I go very still, afraid if I move, he’ll stop.
“My uncle told the Kel Doru story every winter. Every winter it grew. More enemies. A wider river.” He pauses to swallow. “There was a gate. A male died holding it, and that male had sons, and the sons sat in our hall and listened to my uncle say he held their father’s gate.” His hands lie flat on the desk, both of them. “I was twelve. I had kept every version, word for word. I stood up in the hall and told the first version.”
“What happened?”
“The hall went quiet. My uncle left before the next thaw.” His eyes find a spot on the wall to say it to. “When he came back, his stories were smaller. He never told Kel Doru again. He was not wrong to leave. I was not wrong to speak. I have carried both since.”
I fight the urge to tell him he was just a kid and say the simpler thing. “That’s why you have a vault.”
“Words are water in Stormbreak. Spilled everywhere. Nobody drowns.” His eyes come back to mine. “Mine were stones. The first one I ever threw hit someone I loved. So I stopped throwing them.” His mouth tips at one corner. “And you heard me anyway. First one through one hundred and seven doors.”
My eyes are burning as he picks me up and carries me the three steps it takes to cross my quarters. He sits down on the bed and tucks me against his chest as the silence holds us both.
I don’t even know why I’m crying. I try to tell myself it’s exhaustion. But the honest part of me knows it’s more than that.Valdrek and I just shared a deeper part of our souls, and he still hasn’t asked me to stay.
He rests his chin on my hair and rumbles, wordless as I cry. The sound goes through my ribs, and it reminds me of the moment in the hearing room the first day. I cry until I’m done, and he holds on patiently.
Later, I’m wrung out and strangely light. I’m sitting wrapped in a blanket while he stacks my page proofs into a perfect stack because apparently that’s a thing he needs to do. My phone pings on the desk. It’s the agency I contract with. There’s a night-shift scheduler with no idea what time zone my life is in. They’re offering a two-year contract, a posting I’d have chewed glass for six months ago. I read it twice, decline it in one line, and make a decision.
One of us has to say it.
“Say I don’t get the ferry tomorrow. What’s on the other side of the rift? Walk me through it.”
His hands go still on the paper. Then he sits back down across from me, and for the first time in the two weeks I’ve known him, Valdrek of Clan Stormbreak talks for five whole minutes.
He tells me about Gorrath Venn. Stone Cradle, in his language. It has cold air that tastes like snowmelt, mountains older than the gods. Their days are three hours longer than mine, so the light in the afternoon goes on and on. The Stormbreak stronghold in the caves and terraces of the Ironspine range, halls lit withstonemoss, an amber glow that runs along the walls and makes the rock look warm. His house, which he built, every rock read and placed. A warm kitchen. A bed he built too long for anyone human and never once shared.
“There are other human women,” he says. “They gather. They are loud in a way my people enjoy very much. My shieldmate married one of them.” The eyebrow adds a footnote. “Brokk. He talks like a rockslide. He found his wife here in eleven days. Eleven. I stood in his wedding line two years ago, thinking it would never happen for me, or thinking that if it did, she would take one look at all this silence and ask for a louder one. I applied anyway. And then I waited.”
“Valdrek.”
“It’s what I thought.” He shrugs. “Humans read silence as a locked door. One hundred and six times, I saw the look on the women’s faces. They didn’t want me, even if they had been the one.”
He’s one hundred percent wrong, but he continues before I can say it.
“And then a court reporter was in the corner of a hearing room, and my whole life caught fire. When I looked at what was burning, it was every plan I had for being alone.”
If this weren’t such a serious moment, I’d toss this blanket off and show him exactly how much he’s also caught my life on fire.
“And if I go with you,” I say carefully. “What would I do? There’s no court. No depositions. This is what I do. I have ten years into this and a machine.”
“You bring it with you.” He reaches into the pocket of his coat and sets a small object on the desk between us, and my heart trips hard enough that he can probably hear it.
It’s a flat, orc-palm-sized stone. Deep gray shot with a vein of white. Carved into its face, in details so fine it must have taken days, is a steno machine. My machine, the actual model, the little folding stand rendered in granite down to the latch I have to jiggle. Above it, arced across the top, runs a line of orcish runes.
“Stormbreak protection custom,” he says. “A warded stone. Carried, or set over a doorway.” His ear tips. “The carving took three nights. Your machine has many small parts, and my hands are not small.”
I look at those hands. Last night, they spanned my whole waist and lifted me as if they were entertained by the idea that I weigh anything. My body buzzes in delight.
Down, girl. He just gave us a protection stone. This is a serious moment.
I pick it up. It’s warm from his pocket and heavy. My thumb finds the runes and traces them slowly, and I can’t read a one of them.
“What does it say?”
“Her words are kept here.”
I close my fist around the stone and hold it against my chest. I don’t say anything because every word seems too small. He watches me not say it.
