"You were on the ground and someone was removing his belt."
"I know what was happening." My voice comes out harder than I intend. "I was there."
He stands up. Not aggressively — just standing, because sitting has run out of room to hold whatever he's containing. "This is what I warned you about."
"You warned me about patrols."
"I warned you about the risk." He stops a few feet away. "This is what it looks like when the risk stops being theoretical. That man outweighed you by four stone. You had a knife you couldn't reach and no one within earshot." His jaw works. "You could have been killed before I found you."
"But you did find me."
"That's not the point, Edria." His voice rises, briefly, before he pulls it back. "You were lucky. And luck runs out."
I stand up. My head protests. I ignore it. "You want to keep me safe — I understand that. But there's a version of keeping me safe that looks exactly like controlling what I do and how I do it."
"I'm not trying to control?—"
"You want me to stop the deliveries. Stop the only income that keeps Finn medicated and the roof patched." I take a step toward him. "You came back here twice while I was filling an order you told me to abandon. You show up in my forest in the middle of the night?—"
"Because you were in danger?—"
"Because you decided my choices were wrong." My voice holds. "There's a difference between protecting someone and overriding every decision they make for their own survival."
His eyes linger longer than they need to. The fire outside throws faint light through the tent canvas, and the camp around us is quiet.
"I couldn't find you," he says finally. It comes out low, stripped of everything except what it actually is. "Finn said you hadn't come home. I tracked the creek path all day before I heard the fight." He exhales through his nose. "I'm not trying to override you. I'm telling you that watching someone I—" He stops. Starts again. "I don't want to find you like that again."
The tent is very quiet.
I want to hold onto the argument. It's easier than what's underneath it—the fact that his hands had been shaking slightly when he'd crouched over me in the underbrush, and I'd noticed, and it had mattered to me.
"I hear you," I say. Not a concession. Not an apology. Just the truth of it.
His eyes stay on me another moment, then nods once and goes to fetch fresh water for the bandage.
I sit back down on the cot and let him.
16
NYRIUS
Ipull four men from the eastern patrol and reassign them to the Oxwood perimeter before breakfast.
Cyran watches me write the orders without commenting, which means he's waiting until I've committed to paper before he argues. He knows me well enough to pick his moments.
"Tightest coverage on the northern creek path and the mill lane after dark," I tell the patrol captain. "I want a face with every name that moves through those routes between the second and fifth hours."
"Yes, my lord."
"Quietly. No confrontations unless there's active threat to a village resident."
"Understood."
He goes. I fold the remaining orders and reach for the ledger copies Cyran laid out this morning. Three weeks of financial records from the regional magistrate's office, cross-referenced against the trade manifests from the western corridor's last quarter.
The numbers take an hour to reveal themselves properly. When they do, I sit back and look at the ceiling for a moment.
Malrec isn't just padding tax collection. He's drawing income from the smuggling routes directly—a percentage skimmed from every shipment that moves through the western corridor, laundered through a series of supply contracts paid to companies that don't appear in any legitimate merchant registry. Clean on the surface. The kind of arrangement that takes years to build and requires connections in both the criminal trade and the administrative record offices.
