The first thing she saw was the ceiling.

  Low, close, the plaster cracked in two places and slightly discolored near the corner where the roof had been repaired with different materials at a different time. A single shelf above her head held books pressed together at irregular angles, a bundle of something dried and herbal, and a chipped cup that had no obvious reason for existing but was clearly being kept anyway.

  She turned her head.

  The room was small enough that turning her head covered most of it. A chair that was doing three jobs simultaneously — clothes, desk, surface for things without other surfaces. A narrow window set into the stone wall, the shutter half-open, morning light coming through at an angle that told her it was early. A door, closed. The floor had a rug on it that had once had a pattern and now had the memory of one.

  Everything was slightly cluttered in the way of a person who cleaned the important things and left the rest for a future version of themselves that never quite arrived. It smelled like dried herbs and old books and faintly, underneath both of those, candle wax.

  She was wearing a plain white robe. Simple cloth, loose, the kind of thing that cost very little and apologized for nothing. She didn't mind it. She'd slept in armor for — how long? She couldn't — her mind reached for the number and found fog instead, thick and resistant, the kind that made thinking feel like moving through water. Each attempt to push through it produced a dull ache behind her eyes that suggested the fog was the better option for now.

  Something was against her back. She shifted slightly, trying to identify it, and the shift produced a cascade of information from her body that she immediately wished she hadn't requested. Every part of her had an opinion. The opinions were unanimous and negative.

  She lay still and listened instead.

  Outside the window — voices. Children, close by, the specific bright noise of kids whose morning had no particular agenda, chasing something or each other or nothing at all. Further out, beneath that, the rhythmic call of a merchant setting up, the creak of a cart, the general assembling sound of a street becoming itself for the day.

  Where am I?

  She said it out loud without meaning to, the words just arriving in the room before she'd decided to produce them. No one answered. The ceiling offered nothing.

  She turned her body.

  This was a project.

  Each degree of rotation filed its own complaint — her ribs, her side, her left arm, her back, things underneath things that she didn't have names for. She did it anyway, the way she'd been trained to move through pain, converting it from an obstacle into information and filing the information for later. By the time she was facing the door she was breathing deliberately, in and out, the counted rhythm that her old drill instructor had taught her before she'd known why she'd need it.

  Her feet found the edge of the bed.

  She told them to respond.

  They didn't.

  Not pain — numbness, the deep kind, the kind that meant the body had made a protective decision and wasn't ready to reverse it yet. She looked at them with the expression of someone encountering an administrative problem they hadn't anticipated. They looked back at her and offered nothing.

  Fine.

  She pushed herself upright with her arms.

  The room tilted. She grabbed the wall — the actual wall, both palms flat against the plaster, the chipped cup rattling on the shelf above her — and held it until the tilting stopped and the room agreed to stay in one place. Her white hair was everywhere, across her face, stuck to the side of her neck, a general disaster that she noted and could not address right now.

  She stood.

  Technically. Both feet on the floor, body vertical, wall providing the margin of error that her legs weren't yet equipped to cover alone. She shuffled toward the door in the way of someone who had decided that shuffling was beneath them but was currently the only option, her hand trailing along the wall, until her fingers found the door handle.

  She opened it.

  Light.

  The main door of the building was open wide — propped or simply left that way, the morning coming through it in a long golden rectangle that reached across the floor and lit the dust moving in the air above it. More light from the walls, from holes cut into the stone at intervals, simple and unglazed, letting in both the sun and the faint sounds of the street outside.

  Rows of wooden seats on either side of a central aisle. A carpet, worn thin at the center from years of feet, running from the main door to the far end. Candles along the walls, mostly unlit at this hour. The smell of the place — that wax-and-age quality, something that accumulated over decades of people bringing their grief and their gratitude and their ordinary Tuesdays to the same room.

  At the far end, a statue.

  Stone, tall, winged — a figure with its hand extended downward, reaching, its face smooth and unfinished in the way of something that was never meant to be specific. She knew it. Everyone in Valerne knew it.

  A church?

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  She said it quietly, to herself, still holding the door frame.

  Then she saw him.

  He was kneeling at the base of the statue — young, her age or close to it, slight in the way of someone whose build was functional rather than impressive, his dark hair still disheveled from sleep or from not having addressed it yet this morning. His hands were folded. His eyes were closed.

  Cloth wrapped his left hand. More at his collarbone, visible at the neck of his shirt. She could see, from here, the evidence of recent repairs distributed across him at intervals.

  His lips were moving.

  She couldn't hear most of it — just the murmur of it, low and private, the sound of someone saying something they meant. Then, in a moment of quiet from outside, three words arrived clearly across the nave:

  "—your favorite child."

