Page 32 of Dark Chains: First Link
She was thinking about the barrier in her head, the one she had erected between the rational part of her brain, which insisted on caution, and the irrational part, which kept replaying the same fragment of memory until it was worn smooth.
Yaaf's eyes.
The fraction of a second when something had surfaced behind the blankness.
Four days had passed since the soldiers' second visit, the one where two soldiers had come, and Burda had lied to their faces, and they had left without incident. Eight days since the first visit, when eight big warriors had walked in, and the world had tilted on its axis.
She couldn't stop thinking about them, or rather just one of them.
Sullha snapped another pod from the stem, tested its weight in her palm, and dropped it into the basket.
It was difficult to reconcile the boy she had known with the soldier wearing a dead expression on his handsome face, but that tiny spark in his eyes hinted that Yaaf was still in there. Perhaps he was hiding behind a barrier that he had erected in his mind the same way she'd done. To preserve her sanity, she had to compartmentalize, and Yaaf might have used the same technique to preserve his soul.
She bent to check another pod, decided it needed one more day, and moved on to the next plant.
Suddenly, something in the air changed, became charged.
It was a shift in pressure, the way the atmosphere tightened before a storm, even when the sky was clear. A charge that hadn't been there a moment ago, subtle enough that the other two women couldn't feel it, but undeniable enough that her body responded before her mind caught up.
She lifted her head and looked over her shoulder.
Yaaf was standing at the edge of the garden, wearing the standard Brotherhood uniform, hands relaxed at his sides, watching her.
Her breath hitched, and her heart stuttered. It felt as if it had skipped a beat, and her body registered it as a small shock, making her fingertips tingle and her throat tighten.
This time, she was certain that the soldier was Yaaf. It wasn't the tentative almost-recognition from the first visit, but a knowing that was bone-deep and came from thirteen years of shared childhood. She knew those eyes. She knew the way he held his head, tilted slightly to the left when he was studying something, a habit so ingrained that even the training camp hadn't erased it. She knew the particular set of his mouth, which was harder now, the lips pressed into a line that held no trace of the goofy humor she remembered, but the shape was the same.
He was harsher.
That was the word she was looking for. Everything soft about the boy she'd known had been filed down or beaten away, leaving edges where there had been curves, and angles where there had been roundness. His jaw was sharper. His posture was rigid, drilled into him by years of conditioning that had turned a boy into a weapon.
But he didn't look menacing. He didn't look cruel. He looked like someone who had been standing on the outside looking in for a very long time and wasn't sure he was allowed to enter.
Feyla and Mahra had both gone still, their hands frozen over the weeds they'd been pulling. Sullha could feel their fear without turning to look at them. It radiated like heat from the sunbaked soil.
She gathered her courage and smiled at him. "What are you doing here, Yaaf?"
His eyes widened.
It was the first genuine reaction she had seen on his face, the first crack in the expressionless mask, and it confirmed what she'd suspected. He was still in there.
"You recognize me," he said.
His voice was deep but pleasant. He didn't seem threatening or condescending, and something about his cadence still sounded like the thirteen-year-old boy she'd known.
"Of course I do," she said. "Do you recognize me?"
He tilted his head, that leftward tilt she knew so well, and looked at her with an expression that suggested the question puzzled him. "You haven't changed. You still look the same as you did six years ago."
Sullha chuckled, her brain bypassing the part that was insisting she should be terrified and emerging from the part that remembered a boy who'd made her laugh by saying absurd things with a straight face.
"Should I feel offended?" she asked.
The confusion on his face deepened, and the expression was so earnest, so completely devoid of artifice, that it made him look so much more like the boy he used to be.
"Why would you be offended?" he asked.
She shook her head. "You are all grown up, and you still don't know anything about women. I'm nineteen. I have a son. I don't want to be told that I look like a child."
