Eliska picked up a twig and used it to scratch geometric designs in the dust at her feet. The sun was starting to go down.

  She would have to leave the shelter of this garden eventually. The alternative would be to sleep here behind the solarium.

  She’d slept in worse places. Anything would be better than going out there and dealing with the townspeople.

  She didn’t know where Marine, Anríq, and the Watchmen were or what they were doing. O’akim would probably give Marine a place to stay. It would probably be a very nice place, too.

  Atian would take care of the Watchmen. He might take them to some kind of barracks or wherever the Tenby defenders stayed.

  Then again, the Tenby defenders weren’t members of the Black Watch. All those men probably had homes and families they stayed with when the men went off duty.

  That left Eliska out in the cold by herself as usual. What the hell was she even doing in this town?

  She should walk out that gate right now, walk into the chaos, and get herself sent back to some magical Layer. She knew exactly what to do there. She belonged there. No one had to tell her and she didn’t have to hide from anyone.

  She stiffened just then when she heard a thump followed by footsteps. Someone strode through the garden behind her.

  The person didn’t make any effort to hide what they were doing. They snapped twigs underfoot and then bootheels struck the flagstones on the other side of the solarium.

  She held her breath waiting for the person to leave. None of the garden’s walkways passed behind the solarium. The person had no reason to come back here.

  Her heart stopped when Yvan stepped out from behind the solarium and saw her siting there.

  “There you are,” he exclaimed. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

  She forced herself to look away. “You found me. Now I have to find somewhere else.”

  “You don’t have to find somewhere else. I want you to come to the wall with us. We need you.”

  “You don’t need me for anything,” she mumbled. “I would be no good to you on the wall.”

  “I don’t mean we need you to defend us with your magic. I mean I need you to check the situation with the Layers and tell me if you can see anything up there that might indicate where we are or what’s coming.”

  She turned her head even farther away. “I can’t tell you that. No one can tell you that.”

  “You don’t know because you haven’t looked. I need you to come up to the wall.”

  “Leave me alone,” she growled. “I don’t want to look at those people and they sure as hell don’t want to look at me.”

  She kept her head turned so she wouldn’t see his reaction. She really wished he’d leave. Life was so much simpler and easier without all these people around.

  He stood there staring down at her in silence for a minute. Maybe now he would realize that leaving her here would be simpler and easier for everyone else involved, too.

  She counted down the seconds before he walked away. Then she could go back to being blissfully alone in the silence.

  She would have to find another hiding place, though. He found her.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  She probably wouldn’t be able to find another place in Tenby to hide. All the more reason to leave here and go on her way.

  Just then, he surprised her by sitting down next to her. Her instincts told her to leap away from him or at least move aside to put more space between them.

  He sat way too close—almost close enough for their shoulders to touch.

  She didn’t leap away even though she wanted to. She sat rooted to the spot. What was he going to do to her? Was he going to reprimand her for letting him and the Watch down?

  She winced when she thought that. She was letting him down. She threw her fate in with these men. She was the one violating that by running away like this.

  He didn’t say anything for a long time. He just sat there in silence.

  He stayed where he was for so long that she had no choice but to relax and start breathing again.

  What the hell did he want from her? Why did he constantly thrust himself into her awareness like this when she made it so abundantly clear that she didn’t want him to?

  He was as bad as Yann that way. Neither of them would leave her the hell alone.

  The silence did something to her—something other than what it did before. It didn’t give her the same peace—and yet it did.

  That silence didn’t call out to her to fill it with words. Yvan didn’t fill it with words. He just let it sit there. How long would he let it sit there? He acted like he could wait forever.

  Could it possibly be that he liked to sit alone in the silence, too—somewhere far away from everyone who wanted anything from him?

  What had his life been like all these years as Commander of the Watch in Middleborough? He must not have gotten a minute to himself in all that time.

  Maybe he really wanted to run away and hide, too. Maybe he really wanted to run away and hide all the time, but he couldn’t because everyone always needed him to stay on duty.

  He would have been on duty around the clock, even when he and the other Watchmen slept. He would have been on call every hour of every day in case anything threatened the town.

  He finally spoke up, but he did it softly in a low murmur. “We have a house where the Watchmen are staying. There’s a room there where you can stay with Marine. You should come back and stay with us. Don’t stay out here.”

  She gulped and looked away. The words stung. He didn’t ask her to do anything except to come back and stay with the Watch.

  Her heart ached to go back to them. She invested so much in them these last few days—and not just by putting herself in danger to help them survive.

  She just wanted to be one of them. They all kept saying she was one of them. She just wished she could believe that.

  She didn’t dare to say that out loud—or to voice this stabbing pain in her middle that kept telling her she never would be one of them.

  “Come back to the house, young one,” Yvan murmured. “No one cares if you have magic or if you can see anything in the Layers. Just come. You can’t stay out here. You belong with us.”

  She clamped her eyes shut to block out that word. Belong. She didn’t belong with them. She didn’t belong with anyone.

  The burning ache to belong with someone and to someone—it became unbearable. His presence at her side tormented her worse than all the Darkness in her soul.

  She lost Barsali for these people. She lost Wesh for these people. Now she couldn’t even be one of them the way she so desperately wanted to be.

  Out of nowhere, Yvan put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed.

  He felt different than Yann. She tried to stiffen and pull away, but she couldn’t even do that.

  Yvan should have been the one to pull away from her. He would have if he knew about the poison boiling away inside her.

  Or maybe he already knew and stayed near her anyway. Yann and Anríq did it. Why not Yvan, too?

  She wanted to pull away as much to protect him as to protect herself, but she found herself softening to him instead.

  Being near him didn’t carry the same weight it did with Yann. Yann putting his arms around her meant something.

  Yvan putting his arm around her meant something, too, but it meant something different—something she could actually accept if she really stretched.

  Yvan would never expect anything more from an embrace like that. He did it out of genuine protective affection. It could never be anything else.

  It meant something so much more because of that. It meant something so much purer precisely because he never could or would ask or expect anything else. He only did it because he cared about her—and not the way Yann did.

  She floundered in a confused turmoil of emotions, but she couldn’t pull away. She wanted to, but she also didn’t want to.

  She just wanted to feel this. Someone actually cared. They all did. That was the most excruciating thing about all of this.

  All of the Watchmen cared about her like that now. Yann. Anríq. Yvan. Niyazi. Neils. Vidal. Even Rien cared about her like that now.

  She clamped her eyes shut against a fresh torrent of crushing despair when she thought about Barsali. He and Omer both cared about her the same way.

  She couldn’t betray Barsali’s memory by leaving the Watch. Even spending the night out here behind this solarium somehow betrayed some trust between her and the others.

  Yvan took his arm down, stood up, and waited for her to do the same thing. They climbed over the garden wall together and headed back toward the entrance gate.

  End of Chapter 31.

  ? 2024 by Theo Mann

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