#unrest

Rayla tugs him back down into her lap, prepared to refuse resistance that doesn’t come…and blends the jagged edges of the clump he’d cut in with the other locks at the crown of his head.

She swipes the white streak out of his eyes.

It’s been a lot on him lately, she knows—everything with Ezran about their dad. The stolen quasar diamond…

He’d tell her if it mattered.

She definitely notices, though, the bandage that appears over his hand the next time he returns back to their suite at the Lodge less than whole.

This time, though, Callum has an answer she believes.

He’s steady when she takes his palm and unwraps the strip of linen over the heel of his hand—steady while they both look at the clean red slice.

“I was sharpening my charcoal—down in the study earlier.” he explains as she ghosts a finger over it. He breathes in a hiss when she then passes a blotted towel of alcohol across the wound…but only just under his breath. He’ll live, she decides, dabbing at the cut, assured, at least, that it doesn’t need anything more than a bandage and a kiss. “Slipped.”

She believes it, too, for a good long ten minutes. Really, why would she doubt it? Sure, her dorky mage is a little less clumsy these days…but it’s not like she hasn’t seen similar scars littered over his hands, all by that same cause.

She’d have kept believing it, too…if not for the gloves.

He’d gone for a bath, she’d been picking up his clothes, and—

Shouldn’t his glove have a gash—and blood—too? Since when did he just…randomly take them off? They’d started as an art thing, keeping charcoal off his hands, he’d said once when she’d teased him—

Rayla knows she shouldn’t coax him into another lie. She should just outright ask him, but—

“Guess you’ll have to dig out a backup pair—huh?” she wonders when he comes back from the washroom, making it seem as though she’d just then been stacking his clothes up for him, like she hadn’t looked at the gloves closely. “Shame.” she sighs, eyeing his reaction.

To his credit, he doesn’t flinch as she picks them up—doesn’t take them out of her hands or anything.

He just…waits to tell his lie, until she sets them down again.

“Yeah, I’ll, uh…get those fixed too, though.”

“I have other things to be mended, too—there’s a basket over there.”

He adds them on top of her long-tattered cloak and an old orange pajama shirt neither of them wants to part with.

They’re not there in the morning.

Smart.

He’s learning, she thinks, biting her tongue.

It’s not anger, even, that’s churning in her gut—just worry, mostly. Why lie? She already knows he and Ez have been arguing, she already knows it’s all circled back around to them saving Runaan, and she already knows that none of this would be happening if they’d just caught Claudia that night when she’d made off with the remaining diamond—why make things more complicated, now with her?

He’s not smart enough to lock a door, though, apparently.

She hadn’t even been suspicious. She’d just rapped her knuckles once against the door to his study, looking for him for bed, easing it open like she has a hundred times before—

“Hey, Callum—”

—to find Callum shirtless, a knife—her knife, swiped from the place where her armor hangs behind their door—turned on himself, pointed at his hips.

“Rayla!” he jumps, dropping the blade and showing his hands. “What, uh—”

Every single nerve freezes, locking her body tight, and she goes painfully, eerily still—like one wrong move will spell disaster. What was he—

“It’s not what it looks like!”

She doesn’t know what’s worse—the lies, the stealing, the…hurting himself—or what she fears it all means.

“And what does it look like, Callum?” She tries to keep her voice measured, calm—but it pitches toward disbelief, toward panic, toward disgust. “You, trying to gut yourself in the middle of—”

It’s then that she sees the open book on his desk, and she’s only just fast enough to bolt all the way across to the table and snatch it from in front of him.

ydobwena

For breath: scrap of a Sky creature (a lock, a feather)

For bone: nail of a nobleman (an ounce exactly)

For blood: essence of an Ocean creature (a vial full)

For body: skin of the spellcaster (an inch or so will do)