Chapter 123: The Unfolding Truth III

Third Person POV

Helen was lost. Not slightly lost, the kind where you take a wrong turn and correct it in two minutes. Properly, completely, no idea which direction she had come from.

The streets around her were narrow and winding and lined with buildings that all looked like slightly different versions of each other, and she had passed the same cracked stone wall twice now. Or she thought she had. She genuinely could not tell anymore.

Sonita had told her where to meet. The fountain. The small square they had stopped in yesterday after running from the courtyard. Simple enough. Helen had found the fountain without any trouble.

Sonita had not been there.

She had waited. Ten minutes. Twenty. Then she had decided to walk a short distance and look for her friend and come back.

That had been roughly an hour ago.

Now she was standing at the mouth of a narrow alley with no idea which direction was forward and which direction was back, staring at the street in front of her and coming up with nothing useful.

Then she heard it.

Shouting. Not angry shouting. The rough loud kind that came from a group of people watching something and reacting to it. Men’s voices. Laughing. Cheering. The sound of something heavy connecting with something solid.

She knew she should walk away from it. Every sensible part of her pointed in the opposite direction.

She walked toward it.

The alley opened up and she stopped.

It was not a courtyard like the night before. Something rougher than that. A training ground of some kind, open and uneven, with wooden practice swords scattered across the ground and targets propped against the far wall and men everywhere.

Some were sparring in pairs, circling each other with the focused intensity of people taking it seriously. Some were sitting on upturned barrels with cups in their hands, watching the others and calling out opinions nobody had asked for. Some were just standing around making noise.

The air smelled like sweat and dirt and something metallic that sat at the back of her throat.

Helen stood at the edge of it and had not decided yet whether to move or retreat when her eyes started moving across the space the way eyes moved when they were looking for something specific without having announced that intention to anyone.

They found him under a tree.

At the edge of the clearing, apart from all of it, sitting against the trunk with one knee bent and the other leg stretched out in front of him. A book was open in his lap. His black hair fell slightly forward as he read. His green eyes were moving across the page with the focused attention of someone who had genuinely left the training ground behind even while sitting inside it.

He was reading. While dozens of men made as much noise as possible around him. Like the chaos was simply weather and he had long since decided he was not going to let weather change his plans.

Helen stood there and looked at him.

One of the sparring men nearby missed a swing and stumbled sideways trying to recover his balance, and when he turned to steady himself he saw her standing at the edge of the clearing.

"Well, well." He grinned. "Look what wandered in."

Heads turned. The ones nearest to her first, then rippling outward as more of them noticed. Helen felt their eyes land on her one by one and her feet stopped working.

"A girl in here," someone said. "What is the occasion?"

Another voice, further back. "Maybe she is lost. You lost, sweetheart?"

The laughter that followed was not unkind exactly. Just the loud careless kind that came from men with too much time and not enough structure, the kind that did not mean harm but did not particularly think about it either.

Helen’s heart was going considerably faster than she wanted it to. Her mouth was not producing words.

The man under the tree looked up from his book.

His green eyes found her immediately. He closed the book slowly, his finger marking his place out of habit, and looked at her across the clearing. His expression did not change.

The first man took a step toward her. Still smiling. "Come on, do not be shy. We do not bite."

"Speak for yourself," someone else said. More laughter.

Helen’s hands were tight at her sides.

"Leave her alone."

The voice was quiet. Quiet enough that it should not have cut through the noise the way it did. But it did. Something in the quality of it, the complete absence of effort in it, made everything around it go still for a second.

The first man turned. "What?"

"I said leave her alone." He was not looking at the man who had spoken. He was looking at Helen.

A beat of silence moved through the clearing. The men exchanged looks. Then the first man shrugged and turned back to his sparring partner. The others went back to their cups and their conversations. The moment closed over itself like water closes over something dropped into it.

He looked at her.

He patted the grass beside him.

"You should sit," he said. "Before they find another reason to look at you."

Helen hesitated for a moment that lasted slightly longer than she wanted it to. Then she walked over and sat down. Not close enough to be presumptuous. Just close enough to be out of the center of the clearing.

He opened his book again. Did not look at her.

"What is your name?"

She looked at him sideways. "Why would I tell you that?"

He looked up. One eyebrow lifted just slightly.

