The Cozy Kirin

@daily-writing-challenge

( TW for execution and death )

( If anyone is curious about what Sybil keeps dipping into! I like to use Gaelic as an inspiration for old Drust / Old Common. It is a genuinely beautiful language that I’ve been putting in effort into learning as well! )

The crowd thickened near the Ashvane yard, pushing toward the harbor square like a tide with nowhere else to go. Dockhands, fishwives, and children balanced on their fathers' shoulders gathered together, all craning necks to see the timber scaffold where three nooses swung in the salt laced wind, heavy and patient. Three pirates from a crew that had been raiding merchant ships now stood there, stripped of their coats and boots with their hands bound behind their backs with tar-stiffened rope. Merrick walked ahead, broad-shouldered and easy in the press of bodies, parting the crowd with nothing more than the way he carried himself. "Oi, look at that." He jerked his chin toward the gallows, where the hangman was adjusting the length of the first noose. "Sloppy rigging, that is. Rope's too long by 'alf. Bloke'll bounce like a fish on a line 'fore 'e goes." He laughed, a short, barking thing, and elbowed Ridley's arm. "Bet you five silver the fat one pisses 'imself.” Ridley didn't answer. He was walking a half-step behind to the left, his usual position. His pale gray eyes swept the crowd out of habit—counting exits, noting the pair of guards flanking the gallows, and cataloguing the pickpockets working the edges of the mob. A boy no older than eight was lifting a merchant's coin purse near the fish stalls. Ridley watched him palm it and vanish between legs like a rat through a drain grate. Dampwick-born, he had to be. Merrick was still talking. "Should charge admission, they should. Only free entertainment this city gives, an' they don't even do it proper—" The first pirate was shoved forward and the crowd roared. Somewhere behind Ridley, a woman cheered and a man threw a half-rotten cabbage that struck the condemned man's shoulder with a wet thwack. Ridley glanced back, and he saw that Sybil had stopped walking. She stood three paces behind them, small and still in the press of bodies, her shawl pulled tight around her narrow shoulders. The crowd jostled around her as though she were a stone in a river, and she did not move, she didn’t even blink. Her mismatched eyes were focused not on the pirates, but the nooses. The hangman pulled the lever and the trapdoor dropped with a bang that cracked across the square like a pistol shot and the crowd erupted. Sybil flinched as if she'd been struck across the face. Her lips parted, but no sound came out. Her fingers, poking from the frayed ends of her shawl, had gone white at the knuckles. Ridley saw it happen in pieces. The way her breathing changed—shallow and rabbit-fast, her chest barely moving under the wool. The way her eyes went glassy and distant, fixed on something that wasn't the pirate jerking at the end of his rope but something older, something further away, something strung up in a village square in Drustvar where the trees grew crooked and the fog never fully lifted. "Oi, Rid!" Merrick was grinning, his full attention on the spectacle. "Told you—fat one's next, watch 'is face, 'e's already gone green—"

The second trapdoor banged open and  Sybil made a sound that was so small, it was barely one at all—it was more like the air was being pressed from her lungs by a hand she couldn't see. Her knees buckled, just slightly, just enough that she swayed, and her lips began moving in fragmented whispers that were lost under the crowd’s jeering. "—mo dheartháiríní, Rowan, Thane, a stóirín, don't be lookin', don't be—" Her hand came up to her own throat and pressed against the collar as if she could feel a different rope there entirely.

Ridley moved without thinking about it. He didn't glance at Merrick for permission, his body simply turned and closed the distance between them in two strides, his long dark coat cutting through the crowd like a curtain being drawn. He stepped directly in front of her and blocked the gallows from her sight as completely as a wall. "Oi." His voice was low, barely above a murmur. "Don't look. Yeah? Eyes on me. Right 'ere."

She didn't seem to hear him. Her gaze was somewhere past his chest, past the fur-trimmed collar of his coat, past Boralus entirely. Her lips were still moving—names, fragments, old Drust prayers tangled with Common like briars through a fence. "—Da were first, they took Da first, an' Mam were screamin', Bran were cryin', he were only—an' Alaric, Alaric had the blood comin' out of 'im, out of his belly, an' they dragged him up anyways, they dragged him up with the—"

"Sybil." Ridley's gloved hand came up and hovered near her shoulder without touching. His jaw was clenched so tight the muscle twitched. He could hear the third trapdoor bang behind him and the crowd screamed approval. 

Sybil's whole body jerked like a marionette whose strings had been yanked. "Máthair," she whispered. "Máthair, tá brón orm, ní raibh mé in ann—"

Something hot and ugly twisted in Ridley's chest. He'd seen people die. He'd watched Merrick break fingers, burn ledgers, and put a knife through a man's hand for shorting them on a shipment. None of it had felt like this—like watching someone drown in air, standing right in front of him, small enough that his shadow swallowed her whole. He took her by the shoulders gently—more gently than his hands knew how to be, the leather of his gloves creaking with the effort of not gripping too hard. He turned her bodily, steering her away from the gallows, away from the crowd, away from the roaring and the creak of taut rope and the wet gurgling sounds a man makes when the drop doesn't break his neck clean. "Come on," he muttered. "Come on, we're goin'. We're walkin'. That's it." He kept himself between her and the spectacle, one hand on her shoulder, the other hovering at her back without quite landing. He guided her down a side alley between a chandler's shop and a sail-maker's, where the crowd thinned and the noise dulled to a muffled roar, and the air smelled like tallow and old canvas instead of sweat and harbor brine. Sybil's legs gave out halfway down the alley but she didn’t fall because Ridley caught her, his arm hooking around her waist before her knees hit the cobblestones. She weighed almost nothing, it was like catching a bundle of sticks wrapped in wool. He lowered her against the chandler's wall, crouching in front of her. Her breathing was wrong. Too fast, too shallow, catching in her throat like hiccups. A thin line of blood had started from her left nostril—bright, and startling red against her freckled skin, and her hands were shaking so badly that the tremor traveled up her wrists and into her forearms. "'Ey. 'Ey, look at me." Ridley's voice had gone even quieter. He pulled off one glove with his teeth and, after a beat of hesitation that cost him visibly, pressed the back of his bare hand against her cheek. Her skin was ice-cold. "You're in Boralus. Yeah? Boralus. Not—wherever you were. You're 'ere. Alley smells like shit, seagull's screamin' up there like it's bein' murdered, an' there's a drunk bloke asleep in that doorway. See 'im? That's Boralus. That's now."

Sybil's eyes slowly focused. The lavender one first, then the brown, dragging back from wherever her memory had taken her. "They didn't—" Her voice cracked, thin as thread. "They didn't drop clean, Ridley. None of them dropped clean. Alaric were already dyin' from the shot an' they hung him anyways an' he—hhh—" A sob hitched in her chest but didn't fully form. Her hand came up and gripped the front of his coat, fingers twisting in the dark fabric as the blood from her nose reached her upper lip.

Ridley fished a rag from one of his belt pouches. It wasn’t exactly clean, but it was at least cleaner than the street—and pressed it to her face with a clumsiness that betrayed how unused his hands were to gentleness. "'Old that there. Tilt your 'ead forward, not back. Forward. There you go."

Sybil obeyed, but her grip on his coat didn't loosen. If anything, her fingers tightened, as if he were the only solid thing in a world that had suddenly gone liquid and dark. Her breathing was still ragged, but slowing. The tremors came in waves now instead of one continuous shudder. "I ran," she whispered into the rag. "I ran an' I left them. I were a doe an' I ran through the trees an' I didn't stop an' when I came back they were—still up there. Still hangin'. The crows were already—"

"Sybil."

"—already at Bran's—"

"Sybil." His free hand found the back of her head, rough fingers sliding through the choppy sandy hair, and he held her there, holding her at a fixed point. An anchor dropped in a storm she couldn't swim out of alone. "You was one girl against a whole village gone mad. You'd 'ave died with 'em.”

Sybil's face crumpled and the sound she made was barely human—it was a thin, keening thing, muffled against his knuckles and the rag. Her shoulders curled inward until she was folded almost in half. Ridley stayed exactly where he was. Crouched on the wet cobblestones, knees aching, with one hand on the back of her head and the other holding the rag to her bleeding nose. He didn't speak. He didn't move. He barely breathed. Behind them, muffled by brick and canvas, Merrick's laugh rang out over the crowd like a bell. Ridley's jaw tightened and he shifted his weight, putting his back more fully to the alley's mouth, and let his shadow fall over Sybil like something he could give her when he had nothing else.

She cried for a long time. Quiet, airless sobs that shook her frame and left dark spots on his coat where her tears soaked through. At some point her whispers slid entirely into Drust—a Athainne, glac aire díobh, coinnigh solas orthu, tá siad beag, tá siad chomh beag. Ridley understood none of the words but sat with them anyway, steady and silent and unmovable, until the shaking finally slowed and her grip on his coat loosened from a death-clutch to something merely desperate. "M'sorry," she breathed at last. Her voice was raw and small. "M'sorry, I didn't mean to, I just heard the—an' I were back there an'—"

"Don't." He pulled the rag away and checked the bleeding, seeing it had stopped and so he tucked it back in his pouch. "Don't apologize for that. Not to me. Not to anyone." He said it with the same gruffness he said everything, but something underneath it had shifted. Something he didn't have a name for and wouldn't have admitted to under torture.

Sybil looked up at him. Her face was blotched and swollen, her mismatched eyes red-rimmed, and her nose pink with a drying smear of blood still on her upper lip he'd missed. She looked wrecked and very young and very old at the same time, the way only grief can make a person look. "You see things too, so," she said quietly. "Don't you. Things you can't unfind in your head."

