Page 33 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

By nightfall, the main command tent is warm and dim with oil lamp glow, smelling of tallow and damp wool and the faint mineral scent that clings to gargoyles like quarry dust. The tactical maps are spread across the long center table — terrain sketches, trap placements, patrol rotations, supply inventory.

Velka is arguing with one of the Ashwing generals about something involving the western pass that I stopped following twenty minutes ago. Father Corren's notes are pinned in the corner. Leif is present but quiet, seated at the far end of the table with his arms crossed, watching everything with wide eyes he's trying hard to make look calm.

I am halfway through recalculating the eastern deadfall spacing when I feel him.

I look up.

Tovian is standing at the opposite end of the table, arms folded across the vast expanse of his chest, a tactical map completely ignored in front of him. He is looking at me. Not at the maps. Not at Velka's increasingly emphatic argument. At me. With that dark, unhurried attention that used to make my pulse spike with fear and now does something entirely different and significantly more inconvenient.

I hold his gaze for exactly one beat.

Then I point my charcoal pencil at him across the table. "You're going to leave a scorch mark on the canvas if you keep staring at me like that."

Velka stops mid-sentence. The Ashwing general blinks his enormous yellow eyes. Leif makes a sound that might be a laugh he immediately swallows.

Tovian doesn’t look away. The corner of his mouth moves. Just barely.

"Continue," he says.

"I'm serious. Someone's going to think something is on fire."

"Something is not on fire."

"Your dignity might be."

He uncrosses his arms slowly, tilts his head, and the quality of his silence says I am choosing not to respond to that in a way that is somehow worse than if he had.

The meeting disperses in pieces — Velka dragging the Ashwing general back into the logistics argument as they duck out of the tent, Leif murmuring a quiet goodnight, Vorgrym leaving without ceremony as he arrived. The oil lamps gutter in the draft of the open tent flap and then the canvas settles again and it is just the two of us and the mountain wind pressing cold fingers against the tent.

Tovian moves around the table. Not fast. He has stopped moving fast around me when we are alone, which I think is more deliberate a restraint than I used to give him credit for.

He stops close enough that I have to look up.

"I meant what I said," I tell him. "You were staring."

"I was."

"It's unsettling."

"You were unsettled?"

I think about lying. It would be the smarter choice. "No," I admit.

The rigid line of his jaw softens — barely, but I know his face now the way you learn a difficult landscape by walking it in all weathers. He reaches out and adjusts the corner of the nearest map.

"After centuries of warriors who only know how to bow," he says, his voice dropping into that low register that does terrible things to my composure, "there is something in your tongue that reminds me I am still alive."

The wind presses against the canvas. The fire in the pit outside snaps once, bright and brief.

"Careful," I say quietly, a small smile playing on my lips. "That almost sounded like a compliment."

"Almost," he agrees.

18

TOVIAN

The reports come in waves. First Greyspine Ridge. Then the Hollowed Pass. Then the twin outposts along the eastern shelf—both overrun before dawn, the gargoyles stationed there found petrified mid-flight, forced into emergency Stone Sleep by wounds too severe to survive conscious.