"At minimum, I would like to know the name of my stalker," he said.

"I am not a stalker," Helen said immediately.

"Really." He said it without the upward inflection of a question. "Yesterday you stared at me for a very long time. Today you showed up in the same place I am. Again."

"I was trying to find my way," she said. "I am lost."

He tilted his head. "That is a very poor excuse."

Helen stood up. The frustration of the morning, the wrong turns and the cracked stone wall, and the hour of going nowhere, combined with the heat in her face that had arrived uninvited the moment he started talking, and she turned to leave.

"Whoa." His voice came quickly. Not urgent but close to it. "Okay. I am sorry."

She stopped. Did not turn around.

"I am sorry," he said again. Quieter. "Let me at least help you find where you are going."

She turned back and looked at him for a little while.

"It is useless," she said. "I do not even know where I am supposed to be."

His mouth moved. Something at the corner of it, small and private.

"Then we walk to the place where everybody figures that out eventually," he said.

They stared at each other. Then he closed his book, tucked it under his arm, and stood up.

"Come on," he said. "Let us go."

Helen followed him.

Not because she had decided she trusted him. Because she was lost and he was the only person who had offered to help without wanting something from it and she did not have a better option available.

They walked through the training ground, past the sparring pairs and the barrel-sitters and the ones who were too busy being loud to notice them passing. A few heads turned. Nobody said anything.

He walked with his hands in his pockets and the book tucked under his arm. He did not look back to check if she was following. He just walked, steady and unhurried, like he had already established that she was there and did not need to keep confirming it.

They turned into a narrow street. Then another. Then a wider one that had actual people on it going about their actual business.

"Do you live here?" he asked, after a stretch of quiet.

Helen glanced at him. "Why would you ask that?"

"I have not seen you before," he said. He looked at her briefly. "For pretty ones, they are not rare around here. But you are not like them."

The heat came up her neck before she had any say in it. Moved into her cheeks and stayed there and she looked away immediately, finding a bird on a nearby rooftop and becoming very interested in it for several seconds.

He said nothing else. He kept walking.

Helen pressed her hand against the front of her coat. Her heart was doing something it had no reason to be doing at this pace and she told it to stop and it did not stop.

"HELEN."

The voice came from ahead of them. Sharp. Stretched thin with something that was three hours of worry wearing the costume of anger.

Sonita was standing at the entrance to the small square, arms folded, foot moving against the ground with the particular rhythm of someone who had been waiting long enough to have moved through worried and out the other side into something more focused.

She was already walking toward them before Helen opened her mouth.

"Where have you been?" Sonita’s eyes moved over Helen fast, checking, and then lifted past her to the person walking beside her. They stayed there for exactly one second. "I have been standing at that fountain for three hours."

"I was lost," Helen said. "I could not find you and I got turned around and..."

"You found a cute one," Sonita said. Not an accusation. More like a fact being recorded for future reference.

"I was lost," Helen said again.

Sonita looped her arm firmly through Helen’s and began steering her toward the fountain with the energy of someone reclaiming their property.

"We are going to discuss this later," she said, low and certain, into Helen’s ear.

Helen did not argue.

They were almost to the fountain when his voice came from behind them.

"Helen."

She stopped and turned around.

He was standing where they had left him. Hands back in his pockets. Book under his arm. The green eyes were steady and direct on hers across the short distance between them.

"It was good to meet you," he said. Simple. No performance in it. "I hope to see you again."

He said her name once more. Just her name. Like he was trying it out. Like he wanted to know how it sat in the air.

Helen stood there.

She did not answer.

She did not know what she would have said if she had tried. Nothing felt like the right size for the moment.

She turned back to Sonita, who was looking between the two of them with her head tilted and her blue eyes doing the thing they did when she was taking in more information than she was ready to organize.

"What," Sonita said quietly, "was that?"

Helen did not answer that either.

She looped her arm through Sonita’s and started walking. Behind her she heard his footsteps moving in the opposite direction, getting quieter with each step, fading into the general noise of the street until she could not separate them from everything else.

She did not look back.

She wanted to.

She kept walking and kept her eyes forward and kept her hand pressed flat against her chest where her heart was still doing the thing she had told it to stop doing, warm and persistent and entirely unbothered by her instructions.

Somewhere behind her, his footsteps were gone.

She was already thinking about the next time.