Ridley's expression shuttered. He stood, offering her his hand—bare, scarred across the knuckles, and rough-palmed. "Can you walk?"

She took it. Her fingers were still cold, still trembling faintly, but they wrapped around his hand and held on. "Aye," she said. "If you stay atween me an' the noise."

@daily-writing-challenge

Boralus stank in the heat. 

This wasn't its usual salt and tar smell on a particularly muggy day, but something thicker and spoiled. Fish guts baking on the docks mixed with the sour funk of low tide pooling in the canals and the misery of too many bodies crammed into too little shade. There was no wind off the water and no mercy from the clouds, just a white, hammering sun that turned the cobblestones into griddles and sent dogs crawling under carts to pant in whatever shade they could thieve. Even the gulls had gone quiet, too lazy to scream, hunched on wherever they could perch with their breaks cracked open. Ridley had stripped his coat that morning. His sleeves were shoved past his elbows, his collar open, and still the sweat crawled down his spine. He stood in the doorway of the room they had above Chuck’s, watching Pebbles fan himself with a bent bit of cardboard while Oliver sat cross-legged on the floor, methodically pulling apart a bread roll into pieces small enough for Aggie to chew. The toddler was red-cheeked and fussy, her copper curls plastered to her forehead, whimpering every few minutes without committing to a proper cry. Sybil sat by the window, braiding dried lavender into a cord with the slow, dreamy patience of someone who did not appear to register that the room was roughly the temperature of a kiln. Her lips moved faintly, murmuring something. A prayer, maybe, or a rhyme. It was hard to tell with her. Agatha had toddled away from Oliver and was now tugging at Ridley's trouser leg with one sticky hand, her round face flushed pink. "'M hot," she announced, with the grave authority only a three-year-old could muster.

"Yeah, darlin', we're all 'ot." Ridley scooped her up and settled her on his hip. She grabbed a fistful of his collar and leaned her damp forehead against his jaw. "Right," Ridley said, and pushed off the doorframe. "We're goin' out."

Pebbles looked up, instantly suspicious. "Out where?"

"Swimmin'."

"Swimmin'," Pebbles repeated, flatly. "In what? The canal? I ain't puttin' my feet in that, there was a dead dog floatin' in it Tuesday—"

"Not the bleedin' canal." Ridley was already pulling his satchel off the hook, adjusting Agatha as he checked the waterskin before tossing a threadbare towel over his free shoulder. "There's a spot out past Hatherford where me an' Merrick used to go when we was lads. Trees come down thick n'the water's cold even in the summer, fed by snowmelt off th'ridge."

Oliver's eyes lit up with interest. "Can Aggie go in?"

"Shallow bit near the rocks, yeah. She'll be fine if someone's got 'er." Ridley's gaze drifted past the boy to where Sybil sat as the boys scrambled to their feet. "Oi," he called, not unkindly. "You comin' or what?" 

Sybil's mouth twitched into something that was not quite a smile, yet not quite a frown. She rose from the window with the careful, light-footed grace of a creature used to stepping over roots and uneven ground, gathering her skirts in one hand. "Aye," she said softly. "The stones are bakin'. Even the shadows have gone warm." 

The walk there took the better part of an hour, which meant the better part of an hour of Pebbles complaining, Oliver silently enduring, and Aggie riding Ridley's hip because her fat little legs gave out before they'd cleared the last warehouse district. Ridley carried her without comment, one arm hooked beneath her, his jaw set against the heat while the toddler grabbed fistfuls of his shirt and babbled at passing seagulls. Sybil walked beside him, barefoot, she'd taken her shoes off within ten minutes of leaving Boralus, claiming the road wanted to be felt, and her skirts were hiked above her ankles, dusty and sun-warm. She hummed as she walked, some formless tune that rose and fell like breathing. "'Ow much further?" Pebbles groaned, dragging his feet. “I can’t go on much longer!”

"You asked me that five minutes ago," Ridley said without turning. "Answer's the same. Shut it."

"Me legs are meltin’—"

"Then walk on your 'ands."

Oliver, quiet as a church mouse, tugged Pebbles' sleeve and pointed. Through a break in the scrub oak and tall grass, the land dipped into a hollow—a natural basin carved out by some old creek that had pooled and widened over centuries, fed by a thin waterfall that trickled down a mossy rock face. The water was clear and green-dark where the shade hit it, dappled gold where the sun broke through the canopy of twisted oaks. Flat stones lined the edges like crooked teeth, warm enough to sit on, and smooth enough for bare feet. An old rope still hung from a crooked branch that overhung the deep end, frayed and sun-bleached but sturdy enough. "Used t’swing off that," Ridley said, nodding toward the rope. Something flickered in his face, a memory, maybe. The ghost of a boy who hadn't yet learned to be this hard. "'Merrick'd go first, e’always 'ad to go first. Shoutin' the whole way down like a bleedin' lunatic."

Pebbles had already stripped off his shirt, his ribs sticking out like a washboard, dirt-tanned skin stretched tight over a body that ate too little and ran too much. "Last one in's a naga!" he hollered, and launched himself off the nearest boulder with a whoop that sent a small cluster of birds fleeing into the sky from the overhanging branches.

The splash was enormous for such a scrawny boy. Oliver hesitated, looked at Ridley, then looked at the water before he pulled off his shoes with a quiet determination and waded in from the shallow end, gasping at the cold. "Ahhh—'s freezing!"

"That's the point, innit?" Ridley called back. 

Agatha's head came up, and her eyes went enormous. "Wa-wa!" 

"Yeah, sweetheart, water." He crouched down beside the water's edge, guiding Agatha’s small feet into the shallows where the stream barely covered her ankles. "You stay right 'ere by the edge, yeah? Shallow bit only. No goin' deep." Agatha was already squirming toward the deeper end of the water with the single-minded determination of a toddler who had identified the one thing in the world she wanted and intended to have it wholly. Ridley caught her by the back of her little shirt before she could pitch herself headlong off the ledge. "Oi. Oi. What'd I just say?"

"Wa-wa," Agatha repeated firmly, as though this constituted a complete counterargument. She squealed then, a bright, clean sound, the kind only very small children make, and stomped, sending up little fans of spray. Ridley's hand stayed firm at her back, steadying her without thinking about it. 

In the meantime, Sybil hadn't moved. She stood a few paces from the water's edge with her arms folded beneath her shawl, watching the others with an expression that sat somewhere between longing and quiet dread. Ridley, of course, noticed because he always noticed. It was the worst thing about him, or the best, depending on who was asking. "Oi." He tipped his head toward the pool. "You comin' in or what?"

Sybil's jaw tightened. She looked at the cascade, at Pebbles splashing Oliver, and at the dark water where the bottom disappeared. Her fingers dug into her own elbows. "I'll...sit a while first. Get me bearings."

Something about the way she said it—the careful lightness, the way her gaze stayed fixed on the surface rather than the depth, made Ridley pause. He narrowed his pale eyes and studied her the way he did that made most people squirm. “Sybil.”

"'Tis a lovely spot, really." she said brightly. "'Tis grand, so it is. The trees are talkin' to each other, d'you hear them? The oaks, they're old, older than—" 

"Sybil."

"Mm?"

"Can y’swim?"

The silence that followed was answer enough. She lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug that tried to be careless and landed somewhere closer to embarrassed. "Sure the streams in Drustvar weren't built for swimmin'. Sharp stones and cold enough to stop your heart, they were. We'd wade, is all. Ankle-deep for the washin'."

Ridley stared at her, blinking twice as he processed this. His mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. "'Ang on. You—you can't swim."

"Didn't say that, now—"

"Y’didn’t say y’could." He looked genuinely thrown, the way another man might look if told the sun rose in the west. In Kul Tiras, swimming was not a skill, it was an assumption. Babies born learned to float before they learned to walk. Dockworkers who couldn't swim were dead dockworkers. Even the Dampwick gutter rats, especially the Dampwick gutter rats, could tread water in the harbor before they had all their adult teeth. Ridley ran a hand through his sweat-damp hair and stared at her as though she'd just confessed to having a second head tucked under her shawl.

“I'll thank ye not to look at me like I've told ye the sky is purple." 

"Y’live on an island." 

"'Twasn't...there wasn't cause for it, where I come from," she said, quiet and clipped. "The water in Drustvar's not the sort ye go splashin' about in for a grand time. 'Tis dark and cold and full of things that'd as soon pull ye under as look at ye. The rivers run fast and the loughs are deep and dark, and me da always said there were things in the deep water that remembered before we did. Ná téigh san uisce dorcha—don't go into the dark water. So we didn't." 

Pebbles, treading water in the middle of the pool, let out a bark of laughter. "You're 'avin a laugh! A Kul Tiran what can't swim? That's like a dwarf what can't drink!"

"Pebbles—" Ridley began.

Sybil's eyes flashed. "I can drink, ye wee—"

"Nah, nah, makes sense though, dunnit?" Pebbles grinned wide, slicking wet hair out of his face. "Backwoods Drustvar lot, all that witch business—bet you could turn yourself into a fish though if you tried, couldn't ya? Just do a bit of the ol'—" He waggled his fingers in a mocking pantomime of spellcasting. "Go on then, give it a go! Flop about a bit, see if somethin' happens—" Ridley's hand connected with the back of Pebbles' wet head with a sharp clap. The boy yelped, ducking, and Ridley fixed him with a look that could've curdled milk at forty paces. "Ow! What—"

"Button it. Now."

