Chapter 126: The Unfolding Truth VI

Third Person point of view

The rogue’s body was already disappearing into the mud behind them.

Sonita did not look back at it. She was looking at the man standing in front of her, the rain coming down between them, his green eyes fixed on her face, and Helen’s name still hanging in the air where he had left it.

The warmth was still there. She could not make it go away by deciding to. It just sat in her chest alongside the cold. Both of them stayed. She pushed past both and straightened up.

"Why are you looking for her?" she said.

He looked at her without answering immediately. Not the silence of someone who had not heard her. The silence of someone deciding how much to give.

"What business does a man like you have with someone like Helen?" She held his gaze. The rain was running into her eyes, and she did not blink. "She is not easy to find. Nobody finds that place without help. So you were going to need me anyway, which means you were going to have to talk to me eventually. You may as well do it now."

"That is between her and me," he said. His voice was the same as it had been when he told her to be quiet, completely level. Not cold. Just settled, the way voices were settled when the person using them had decided a long time ago that urgency was not something they were going to perform. "My business does not require an audience."

"I am her only audience." Sonita took one step toward him. She was not tall. He was considerably taller than her, and she took the step anyway. "Whatever happens to Helen, I know about it. Whatever comes near her, I know about it. If you want to get to her, you go through me first. So start talking, or you can find her yourself in the dark and the rain and see how that works out for you."

He looked at her. His head tilted just slightly, the way it had tilted on the path before he sheathed the sword, studying her the way he seemed to study most things, without rushing the conclusion.

"How about this," he said. "We find her first. Then you decide whether you still want to stand between us."

Sonita looked at him.

He looked back at her.

The rain filled the silence between them.

She had no good answer to that, and they both knew it. She turned and started walking.

"In front of me," she said, after three steps.

He had fallen into step slightly behind her and to the left, and she had felt it immediately: that awareness of someone at her back whom she did not know and had not chosen to trust.

He stopped.

"In front," she said again. "Move ahead of me. I am not walking with you behind my back."

He did not argue. He did not look offended. He simply moved past her with that same quality of movement she had already noticed, that unhurried, lethal ease, and positioned himself ahead of her on the path.

He glanced back once.

"Lead the way, witch," he said. Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. The suggestion of one.

"It’s Sonita."

"Whatever."

Sonita kept her face neutral and told him which direction to go.

****

She took him the long way.

She had known these woods since before she had the words to describe what she was doing in them, since she was small enough that the roots were obstacles rather than inconveniences, and the trees were enormous in the way everything was enormous when you were still figuring out your own size.

She knew every path through them, and she knew which paths were paths and which paths only looked like paths, and she knew the places where the undergrowth closed in and the light failed, and a person who did not know what they were doing could walk in circles for hours without understanding what they were doing.

She took him through all of those places.

Through the thicket where the branches came down low enough that he had to duck repeatedly. Through the section where the ground went soft and deceptive, and every other step sank further than expected. Around the long curve that looked like it was heading somewhere but arrived back at approximately where it started, if you did not know to take the branch that looked wrong.

She watched his broad shoulders moving through the brush ahead of her.

He did not complain. He ducked when ducking was required and stepped carefully when the ground required it and navigated everything she sent him through without a word of objection.

But she watched the way he moved through it, and she was memorizing the path, and she made sure that the path she was giving him was not one that memory would be able to reconstruct easily. Not in the rain. Not in the dark. Not without her.

Even if he came back. Even if he survived whatever tonight was and decided to find this place again on his own, he would not be able to. Not without starting at the beginning and having her beside him.

She made sure of that with every turn she chose.

The rain slowed somewhere in the long middle of the walk, dropping from the heavy driving pour to something quieter, the kind that was still rain but had given up on making a statement about it. The sky above the trees began its shift from black to the particular grey that came before any actual light arrived, the suggestion of morning before morning committed to being present.

Sonita’s bag was heavy. Her legs were tired in the deep way that came from cold and distance and the weight of a night that had contained more than most nights reasonably should. She kept moving.

He was still in front of her, picking the path she pointed him toward, his shoulders steady through the brush.

She watched them and did not think about green eyes, or warmth in her chest, or the fact that he had stepped past her on that path and killed a rogue wolf in one motion without getting so much as a drop of blood on his cloak.

She thought about Helen.

About getting there first. About being between him and the door before he got close enough to the door to matter.

****

The trees thinned.

It happened gradually, and then all at once: the dense wood giving way to something more open, and then the clearing appeared ahead of them in the grey early light, coming into view the way things came into view when the dark finally decided to cooperate.

The cottage sat in the middle of it.

Small and well-kept, the kind of small that was deliberate rather than insufficient. Flowers grew along the front of it in careful rows, their colors muted in the grey light but present, thriving in the way things thrived when someone paid them consistent attention. A low fence around the edge of the clearing, more decorative than functional. Smoke was not rising from the chimney yet. The windows were dark.

This showed that Helen was still sleeping.

The man stopped walking.

Sonita almost walked into his back.

She stepped to the side and looked up at his face. He was looking at the cottage with an expression she had not seen from him yet. Not the studied calm. Something underneath it. Something that was looking at the cottage and the isolation of it and the distance of it from everything else and reacting to what it saw.

"Why would she live like this?" he said, quiet enough that it was almost to himself. "This far from everything. This alone."

Sonita looked at him looking at the cottage.

She thought about how to answer that. About white hair and grey eyes and a girl who had spent her whole life being looked at for the wrong reasons and had found a place where she could simply exist without being a problem for anyone.

She decided not to answer it.

She walked past him to the door.

She knocked three times. The specific knock. The one Helen knew.

"Helen." She kept her voice low. "It is me."

Nothing for a moment.

Then the sound of movement inside. Small and sleepy. The particular sounds of someone who had been asleep and was navigating the space between that and being awake.

The door opened.

Helen stood in the doorway.

She was wrapped in a blanket, her black hair loose around her shoulders, her grey eyes still carrying the softness of sleep. She looked at Sonita, and the smile came immediately, the real one, the one she kept for the people and moments she did not have to perform for.

Then the smile stopped.

Her eyes moved to the bag on Sonita’s shoulder. The travelling bag. The one that meant something had happened and was not temporary.

"Sonita." Her voice was careful. "You are here very early." A pause. "Is that a bag?"

Sonita raised one hand. "We have company, Helen."

Then her eyes moved past Sonita entirely, going to the man standing behind her, and the softness left them. Something else came in, not fear, not quite certainty, but the alert stillness of someone whose body had registered something before their mind had finished catching up.

He had been standing slightly behind Sonita, the early grey light falling across him at the angle it fell across things in the moments just before proper morning arrived. As Sonita spoke, he moved, stepping out from behind her into Helen’s full line of sight.

He lifted one hand. Small and uncomplicated.

"Hi, Helen," he said.

His green eyes found her face and stayed there.

Helen’s breath hitched. It was small. Nearly silent. The kind of sound a person made when their body did something without their permission, when something arrived that the body recognized before the mind had a name for it.

She looked at Sonita.

Sonita looked back at her with the expression of someone who had a great deal to explain and was going to need to sit down first.

Helen looked back at him.

He was still looking at her. Not with the polite neutrality of a stranger being introduced. With the focused attention of someone who had been looking for something for a long time and had just found it, standing in a doorway, wrapped in a blanket, with sleep in her eyes.

Like she was a ghost he had finally caught.