Page 46 of Add To Hoard

I stand at the window until the fire on the beach goes out and the question of what winning costs surfaces, whether it does, for the first time in six centuries, is something I am not prepared to pay alone.

24

NERINA

He comes in the early morning, before the light has fully committed.

I hear him at the top of the beach and I know before I turn that it is not Maelor, the footfall is different, heavier and more deliberate, the tread of a creature considerably older than anything I have yet encountered on this island. I turn with the knife already loose in my hand and I see him properly — daylight, close range, no distance between us.

Soryth is not what I built from Maelor’s descriptions. He is taller than I expected and his eyes are the deep ember-red of banked coals, and he stands at the edge of the cove with the stillness of one who has outlasted every urgent thing it has ever encountered and has consequently stopped finding urgency convincing. He takes me in with the complete, unhurried attention of a creature for whom time is not a constraint.

He does not come further into the cove. He stays at the edge.

“I am not here to threaten you,” he says. His voice is low and carries without effort, the voice of a creature accustomed to large spaces. “I am here because you need information and Maelor will not give it to you because he is protecting you from it, which is a thing he does and which serves neither of you at this particular moment.”

I wait.

He tells me about the review. Clean, factual, no editorializing, the filing, the three grounds, the third ground and what it says and what it does not need to say because the room will say it for him. He tells me what a successful challenge means for the island’s governance and what it means for the barrier work and what it means for the eighteen dragons who have been watching Drazik build and have not yet decided which direction to move. He tells me all of it in the same even tone and then he stops.

He does not tell me what to do.

He says one thing before he turns to go: “You crossed the Varak Fog without charts and found the approach corridor by means that were not navigation and not luck. Whatever it was, it is the most useful thing anyone has brought to this island in two centuries. Drazik’s third ground collapses if the room understands what you actually are.” He looks at me with those ember eyes steady on mine. “I am not asking. I am informing.”

He leaves.

I stand at the waterline. The tide works at my boots. I can feel the stone through the fabric of my pocket. The bound arm aches in the cold morning air and I press it against my side and think about what Soryth said and what he did not say and the specific weight of a dragon that old choosing to walk down to a human woman’s beach and spend words on her.

Then I go to find Maelor.

He is at the Spire’s lower gate when I reach it, meaning he was already moving. He saw Soryth leave the beach. We meet on the forest path with the trees around us and the morning light in its thin columns and he looks at my face and knows.

“I want to testify,” I say.

His first response is in his eyes before his mouth, a contraction, immediate and involuntary, the response of a person who does not want me in that room, and not for strategic reasons.

“Nerina —”

“I know what you’re going to say.”

“You don’t know what that chamber is like?”

“No,” I say. “But I know what the Varak Fog is like from the inside of a brig taking on water, and I know what the approach corridor feels like at night with no charts, and apparently that’s the thing that matters.” I hold his eyes. “Let me do something useful. It’s what I’m here for.”

The forest is quiet around us. Somewhere above the canopy the island’s permanent cloud turns slowly.

His second response is the right one. I can see it arriving.

25

MAELOR

Ispend the night working through every reason to refuse.

She would be in the chamber. Twenty-odd dragons in human form, all of them with six centuries of accumulated instinct about humans in rooms where they do not belong, and Drazik at his wall with his broken horn and the third ground written on the filing and his very good understanding of how to use a room. She would be visible and she would be real and everything Drazik has been making abstract — ‘personal interest,’ ‘compromised judgment’ — would have a face.

I also work through what her testimony does.

She crossed the Varak Fog alone in a damaged brig with no charts and found the approach corridor by a route the survey records have never accounted for. She repaired a structural failure the island had been carrying for two seasons in three days of work. She survived the barrier weather and the island’s deterrent system and an assassination attempt in the western forest and she is still on the beach, still useful, still entirely herself. Drazik’s ‘personal interest’ argument requires that my judgment regarding her is impaired. A woman who walks into the council chamber and testifies with the calm precision of a woman who has navigated worse rooms than this one is not evidence of impaired judgment. She is evidence of exactly the kind of judgment a guardian is supposed to exercise.