"I was only—"

"I said button it." The second look was worse than the first, and Pebbles, who had survived the streets of Boralus long enough to know when adults meant their threats, sank lower in the water until only his eyes and the bridge of his nose were visible, sulking like a bony crocodile. Ridley turned back to Sybil. She had her arms wrapped tighter now, her chin tucked as the flush spread down her neck. One bare foot was drawing a slow circle on the stone. He softened then, loosening his jaw and dropping his shoulders; his usual gruffness pulling back just far enough to let something gentler breathe underneath. "Oi. Look at me." She did, reluctantly so, her lavender and brown eyes bright with embarrassment. "There's nothin' to it," he said, quieter now, dipping his voice low enough to keep the words somewhat private between the two of them. "It's instinct, yeah? Your body knows. Th’water’ll hold you up if you let it. Y’just got t’not fight it." 

Sybil chewed her lip. "That sounds like somethin' a person says right before another person sinks like a millstone.”

"I'm right 'ere. Ain't gonna let nothin' happen. Water's calm 'ere, no current, no undertow an it’s shallow enough to stand near the edge. Ain't no dark water, ain't no monsters in the deep. Just a swim 'ole where two manky Dampwick boys used to come t’wash the gutter off 'emselves in summer." Something passed behind his eyes—a flicker, there and gone, and he looked away toward the water where the light broke into shards on the surface. "'E'd bring whatever 'e'd pinched from the market and we'd eat stolen pears and float about till the sun went down. Most o’the good memories I got of bein' small are 'ere."

Sybil looked at the water once more before lifting her gaze to his. Her fingers twisted in the hem of her shawl, and then she asked. “How did Merrick teach you, then? When you were small?"

Ridley's mouth twitched. "Well," he said. "It went somefin like this." He put both hands on her shoulders and shoved her straight off the ledge. Sybil hit the water with a shriek that scattered birds from the oak tree and made Agatha freeze mid-splash, her mouth a perfect little 'o' of astonishment. Pebbles choked on his own laughter and Oliver clapped both hands over his mouth as she vanished beneath the surface in a cloud of sandy hair and flailing skirts. Ridley stood on the bank with his arms crossed, counting.

One. 

Two.

Sybil erupted from the water like a furious, sputtering otter, hair plastered flat over her face, both arms wheeling, coughing and gasping and mad. "Ridley!" She coughed up a mouthful of water, treading clumsily but treading nonetheless. "Ye gobshite! Ye absolute—a Mháthair na dTonnta, I'll—"

"You're swimmin'," Ridley said.

Sybil stopped mid-curse. She looked down at herself, taking in the sight of her arms moving through the water, at her legs churning beneath her, at the fact that she was, demonstrably and undeniably, not sinking. "I'm..." She blinked and pushed the hair from her eyes with a shaking hand. "I'm swimmin'."

"Told ya. Ain't nuffin but instinct."

"Ye pushed me off a cliff!"

"Ledge, barely four feet." He dropped in beside her with an easy splash, surfacing with a grin he couldn't quite suppress. "Merrick shoved me off worse. Reckon there was rocks involved."

"That's not—that isn't teachin', that's assault, you brutish—"

"Aggie, you watchin'?" Ridley scooped the toddler up and pointed. "Sybil's swimmin'. See?"

"Sib!" Aggie shrieked, clapping her fat hands together. "Sib swi'!"

Sybil's fury cracked. It was impossible, Ridley had seen her try, to stay angry with Aggie beaming at her like that. "...Aye," she said, quieter, and something wondering crept into her voice despite herself. She moved her arms experimentally, turned in a slow circle as she felt the water slide around her. "Aye, I suppose I am. Tá mé ag snámh. Would you look at that." She then splashed water at Ridley with both hands, sending up a wild arc that caught him across the chest and chin. He didn't flinch, but he did finally smile. "Ye could've warned me!" Sybil huffed.

"Merrick didn't warn me neither," he retorted. In the meantime, Oliver had found the shallow ledge near the waterfall and was sitting with the thin stream pouring over his bony shoulders, eyes half-closed. Pebbles, incapable of stillness for more than thirty seconds, had discovered a rope of old vine dangling from an oak branch and was attempting to swing from it into the deeper water with the reckless confidence of someone who had not considered the concept of physics. "Pebbles, if you crack your 'ead open, I ain't carryin' you back," Ridley called.

"You won't 'ave to, I'll be dead, so it won't matter!" Pebbles launched, and miraculously the vine held. He dropped into the pool with a whoop and a cannonball splash that sent a wave crashing over Oliver's head. Oliver surfaced, spat water, and said nothing, but his look could have peeled paint.

Sybil drifted closer to Ridley. She'd found her rhythm now, it wasn’t graceful or strong, but it was steady, her legs working in slow kicks beneath the surface, her chin tipped up to keep her face clear. Water beaded on her freckles and her hair floated around her shoulders like pale weed. "You're an awful man, Ridley Laamb," she said, but her eyes were warm.

@daily-writing-challenge ( Trigger warning for violence and strong language )

The fog had teeth in Drustvar.

Not proper teeth—not the kind a man could knock loose in a back-alley brawl and spit into the gutter with a mouthful of blood. No, this was a slower kind of bite. It crept between the trees like something living, curling around the roots of oaks so old their bark had gone black, slipping into the gaps of Ridley's coat collar and settling against the back of his neck with a damp, intimate chill that made his skin crawl. The whole forest felt like a mouth closing. "Shoulda stayed in Boralus," he muttered, shoving a low-hanging branch out of his path. It snapped back and clipped his ear. "Fuck—shoulda stayed in Boralus.” He shoved another branch out of his face and it whipped back behind him with a wet thwack and sent a fat cold drop down the gap of his collar, straight along his spine. "Fackin'—" he hissed, jamming a gloved hand under the fur and clawing the water out. "Bloody miserable shitehole.” The canopy overhead was so thick the light came through grey and strangled. Somewhere to his left, something creaked—long and low, like a ship's hull in bad water, except there was no ship and no water, just trees leaning into each other at angles that didn't make sense, their branches tangled like fingers interlocked in prayer, or the bars of a cage. "Bloody, bloody miserable. Who lives 'ere. Who’d choose to." he muttered, scraping his sleeve across his nose. The cold had set up shop behind his teeth and showed no sign of leaving.

Merrick had left him.

It had been two hours ago, maybe three at this point. Ridley had told him, plain as day, no room for misunderstanding—that splitting up was a shit idea. A catastrophically shit idea. The kind of idea that got carved on a headstone under the words ‘Here Lies A Stupid Bastard’. And Merrick had clapped him on the shoulder, flashed that shit eating grin of his and said, "We'll cover more ground apart, Rid, don't be a tit about it."

"Don't be a tit about it, 'e says." Ridley spat into the bracken. “Bloody witch country, backwoods folk an’ Light knows what else, an' 'e wants us split. Brilliant. Top o' the class, Merrick. Round of bloody applause." He shifted the weight of the rifle on his back and kept moving, gloved hand resting near the pistol at his hip. His breath came out grey and he could feel the wet creeping under the wool at his shoulders and the fur at his collar, that particular Drustvar damp that was less rain and more the air sweating onto you. Then he came up over the lip of a shallow draw, and came to a sudden halt as standing there, half-hidden by a curtain of mist and the skeletal fingers of a dead hawthorn was a doe. Holy shit. Ridley's hand fell away from his pistol and his breath caught somewhere between his teeth and his chest and stayed there, trapped, because for a moment he forgot he was supposed to be hunting. 

It was her.

He knew it before his brain caught up to his eyes, because there was no mistaking what they'd been told to look for: pale as bone along the flanks, and blotched in soft brown patches like someone had taken a brush to her hide with trembling hands. Her ears flicked, twitched, settled, and then twitched again as she lifted her muzzle from a puddle with a slow, drained weariness. “Tides…” Ridley breathed. He'd seen plenty of deer in his life out in the wilds of Tiragarde, but none of them looked like this, and none of them felt like this. She had a hush around her, like the woods were holding still for her sake. The dark eye on the brown side of her face had a film to it of pure exhaustion. The kind he'd seen on Dampwick kids in a hard winter, the kind that didn't blink right. He could even count the slats of her ribs and the knobs of her spine through her hide, and the line of her hips jutted sharp as a hatchet. Her lavender eye found him and fixed on him. Ridley felt something he couldn't name move through him—not magic, not exactly, but something close to recognition. As though she wasn't just looking at him but reading him. He should signal Merrick because that was the plan, if plan was even the right word for whatever half-formed scheme Merrick had grunted at him before they’d been swallowed by the treeline.

Find the doe.

Signal.

Let Merrick handle the rest. 

Merrick always handled the rest, that was how it worked with them.

Ridley found, and Merrick finished. 

But his hand didn't move toward the signal flare in his coat, his feet instead did something else entirely. They stepped forward. Slowly. Carefully. One boot easing into the soft earth, then the other, weight rolling from heel to toe the way he'd learned to walk on the creaking floorboards when their mum was sleeping and he didn't want to wake her. "Easy, girl," he murmured lowly, the same way you talked to a dog you didn't want to bolt. "Easy now. Easy. I ain't gonna—" Gonna what? You're 'ere to catch 'er, you stupid sod. You came out 'ere wiv Merrick to drag 'er back in chains. What are you doin'? He didn't have an answer for that. He took another step, then another. He was close enough now to see the way her coat was matted in places, clumped with mud and burrs and what might have been dried blood along her left flank. Ridley could see the faint tremor running through her legs—not from cold, but from exhaustion so deep it had become a kind of vibration, the body shaking itself apart because it had forgotten how to be still. 

