51. Every single time he asked

Chapter 51: Every single time he asked,

The infirmary hadn't gotten any less quiet since the night before, and somehow that quiet had a weight to it now, pressing down on all of them the same way the dust had settled over the crypt after everything went still.

Finn hadn't moved. Not a twitch, not a shift, nothing but the slow rise and fall of a chest that still, mercifully, kept doing that on its own. Nora sat exactly where she'd sat since they carried him in, chair pulled as close to the cot as it would go, both hands wrapped around his one small hand like letting go might undo whatever had brought him back.

Eto stood by the window. He hadn't sat down once. His arm was bound tight against his ribs, and every so often his jaw tightened when he shifted his weight wrong, but his eyes stayed fixed somewhere past the glass, past the rooftops of Torak, past whatever it was he was actually looking at.

Freya leaned against the far wall, arms crossed, sword finally sheathed and forgotten at her hip. Mikaela sat a little apart from Nora, close enough to reach her if she needed to, far enough to give her the illusion of space.

Nobody had said much in the last hour. Nobody seemed to have the words left for it.

The door opened without a knock, and Alaric came through it looking like a man who hadn't slept and wasn't going to for a while yet. Dust still clung to his boots. There was a grey pallor under his eyes that hadn't been there the night before, and something in the set of his shoulders that made Freya straighten off the wall before he'd even said a word.

"Freya," he said. Just her name, low, like it cost him something to say it.

"Captain."

"City Lord wants us. You and me. Now." He rubbed a hand down his face, hard, like he could scrub the exhaustion off with it. "Knight Commander's already been sent for. This isn't a, a request, it's a summons. Both of us."

Freya's brow pulled together. "Now? It's barely past noon."

"Now." Alaric's voice didn't leave room for anything else. "He's had the report since dawn. Church destroyed. Bones of half his missing persons list scattered across a crypt floor. A, a demon walking around his city wearing an old woman's face for who knows how long. He wants answers and he wants them from the two people who were standing in that room when it all happened."

"You were also standing in that room."

"I was standing outside most of it, giving orders to guards who found bones. You were inside it. You saw her change." He looked at her then, and something under the gruffness cracked just slightly. "He's going to want someone he can point at. Someone he can say handled it, or someone he can blame for it going wrong. Either way it needs a name attached, and yours is the one that's going to come up."

Mikaela had gone very still on her side of the room. "Is Eto in danger."

Alaric didn't answer right away, and that alone said something.

"I don't know," he admitted finally. "Knight Commander will be there. Freya can speak for what happened, for what he did, that he fought at our side and not against us. That should matter." A pause. "Should."

"That's not the same as will."

"No," Alaric said. "It isn't."

Freya crossed to the door, then stopped, glancing back once at Eto, who hadn't turned from the window, who likely hadn't understood a word of what had just been said in a tongue that wasn't his. She said something short to him anyway, in halting Keth, each word placed with the same careful weight she always gave the language. "We go. Talk. Come back."

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Eto's eyes flicked to her, held a beat, then dropped in something that wasn't quite a nod.

Then she was gone, Alaric a step behind her, and the door shut with a sound too quiet for how heavy it felt.

Mikaela stayed where she was for a long moment after that, watching the closed door, watching Eto's shoulders, watching Nora's unmoving hands around Finn's. She didn't say anything. There wasn't anything worth saying that wouldn't sound hollow right now.

So she waited.

It was some time later, the light through the window shifting long and gold toward evening, when she finally moved, crossing the room and lowering herself into the chair beside Nora's without a word. Nora didn't look up. Didn't loosen her grip. Her eyes stayed on Finn's face like she was afraid that if she blinked too long he'd be gone by the time she opened them again.

She hadn't eaten. Someone had brought a plate hours ago and it sat untouched on the table by the cot, gone cold.

"You should eat something," Mikaela said, gentle, not really expecting it to land.

It didn't. Nora didn't answer, didn't even seem to hear it, just kept staring at Finn's small pale face with an intensity that looked like it hurt.

Mikaela let the silence sit a while longer before she tried something else. "Can I ask you something."

Nora's eyes flicked to her, just barely, and something in her face said she already knew this wasn't going to be a simple question.

"When you get older," Mikaela said, careful with it. "Have you, I mean, have you thought about what you'll do. When you're grown."

For a long moment Nora didn't answer at all, and Mikaela thought maybe she wasn't going to. Then, quiet, still not looking away from Finn.

"Finn wanted to join the Adventurers Guild. When he turned fifteen." Her voice was flat, worn thin. "He talked about it all the time. Wouldn't shut up about it, actually. Wanted to see, I don't know, everywhere. Every city, every, every forest and mountain and whatever else is out there. He said I'd join him when I turned fifteen too. His birthday's three months before mine, so he was always going on about how he'd already be out there a whole three months ahead of me, like that mattered."

She stopped. Her thumb moved slow over the back of Finn's knuckles.

"I hadn't decided anything, really. Never really thought that far past just, just going along with whatever he said, because he always said it with so much, so much certainty, you know. Like it was already true and just hadn't happened yet." Her voice cracked, just slightly, at the edges. "Now I don't even know if he'll be the same Finn when he wakes up. If he wakes up."

"He will," Mikaela said, though she wasn't sure she believed it, only that Nora needed to hear someone say it.

Nora didn't respond to that either way.

"I used to make fun of him," she said instead, after a while. "Constantly. He was, he's an idiot, honestly, a loud, annoying idiot who never knew when to stop talking. But he's the, he was the closest thing to family I ever had."

Mikaela didn't push. She just waited, and after a moment Nora kept going, like something in her had decided it needed to come out now or not at all.

"Ten years ago my parents sold me. To a merchant." She said it plain, flat, like a fact she'd worn smooth from repeating it in her own head too many times. "He was, uhm, grooming me. To be his wife. Eventually. I wasn't the only one, there were at least five other girls my age, some older. He had, he was doing it to all of us, all the four year olds, the five year olds, six. Some of us for that. Some just to, to add to his family. Expand it. He already had dozens of kids by the time I got there."

Mikaela's jaw tightened, but she said nothing, only reached over and rested a hand near Nora's without quite touching, an offer rather than an intrusion.

"That was until about seven years ago," Nora went on. "He was passing through Astoria on business and he tried to grab another girl there. One who wasn't his yet. And there was this knight, Sir Garrick, some famous one apparently, I don't really know, I was little. He stopped him. There was a fight and the merchant ended up dead and everything, everything just fell apart after that. Only a handful of us made it out. The King of Astoria sent us back here, to Rostalio, and they split us up into different homes."

She finally looked up, just for a second, eyes wet and hollow at once.

"That's where I met Finn. He was already there. Started flirting the second I walked in, if you can believe that, some scrawny kid trying to be smooth, asking me to be his girlfriend. I said no. Every single time he asked, and he asked constantly, for years, I said no."

A wet, broken almost laugh escaped her, gone as fast as it came.

"He made this place feel like, like it wasn't just a building full of kids nobody wanted. He made not having a real family not hurt as much as it should have. He used to train, too, thought he could do magic once. Was so sure of it. Didn't work out, obviously." Her voice dropped, barely above a whisper now. "So I don't know. I don't know what I'll do, when I'm grown, if he isn't there to do it with."

She looked back down at Finn's still face, and said nothing else after that, the silence settling back over the room the way dust settles after something has finally, finally stopped falling.