She is silent. Then she moves — not away, toward — and tucks herself against my side with her head on my chest and her hand flat over my heartbeat, the same way she pressed her palm to the scar on my ribs. Checking. Confirming I'm still here.
"I haven't slept," I say. "Not properly. Not in forty years."
Her hand presses slightly harder.
I close my eyes. The noise in my mind is quiet. The room is dark and warm and smells of cold stone and lamp oil and her, and in four decades I stop waiting for the silence to end.
It doesn't.
13
MIREYA
Iwake before him, which means I'm the only one watching when it happens.
Sevareth is asleep on his back, which I suspect is not how he usually sleeps — everything about the way he operates suggests a man who stays near walls and faces doors — but we're in a strange safehouse in a single narrow bed and I'm between him and the wall, so here we are. His face is different when he's asleep. The deliberate composure that he wears like armor over everything else is absent, and what's underneath it is younger. More tired. More human, for lack of a better word, though I'm aware that's ironic.
Then the shadow moves.
Not the shadows in the corners of the room. His shadow. The one falling across the wall behind him from the grey pre-dawn light coming through the shuttered window. It moves toward him instead of away from the light source, the way shadows simply do not move, slow and deliberate, curling around the edge of his shoulder like it's trying to get closer.
I don't breathe.
It lasts maybe five seconds. Then the light shifts as a cloud moves across the early sky and the shadow behaves normally again, flat and obedient against the wall, and Sevareth sleeps on without knowing anything happened.
I lie there in the dark and I think: this is the thing I saw in the study. This is what he wouldn't confirm. And now I've seen it twice and I need to understand what it is, because you cannot protect something you don't understand and I have apparently decided — somewhere between the argument and the safehouse and his voice saying I stop waiting for the silence to end — that I am going to protect this man whether he makes it easy for me or not.
Back at the estate, I start in the library.
House Vhol'ir's library is enormous and impeccably organized, which means whoever catalogued it was not trying to hide anything. Whatever Sevareth keeps that he doesn't want found will not be in the library. I use the library anyway because I need context before I can look for what's been removed from it, and by the end of the first day I have a working understanding of dark elf cosmology, patron deity hierarchies, and the basic framework of abyssal magic theory.
The Thirteen Hungry Maws are mentioned in three texts. Briefly. In the kind of language scholars use when the subject matter makes them nervous — passive constructions, hedged attributions, the academic equivalent of not meeting someone's eyes.
Ancient entities. Pre-deity. Feed on extremity — extreme violence, extreme obsession, extreme emotional states. Symbiotic bonding with a host is theoretically possible and historically documented and universally catastrophic. The texts agree on this last point with unusual consensus.
I close the third book and sit with that for a moment.
Then I go looking for the records that aren't in the library.
I find them in the lower archive, behind a door that requires a specific key. The lock is heavy and old-fashioned — ironwork, not magical — and I should not be able to open it, but four years of breaking into noble storerooms and harbor offices gives you a working knowledge of locks that were built to keep out people with less patience than me. Forty minutes and two bent pins later, I'm in.
The records are old. Decades old. Written in Sevareth's hand, which I recognize from a hundred strategy documents, except the handwriting here is different — less controlled, more pressured, the writing of someone who was frightened when they put the words down.
I read for two hours. When I come back out I sit on the floor of the corridor with my back against the locked door and I stare at the wall opposite and my thoughts are on a thirty-two year old boy who survived the blood wars and then survived the political purges that followed and then made a decision that I understand with painful clarity even as it horrifies me.
He was out of options. He needed power to survive and there was only one place offering it, and he took it, and the price has been eating him from the inside ever since.
The thing I feel about that is not what I expected to feel. It's not fear, exactly, though that's in there. It's something that lives closer to grief.
The man who finds me is not one of Sevareth's people.
I'm in the east corridor the following afternoon when he steps out of an alcove — thin, dark-robed, ink-black eyes that are wrong. Too still. The eyes of a being who has been practicing looking human for so long that most people don't notice when the practice slips. Most people.
"Lady Vhol'ir," he says. His voice has a layered quality, like two people speaking in close sequence. "How fortunate. I had hoped we might speak."
"I don't think we've been introduced," I say. I keep my voice even. Every instinct I have is cataloguing exits.
"Vaustren Dhalor." He tilts his head. "I facilitate certain arrangements for House Vhol'ir. Historical ones." A pause weighted with meaning. "Lord Vhol'ir is starving, you know."