She was fifteen feet away. 

Then twelve. 

Then ten.

Ridley raised one hand, tugging the glove off without thinking because bare skin meant no weapon. "That's it," he whispered. "That's it, easy girl, I'm just—I just wanna 'ave a look at yeh, yeah? Just a look." He offered his palm as he reached out for her, and she did not move, her sides heaving in shallow little pulls.

CRACK.

The shot split the wood in half, birds exploding out of the canopy in a black ragged sheet. Ridley's whole body jolted so hard he heard his own teeth click. The doe's head snapped up and for one suspended instant, Ridley saw in her a terror so old it had fossilized, grief so heavy it had bent her spine, and underneath it all, buried so deep he almost missed it, a flicker of something that looked horribly, unmistakably human—, and then she was gone, diminished into a white streak vaulting sideways through the brambles before his brain caught up to what had happened. "NO, Merrick, you stupid—MERRICK— " She made it four bounds, and on the fifth, the iron came up out of the moss like a mouth. The sound it made was a wet, bright, mechanical CHUNK, and underneath it a noise came from her—high and broken and entirely too human, a sound that lived in the agonized space between animal and human, and Ridley felt it hit him in the sternum like a fist. She went down in the bracken thrashing. The chain rattled tight against its stake. Blood was already blooming dark against the white of her hindleg, and she was screaming, screaming, that wrong human scream out of a deer's mouth, and Ridley was running before he knew he was running, slipping on the moss, swearing, "No no no no no—"

“There’s m’girl!” Merrick stepped out of the trees on the far side of the clearing, calm as a man strolling out of a pub, rifle resting easy across his forearm. His silver hair was swept back wet and neat. He was grinning under his mustache. "Knew she'd circle this way," Merrick said, pleased. "Set that trap an hour back. Told you I had a feeling, little brother."

"You bleedin'—she were—" Ridley had no words. He had only his hands, which were shaking, and a hot wet pressure behind his eyes that he hadn't asked for. "She were comin' to me, Merrick, she were eatin' out me 'and, you didn't 'ave ter — " 

"Mind your step." Merrick crossed the clearing in three long strides. The doe was still thrashing, that scream now a wet ragged bleating, foam bubbling at her dark lips. He went down on one knee beside her head like a man tending a horse, and from inside his coat he produced the suppression collar, the runes along the inside of it already humming.

"Merrick—"

"Hold 'er head."

"Merrick, c’mon—"

"Ridley." Merrick didn't look up, his voice had that velvet edge it got when he was done playing. "Hold. 'Er. Head. Or I'll do it meself an' I'll be cross about it." Ridley's hands moved before the rest of him did. That was the old shape of it, Merrick's voice and Ridley's hands, over two centuries of muscle obeying before his conscience caught up. He went down in the wet moss and took the doe's long jaw between his palms. She was burning under his gloves. Her dark eye rolled while her lavender one looked at him and he felt something in his chest fold in half. Ridley couldn’t speak, instead he bowed his head and pressed his forehead into the fur between her ears. The collar clicked, and it made a small metallic snick, like a lockbox closing. The runes flared once, bright violet, and then she came apart. It was not the beautiful, graceful transformation he'd heard travelers describe when talking about the Kaldorei who could change shapes. It was a wrenching, tearing thing, as though the collar's magic had reached into the marrow of her and ripped the animal away by force. Bones cracked and reformed, fur receding in patches and revealing pale skin covered in gooseflesh and grime. The delicate legs thickened and reshaped, becoming human—save for the one still caught in the trap, where the shift dragged the iron teeth across changing anatomy. Suddenly, there was a girl's face where the muzzle had been, eyes wide and mismatched and full of an agony so pure Ridley felt his own teeth ache from it. And then she was screaming properly, high and raw and torn from somewhere under her ribs. She was naked, mud-streaked, leaf-tangled, and as thin as a sparrow. Her hair was a sandy snarl that was matted with bracken. Her right leg below the knee was caught in the iron teeth and there was so much blood, so much red against so much pale, and she was clawing at the collar with fingers that hadn't been fingers a second ago. The runes were burning her, Ridley could see the welt rising under the iron band, an angry pink scald spreading down her collarbone, every time her hand touched it. She yanked her hand away with a hiss and her head went back against the leaves and she sobbed once, raggedly, and then bit it down to a whimper. "There we are." Merrick stood, brushing leaf-mulch off his knee. "Hello, witchlin’. Long way from home, ain’t we."

"Aaahh—ah, ah— " She whined, the lilt of her words breaking through her teeth like water through ice. "Athair—Athair guide me—oh, oh the iron in me, the iron's bit me bone— "

Ridley found his voice somewhere down in his boots and dragged it up by the scruff. "Yeh shot at 'er." His voice had gone thin and ugly. "Yeh bloody shot at 'er, yeh planted that, yeh—"

"'Course I planted it." Merrick smirked, sounding quite proud of himself. "Set three of 'em while you was off havin’ a sulk. Worked a treat, didn't it?"

"You absolute cunt, Merrick. Look at 'er! You didn't 'ave to spring the trap, she were comin' in soft, I 'ad 'er, I 'ad 'er in me 'and an' you—"

"Bitch, bitch, bitch." Merrick rolled his shoulders inside his coat and grinned at him, all teeth. "Listen to yerself, proper old wife you are today. The trap took 'er, didn't it? Collar's on, ain't it? Job's a good 'un. Stop yer fackin' bitchin'."

"She's bleedin' out—"

"She'll live. These backwoods folk are hardy.” Merrick crouched, examined the trap's jaws, and gave the chain a businesslike yank, causing her to whimper. "Bit a' rope round it, splint it back at camp, she'll be right enough by mornin’. Won't ye, pet."

Sybil was shivering on the ground now in great wracking waves, arms wrapped round her chest, blood pooling slow and dark in the moss beneath her. Her eyes had gone unfocused and she was murmuring something, very fast and very soft, almost like a prayer or a chant. “—Three crows on the rooftree, one for the comin' an' one for the goin' an' one fer the boy what didn't mean it—didn't mean it, no, no, no. Mam, Mam, the kettle's gone over, the kettle's gone over on the hearth—" 

“Fel…” Ridley breathed.

Merrick snorted through his nose. "Don't listen to none of it," he said, waving a hand dismissively. "All these backwoods sorts are a bit fackin' touched, ain't they. Live out 'ere with the mud an' the moss an’ drinkin' rainwater an' talkin' to trees—wouldja be right in the 'ead? I wouldn't. 'Alf of 'em are inbred, t'other 'alf's been kicked by a goat. She'll babble all the way to camp if yer let 'er. Tune it out." 

Ridley knelt then, working the jaws of the bear trap until the iron came open with a tired groan. She gasped, a thin little inhale, and then went very quiet, which was somehow worse than when she was screaming. The wound was bad. The teeth had bitten clean down the meat of her calf, and one of the lower fangs had gone through. He shrugged out of his coat without thinking and tore the lining of his shirt with his teeth, because his knife was too slow. He wound the cloth tight round her leg above the bite and knotted it. His fingers left red prints on her white skin. "Easy,” he muttered. "Easy now, I gotcher, breathe, tha's it, breathe, in an' out, in an' out.”

"Well, pick 'er up." Ridley lifted his gaze to stare at Merrick. "We got a camp four miles east an’ I ain't carryin' 'er; my back's been givin' me grief since Freehold." Merrick straightened, rolling his shoulders as he reached for his tobacco pouch as though the last five minutes had been no more taxing than a hand of cards.

"Four miles," Ridley repeated flatly. "Four miles, Merrick. Through this." He jerked his chin at the soaked tangle of bracken and root and fog. "She's lost a pint already an' she ain't got the meat on 'er to spare it. Yer back's been givin' yer grief since Freehold, 'as it? Bullshit, yer back's been givin' yer grief since it suited yer, more like."

"Mind yerself."

"Nah, nah, I'm mindin' meself just fine. Yer the one tha’ set the bleedin' trap, yeah? Yer the one who fired the shot. Yer the one wanted 'er kicked through the teeth 'stead of walked in on me palm, an' I 'ad 'er, Merrick, I'ad 'er, she were three foot off an' breathin' on me knuckles. But no, no, gotta be the big clever lad, gotta plant three of 'em and come swanglin' out the trees like the Lord Admiral 'isself wiv 'is rifle slung pretty—”

Merrick had stopped listening somewhere around the word pint. He was tamping his pipe with one thumb, watching Ridley over the bowl with an expression of mild, patient amusement—the same expression their mother used to wear when one of the regulars was working himself up to something he couldn't afford. He snapped his fingers and summoned a small flame, lowering it into the bowl with the slow deliberate care of a man who had nowhere else in the world he needed to be. The smoke unfurled out the corner of his mouth and went to join the fog, which welcomed it like family. After a moment he plucked the pipe out from between his teeth and looked at Ridley properly. "Y’done?"

Ridley's jaw worked. "Yeh—"

"You done, Rid? 'Cos yer makin' a lot of weather for a man what's already got 'is arms full. Take a breath, have a little think, an' tell me if yer done." 

Ridley's jaw worked, and he looked down at the girl—at the wet stick of her lashes, the blue beginning to bruise into her lips, and the violet pulse of the collar at her throat. The heat in his chest banked itself down to a dull miserable ember, because what good was it? What good had bickering at Merrick ever done him in over two centuries of trying. The words went where words always went with his brother, out the ear and off into the fog. "Yeah." He didn't look up, the word came out small and gravelled, more breath than voice.

