Page 24 of Add To Hoard

The Spire receives me as it always has, with the cool mineral certainty of old stone and the smell of a building inhabited for centuries by creatures that run hotter than most. I go to the war room and do not sit down and do not look at the survey records and stand at the west-facing window for an unmeasured while.

The island spreads below me. The western forest is dense and dark and gives nothing away. Somewhere in it a hot spring steams in the morning air around a woman who has been on this island for one day and has already found the one place I have been avoiding for a century.

Soryth finds me still at the window.

The elder comes in without announcement, his right and his habit, and he reads me in the first second with the thoroughness of four centuries of practice. Then he looks at the table and sets down the report he is carrying.

“Drazik has filed a formal motion,” he says.

I turn from the window.

“A motion to remove the intruder by clan force.” Soryth’s voice is even. “Filed this morning with the council recorder. It requires a session within twenty-four hours under the emergency provisions. He has seven signatures.”

Seven. The same number who came into the last session already knowing what Drazik was going to say. He has been busy since yesterday’s session and he has been busy in the right rooms with the right dragons, and the motion is not going to pass. I have the numbers against it if it comes to a formal vote, but that is not the point of it. The point of it is the session itself. The point is putting me in front of the full council and making me defend an arrangement that I made unilaterally without council consultation on a security matter that Drazik has successfully framed as an island-wide concern.

The point is making me say, in front of everyone, why I have not removed her.

“He knows the arrangement I made,” I say.

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Kael was on the northern approach this morning. Early.” Soryth pauses. “Earlier than his rotation requires.”

I look at the report on the table. Kael had been in the trees. On the northern approach, which runs close enough to the spring depression that a dragon with good hearing would have caught the conversation. The stone grain comment. Her thank you. Enough to confirm not only that I had been to the beach again but that the arrangement involved me going to her, which is a different and considerably more useful piece of information than the arrangement itself.

Drazik will know how to use it.

Kael’s rotation transfer is processed before the hour is out. No explanation given in the filing. None required. He will know why, and Vorath will draw the correct inference from it, and Drazik will draw his own inference from both of those things, which I am content for him to do.

“The session,” I say. “When.”

“Tomorrow midday. Which gives you —”

“One day.”

“One day,” Soryth confirms. “Before you must stand in that chamber and account for what you’ve decided and why. Whatever you intend to say, I would suggest knowing the answer before you are in the room being asked it.” He picks up the empty report folder with the unhurried air of an administrator who has delivered what he came to deliver and considers the rest my work to do. “The motion will not pass. You have the numbers. But Drazik is not trying to win the vote. He is trying to win the room.”

He goes.

I stand in the war room with one day on the clock and Drazik’s motion on the table and the image of a scar on a forearm resting in warm water sitting in my chest where my certainty used to be, and My mind is already in the chamber tomorrow, in a room full of dragons who are watching to see whether six centuries of leadership has finally produced a crack wide enough to matter.

I think about her voice saying thank you in the steam above the spring.

What it means that of all the things currently demanding my attention, that is the one my mind returns to.

I do not reach a conclusion I am willing to write down. I pick up the survey records instead and open them to the western approach corridor and read the same degradation data I read yesterday, and this time I am not thinking about anything else at all.

Or so I tell myself.

The telling gets less convincing each time I try it.

13

NERINA

Inotice it first in my hands.