Dark Eyes

RHYDIAN

I was late.

My father was standing at the edge of the training ground with his arms folded and his expression crumbled into disappointment, the one that had not changed since I was seven years old and showed up late to my first sparring lesson. The warriors were already mid-drill, moving in pairs, the crack of wood against wood reverberating in the morning air.

“You missed breakfast,” he said finally.

“I had a late night with the records.”

“The records will always be there. Your body needs fuel.” He looked at me the way he looked at territory maps, assessing weak points. “A wolf who does not eat is a wolf who fades away.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?” He tilted his head and ran a moist tongue along his lips. “Because you are standing in front of me at this hour looking like you slept badly and ate nothing and I am supposed to believe my heir is in fighting condition.”

“I am always in fighting condition.”

He made a sound that was not quite a laugh. “Then prove it. Stop standing here talking to me and go.”

I went.

~

Training was the one hour of any day that required nothing from me except my body. Only movement and muscle and the mental clarity. I was already enjoying the satisfaction that came from hitting something with full force and having it hit back.

I worked through the standard drills first, footwork and striking combinations, then moved to sparring. My partner was Dace, one of the senior warriors, broad and experienced and not in the habit of going easy on me because of my rank, which was why I had requested him specifically. We went three rounds. I won two of them. The third one he caught me on a turn I had telegraphed and put me on the ground and I lay there for a moment looking at the sky, thinking of a particular face before I got back up.

My father was watching from the edge. He said nothing but I saw him nod once, which from him was considerable.

By the time we broke I was soaked through, chest heaving, the satisfying burn of pushed muscle settling in across my shoulders. I found a spot at the edge of the yard and a servant appeared with a cloth, working quickly and quietly.

I was looking at nothing in particular. The yard, the warriors cooling down around me, the line of the compound wall against the morning sky.

I was thinking about the omega.

The thought had arrived without invitation and installed itself like a weed, burrowing deep into my mind and killing everything else. I kept returning to the moment in the kitchen courtyard, the way she stood there with a stack of bowls and her back straight and her face composed, wearing last night’s punishment. The way she had looked at me when I pulled the kitchen assignment. She wasn’t particularly relieved or grateful.

I had known it in the garden and I knew it now and I did not know what to do with that knowledge yet.

She had been in the inner compound. In the garden specifically, which was nowhere near any route an omega processing through the east quarter would take by accident. She had been still in the hedgerow with the specific stillness of someone who had practice with not being found. She had looked at the pack house and then at me and her face had given away nothing, which was its own kind of information.

Lost, she had said.

I knew what lost looked like. That was not it.

The question was what it actually was and why I had walked her to the gate instead of turning her over to the guard rotation.

I did not have a good answer for that.

“You didn’t eat this morning.”

I looked up. Vessa was crossing the yard toward me, dressed beautifully as always, a wrapped cloth package in her hands. She looked out of place here.

She held the package out. “I had the kitchen pack something.”

I looked at it.

“Rhydian.” She said my name with the patience of someone scolding a child.

I took the package. She sat beside me on the bench and watched me open it and I was aware of my father’s eyes from across the yard, the slight shift of his posture, the approval in it. This was what he wanted to see. His son and his son’s mate.

I ate.

Vessa talked about something. The pack house renovations, I thought, or possibly the vault inventory, I had lost the thread almost immediately. She was warm as her hand found my arm in the easy way it always did and I sat there and let her talk and ate the food she had brought and thought about a woman crouched behind a hedgerow in the dark with her heart rate perfectly controlled and her face giving away absolutely nothing.

What was she looking for?

She had been near the records building, I was almost certain of it. The garden sat adjacent to the eastern administrative corridor and the route she would have taken to reach it from the omega quarters passed directly past the records room. I had not thought much of it at the time because I had been focused on getting her out of the compound unseen. Now I was thinking about it.

I was thinking about it more than I should be.

“What are you thinking about?” Vessa asked.

I looked at her. She was watching me with her careful eyes, reading my face the way she always did.

I picked up her hand and held it.

“You,” I said. “My dear mate.”

She smiled. It was a satisfied smile, warm at the edges, and she leaned her head briefly against my shoulder and I sat there with the sun coming up over the compound wall and my father watching from across the yard and thought about dark eyes and a composure that was not composure at all but something else entirely, and I did not let a single thing I was thinking reach my face.