"Say again, love? Didn't catch it."

Ridley lifted his head then and met him square. The pale grey of his eyes had gone flat as wet slate. "I said m’done."

Merrick smiled around the pipestem. "Atta’ boy. So pick 'er up, stop bitchin', and let's move before somefing in this forest decides it don't like us." He then sauntered off, already walking ahead.

Ridley kept his gaze on his brother as he went, shrugging off his coat. The cold hit him immediately—Drustvar's wet, bone-seeking chill sliding through his shirt like a blade through linen. He ignored it and leaned forward, lifting her shoulders—Light, she weighs nuffin, she weighs absolutely fuckin' nuffin, and wrapping the long dark coat around her, pulling the fur-trimmed collar up around her neck where it sat strange and large against the cruel metal band already circling her throat. He tucked the hem beneath her legs, folded the front panels across her chest, and for a moment his hands hovered there—not quite touching her and yet not quite letting go because some part of him understood that this was a threshold and he was standing on the wrong side of it. She was looking at him again. Those mismatched eyes were wet, but the tears hadn’t fallen. Her lips moved, and he leaned closer without meaning to. "...warm," she breathed, the word came out wondering and bewildered, as if warmth were a thing she'd stopped believing in. Her fingers curled into the coat's lapel with filthy, trembling fingers, and held on.

Ridley's throat closed, and he quickly cleared it. "Right." He bent down and slid one arm beneath her knees carefully, moving like a man handling black powder near an open flame. The other went behind her shoulders where the coat bunched and folded around her narrow frame. She stiffened, every tendon in her body drawing taut at once like a bowstring pulled to its limit. For a moment, Merrick was already a smudge of smoke and dark red wool between the trees up ahead, not waiting or looking back. Why would he? The job was done. The hard part—the planning, trapping, and collaring was Merrick's domain. The carrying, the cleaning up, the messy aftermath was Ridley's. The forest pressed close around them. Without his coat, Ridley felt Drustvar's cold with a viciousness that seemed personal. His shirt was thin—thinner now, with three strips torn from the hem, and the damp got through it in seconds, plastering the cotton to his chest and back until it felt less like a garment and more like a second skin made entirely of discomfort. Fog condensed on his bare forearms, and ran down to his elbows in slow rivulets, dripping from his knuckles and onto the dark wool wrapped around the girl in his arms.

The girl.

He still didn't know her name.

He should ask. Shouldn't he? That's what a decent person would do. What's your name, love? Simple and easy. Except nothing about this was simple or easy, and the word love sat wrong in his mouth when he was carrying a woman his brother had just caught in a bear trap like a fox bound for skinning. A root caught his boot and he stumbled. She gasped—a small, bitten-off sound, her fingers tightening in the coat as her injured leg swung with the motion in a way that must have sent a bolt of pure white agony up through her bones because she pressed her face into his shoulder and went rigid. "Sorry," Ridley muttered as he steadied himself and adjusted his grip. "Sorry, ground's shite. 'Ole forest's shite. I—watch your leg, I got you." She didn't respond, instead her breathing came in shallow little pulls against his collarbone, warm and damp through the cotton, each exhale trembling at the edge.

Ahead, Merrick had paused at the crest of a low ridge, one boot braced on a rock, pipe pinched between two fingers as he surveyed the path down with the leisurely air of a man on a country stroll. He didn't turn when Ridley caught up, he just exhaled a thin stream of smoke through his nose and gestured east with the glowing end. "Ravine's too steep to take straight. Circle round the birch stand, come at it from the north. Should cut back toward the creek where I set camp."

"You remember th’way?" Ridley's voice came out shorter than he intended. Or exactly as short as he intended, hard to tell.

"Do I remember th’way." Merrick repeated it flatly, amused. He finally glanced back—past Ridley, to the bundle in his arms, and something akin to both appraisal and inventory moved across his face. The same look he gave a crate of smuggled goods when checking that nothing had been damaged in transit. "She still bleedin'?"

"Bandaged it."

"Wiv what?"

"Me shirt."

Merrick's mouth twitched. "Romantic." Ridley said nothing at that. His jaw worked, the muscle in his cheek twitched once, twice, then went still. Merrick held his gaze for a beat—testing, always testing, probing for the exact edge of Ridley's patience the way a man might press a bruise to see how deep the pain went, and then turned away with a shrug that dismissed everything. "Circle the birch stand," he said again, and disappeared over the ridge. Ridley stood there. Cold to the bone and arms full of a shaking girl who smelled like blood, the forest floor and something faintly sweet underneath it all—herbs, maybe, or wildflowers crushed into the skin from weeks of sleeping rough in meadows, and for one white-hot instant he imagined setting her down, drawing his pistol, and putting a round between his brother's shoulder blades. The thought came and went, because Ridley was good at letting thoughts come and go.

@daily-writing-challenge

The sunlight in Quel'Thalas was wrong.

Not wrong in any way Ridley could properly explain. It was warm, golden, and honeyed through the canopy of red-leafed trees that arched over the estate's courtyard like the ribs of some enormous living cathedral. Boralus’s light was gray, and Dampwick’s in particular had been the brown of old puddles and lamp-smoke. This was something else entirely, and standing in it made Ridley feel like a stain on clean linen. He leaned against the stone balustrade of the upper terrace, arms folded while he watched Sybil and Agatha far below in the paddock yard. Agatha's shriek of delight carried clear up—she'd found the hawkstriders. One of the juveniles, its plumage still mottled with the dull fawn of adolescence, had lowered its ridiculous feathered head to inspect her, and Agatha had seized its beak in both chubby hands with the fearlessness of a child who assumed all animals were secretly her mother's friends. Sybil stood beside her, one hand resting on Agatha's shoulder, her sandy hair catching the golden light. Even from up here, Ridley could see the tilt of her head—that particular sideways listening she did when something only she could hear was talking to her. "She has a way with them," Jilene said from behind him.

Ridley grunted. He didn't turn around, but he shifted his weight to make room at the railing, and after a moment Jilene drifted up beside him. She moved the way she always moved—careful and peripheral, as though she were trying to take up as little space as possible in a world that had already told her she took up too much. His aunt was tall—or maybe she only seemed tall because she was so narrow, built like a candle that had been left to collect dust. Her snow-white hair was pinned in a half-up braided style that looked meticulous and slightly outdated, as though she'd learned it once and never found reason to change. Her robes were fine but faded, the embroidery at the cuffs picked loose in places by nervous fingers. She held a cup of tea she wasn't drinking, both hands wrapped around it like a ward. "Aggie's got no bloody sense of self-preservation," Ridley said. "Gets that from 'er mum."

"Or from you."

He cut her a look and Jilene's mouth twitched into something that wasn’t quite a smile, more the ghost of one that had died on its way to her lips. They watched the paddock in silence for a while. Below, Agatha had somehow convinced the juvenile hawkstrider to sit down, and was now attempting to climb onto its back while Sybil steadied her with both hands, murmuring something in that lilting way of hers. "Place looks good," Ridley offered, because he wasn't sure what else to say. The estate did look good—immaculate, even. The hawkstriders were in magnificent condition: glossy-feathered, bright-eyed, and their legs clean and strong. He'd noticed the way every bird in the yard moved with an alertness and ease that spoke of careful handling, good feed, and someone who knew what they were doing. But he'd also noticed the empty stalls in the lower barn. The paddocks could hold three times as many birds as they currently did. The staff he'd seen numbered two, maybe three.

"It's...quieter than it used to be," Jilene said. "Father kept forty breeding pairs at the height of things. I have eleven now. Well, Nine hens and two cocks, so eleven feels generous." She gave a small, fluttering laugh that didn't reach her eyes. "The Farstriders used to place orders a year in advance. Now they go to the Dawnsong ranch in the south. Bigger operation. Better bloodlines, they say, though I—" She stopped herself and smoothed the front of her robe out of habit. "Well."

Ridley said nothing. He recognized the shape of that sentence. Better bloodlines. “Jil.”

"Mm?"

"You ain't gotta perform for me. Yeah?" He looked at her properly then, with the flat directness that made most people flinch. Jilene didn't flinch, but her fingers tightened on the cup. "I know what it looks like when someone's holdin' the whole fing togevver wif spit and prayer. I grew up doin' it."

Her chin trembled, just once, before she set her jaw. For a moment she looked almost like Merrick—not in cruelty, but in the stubborn refusal to crack where anyone could see. "I manage," she said.

"Yeah, I know you do."

The hawkstrider below let out a warbling trill as Agatha finally got both legs over its back and she threw her arms up in triumph. "Do you remember your father at all?" Jilene asked softly, not looking at him.

Ridley's jaw worked as he stared at the treeline—focusing on those perfect red-gold leaves, every one of them exactly the right shade, not a single one brown or curled or rotting. "Bits," he said. "'Is 'ands, e’had long fingers. He smelled like, I dunno—somefing floral. Couldn't tell you what. Merrick remembers more, or says 'e does." He paused. "Don't fink Merrick remembers 'im so much as remembers bein' angry at 'im. Two different fings, innit." 

