Chapter 119: It’s Him

Rhydor’s POV

Torin was sitting in the chair like someone had put him there and he had not moved since.

Not the way he usually sat. Not the easy sprawl of someone comfortable in whatever space they happened to occupy.

This was different. Slumped. His shoulders were carrying a weight that his body had stopped trying to redistribute. His head was down when I walked in and his hands were loose between his knees and everything about him said that whatever had happened between Hollowcrown and here had cost him something he had not finished accounting for yet.

Silas stopped at the door behind me.

"I will give you two a moment," he said quietly.

The door clicked shut.

I stood in the middle of the room and looked at Torin and let the silence sit there for a moment. Not because I had nothing to say. Because the anger moving through my chest needed to stay where it was until I had information. Anger without information was just noise and noise was not going to tell me where she was.

"Talk," I said. Slow. Controlled. My jaw was tight enough that I could feel it.

Torin looked up.

His face was not the face I was used to. The ease was gone from it completely. Whatever version of himself he showed the world by default, the one that made everything look manageable, was not present right now. What was present was something hollowed out and tired and carrying something heavy.

"We were ambushed," he said.

The door opened.

I glanced toward it. My mother walked in, her expression already calibrated to careful, which told me Silas had said something to her on his way out.

She looked at Torin first, then at me. She moved to stand at the edge of the room without saying anything yet.

I looked back at Torin.

He continued. "On our way to where we were going. After she left with..."

"Stop." I kept my voice even. "I left all of you at your house. Which way are you talking about? What destination? Start from where it actually started."

He hesitated. The kind of hesitation that was not uncertainty about the facts but uncertainty about how to present them.

"There was something Azura needed," he said. "Something I told her that might have an answer to what she is. She would not wait. She would not listen to me when I said we needed more time to prepare."

I said nothing. I looked at him and waited. Patient in the way that was not patient at all but looked like it from the outside.

He exhaled slowly. "There is a book. I mentioned it to her after we returned from the Wraithfen." He looked at his hands. "I said some things that made her want to find it. She decided she was not going to wait for the right time."

My mother moved closer.

"You mean she went looking for the Aegis?" Her voice was sharp in a way she did not bother to soften.

Torin nodded once.

I looked at my mother. Then back at him. Then something moved through me that was not amusing and came out as a sound that was not a laugh.

"Wait," I said. I stepped closer to him. "Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait." Each repetition was slower than the one before it. "You are telling me she went in search of a book that you told her had something to do with who she is."

He nodded again. Still not lifting his head fully.

"A book," I said, "that you apparently know enough about to tell her it exists and is relevant to her, which means you have known things about what she is for longer than you told anyone."

He said nothing.

I looked at my mother. "How does he know?"

She looked at me with those steady blue eyes. "Torin is a sorcerer," she said simply.

The room went quiet.

I looked at Torin. Then at my mother. Then at Torin again.

I had just watched my mother move a table with her eyes. I had just spent the last hour standing in a room with a version of reality I did not have a framework for yet.

And now the cousin I had known my entire life, whom I had grown up with, whom I had fought beside and argued with and trusted without examining the basis for that trust, was sitting in front of me wearing a face I did not fully recognize and had apparently been carrying something he had never chosen to say out loud.

"A sorcerer," I said. Quiet. Controlled.

My mother nodded.

I breathed through it. Filed it somewhere I would come back to when I had the time to examine it properly. Right now there was a more immediate problem.

"Okay," I said. I turned back to Torin fully. "First. Tell me where they are. Tell me what happened to Azura. Everything. From when she left the house."

Torin looked at me. Something moved across his face that was not quite guilty and was not quite grief but was sitting in the space between them. He straightened slightly in the chair, not much, just enough.

"She left without me," he said. "She and Liona. I followed when I realized they were gone. I caught up with them on the road. There was a group of men. I dealt with them." He stopped. "We kept going. Then on the road, further in, there was a second group. Larger. More organized. They came from both sides." His jaw moved. "I used what I had. I cleared a path and I told them to run. They ran."

He stopped again.

I waited.

"I was knocked out," he said. "I do not know for how long. When I woke up I searched. I covered the area around where we were separated. I found the bodies of the men who had gone after them." He looked at his hands again. "But I did not find Azura or Liona."

I was watching his face. Every part of it.

"Maybe they fought back," I said. "Maybe they managed to bring the men down themselves."

Torin shook his head. Immediately. Not the slow uncertain shake of someone considering and dismissing. The immediate shake of someone who had already thought through exactly this possibility and had a reason to reject it.

"No," he said. "You do not understand what I found. Azura had a knife. Liona had her wolf. Against that number, on that road, they could not have done what was done to those bodies." He looked up at me fully for the first time since I had walked in. "The men were dead. All of them. But they were not dead the way people died in a fight where someone was defending themselves with a knife and a wolf. They were dead the way things died when something much larger than a person decided they were going to be dead."

The room was very still.

"There was a mark," he said. "On the bodies. Or what was left of them." He stopped. Seemed to be looking for the right description and not finding one that fit. "Something went through them. Something sharp and massive. I do not know any weapon that makes a mark like that. I have never seen anything like it."

I looked at him for a long moment.

Something was moving in my chest. Not the anger this time. Something underneath it. Something that was pulling a specific image up from the part of my memory that stored things I had not finished processing.

A corridor full of smoke.

A figure walking through it. Enormous. Unhurried. A sword dragging along the stone floor behind him, scraping with that slow deliberate sound that had nothing urgent in it because urgency was for things that were not certain of the outcome.

I had fought that figure. I had hit him and blocked him and tried to end it and he had not been interested in ending it. He had not come for a fight. He had been looking for something specific and the attack on the pack house had been covered for the looking.

He had been looking at Azura. I believe so because he made it clear he wasn’t there for me.

Azura and Liona left and he withdrew.

And the mark Torin was describing, something massive and sharp going through multiple men cleanly and completely, there was only one thing I had ever encountered that left a mark like that.

That sword.

"It was him," I said.

My mother and Torin both looked at me.

"Who?" my mother asked.

"The man who attacked the pack house." I looked at her. Then at Torin. The certainty of it sat in my chest like something that had been waiting to be named. "The masked man. The one I fought in the corridor the night of the ceremony." I held their gaze. "He found them. And took them."

Neither of them spoke.

"I do not know what he wants from them. From her," I said. The words came out slower than the ones before them. Weighted with everything I did not know yet and everything I was going to have to find out. "But it was him. He was the one who took them."

The fire in the hearth crackled.

My mother’s face had gone to the still careful version she wore when she was holding something together from the inside.

Torin was looking at me with the hollow tired eyes of someone who had already considered this possibility and had been hoping I would arrive at a different conclusion.

I had not arrived at a different conclusion.

And the man who had Azura right now was the same man who had walked through an attack on this pack house without breaking stride, who had stopped an axe with one hand, who had disappeared through a wall of stone dust like the laws that applied to everything else did not quite apply to him.

I needed to find her.

I needed to find her before he decided that whatever he wanted was worth more than her.