Chapter 63: What Are You Doing To Me

Azura’s POV

We found a place that felt safer than the open forest.

Not safe. Nothing in this place felt safe. But better, a wider stretch of ground between the silver trees where you could see in most directions without the branches closing in too tightly overhead. It was the best option the forest had to offer, and everyone recognized that without needing to be said.

The leftover meat from the hunt was finished that evening. Not much remained but enough to share around, and the warriors ate quietly and without complaint, the kind of quiet that had become normal since entering this place.

Corvin had stopped struggling.

The fight had gone out of him somewhere between midday and evening, like a fire that had burned through everything it had to burn and simply stopped.

He sat where they placed him, his wrists still tied but his body loose and defeated, and when someone brought him a portion of food he took it without a word and ate it slowly, staring at nothing.

I watched him from across the camp and tried not to think too hard about what was still happening inside his head. Whether he was still home with his wife and family, or whether some part of him knew where he actually was and was screaming underneath the part that did not.

I looked away.

Liona settled beside me after eating, pulling her bedroll close to mine the way she always did, close enough that our shoulders almost touched.

The camp arranged itself around the low fire with the efficiency of people who had done this enough times now that it required no discussion. Watch rotations were agreed on with a few words and a nod. Weapons stayed within reach. Nobody ventured near the flowers.

The forest made its sounds around us, soft and arranged, that particular quiet that felt like a decision rather than an absence.

Finally, I closed my eyes.

****

I opened them in the dark. No sound had woken me.

No movement, no voice, no hand on my shoulder. I simply went from sleeping to awake in a single moment, my eyes opening onto the dim camp with no clear reason for it.

The fire had burned down to a cluster of low orange embers that threw just enough glow to see the shapes of people sleeping around it. The moonlight came through the gaps in the branches overhead in thin pale strips, falling across the ground in broken pieces that made the silver bark of the nearest trees glow faintly.

I lay still for a moment, listening.

The camp breathed around me in the slow rhythm of sleeping people. A warrior on watch sat at the far edge of the firelight, still and alert. Liona was beside me, her face relaxed in sleep, one hand curled near her chin.

I looked toward where Rhydor had settled for the night.

His bedroll was empty.

I sat up slowly, looking around the whole camp. The warriors. Silas. Axel. Torin. All of them present, all of them sleeping or on watch.

No Rhydor.

I got up carefully, stepping over Liona’s feet without waking her, and moved toward the edge of the camp.

The warrior on watch looked at me and I held up one hand to show I was fine, just moving. He nodded and looked away.

I stood at the edge of the firelight and listened.

Then I heard a sound.

Not far. Just beyond where the trees thickened slightly to the left of camp. A sound so small and so controlled that I almost missed it entirely. The kind of sound a person made when they were trying with everything they had not to make any sound at all and the pain was winning anyway.

I followed it.

The trees were closer together here, the moonlight thinner between them, but enough reached the ground to see by. I moved carefully, watching where I stepped the way Silas had told us all to, staying aware of what was around me.

I found him sitting against the base of a large silver tree, slightly apart from the camp, his back to the trunk and his legs stretched out in front of him.

He had removed the bandage from his shoulder and was trying to apply something to the wound himself, one-handed, his jaw set and his eyes focused on the task with the concentration of a man who had decided that concentration was the only thing standing between him and the sound he was trying not to make.

He made it anyway.

A small, compressed sound, breaking through his control for just one second before he locked it back behind his teeth.

Something in my chest cracked open.

I stood there for a moment just feeling it, that small sound sitting inside me somewhere I had not known anything could reach. Then I walked forward.

He heard me and looked up. His eyes found me in the dim light and he looked at me for a moment without saying anything. He did not tell me to leave. He did not reach for the bandage to cover the wound. He just looked at me with an expression I could not fully read in the dark.

I looked at the wound.

Even in this light it was worse than I had last seen it. The darkness at the center had spread. The skin around it had that raised, poor quality that had been there before, but more so now, more pronounced, more settled, like whatever was in it had decided it was comfortable and was making itself at home.

It was bad. It was genuinely, seriously bad, and he had been riding and leading and making decisions and carrying the weight of this entire group on top of it without saying a single word to anyone about how much worse it had gotten.

I sat down in front of him.

"How long," I said quietly, "are you going to keep doing this to yourself?"

He said nothing. He looked at me and said nothing.

I reached out and took the cloth from his hand. He let me take it without resistance, which told me more about how he was actually feeling than anything else could have. I took the small medicine pot beside him and opened it and began cleaning the wound carefully, working slowly, trying to be as gentle as I could.

The tears came without warning.

I was not planning them. I was not even close to planning them. One moment, I was focused on what my hands were doing, and the next moment, my vision was blurring, and the first tear was already falling, and there was nothing I could do about it because it had already happened.

I blinked hard and kept working.

Rhydor went still.

I could feel him looking at me. I kept my eyes on the wound and kept my hands moving and tried to breathe evenly.

"Why are you crying?" he said.

And everything I had tried to keep organized inside me came apart at once.

"Why won’t I?" I started, and my voice broke immediately.

The words came out in pieces around the tears I could not stop.

"You are the most stubborn..." I stopped, a hiccup breaking through.

"The most impossible person I have ever met. And you just... You sit out here alone in the dark, and you don’t tell anyone, and you act like it’s nothing."

Another hiccup. Another break in the middle of the word.

"And it’s not nothing. It is so far from nothing. And I don’t understand why you keep doing this. Why you keep hurting and acting like it doesn’t matter. Like you don’t matter."

I pressed my lips together, but the tears kept coming.

"And I know you hate me. I know that. I know you don’t like or want my presence. And I know I shouldn’t even..." I stopped again, pressing my lips together harder, the tears running freely now. I did not care anymore about stopping them.

"I shouldn’t even be sitting here. I don’t know why I am. I don’t know why I care this much. I don’t understand any of this anymore."

I ran out of words.

The forest was very quiet around us.

Rhydor looked at me for a long moment. Not with coldness. Not with that flat armor he wore everywhere. Just looking, the way you look at something you are genuinely trying to understand and cannot.

"You are strange," he said quietly. Not cruelly. Like a man saying something true that he had been turning over in his mind and had finally decided to say out loud. "Why would you cry for someone who treats you the way I do?"

I looked at him.

I did not have an answer for that. Not one that made sense. Not one I could say without handing him something I was not ready to give.

He looked at me for another moment.

Then slowly, carefully, like someone doing something they were not entirely sure they had the right to do, he raised his hand. His thumb found my cheek. He wiped one tear away, slow and deliberate, his touch so gentle it was almost nothing, almost just the suggestion of a touch.

He did not move his hand away.

I looked up at him, his face close, the moonlight catching the edges of him, his thumb still resting at the curve of my cheek like it had found somewhere it intended to stay for a moment.

"What are you doing to me?" I whispered.

Neither of us moved.

The forest breathed around us, soft and quiet and indifferent, and the fire somewhere behind us had burned down to almost nothing, and the moonlight sat in thin pale strips across the silver ground between us.

And he did not answer.

And I did not look away.