"Lanril was..." Jilene began, then seemed to lose the thread. She turned her teacup in her hands. "He was the talented one. The heir. Everything came easily to him—magic, combat, society. Mother adored him, and Father staked everything on him. And I was just..." She made a vague, diminishing gesture at herself. "The spare." Ridley looked at her. "I couldn't do what he could," she said, and her voice had gone thin. "Not with magic. I was thirteen before I could manage a basic illusion, and even then it flickered so badly the tutor asked me if I was doing it on purpose as a joke. "Father used to make me practice in front of him. I had to stand in the study and cast what I learned in front of him." Her voice dropped. "I would shake so badly the spells fell apart and he would just...sit there. He didn’t even look angry or disappointed, he just looked—bored. As if watching me fail wasn't even worth the energy of being upset about." She shifted her jaw slightly. “I was in the paddock at dawn one evening, sitting in the mud with a skittish yearling that wouldn't let anyone else near her, doing the slow patient work that no one wanted to do and Father said I handled them like a human." The word came out as though she were quoting someone else's disgust. "He meant it as the worst thing he could say." 

Something cold and old shifted in Ridley's chest. He knew that feeling, he knew it like he knew the taste of dock water and the weight of a too-thin coat in winter. "Merrick can do it," he said, low. "The magic, took to it like breavvin'. Me—" He stopped, clearing his throat before he started again, rougher. "I got th’ears, but the one fing that actually matters?" He held up his hand and turned it over. "Nuffin. Can’t light a candle wif it without gettin’ a headache. Not wivout a rune or a glyph or some bit of kit to do the work for me." He dropped his hand, grasping the railing with it. "So I got guns, I got traps, and I got fings I built wif my 'ands because my blood didn't give me what it was s'posed to." He swallowed. "An' every time I walk through this place, every time I see the spires and the enchantments and I fink: you don't belong. Not in Boralus, not 'ere, not anywhere."

Jilene set down her tea and her hand found his forearm, light and tentative, the touch of someone who expected to be shaken off but he didn't shake her off. "I think that too," she whispered. "Every day in my own home. In the house I grew up in, with the birds I raised from eggs, in the country that's supposed to be mine—I feel like a guest who's overstayed."

Ridley's throat ached and he looked down at her hand on his arm. Her fingers were long and pale and ink-stained while his were tanned, thick, and as rough as old rope. Same blood in both, and same in their insufficiency. "'S a right pair, ain't we," he muttered.

Jilene let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "Lanril got all the magic," she said. "And then he died, and the magic left with him, and what was left behind was...me. Trying to do what he did with half the gift and none of the confidence. And you and Merrick—" Her voice caught. "You got the hardest part of him, the absence. And I couldn't even—I should have done more, Ridley. I should have come to Boralus and brought you both here. I should’ve fought Father on it—" 

"Don't." His voice was gruff but not unkind. "You 'ad your own weight, but y’tried. You sent parcels when we was kids. Books, clothes, dried fruit—wrapped in that blue paper wif the hawkstrider stamp." He paused and worked his jaw. "Merrick pretended 'e didn't care, but I kept every one."

"I was afraid," she corrected, very quietly. "That's different from having weight. I was afraid of my family, I was afraid of them finding out I cared and I couldn't afford to be diminished any further. So I let two boys grow up hungry in a slum and told myself sending parcels was enough because I was a coward." 

Ridley stared at her for a long moment. He stood there, rigid and uncomfortable and utterly useless with this kind of thing, until something in him, the part that Sybil had pried open, overrode the rest. He put his arm around Jilene's narrow shoulders. Stiff and awkward, like a man who had learned tenderness the way some people learn a second language: late, clumsily, and with an accent that never quite smoothed out. "Yeah, well," he said. “You wanna talk 'bout bein' a coward? I sat next to Merrick for years watchin' 'im do fings that made me sick and told meself it's just business, it's just 'ow it is, 'e's family, what else am I gonna do." His gaze drifted back to the paddock. Sybil was lifting Agatha down from the hawkstrider now, pressing a kiss to the girl's wild dark curls. "Took a girl 'alf my size wif witch eyes to make me see I 'ad a choice. An' even then I nearly chose wrong." 

Jilene followed his gaze and watched Sybil settle Agatha on her hip, the child's arms looping around her mother's neck with the absolute trust of someone who had never once doubted she would be caught. "She's extraordinary," Jilene said.

"She's mad as a bag of cats, is what she is," Ridley said, but his voice had gone soft. "Talks to trees n’bones, and answers questions no one's asked yet. She told me last week that the bread wouldn't rise ‘cause the house was sad." He paused, before adding "Th’bread didn’t rise."

Jilene smiled, small and wobbly, but genuine. "You love her very much."

Ridley's ears went pink and he cleared his throat, adjusted his gloves, and looked at the trees, the sky, the distant spire of a magisters' tower catching the sunlight, anywhere but at his aunt. "She sees me," he said finally. "Not th’ears or what I can or can't do wif magic. Just me. Ain't no one ever done that before." He hesitated. "Cept maybe you.” At that, Jilene bowed her head and leaned into him without another word.

( Minor trigger warning for mentions of violence and abuse ) @daily-writing-challenge The floorboards creaked like they were trying to wake the whole house. Ridley shifted his weight to the balls of his feet, rolling heel-to-toe the way he used to move through back alleys in Boralus when being quiet meant the difference between a heavy pocket and a broken jaw. Old habits, the kind that lived in muscle and bone long after the reasons for them had gone. He adjusted the bundle against his chest carefully, and kept walking the slow circuit from the window to the hearth and back again. Giddeon was four days old and had opinions about sleeping, loud ones. Not now, though. Now the boy had finally gone quiet, his damp little mouth pressed against Ridley's collarbone with one fist curled into the open collar of his shirt. The weight of him was almost nothing. A bag of flour weighed more. His pistol weighed more. Hell, Ridley's arm alone probably weighed more, and yet this scrap of warmth and breath and angry red skin had him moving through the dark like a man carrying a crate of Azerite—terrified to jar, to jostle, to breathe wrong. Sybil was fast asleep, finally. She'd wanted to keep the boy in the crook of her arm all night, murmuring those strange little half-rhymes she does when she's too tired to filter them: thin night, thin night, mind the light, mind the light. 

He'd kissed her forehead and pried the babe out of her grip the way you'd pry a bottle from a drunkard, slow and careful, as he reassured her. Sleep, love. I got 'im. I got 'im. 

Ridley stopped by the window, the glass cold near his cheek.

Westfall stretched out below the homestead in silver and black, the grass pale as ash under a fat autumn moon. The sea was a dark line at the horizon, restless and glinting where the moonlight caught the chop. He could hear it from here if the wind was right, and tonight it was. A low, rhythmic shush that sounded nothing like Boralus—there was no creak of rigging, no drunk singing, no slap of bilge against hull. Just open water and open sky and the dry rustle of wheat. Their homestead wasn't much, just a stone cottage with a patched roof, a chicken coop Ridley had built twice because the first one leaned, and a garden where Sybil grew things he couldn't name that smelled of rain and old bark. But the land was theirs and it was bought honestly, or as close to honestly as a man like him could manage. 

It was quiet here, quiet enough to make a man's thoughts too loud. 

Ridley shifted the baby's weight again and let himself look at his own reflection in the dark pane. His shaggy hair had fallen over one eye as always. His beard was untrimmed and his shirt rumpled from being slept in for three days running. He looked like a man who'd been dragged backwards through a hedge and then handed an infant. Which, near enough, was the truth of it. Ridley had never known what to do with peace. He understood noise, because to him noise made sense. Noise told you where trouble was coming from, like a bottle shattering in an alley, a woman shrieking three streets over, or boot steps behind you that were too measured to be drunk and too slow to be harmless. Merrick’s laugh booming through a room before someone else’s teeth hit the floor, gunpowder cracking in the damp air, coin clinking, men cursing, and the ugly wet sound of a knife finding somewhere soft. Peace was different, because peace had both space and time to it. Peace let a man hear the blood moving in his own ears and wonder what, exactly, had been left behind in him after all the shouting stopped. 

Merrick's face came to him unbidden, the way it always did in quiet moments. That was the bastard of it. Not the shouting, not the ugly words or the uglier blows—those he could handle, those were the language of Dampwick, the grammar of brothers who'd been built on the same broken foundation. What haunted Ridley was the look on Merrick's face the moment he'd understood that Ridley was actually leaving.

Not threatening.

Not posturing.

Leaving.

Betrayal, raw as a wound, and underneath it had been something worse—confusion. Like Merrick genuinely could not fathom that his brother, his brother, the boy he'd fed and taught and dragged through every gutter in Boralus for over two centuries, would choose someone else over him.

The split had not been clean.

Nothing with Merrick was ever clean. The fight started over Sybil because of a vision. She'd told him the deal in Freehold would go sideways, that the man he was meeting would bring iron instead of coin. Merrick heard the man will betray you and acted on it, he put a knife through the man's hand before the meeting even started, torched the arrangement, and lost the cargo and two contacts in one evening. When the dust settled it turned out the man had brought coin after all, the iron Sybil had seen was the Watch, three officers who'd been tailing the deal for weeks, Merrick didn't blame himself for misreading it, he never did, he blamed her.

The shouting had been bad, but the rest had been worse. Ridley remembered the exact moment his loyalty snapped, not bent, not frayed, but snapped—the sound Merrick's open hand made against Sybil's face, the way her head turned with the blow, the collar at her throat buzzing like a hornet. Ridley, who had spent his whole life standing at his brother's shoulder, stepped between them and said that was enough. The beating Merrick gave him was thorough, professional even. Merrick knew how to hurt a man without killing him, and he knew how to hurt Ridley specifically, because he knew every old break, every scar, every spot where the body remembered pain the most. His brother had cracked two of his ribs, split his eyebrow to the bone, and dislocated his left shoulder with a move he'd taught Ridley when Ridley was fifteen. But Ridley had gotten up. That was the part Merrick hadn't expected. Ridley always got up, because he'd been getting up his whole life every time something or someone knocked him down. But this time, he got up and he didn't come back to heel. 

