I stop walking before I've decided to. Theren's hand comes to my arm from behind. Not hard, but I know it's a warning. I know exactly what happens to a human woman in chains who steps toward soldiers in a city street at night, and I know it doesn't end with them backing down. I know all of this and it doesn't move the thing sitting in my chest that grew up watching exactly this and never learned to stand still.
Leoric has already moved. He doesn't raise his voice. Doesn't reach for a weapon. He crosses toward them with no urgency in it, which is somehow more effective than speed would be.The first soldier turns and goes quiet before Leoric speaks. The second is slower to understand. He speaks to them in a tone too low to carry, and the words aren't for me, but the effect is immediate—both soldiers straighten, step back from the man against the wall, and fix their attention on Leoric like they've just realized they're doing something careless while someone with the authority to make that cost them watches. He says something else. One of them nods, and they move off without arguing.
Leoric glances at the man against the wall and tips his head toward the far street. The man reads it and goes. Leoric walks back to us.
"Keep moving," he tells the group, and that's all.
I walk without saying a word, because the options that come to mind aren't entirely appropriate, and Theren's hand drops from my arm. The buildings of the city close in around us again, and I watch the corner where the soldiers disappeared. I turn that moment over and I can't make sense of it yet.
The patrol comes fast, three streets later. Organized, covering both ends of the road before we've had time to reverse. I hear them half a second before Leoric does.
"There's a tunnel access forty meters back," I lower my voice. Not asking permission. "Drainage channel, grate behind the farrier's sign. It runs under the merchant quarter and exits near the old tanner district."
I continue, "I worked these routes for six years. You want my tunnels or their patrol?"
A beat. Then: "Lead."
I get directly in front. The grate is where I left it—not guaranteed, city infrastructure shifts—but the seal on the catch is still the old lock, and my thumb finds the release without needing to think about it. The channel below is low, damp,reeking of standing water and old rot, and I drop down first because it's mine and I know where the bad footing is.
The escort follows, Leoric is last. His shoulders have to be on an angle to clear the grate drop, and the channel forces him into a crouch he manages without complaint. I note it, because commenting on what physical difficulty costs is something powerful men do when they want people to understand the weight of leading, and he doesn't. We move through the dark with Theren's small flame behind us and my memory leading.
The tunnel splits at the second junction. I take the left branch, stepping over the collapsed section. The patrol noise above fades to nothing. At the third junction, it narrows to single file through the worst stretch. Theren falls back to manage the soldier and Leoric ends up directly behind me.
"Watch your head," I warn.
He doesn't answer. The air shifts as he ducks anyway.
The narrow part is eight meters long. I've counted it in the dark before, knowing the number makes it finite. My hands stay put on the wall, my eyes on the pitch ahead, and I'm aware—irritatingly, precisely—that Leoric is less than an arm's length behind me. His coat brushes my shoulder when I slow for a footing change. That's all. Fabric. Contact in a space too small for anything else.
I move faster. We stop at the fourth junction as a patrol passes above. Theren signals it and we go still in a passage wide enough for two but not comfortable. Leoric ends up beside me. I keep looking straight ahead. Telling my brain what I see. Stone. Water stain on the wall. An old rebel marker carved into the mortar that no one alive would recognize anymore. I don't look at him, until I do.
Theren's flame doesn't reach us well, but it catches the scar at his jaw where the burn pulls the skin flat, and then the place at his throat where the damage goes deeper. Where his collar hasshifted, I see the scar continue beneath the fabric, disappearing down toward his chest. I know fire is lethal. I know it from the wounded I've moved through crossings, from the burn across my own shoulder. I know the texture of damage like this and what it's like to survive it and keep surviving it every morning after. I did that. Not alone. Not the way histories tell it. But I was there and the fire was partly mine.
My pulse does something I don't want it to. That's just proximity to old danger, I tell myself. Just the body keeping score. A reasonable explanation for the fact that I notice the distance between his arm and mine, the way he breathes without wasting any of it, the fact that he has not looked at me once during this crossing even though I have now looked at him twice.
Theren signals clear. We move. The exit comes up through an empty storage cellar in the tanner district. The front man surfaces first, checks the space, and we follow. Above is quieter here, and we're outside the main patrol grid.
Not safe. Safe does not exist yet. Not until we are out of Protheka, on roads that do not know our names. But the teeth on this danger are smaller. Leoric glares at me once when we're all standing in the cellar dark. Not for long. It's the kind of look that gets filed somewhere and closed before I can read what the folder says.
"Good," he tells me. Not a thank you. Not an acknowledgment. Nothing I can use against him.
"Where are we going?" I ask.
"Out of Protheka."
"That is not an answer."
"It is the only one you need tonight."
I should hate that. I do hate it. But the streets above are full of patrols, the estate is compromised, and the man withholding answers is still the only reason I am not dead.
I pull the cloak tighter and don't say another word, because what I know now—that he stopped those soldiers without calling it mercy, that he followed me into rebel tunnels without hesitation, that his scars sit somewhere in my chest I haven't found a word for yet—is more than I knew this morning, and more is not something I asked for.
6
LEORIC
The road east of Protheka has not seen peace in years. It remembers other things—troop positions, supply lines, the compression of earth under siege equipment moving fast. I read it the way I do with everything: for what it's already telling me. That is why I chose it.
