Chapter 115: Princess

Liona’s POV

He stood up. That was the first thing that registered after he pulled his hand back from my face.

His eyes were still gold. Burning. Unreadable

He simply stood, unfolding himself from the crouch with the easy unhurried movement of someone who had all the time available to them that existed and had decided to use a small portion of it here.

He turned his back on me.

And that was when I saw the sword.

I had seen it before. Back at the Crescent Moon Pack, during the attack. But seeing it strapped to his back was different.

The sheer size of it, the blade alone was longer than I was tall, wide enough that it looked like something that should require two people minimum to lift, sitting in the sheath across his back like it belonged there. Like it had always been there. Like he and the sword had come to an arrangement a very long time ago and neither of them felt the need to explain it to anyone.

He raised his hand. The one with my tear on his fingertip. He held it up in front of him, the single tear catching what light was coming through the trees above, and he looked at the men still standing in the clearing.

"This," he said, his voice deep, quiet, and completely even, "is worth more than every single one of you combined."

Nobody moved.

His voice dropped. Not in volume. In temperature.

"You were raised by women. You came into this world because of women." He looked at each of them in turn, slow and deliberate. "And you chose to raise your swords against one."

He took one step forward.

"I will not be so gentle about that."

They rushed him.

All five at once, which was either very brave or very stupid, and I was watching it happen in real time, and it was looking increasingly like the second option.

They came at him from every angle, swords already swinging. A coordinated rush. The kind that worked against most people because most people could not defend from all sides at the same time.

But he was not like most people.

He moved forward. Not away. Toward them. Slowly. Lazily almost, the way a person walked toward something they had decided was not actually a problem yet.

The blades came at him from multiple directions and he moved between them with the particular ease of someone for whom this was not a situation requiring urgency. A tilt of the body here. A small shift of the head there. A step that looked too casual to be calculated and was obviously completely calculated.

The swords found nothing.

He was not where they were aimed by the time they arrived. Over and over, from every angle, finding nothing but air.

I watched this from the ground with my hand pressed against my ribs and thought that I had been alive long enough to see a lot of things and had never seen anything quite like this.

One of them connected.

A blade caught the side of his face. Just the side. Just slightly. His head moved with it, turning sideways, and for a moment nothing happened and I thought perhaps it had not landed properly after all.

Then the mask cracked.

Right down the middle. The two pieces separated and fell, one to each side, landing in the dirt, and his white hair swung forward with the motion of his head turning, falling around the sides of his face.

I could not see him clearly from where I was. Just the white hair and the outline of a jaw and the stillness that had come over the clearing the moment the mask came off.

He reached up slowly.

Touched the empty space where the mask had been.

"That," he said, with the tone of someone making a very specific note, "was my favorite mask."

His hand moved back. Over his shoulder. Found the handle of the sword on his back.

He pulled it out.

One hand. Like it weighed nothing. Like the sword that should have required two strong people and a great deal of effort to lift was simply an extension of his arm that had been resting in a convenient place.

He stretched his arm out to the side.

He swung.

The blade moved through the air and the sound it made was not the sound of metal through air. It was something lower and more absolute than that. Two men fell. The blood hit the rocks and the remaining men went very still in the way people went still when something happened in front of them that rewrote their understanding of the situation.

He stabbed the sword into the ground with one hand.

It went in straight and stood there perfectly upright, the handle at exactly his height, like the earth had simply accepted it.

He looked at the three remaining men.

"Run," he said.

They backed up. I could see it in the way they were holding themselves, the particular posture of people whose bodies had already made a decision that their minds were still catching up to.

He took one step forward.

"Run." He repeated but this time it sounded more dangerous.

That was all it took. Their legs started moving.

He watched them dash into the trees. As if they had gotten where he wanted them to be.

He pulled the sword from the ground. The motion was slow and deliberate, the kind of deliberate that was not taking its time because it needed to, but because he wanted the people watching to understand exactly what was happening.

Then he threw it.

The sword flew through the air like a spear thrown by a god. It went through the first running man, then the second, then the third. It pinned all three of them to a single tree at the far edge of the clearing.

The sword stood there, perfectly straight, with the three bodies hanging from it like they had been placed there deliberately.

He walked toward them.

Slow. Unhurried. Exactly like a man who had all the time available to him in the world and had decided to spend just a little of it walking across a clearing.

He pulled the sword out with one hand. The bodies dropped. He looked at the blade for a moment, at the blood on it, and then he swung it once through the air in a clean arc and whatever had been on it was not on it anymore.

He reached back and slid it into the sheath on his back with the ease of something practiced so many times it no longer required thought.

