Page 16 of Add To Hoard

“I see,” the elder says. “And the contact — how did it resolve?”

“It didn’t. She refused to leave.”

The silence that follows has a texture to it.

“She refused.”

“Yes.”

“A human woman. On the western beach. Refused the direct instruction of its lord.” Soryth’s voice is perfectly even. This is somehow worse than if it weren’t. “And you —”

“I withdrew to assess the situation.”

“Of course.”

I turn from the window. Soryth is watching me with those ember-red eyes that have spent four centuries watching me specifically, and have consequently developed an accuracy that I find, in moments like this, profoundly inconvenient.

“She crossed the Varak Fog,” I say. “Alone. In a coastal brig with a compromised hull. She survived the barrier weather and the inner corridor and made the western approach in the dark and beached the vessel without charts or local knowledge. That is not nothing, Soryth. There are strategic questions about how she found the corridor approach that need answering before —”

“Did she affect you?”

“No.”

The word leaves me before the question has fully finished arriving and lands in the room between us with the specific weight of a thing said too quickly to have been considered. Soryth does not move. I do not move. The archive is very quiet around us, six centuries of records bearing patient witness.

I look at the elderly.

Soryth looks back at me with the expression of a man who has just received a great deal of information from a single syllable and is being kind enough not to say so.

“I mean to say,” I begin.

“Yes,” Soryth says.

“The situation warrants —”

“Of course it does.”

The awkwardness sits between us like a third party, large and uninvited. Soryth has the grace to look back at his records. I have the discipline to keep my face arranged into my normal expression and not examine what just happened in the open air of this room where four centuries of shared history have made concealment largely theoretical.

“She needs to leave,” I say, finally, on ground I am more certain of. “Regardless of how she got here, her presence is a security liability. If she found the corridor once she can find it again, or share what she knows with others. The situation needs to be resolved directly.”

“Agreed,” Soryth says, in a tone that agrees with the conclusion and declines to comment on the path that led to it. “There is, however, a complication.” He sets down the record he has been holding and folds his hands. “Drazik knows.”

The council session is called for midday, which gives me two hours to prepare a position I do not fully have and to receive three separate informal reports from scouts who are being very careful about the order in which they deliver their information to me versus who else they have already delivered it to.

I notice the order. I note it.

Halfway to the council chamber, Ysara finds me.

My cousin has the quality of appearing exactly where I do not expect her and then behaving as though she has been there the entire time. She falls into step beside me without announcement, a habit since she was young enough that I carried her on my back across the volcanic flats, and which two hundred and ninety years have not done anything to diminish. She is smaller than me by a considerable margin and moves with the quick economy of a scholar who has learned to be efficient because the world was not built to her scale.

“I hear you have a visitor,” she says, in the tone of someone sitting on that question and finally deciding the moment is now.

“The situation is being managed.”

“I’m certain it is.” She is carrying three archive records under one arm and does not look at me. “A human woman. Alone. In a fishing brig. Through the Varak Fog.” A pause. “I’ve been reading the western barrier survey logs this morning. The corridor approach she used, the angle is very specific. The probability of finding it without charts is⁠—”

“Ysara.”