Page 65 of Reaper Said Mine

His mouth tightens, but he has no useful answer, which is my favorite kind from men like him.

Another ceremony begins at the high table. I try to watch without being obvious, though subtlety becomes difficult when the entire room seems larger and closer than before. Gnash sits at the head beneath the banners, immense in formal armor, his long silver hair loose over black shoulder plates etched with ship names and old victories. Firelight turns the red of his eyes almost molten. He has been present all night the way gravity is present, felt even when ignored, shaping every orbit in the room.

I have avoided staring at him because staring is foolish and because I am not here to behave like another correspondent dazzled by proximity to power.

That has become harder.

The first time I saw his image in a file, he looked like every warning ever given physical form. In the Blood Hall, he looks like something more difficult to define. Brutal, yes. Nobody could mistake him for gentle. But he is not lounging in mindless savagery while diplomats squirm. He watches everything. Every course, every insult, every hesitation, every servant’s route, every ambassador’s reaction. When Gobold laughs too loudly, Gnash measures who laughs with him. When Theryki compliments a ritual, Gnash notices which aide fails to hide revulsion. When the Helios proxy raises his cup, Gnash’s expression becomes pleasant enough to make three Reapers near him stop smiling.

Power sits on him heavily, but he does not seem crushed by it.

He seems accustomed to carrying weight.

The thought irritates me because it sounds too close to admiration.

A new round of cheers rises around me as the last of the shared blade challenge completes at our table. The gray-bearded warrior calls for someone to bring “the small scholar a proper cup,” and Rikka argues that no human of my size needs a proper cup unless the goal is entertainment followed by medical documentation. Vesk remains near the wall, but his face has moved beyond resignation into something like pained satisfaction.

“You see?” I call to him over the noise. “No one is dead.”

“Dinner is not over,” he calls back.

“Encouraging as always.”

“I protect morale by limiting it.”

The warriors around me love that. The noise grows again, warmer now, more inclusive, and the attention spreading from our section of the table becomes impossible to ignore. Reapers from farther down lean to see me. An elder lifts his cup. A young warrior thumps his chest in acknowledgment. A server brings me a smaller portion of the next course without being asked and murmurs, “For soft-finger survival.”

“Thank you,” I say.

He looks pleased enough to trip over the bench on his way away.

The hall’s energy shifts in visible ripples. Outsiders look irritated or confused by the approval surrounding me. Reapers look delighted that a human woman has forced the room to adjust its expectations. I understand the danger in that. Approval can be another kind of stage, and stages can collapse under arrogance. I keep my movements measured. I ask before touching unfamiliar dishes. I laugh when laughter includes me, not when I am uncertain of its target. I decline nothing out of contempt. When I cannot stomach more of a dish that tastes like fermented engine grease and lightning, I say, “My body is less honorable than my intention,” which makes Rikka laugh so hard she has to brace herself on the table.

Then the sound changes.

I feel it before I identify it.

The noise around me does not stop, but it thins in my perception, as if the room has become a long tunnel and every voice is moving away from the center of me. The table pounding, the music, the scrape of dishes, the crackle of fire baskets, and the deep laughter of warriors all recede beneath one sudden awareness pressing against my skin.

Someone is looking at me.

Not glancing.

Looking.

I turn toward the high table.

Gnash is watching me.

Whatever thought I was forming disappears.

His eyes meet mine across the crowded Blood Hall, and the galaxy opens under my feet.

For one impossible instant, I am nowhere and everywhere at once. Firelight bends into memory. The smell of blood and spice becomes smoke from Horus IV, then cold metal from a dead refugee colony I have never seen, then the salt of tears swallowed by a child too angry to die. Pain moves through me, but it is not only mine. Hunger. Rage. Loneliness so vast it feels like open space. A boy standing among bodies in a settlement abandoned by everyone who had promised help. A girl crouched behind a burned transport with a compad in shaking hands. The two images strike each other and fuse into something too intimate to be witnessed and too powerful to be private.

My breath leaves me.

Heat floods my body. My injured hand throbs, then the pain vanishes beneath a deeper pulse that rolls through my blood from throat to belly. Every nerve wakes at once. My skin tightens. My heart slams so hard it seems to shake the plate in front of me. A pressure opens behind my eyes, not painful exactly, but immense, like a door in my mind has been thrown wide before I knew there was a room behind it.