Then he turned around. And walked back toward me.

My first instinct was to get up and put distance between us because every sensible part of me was pointing out that I had just watched this person do things that redefined what I thought was possible and standing still felt wrong.

My ribs had a different opinion about getting up.

The pain that shot through my side when I shifted my weight was immediate and specific and left no room for argument. I stayed where I was.

He crouched down in front of me.

"Do not move so much, princess." His voice was different from before. Not cold. Not distant. Something else. "You will hurt yourself."

My mind stopped on the word.

Princess.

I looked at him. "I am not your..."

And then his hair shifted.

Just slightly. Just enough that the curtain of white that had been obscuring his face from this angle moved and I could see him clearly for the first time.

He was not old.

That was the first thing I noticed. Not old, not the centuries-worn face I had been bracing for since the word Dragon King had entered my understanding of the situation. He was young. Not as young as me but not far from it. Late twenties perhaps. Early thirties at the furthest stretch.

Sharp jaw. Strong features. The kind of face that did not require any particular expression to be striking because the structure of it did that work on its own.

His eyes were grey again, whatever gold had been in them gone back to wherever it came from, looking at me with a steadiness that was not cold and was not warm and was not anything I had a ready category for.

He is the most handsome person I have ever seen in my life. That thought arrived without my permission, and I did not know what to do with it, so I did the only reasonable thing available to me, which was to look away immediately and pretend I had not been staring.

I became very interested in a specific rock near my left hand.

A small sound came from him. Not quite a laugh. The beginning of one that had decided not to finish itself. I felt it without looking.

I tried to stand up.

My ribs immediately reminded me of their position on this matter.

The sound that came out of me was not dignified. I pressed my hand harder against my side and breathed carefully and waited for the wave of pain to pass.

"I told you not to move," he said. The frown was in his voice before I looked up and confirmed it was on his face.

"You do not tell me what to do," I replied.

He stared at me for a while and picked me up.

Not roughly. Not like I was being carried against my will, though I was being carried against my will. Just picked me up as if the conversation about whether this was happening had already concluded somewhere he had access to, and I did not.

"Put me down," I said.

He did not put me down. He held me with a steadiness that my ribs were embarrassingly grateful for and I hated that they were grateful for it.

"You are stubborn, aren’t you?" he asked. Not like it was a complaint. More like he was noting something he had observed and was filing away for future reference.

"Put me down," I said again. With more conviction this time.

He was not listening. I could tell because he was not putting me down and also because his eyes had moved away from my face and were scanning the trees around us with a focused attention that had nothing to do with me anymore.

He was looking for something. A particular area.

I watched his grey eyes move through the tree line, and I knew what he was looking for, and I felt the cold drop through me that came when I remembered why we were out here in the first place and where Azura was right now.

Just then the world changed.

Not gradually. Between one breath and the next, the clearing was gone. The bodies were gone. The trees were different. The ground under his feet was different ground.

I blinked.

We were standing in front of the cave.

"How..." I couldn’t even speak properly.

The rocks I had pulled down across the entrance were right there in front of us, stacked and settled and completely solid, exactly as I had left them. The cave I had sealed with my own body to keep Azura safe was right there, and he was standing in front of it, and he knew.

I did not know how he knew. But he knew.

He set me down. Gently. With more care than the situation required, which I noticed and filed somewhere I was not going to examine right now.

He walked toward the rocks.

He raised his hand. The way you raised your hand when you were about to apply force to something. The way his hand looked when it was preparing to do the thing it had done to the men back in the clearing.

I moved.

My ribs screamed. I ignored them completely and moved and put myself between him and the rocks with my arms out, my eyes closed, and my back against the cold stone of the sealed entrance.

The air shifted.

The force of something coming toward me was present and real and I felt it in the space in front of my face before it arrived.

Then a breeze. Soft and warm, completely out of place in the cold clearing, brushing my cheek like something that had decided at the last possible moment to be gentle.

I opened my eyes.

His fist was an inch from my face.

Frozen.

Not moving. Not retreating. Just stopped, suspended exactly where it was, close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off his skin.

I looked above his fist to see his face. And it wasn’t looking good.

His eyes were gold again.

Not the soft gold from before. Burning. Furious in a way that was completely controlled and somehow more frightening for being controlled.

He looked at me like I had done something that required an explanation.

"Have you lost your mind?" His voice was still quiet. The fury was all in the eyes. "Why would you stand in front of me like that?"

I kept my arms out. My back against the rocks. My eyes on his.

"I will not let you hurt a single hair on my friend," I looked at him dead in the eyes.