Merrick had called after him. Not with rage, at first, but with something much worse. "Ridley. Rid. Come on, bruv. Where you gonna go, eh? Where you gonna go that ain't with me?" That facade of familial warmth fell apart quickly when Ridley hadn't stopped: "You're nothin' without me, you stupid bastard. You know that, right? You've always known that. You don't walk away from me, little brother.”

“Watch me.” The scar above Ridley's eyebrow itched sometimes, in the cold. He had others from that night—a white line along his forearm where he'd blocked a bottle, a burn on his back from where Merrick had unleashed a blast of arcane fire, and a crooked knuckle on his right hand from when he'd finally hit back and broken Merrick's nose. The first time in his life he'd ever raised a fist to his brother, and it had felt like cutting off his own arm. Some nights he still dreamed about Dampwick. Not the bad parts, or rather, not only the bad parts. He often dreamed of the early parts during those nights. Merrick boosting him up through a bakery window to steal day-old rolls, Merrick showing him how to tuck a blade flat against his wrist so it didn't print through his sleeve, Merrick sitting on the edge of his cot after their mother passed, not saying anything, just sitting there, hand on the back of Ridley's neck, heavy and warm. And now it all meant nothing, or it meant too much. It was hard to tell the difference on some nights. He exhaled through his nose, and Giddeon made a sound. A small wet mnnh against his chest, and Ridley's hand came up to cup the back of the boy's skull before he'd even thought about it, his palm swallowing the whole of it. He wondered if Giddeon would have magic. Real magic, not Ridley's patchwork rune carving and the jury-rigged traps and inscriptions he'd cobbled together because his blood wouldn't cooperate—but the arcane that had come easy to Merrick, liquid and obedient, proof of their Elven inheritance that Ridley had always reached for and never quite caught. Sybil's gift was something else entirely, older and wilder, tangled with antler and root. Between the two bloodlines, Giddeon might carry something. Or he might carry nothing. He might be like Ridley, reaching for a fire that he cannot light. 

Then I'll teach him runes, Ridley thought, with a stubbornness that felt like pressing a bruise. I'll teach him to shoot. I'll teach him to build. He won't need it to come easy. He'll have hands and a head and that'll be enough because I'll make bloody sure it's enough. 

Somewhere in the dark, a nightjar called. Westfall was louder at night than people expected, with crickets and frogs in the creek down the hill, and the occasional far-off bark of a coyote out in the dust plains. It wasn't the forest sounds Sybil grew up with, the deep dark forests of Drustvar that were full of rustling undergrowth and stag-calls. But she'd planted things from that home already. They had herbs along the windowsills, lavender by the front step, and a hawthorn sapling near the fence that she talked to when she thought Ridley wasn't listening, murmuring in that lilting half-rhyme of hers, blessings or prayers or whatever the old Drust words were that she carried like seeds in her pockets. The whole homestead smelled like her now—dried rosemary, wool, beeswax, and the faintly sweet earthiness of whatever she brewed in the kettle that wasn't quite tea.

Ridley still didn’t know if he'd earned all of this, and a part of him suspects he hasn’t and never will and that's a thing he was going to have to carry. But Sybil told him once, back when he'd said something close to that out loud, drunk on bad wine and ashamed of himself for being drunk. She had just touched his jaw and said, Earnin' is just doin' it again tomorrow, love. Just doin' it again tomorrow. That's the whole of it.

@daily-writing-challenge She'd mentioned it once, just once, while sitting on the windowsill at Chuck's with her knees drawn up and her shawl wrapped tight as she watched the last of the gray light drain out of the Boralus sky. She hadn't been talking to Ridley, not really. She'd been talking to the air, or the gulls, or whatever invisible thing she was always half-listening to. "Back home," Sybil murmured, her voice carrying the weight of a forest she might never see again, "when autumn turned, the sky would sing. Colors, like—like someone spilled dye across wet cloth. Green an’violet and sometimes a pink so pale ye'd think ye dreamed it. Me mam used t' say it was th’hidden folk shakin' out their skirts after th' harvest, lettin' the hem trail through the stars." She paused, her fingers had moved on the sill, tracing slow arcs. "I miss that. Th’way it moved like it were breathin'. Like the whole sky was alive and it wanted ye t' know." Then she'd gone quiet, and Ridley had grunted something about drafts and shut the window, and that had been the end of it. 

Except it hadn't. Because the words had lodged in him the way a splinter lodges under a nail—small, invisible, and impossible to stop feeling. He'd lain awake that night on the floor of the room they shared at Chuck's, staring at the water-stained ceiling while Sybil slept curled on the cot with her shawl pulled over her head, and he'd thought about a sky full of breathing colors, and he'd thought I ain't never seen anyfin' like that, and then he'd thought she ain't gonna see it again eivver, not 'ere, not wiv that collar on 'er, and then he'd rolled over and pressed his face into his arm and told himself to go to sleep.

He didn't go to sleep.

He started collecting bottles two days later. Not obviously, of course, Or in any way that could be traced or questioned or, Mother forbid, explained. Ridley would sooner swallow his own tongue than explain. He simply started noticing them. The green ones first—wine bottles, mostly, thick glass with that particular murky sea-color that taverns threw out by the crate. Then blue, which was harder to find. Apothecary vials, the odd flask from the Tradewinds Market, and a chipped perfume bottle he fished out of the gutter behind the Ashvane Company Yards while pretending to check a dead drop. Purple was the worst. He found exactly one, and it was a slim, elegant thing that had probably held something expensive once. It was in a bin in Upton Borough, just being there long enough to fish it out made him sweat through his coat, but once he had it in his hands he wrapped it in his handkerchief and tucked it inside his coat with the care of a man handling a grenade.

It was Pebbles who caught him at it. "Wha' the fuck are you doin'?"

Ridley froze, crouched behind a stack of fish crates on the wharf, one hand closed around the neck of a red glass bottle he'd spotted glinting between the slats. Pebbles stood three feet away, arms crossed, blonde hair spiking in the harbour wind, wearing the expression of a boy who has just witnessed an adult doing something profoundly stupid and wants a full accounting. "Nuffin'," Ridley said.

"Yer nickin' bottles."

"I ain't nickin' 'em. They're rubbish."

"Yer nickin' rubbish bottles an' puttin' 'em in yer coat like they're gold." Pebbles' eyes narrowed. "You gone soft in the 'ead?"

Ridley straightened up, drawing himself to his full height—which was considerable, and usually enough to end conversations with teenage boys. "Drop it." 

Pebbles did not drop it, because Pebbles had never dropped anything in his life except other people's coin. "Is it fer 'er?"

The silence that followed was so sharp you could have cut a sailcloth with it. "Wha'," Ridley said flatly.

"Sybil." Pebbles tilted his head, foxish and knowing. "It's fer 'er, innit."

"It ain't fer anyone. I told you, it's—"

"Rubbish, yeah." Pebbles looked at the red bottle in Ridley's fist, then back at his face, and something shifted behind the boy's sharp eyes. Not mockery, or rather, not only mockery. Something softer and more careful flickered briefly in his gaze. "Right. You want 'elp, or wha'?" Ridley stared at him. "Don't just stand there gawpin',” Pebbled snapped. “I got places t' be. You want 'elp collectin' yer not-fer-anyone rubbish bottles or not?"

What Ridley wanted was for the dock planks to open up and swallow him into the harbor. What he said, after a long and agonizing pause, was: "...Blue ones. An' green. Nuffin' cracked too bad." Pebbles flashed a smile that was both feral and delighted in the way of a boy being let in on a secret and took off down the wharf at a loping run before Ridley could add conditions. 

By that evening, Pebbles had recruited Oliver. "I found three!" Oliver announced, bursting through the back door of Chuck's with his too-big coat bulging at the front, dock rope straining. He upended the coat onto the table with all the ceremony of a merchant unveiling fine silk, and three bottles rolled out: one green, one brown, and one that might have generously been described as yellow if you squinted and had a forgiving disposition.

"Tha’ one's brown, Ollie," Pebbles said.

"It's amber."

"It's brown."

"Syb says amber's just brown tha's been kissed by th' sun."

"Syb says a lot of fings." But Pebbles set the brown bottle aside rather than throwing it out.

"Wha's it all for?" Oliver asked, bouncing on his toes with the barely contained energy of a child who suspects a secret and would rather die than not be told it.

"It's a fing," Ridley grunted.

"Wha' kind of fing?"

"A fing fing. Don't worry ‘bout it."

"Is it a present? Is it fer Syb? Pebbles said—"

"Pebbles needs t' learn to shut 'is mouf." Ridley shot a glare at Pebbles, who was examining a blue bottle against the lamplight with a facade of practiced innocence. "It ain't—look, it's just somefin' I'm doin'. Wiv lights. An' bottles. An' it don't need explainin', a'right? Just...find more blue ones."

Oliver processed this with his entire body—chin jutting, brow furrowed, and fists clenched at his sides in concentration. Then a grin split across his little face, and his eyes lit up. "Yer makin' 'er somefin' pretty."

"M’endin’ this conversation, Oliver."

"You are! Yer makin' Syb somefin' pretty cos you like 'er—"

"Ollie." Pebbles cuffed the boy lightly on the back of the head. "Shut up an' go find blue bottles." 

_________________________________

The shed took him four nights.

