"What does that mean?"
She directed the question at Rhaezon. She watched him weigh the question. Watched the muscles in his jaw shift, not with tension but with calculation — how much to say, how much she needed. She thought he might not answer.
The corridor hummed around them. Davn stood four feet away, his expression neutral, waiting for whatever Rhaezon decided.
Rhaezon's eyes found hers. "It means you're safe."
SEVEN
The rest of the journey was blessedly uneventful.
No one else followed them. Davn confirmed this each day with a single nod and returned to his reader. The corridor remained quiet. The transport moved through the dark between stars at a speed November said she couldn't feel, and Rhaezon didn't tell her that he could. There was a constant low vibration in his sternum, the particular hum of a ship pushing through compressed space that registered in Drakon bones the way weather registered in old injuries.
Each night she sat with him.
He did not invite it. He positioned himself against her door in the same spot, blaster on his hip, back to the metal, awake. And each night the door opened, and she came out with the blanket. She settled next to him on the floor as though this were simply what they did now.
She talked. Not always — sometimes she remained quiet, and the silence between them was the kind that did not require filling. But most of the time she offered things: a story about a horse that had taken eleven months to accept a halter, a description of the way Colorado light moved across grassland inthe hour before sunset, the specific smell of sage after rain. Small things. Ordinary things.
He listened. He did not contribute much. But on the second night she asked him what the stars looked like from Aelthar, and he told her about the binary system — the amber light, the silver evenings, the way both stars sat on the horizon at once during the long dusk. He told her the sunsets were famous. She asked if he watched them. He said he hadn't in some time. She said maybe she'd watch them for both of them, and he didn't answer because his throat had done something inconvenient.
The blanket smelled more like her each time she brought it. Warm skin and something clean, and a faint undertone he couldn't identify that he thought might simply beher. He pulled it tighter around his shoulders each night after she went back inside. He was not examining this behavior. He was declining to examine it with considerable discipline.
On the third day, the transport dropped out of compressed space above Aelthar, and she was standing at the observation window when the planet filled the viewport.
He watched her see it.
The amber star was dominant, casting the world in its characteristic warmth — the mountain ranges throwing long shadows across the plateaus, the rivers catching light in thin silver threads between the dark stone. From orbit the planet looked severe.
November pressed one hand flat against the viewport glass. Her lips parted. Her eyes moved across the surface. She didn't say it was beautiful. She didn't say anything at all for a long moment. Then: "It looks ancient."
"It is."
"Good. I like old things. They've figured out what they are."
He turned his head away before she could see what that statement did to his face.
The transport landedat the plateau port. From there, Davn hired a ridge-runner for the hour's ride along the ridge road to the estate. Rhaezon sat in the back next to Davn and watched the plateau reveal itself through November's eyes.
She had her palm against the glass as the plateau unspooled past the window. Dark stone and thin soil made up a large part of the countryside. The low, stubborn vegetation that only grew here, silver-green and fragrant where the runner's passage bruised it.
She said nothing. She just watched.
He watched her watch.
She tilted her head and the light moved across her face. He registered that his eyes were about to shift and held them by force of will alone, noticing that his chest had gone warm along the scale-lines. He looked at the floor of the runner. Counted the grain in the wood. Looked back up when he was sure of himself.
The runner slowed as they neared town. The road narrowed into the single street threading through the village that sat a few miles below the estate, the one whose inhabitants supplied the Hold and drank in the one tavern and talked, without fail, about everything.
November went still, paying attention with her whole body.
The buildings were low, stone-built, roofs pitched steep for snow. Smoke rose from three chimneys he could see. A Drakon woman in a heavy wool coat lifted a basket onto a cart and watched the runner pass without disguising that she was watching, her wings twitching with curiosity. A child ran alongside the wall, one hand trailing the rough stone, and stopped when the runner came level with him. He stared openly at the window — at November — with an expression of undiluted interest.
November lifted her free hand off the glass and waved at him. The child's mouth fell open and his wings unfurled. Then, after a stunned beat, he waved back.
Rhaezon watched this exchange and felt something inside his chest make a small, involuntary adjustment he did not have a word for.
The Vaethari Hold appeared as they crested the final rise — dark stone against the darkening sky, the long wall running along the plateau edge, the stable buildings clustered to the east. Both stars were visible on the horizon, the amber dropping below the ridge while the pale one hung above it, and the light was the silver-gold of the coming evening on Aelthar.
