“Stupid plan.”
“Probably.”
He stands up.
The scale of him hits me all over again. Eight feet tall. Shoulders wide as the doorway. He crosses the room in strides that make the ground vibrate beneath me and stops ten feet away. Not close. But closer than the chair.
I have to crane my neck to see his face.
“You walked into the Wastes to die,” he says. Lower now. Rougher.
“Yes.”
“On purpose.”
“Yes.”
“Because of the water.”
I don’t answer. He heard me begging for it to stop. Three days of fever and delirium, and that’s what came out of me. He already knows more than I wanted him to.
He looks down at me. I look up at him. I’m sitting on the cold floor, still shaking. He’s eight feet of gray skin and heat, and this near I can feel the warmth coming off him.
“Stupid,” he says again, but his voice is different this time. Softer. Not directed at me at all.
He turns and walks back to his chair. Distance restored.
“The fire will need wood soon. I’ll get it.”
“Wait.”
He stops but doesn’t turn. Gray skin and white fur. The breadth of him filling my vision.
“What’s your name?”
A pause.
“Thyran.”
“I’m Eseld.”
Another pause. Then, quiet: “I know.”
He leaves through a door I hadn’t noticed, disappearing beyond the firelight.
I sit on the cold floor and think about what he said. He knows my name. Found it on something I was carrying, maybe. He went through my things while I was unconscious, which should bother me more than it does. He listened to three days of fever and delirium and he hadn’t mentioned any of it until I asked.
He kept the knowledge to himself. A thing he wasn’t sure he was allowed to have.
I think about the tremor in his fingers when he carried me through the snow. He keeps his distance. I don’t know why yet.
The fire crackles. I pull one of the folded blankets around my shoulders. It’s warm, soft and smells like woodsmoke. And underneath that, something else. Cool and sharp. Something I don’t have a name for yet.
When he comes back with the wood, I’m still on the floor. He adds logs to the fire. Adjusts the angle of the flames. He checks the space around my sleeping platform, moving things, shifting blankets, making small adjustments I would never have thought to ask for. The tea cup refilled. The plate set aside for washing. A second fur pulled from somewhere and layered over the sleeping area, adding warmth.
He doesn’t look at me while he works. Doesn’t speak.
I watch him. The careful way he moves through his own hall. The way he avoids coming within ten feet of where I sit. The way he positions himself on the far side of the fire so there’s always flame between us.