It was an old storage lean-to that had been abandoned since the Ashvane Company had consolidated the nearby yards. It was too small to be useful, and too out of the way for the guard to bother patrolling which is why Ridley had used it once or twice for dead drops. He worked alone, after dark, when Merrick was elsewhere and Sybil was sleeping. The bottles went along the back wall first, arranged on a shelf he'd hammered together from scrap timber. Green ones in a long row at the bottom, ranging from near-black to the pale milky colour of shallow sea glass. Above them were the blue ones—the apothecary vials, the flask, and three squat bottles Pebbles had liberated from a chandler's bin. The single purple bottle was in the center, slim and jewel-dark. And scattered among them, the reds and ambers and that one yellow-brown Oliver had insisted was amber. They were to serve as warm tones to break the cool, the way firelight breaks through fog. The broken pieces went on a second shelf, and this was the harder work. Ridley had taken a hammer to the bottles that were too cracked to stand and broken them into rough shards, and then he'd spent two nights fitting those shards into a wooden frame he'd nailed across the wall—overlapping them and layering the colours until green bled into blue which bled into purple which bled into rose, with gaps between to let the light fracture through. His gloves were ruined by the end of the first night and his fingertips were cut to ribbons by the end of the second but he just wrapped them in scraps of linen and kept going. Ridley didn't know what an aurora looked like. He'd never left Boralus, and he'd never seen the sky do anything more dramatic than rain sideways. But he remembered her words, like someone spilled dye across wet cloth, and he remembered the way her hands had moved when she said it, tracing slow arcs on the windowsill, and he built what her hands had drawn. When he tested the lantern on the third night, the light hit the bottles and the shards and scattered across the opposite wall in a wash of colour—green and blue and violet and rose and the deep warm red of the single red bead Agatha had contributed, all overlapping and rippling where the uneven glass bent the light into soft, trembling bands. It wasn't an aurora, or the sky she had grown up under. It was bottles and broken glass and tar-stained planking. He stood there for a long time, looking at it, and he thought: it ain't enough. And then he thought: nuffin' I do is ever gonna be enough. And so, he adjusted the lantern two inches to the left, because the purple wasn't catching right, and kept working.

_________________________________

"Where are we goin'?"

"Out."

"I can see that, Ridley. Out where?"

"Just out, somewhere. It ain't far."

Sybil walked beside him through the damp evening streets of Boralus, her shawl pulled tight against the salt breeze, bare feet silent on the wet cobblestones. She never wore shoes if she could help it, as she said she couldn't feel the ground properly through leather, which was the dumbest thing Ridley had ever heard and also, privately, drove him mad with worry about broken glass and nails, but he'd learned that arguing with Sybil about shoes was like arguing with weather. She kept glancing at him, studying the side of his face with patient curiosity. "Yer bein' very strange," she observed. “Yer walkin' like ye've stolen somethin' and haven't decided whether t' run or not."

"I ain't stolen nuffin'."

"Yer hands are in yer pockets."

"So?"

"Ye never put yer hands in yer pockets, ye always keep them free. So eivver ye've stolen somethin', or yer nervous, and I've never once seen ye nervous about anythin' that wasn't—"

"Can you just—" He stopped walking and drew a breath before releasing it through his teeth. "Can you just...come wiv me an' not ask questions fer five bleedin' minutes? Is that somefin' you're capable of?"

Sybil blinked, then her head tilted in that familiar birdlike motion. "Five minutes," she said. "I'll time it."

"You ain't got a clock."

"I've got somethin' better." She tapped her chest, over her heart. "This one keeps perfect time.” 

Ridley made a noise that wasn't quite a groan and started walking again. Sybil followed, quiet for once, or at least as quiet as Sybil got, which still involved her humming under her breath and occasionally murmuring to a stray cat that wound between her ankles. Meanwhile Ridley's pulse was doing something he refused to acknowledge. His hands, stuffed deep in his coat pockets, were clenched into fists around nothing. This is stupid. This is the stupidest fing you've ever done, and you once let Merrick talk you into robbin' a cadet, so the bar weren't exactly 'igh t' begin wiv— The shed loomed dark and shuttered ahead. He turned down the narrow alley beside it, boots splashing through a shallow puddle that reflected the amber glow of a distant street lantern. The lean-to door was right where he'd left it, warped and salt-bleached, the latch held shut with a bit of wire he'd twisted into place.

"...Ridley?"

"Yeah."

"Is this it, then?"

"Yeah."

"It's a shed," Sybil said carefully.

"I know it's a shed."

"A very nice shed, I'm sure—"

"Just—" He turned to face her, and the expression on his face must have been something, because Sybil's teasing died in her throat. Whatever she saw there, whatever mix of terror and defiance and raw, exposed wanting was written across his features made her go still. "Close yer eyes," he said.

"What?"

"Yer eyes. Close 'em."

She studied him for one more heartbeat, then she closed her eyes. Her lashes lay against her freckled cheeks, pale and fine. The collar gleamed at her throat and her lips were slightly parted. Standing there with her eyes closed, trusting him in a dark alley in a city that had given her no reason to trust anyone, she looked so small and so certain that Ridley's chest seized like a fist had closed around it. He turned to the door, and unwound the wire. His cut-up fingers fumbled with it several times and he swore under his breath. "Are ye all right—"

"Fine. Keep 'em shut." The door swung open with a protesting creak. Inside, the shed was dark, the lantern sitting cold on the stool where he'd left it. He crossed the threshold, fumbling for the tinderbox in his pocket. The wick caught on the third try, and the flame crawled up, small and golden. He adjusted the lantern's shutter, angling it toward the rows of bottles and the mosaic of coloured shards in their rough wooden frame. The light hit the glass, and colors bloomed across the opposite wall, rippling, overlapping and shifting with every tiny flicker of the flame. Green bled into blue, deep and cool as winter twilight. Blue dissolved into violet at the edges where the purple bottle caught the light and threw it wide. Rose and amber crept between, warm threads through the cool wash, and at the center, where Agatha's red bead sat, a single point of deep crimson pulsed like a heartbeat. The broken shards fractured the light further, scattering it into soft, trembling bands that wavered and breathed on the rough grey planking. "...A'right," Ridley said, and his voice came out rougher than he liked. "Open 'em."

Ridley heard her step through the doorway, her bare feet shuffling onto the gritty floor. He heard the sharp, soft intake of breath that followed—a sound like someone being struck, except gentler. He didn't look at her, instead he looked at the wall, at the colours, at the imperfect wavering bands of green and blue and violet and rose, and he said nothing because there was nothing to say that wouldn't come out wrong or too much or not enough. "Ridley." Her voice was barely a whisper when it came, and it cracked down the middle like thin ice. "Ridley, what—how did ye—" 

"It's just bottles," he said quickly. "Found 'em around, mostly. Pebbles an' Ollie 'elped. Agatha found that red bit in the middle, dunno where, she just gave it to me. It ain't—I know it ain't the same as wha' you—I know it ain't right, it's just glass an' a lantern an'—"

"Ridley."

"—it don't move proper, like you said, the real ones move different, I know that, but the flame sort of—if you leave the shutter cracked just a bit it flickers an' the colours shift, see, an'—"

"Ridley."

He stopped, swallowed, and forced himself to turn and look at her. Sybil stood three paces inside the door with both hands pressed over her mouth. Her mismatched eyes were wide and luminous, catching the reflected colour—green on one cheek, violet on the other, her sandy hair lit rose and blue where the scattered light fell across it. Tears tracked down her face and over her fingers, silent and steady. She was weeping the way rain falls—quietly and inevitably, as though something had simply opened inside her that could not be closed again. "It's just bottles," he said again, helplessly.

She shook her head, dropping her hands from her mouth, and her lips were trembling. The smile that broke through the tears was the most devastating thing Ridley had ever seen—it wasn’t the crooked and careful half-smile she typically wore, but wide open and radiant with grief and gratitude so tangled together he couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. "It's home," she whispered. "Oh, Ridley. It's home, it's—”

"I didn't, it's not—" She crossed the space between them in two steps and her arms went around his middle, her face pressing into his chest and she held on like the floor was tilting. Sybil was shaking, he could feel it through his coat, through the leather and the layers, the fine tremor running through her like a plucked string. She made a sound against his chest. A hiccupping little "hhh—" that dissolved into a wet, shuddering breath. Ridley broke then, his arms coming down around her, heavy and uncertain. One hand cupped the back of her head, his fingers sliding into the loose braid at her nape. She was so small against him, the top of her head barely reaching his collarbone. He could feel the ridge of the collar against his wrist where it circled her throat, cold bronze against warm skin, and the hatred he felt for that strip of metal in that moment was so vast and so quiet it didn't even feel like anger anymore, but a black mark on his soul. "I can't give you Drustvar," he said into her hair, low and wrecked. "I can't. I ain't got—I don't know 'ow to fix anyfin', Sybil. I don't know 'ow to make it right. Any of it. But you said—you said you missed the colours, an' I fought maybe—I dunno. I just fought maybe you shouldn't 'ave to miss everyfin' all the time." 

She pulled back just enough to look up at him, and her face was wet and flushed and blotched with crying, and the coloured light played across her skin. "In all me life," Sybil said, very quietly, her voice thick and cracked and musical even in breaking, "no one has ever tried t’give me the sky." She curled her fingers into the fabric of his coat and pressed her forehead against his collarbone, the heat of her tears soaking through to his skin.

"Don't—" Ridley’s voice cracked and he cleared his throat viciously. "Don't read nuffin' into it."