Page 52 of The Orc's Protection
I arrive forty-five minutes early, the way I always do.
The school building is the same. The parking lot, the mural of children holding hands, the smell of industrial cleaner and whiteboard markers. All of it identical to every morning for the past months. And yet something has shifted in the quality of my attention, a new awareness running beneath the familiar routines.
I’m passing the teachers’ lounge before the children arrive, when I hear Riona’s voice.
“I had a late evening.”
Janet’s response, bright and already delighted, “A late evening. Sure. Riona, you look like someone who had anexcellentlate evening.”
I slow my pace without intending to. The door is partially open. My enhanced hearing, which I’ve spent years pretending is ordinary, does not require me to stop at all.
“Janet.”
“Oh, come on. It’s written all over your face. Was it security? Please tell me it was security.”
A pause. Long enough that I hold my breath.
“He’s a colleague,” Riona says finally. Her voice has shifted—that careful, measured tone she uses with administrators. “A good one. That’s all I’m prepared to say.”
Janet laughs. Riona doesn’t correct the laugh.
I continue my rounds.
That’s all I’m prepared to say.
I have spent years studying human speech patterns—learning the gap between what is said and what is meant, reading subtext the way StoneWatch warriors once read terrain. It is a skill born out of necessity. When you are visibly other, you learn quickly to hear beneath the surface.
I know what she was doing. Janet Marsh carries information the way water finds low ground—inevitably, thoroughly, without malice but without restraint either. A carefully neutral response in that doorway was the only sensible choice. Riona was managing an audience, not speaking her truth. Weeks of watching her move through this building have taught me the difference between her guarded voice and her real one.
I know all of this.
And still.
The StoneWatch part of me—the part that does not process love as a thing to be managed in daylight while being kept for the dark—hears something else entirely. In my clan, a warrior’s claim is spoken openly, or it carries no weight. The protection you won’t name in public is the protection you haven’t fully decided to give.
I understand that intellectually.
It doesn’t help.
What I cannot reason my way past is this: she stood before Principal Winters and defended me without hesitation. That was real. That cost her something, and she paid it without flinching. But Principal Winters was a threat to be faced. Janet is just a colleague with curious eyes—and somehow that smaller, lower-stakes moment is the one that has lodged itself under my ribs like a splinter I can’t reach.
Perhaps that is the more honest wound. Not that she hid us from someone who mattered. But that hiding came so easily. So practiced. So fluent.
I am being unfair. IknowI am being unfair.
I complete my perimeter check with deliberate precision. Thorough. Correct. Professional.
I do not go to her classroom.
She notices by mid-morning. I see the moment she does—a slight pause in her movement as she glances toward the hallway and finds me precisely where I am supposed to be, doing precisely what I am supposed to be doing, not looking at her at all.
She resumes her lesson. But there is a careful quality to her attention for the rest of the morning, a new awareness directed my way.
I don’t want her to feel it. That’s the part I hadn’t accounted for—that withdrawing from her would feel nothing like the clean, controlled distance I maintain with the rest of the world. It feels like holding still while something tears.
But I don’t know how to close the distance again without first understanding what I’m actually asking of her. Whether what I need—the openness, the naming, the refusal to be someone’s private truth—is something she can give. Whether I have any right to ask it, given everything she’s already risked.
So I stay where I am. Visible. Correct. Professionally exactly where I should be.
