The wound should have killed me by now. That is the first thing I understand when I wake, and the second is that I am lying in a bed too short for me, in a room that smells of crushed thyme, with a girl's hand pressed flat against my ribs. I am Kael. I have watched over the border town of Eskaar since before its walls were stone, and no one in it has ever touched me.
“Don't move,” she says. “You'll tear it again.”
Liora. I know her the way I know everyone here: from above, from the roofline, from the market where she sells salves in blue jars and argues with the guards about the price of clean water. Up close she has flour on her sleeve and a scar through one eyebrow. Up close she is looking at my chest with a frown that has nothing to do with the wound.
“Your blood is wrong,” she says. “It's too hot. And it closed the cut while I was still stitching.”
I say nothing. Silence has kept Eskaar safe for four hundred years.
She sits back. She doesn't call for anyone. She wipes her hands on a cloth, slowly, watching me the way she watches a customer who has just tried to pass a bad coin. “The men who did this were looking for something in the east quarter,” she says. “They asked about a guardian. They said it like a word for a thing, not a person.” She leans in, and her fingers rest on the closed wound again, and the heat that rises in me has nothing to do with healing. “I'm not going to ask what you are,” she says. “I'm going to ask if you'll let me finish, and then whether you'll come back when it's dark.”
"Someone who can't stay," I say. Liora nods, as if she's heard that before, stands up, and locks the door. From the inside. "Then at least stay until you can leave," she says.
