Chapter 60: The One He Wanted
Chapter 60: The One He Wanted
[Blind Call activated.]
[Eligible Grade: D.]
D.
The disappointment arrived instantly and honestly and I want it on the record, because of what happened four seconds later. D is the bottom of the ladder. D is a scout with two knives and a limp.
[Previously Encountered Preserved Signature Detected: Liora Venn.]
[Repeat Selection Chance: 25% after eligible D-grade roll.]
[Preserved Signature Repeat Roll: Successful — Liora Venn.]
[Summon selected.]
[Physical manifestation initiated.]
[Manifestation Duration: 08:00:00]
The air split open a metre from my knee and a woman came out of it sideways, mid-motion, and landed in a crouch with a knife already reversed along her forearm.
Black hair chopped short, cleaner and more evenly trimmed than before. Dark cat ears swivelling hard. Freshly maintained brown-black leathers fitted close over the compact strength of her chest, waist, and thighs, with new stitching where the Scalejaw had once opened the leg. She looked fully healed and better fed. A tail that went rigid and then, as her amber eyes found me, went completely still.
Recognition hit with attraction behind it so fast that for one useless second I forgot every sentence I had prepared.
"Liora—"
She hit me hard enough to put my shoulder blades into the door.
She wasn’t gentle about it and she wasn’t careful, and her arms went round my ribs and locked, and her face went into the side of my neck, and she made a sound she would deny making for the rest of her life. Her ears had folded flat and back — not the fear-flat I’d learned to read, the other one. Her tail wrapped my leg above the knee and stayed there.
I got my arms up around her, which took me a second longer than it should have.
We stayed like that for a while. Neither of us said anything, which was possibly the only elegant thing either of us managed all evening.
Then she pushed off me, cleared her throat, and got her face back under control.
"You’ve been eating," she announced.
"I have, actually."
"Don’t look so pleased, it’s a low bar." She stepped back and looked me over properly, and her tail resumed a slow deliberate sway that was working very hard to look casual. "Shoulders. Arms. You’re still built like a rumour, but there’s something to grab now." Her nose wrinkled. "And you smell different."
"Better, I’d hope."
"Not better. Different. You smell like—" she leaned in, sniffed once at my collar, and pulled back with an expression I couldn’t read at all "—metal, and gun oil, and a woman I don’t know."
Oh, we’re doing this immediately, then.
"That’s the coat," I said. "It was somebody’s coat."
"Mm." She turned away and went round the room, and I let her, because I’ve learned that Liora inspects a place the way other people take a breath. She checked the window and the roof beyond it, tested the door with her palm, looked under the bed, looked at the bed for slightly too long, found the rifle and picked it up. "This is new."
"Same one."
"It’s clean. It was never clean." She put it down. "And this is a bed. Adrian. There’s a bed and a door that locks and a lamp. What did you do?"
So I told her.
It took most of an hour, sitting on the floor with our backs against the bed frame, because I started at the Ash Ogre and she wouldn’t let me skip anything.
She was fine about the ogre. She was fine about the cultivator, mostly — she got very quiet at the part where a woman in white put a finger to my forehead, and asked twice whether it had left anything behind besides the art, and looked unhappy with the answer both times.
Then I got to Eira.
"A rabbit," Liora said.
"Rabbit-kin. She’s an archer. Her hearing’s—"
"White fur?"
"Yes."
"Hm." Her tail stopped swaying. "And she was frightened of you."
"She was frightened of everything. Somebody spent years teaching her that mistakes get punished and she came through braced for it, and she agreed to help me before I’d finished asking, because she didn’t think refusing was a thing she was allowed to do."
That took the edge off her considerably. She was quiet for a moment.
"Did you fix it?"
"No. Nobody fixes that in eight hours." I rubbed the back of my neck. "I fed her and didn’t watch her eat and didn’t shout when she missed, and that was about the limit of what I had."
"You patted her head."
I looked up. "How do you—"
"Because you would," Liora said, with enormous satisfaction, and her tail started going again. "You did it to me. You did it to me the second day and you looked like a man defusing something." Then, without any change of tone at all: "Did she touch you?"
"What?"
"It’s a simple question."
"No. I picked her up out of the way of a Ridgeback and put her down again immediately, and that’s the whole of it."
"And the horned one?"
Ah.
I told her about Vaelora, and I could see it landing wrong in real time — the lightning, the glaive, the thirty minutes, the fact that I’d stood in a hazel thicket negotiating with a dragon-blooded commander over who got to fight first.
"She carried you," Liora said.
"No. She—"
"You said she flew."
"That was the other one."
"So the white one carried you."
"By the collar. Like a cat out of a sink. It was not romantic, I was screaming."
Liora considered that. Her ears had gone forward and slightly outward, which I have never entirely decoded.
"Was she beautiful? The horned one."
"...Yes."
"And the rabbit?"
"Yes. Liora—"
"And you’d have preferred either of them tonight."
That one didn’t sound like teasing.
She’d asked it looking at the window, and her hands had gone still on her knees, and I understood — several seconds late, the way I always do — that we had not actually been talking about Eira or Vaelora for a while.
"No," I said.
"You don’t have to—"
"I didn’t want either of them tonight." It came out flat and clumsy, which was probably why she finally looked at me. "I was glad when it was you."
Liora didn’t say anything.
Her ears came up. The tip of her tail thumped the floor once, and she looked at it as though it had betrayed a state secret, which it had.
"Well," she said eventually. "Obviously."
"Obviously."
"I’m extremely memorable." She got up, brushed nothing off her knees, and did not look at me. "Now. You’ve got a skill you haven’t shown me and eight hours minus the hour you’ve wasted talking. Get your coat."
Twelve people saw us leave.
I watched every one of them do the same thing in the same order: look at me, look at the black-haired woman with the ears and the tail walking beside me, look back at me, and then look very hard at something else.
Liora clocked it before we reached the gate.
"They’re afraid of you," she said, once we were past the wall.
"A bit."
"Not a bit. That man practically apologised for existing in your direction." She glanced sideways, and her mouth had gone crooked. "What did you do, exactly?"
"I brought a friend to a hunt."
"Mm." A pause. "And what am I, in the story they’re telling?"
"Another one, probably."
"Good," Liora said, with feeling, and something in her walk changed for the next kilometre.
The tracks were where I’d left them two days ago, out past the plantation road: a Bramble-Hulk, Level 15 or 16, that had been working the same stretch of hedgerow for a week and would eventually work its way toward the settlement.
Liora crouched over the print, laid her hand beside it for scale, and looked up at me with her ears forward.
"Show me, then."