Raine POV
He had forgotten what it was like to share silence with someone who didn't know how.
Not that Ella was loud, exactly. During the day, she was managing questions, arguments, and the occasional sharp comment that landed better than she probably intended. That he could work with. That had edges he could navigate around.
But asleep, she talked.
Not full sentences. Fragments, mostly. Names. The kind of sleep-talking that wasn't meant for anyone, that came up from somewhere too deep to have manners about it. He'd heard it the first night and assumed it was a one-time thing. By the third night, he'd accepted it as a feature of traveling with her, like the mud and the canteen clanking against her bag when she walked.
Seraphine.
She said it the way you said a word you'd been holding in your mouth all day without meaning to. Careful, even unconscious. Like she was still trying not to let it cost her anything.
He kept sharpening the knife.
Seraphine, wait
He kept sharpening the knife slightly slower.
The outline was clear enough from what little she'd told him and what he'd worked out himself. Best friend. Childhood and then some. The kind of relationship where you stopped noticing you were being known because it had been happening so long it felt like the weather. And then the gate, and the hunting party, and the chin that went up and the eyes that went elsewhere.
He understood, technically, how that kind of wound worked. He'd had colleagues at the Guild he'd eaten meals with for six years who had signed the formal complaint against him without calling him first. Not friends he'd known that clearly in retrospect, but something adjacent, something he had apparently valued more than they had.
The math of that had kept him up several nights before he'd decided to stop doing it.
He filed it under things that are no longer relevant and went back to the knife.
Then she said her father's name.
Not loudly. Barely audible. Just Father in a voice that had no armor in it anywhere, small and young and asking a question that wasn't going to get answered. The voice of someone who still, under everything, did not fully understand how the person who was supposed to be unmovable had moved.
He set the knife down.
Stared at the fire for a while.
He did not pick the knife back up.
She woke before dawn the way she always did, immediately, fully, sitting upright with her eyes open, like sleep was something she'd decided to stop rather than something that had released her. He'd noticed that on day one. It wasn't a natural waking. It was a trained one. The kind your body developed when it had learned that being caught unaware was dangerous.
She looked at him.
"You look terrible," she said.
"Good morning."
"I mean it. Did you sleep?"
"Enough."
She tilted her head. That was the thing about her, she listened with her whole face, and she catalogued, and she remembered everything she catalogued, which made lying to her technically possible but practically exhausting. He'd given up on certain categories of it by day two.
"Something is wrong," she said.
"Nothing is wrong."
"You put down the knife."
He looked at her. "What?"
"You were sharpening that knife when I fell asleep." She nodded at his pack, where he'd stowed it. "You stopped before you were done. I can see the edge from here, it still needs the left side." She paused. "You only stop in the middle of things when something interrupts you."
He picked up the knife and finished sharpening it. She watched him do it with the particular quality of attention she had, steady and patient, like she was reading something written in small print and wanted to make sure she had it right. It reminded him of the way she'd looked at the swamp path on day one, before she'd figured out how to read it. Learning the grammar of a thing.
She was learning his.
He wasn't sure how he felt about that.
"You talked in your sleep," he said. Not to tell her. To redirect.
It worked differently than he'd expected. She didn't get defensive or embarrassed. She went still in a specific way, not flinching, more like a person pressing their thumb over a bruise to check if it still hurt.
"What did I say?"
"Names."
She looked at the water. "Which ones?"
He could have said just Seraphine. It would have been easier. She'd have processed that and moved forward, and they'd have gotten on with the morning.
"Your father," he said instead, because she deserved the full accounting, even of the things that cost her. "Once."
She nodded. Small. Kept looking at the water.
Then she stood up and started packing her bag, and the subject was closed. He let it close. Some things needed to be set down before they could be looked at, and she was still in the setting-down phase, and he knew better than most that pushing that timeline never helped anyone.
They'd been walking for two hours when it happened.
No warning. No build. His magic just lurched. Like a rope that had been pulled taut, snapping suddenly loose, the whole thing going sideways in his chest, dark and hot and disorganized in a way it hadn't been since year one, since the worst of the early months before he'd built the containment.
His hand hit his sternum on instinct. Pressing down. Trying to get the shape of it back.
It didn't work.
Ella was three steps ahead. She hadn't noticed yet.
He had scheduled the suppression for midday. It was barely past morning. He ran the numbers fast, her curse, his magic, the connection between them, the way the balance had been shifting incrementally, the further they moved from the forest and deeper into the swamp's interference
He said her name.
She turned.
He was already reaching for her.
"Hour early," he said. "Give me your wrist."
Her eyes went to his hand, the magic visibly churning under the skin, darker than it should be, less controlled, and then back to his face. He watched her read the situation in about two seconds.
She held her wrist out.
He grabbed it.
The connection snapped into place, and his magic flooded toward the curse, and the lurching stopped, but not before she felt it, the violence of it, the difference between this and every controlled suppression before. He felt her pulse jump under his fingers.
When the magic finally settled, she was looking at him with an expression that was not quite fear but was directly next door to it.
"That wasn't normal," she said.
He kept his grip on her wrist. Steady. Even. Everything he was not feeling.
"No," he said. "It wasn't."