then to me. Then he brought me a drink.
I lower my eyes to the glass. Then to the stage, where Kragen is very carefully not watching me.
I understand. I pick up the glass.
The set ends to real applause, and the room reshuffles, people moving, new conversations opening up, the bar getting three people deep. I’m at my table when a sound arrives that precedes its owner by several feet.
“Thereshe is.”
The orc approaching me at a rapid pace is shorter than the other orcs I’ve seen, stocky through the chest and shoulders, moving through the crowd with the momentum of someone who has never once questioned his right to be wherever he’s going. Green-skinned, broad-faced, with a grin that takes up most of the available real estate. He’s pointed at me the way a compass points north.
He arrives and drops into the chair across from mine without asking.
“Honey.” My name in his mouth has the weight of something he’s been saving. “I’m Grulk.” He says it like an introduction that should require no further explanation. “I’ve been waiting for this.”
“Have you,” I say.
“Months.” He settles his elbows on the table. He is constitutionally incapable of subtlety and has decided this is avirtue, which, on consideration, it might be. “He talks about you.”
“Does he,” I say flatly.
“Not the way he talks about other things.” He waves a hand, apparently editing himself, which appears to cost him real effort. “I’m not going to tell you what he said.”
I look at him steadily.
He looks back.
“You’re smaller than I expected,” he says.
“You’re about what I expected,” I say.
He blinks. Something in his face rearranges into delight. “Ha.” He says it like a word. “Ha. Good.” He leans forward. “You’re StillWater.”
I look at him. “I’m human.”
“You’re humanandyou’re StillWater.” He puts his hand in front of his chest, palm down, and rocks it once, a small, deliberate motion, like water barely disturbed. “You know what that means?”
“I looked it up,” I say. “After his first visit.”
Recognition shifts in his expression. Not surprise so much as confirmation. “You looked it up,” he repeats.
“Quiet. Deliberate. Internal.” I inform him.
“Yes.” He studies me. “He’s StillWater too. Has been his whole life. Spent most of his life running from it, which is…” He pauses. His expression softens into unmistakable fondness. “Which is very StillWater of him, actually. The sitting with things. The not forcing.” He shakes his head. “But you. You just have it. No running. No eight years of a bar and two sets a night and a room full of people.” He says this with complete sincerity and not a trace of judgment. “You got there on your own.”
I don’t know what to say to that. I pick up my glass.
“He took you to the clearing,” Grulk says. It isn’t a question.
“Sunday,” I say.