  Something happened in her chest.

  The fog in her mind pulled back — not all of it, not cleanly, but enough. Like a current changing direction. Images surfacing from underneath: a dark floor, crystal light, a sound like a bell struck underground. A stranger's voice in the dark, screaming her name before he knew her name. A broken dagger. An iron sword extended upward in shaking hands.

  I'll protect you to the end.

  The door frame was the only reason she was still vertical.

  The boy's eyes opened.

  She didn't mean to move — her body made the decision independently, the way it had been making decisions without her input all morning, and what it produced was not graceful. Her feet, which had been managing the short distance from the bedroom with the wall's assistance, encountered the slightly uneven threshold of the door and filed a final report.

  The floor came up.

  "Whoa—"

  He was fast. She registered that distantly — he'd crossed the nave in the time it took her to decide she was falling, and he arrived beside her as she arrived beside the floor, and his hands were there, not quite catching her but making the landing a negotiation rather than a statement.

  "Hey—" His voice was close. "Are you alright? You should be in bed right now."

  She looked up.

  He was looking down at her with an expression caught between alarm and relief, his dark eyes wide, and she was close enough to see the exact moment something shifted in them — the alarm and relief still present but something else arriving behind them, unannounced, apparently unwelcome based on what it was doing to his face.

  He went very slightly pink.

  Then he swallowed. Visibly. Like a person managing a process that usually handled itself automatically.

  Her face, she was fairly certain, did nothing. Her face was trained. Her face had been in situations considerably more alarming than eye contact with a boy at floor level and had maintained composure through all of them.

  "Hey uh," he said, and then appeared to briefly lose track of what he'd been planning to say after hey uh. He recovered. "You alive or dead right now, because I can't really tell."

  She considered the question with the seriousness it deserved.

  "Alive," she said. "I suppose." A pause. "You saved me, didn't you?"

  "Well uh." He seemed to be having a structural relationship with the words — finding them one at a time, checking them before use. "Almost died, but uh, yes. I guess."

  She looked at him. At the cloth on his hand. The wrapping at his collarbone. The way he was holding himself slightly to the left, the unconscious accommodation of damaged ribs she recognized because she was doing it too.

  "I'm sorry," she said.

  "Don't—" He started, stopped, recalibrated. "It's fine. It's— you don't have to—"

  "You're covered in bandages."

  "These are— I have a condition."

  She looked at him.

  "The condition is that I was in a fight," he clarified, after a moment. "Just to be transparent."

  "I know. I was there."

  "Right." He cleared his throat. "Yes. You were."

  A brief silence. Outside, one of the children laughed at something, the sound bright and uncomplicated, belonging to a completely different morning than this one.

  "Can you stand?" he asked.

  "Probably not without assistance."

  "Okay." He offered his hand — the one with less cloth on it. "I'll—" He appeared to think about how to finish that sentence. "Here."

  She took it.

  The process of getting her vertical was not swift or elegant and involved a significant amount of contribution from the nearest pew, but it concluded with her upright and him beside her, and he was careful with the injured side in a way that suggested he knew exactly where it was, which made sense given that he'd apparently carried her through five dungeon floors in the dark.

  She was taller than him. Marginally. He noticed this and did not comment on it, which she appreciated.

  "The room is mine," he said, looking straight ahead now, at the statue rather than at her, which was clearly a deliberate choice. "You can have it as long as you need it. I'll take the bench."

  "I can't take your room."

  "You've been in it for two days and that's already happened, so."

  She opened her mouth. Closed it.

  "Two days," she said.

  "Two days."

  She absorbed this. "The bench can't be comfortable."

  "It isn't," he agreed, with the composure of someone who had made their peace with a decision and required no sympathy about it. "But it builds character, apparently. Edric says that. He says it about a lot of things that are uncomfortable."

  "Who is Edric?"

  "The priest. He lives here. He's—" A pause. "He's the one who actually healed you. I just carried you here."

  "You just carried me," she repeated. "From Floor Six. While injured."

  "It wasn't—" He stopped. Started again. "I mean the first two floors were mostly fine."

  "And the last three?"

  A longer pause.

  "Also fine," he said, in the tone of someone who understood what fine meant and was using it anyway. "Mostly."

  She looked at the side of his face. He was still looking at the statue, with the focused attention of someone who had assigned himself a task and was committed to it regardless of whether the task required that level of focus.

  "What's your name?" she asked.

  He turned then — briefly, just enough for eye contact, and whatever had happened to his face the first time attempted to happen again and was visibly suppressed with moderate success.

  "Aris," he said. "Edren. Just Aris is fine." A beat. "What's yours?"

  "Elysse," she said. "De Carvaine."

  Something flickered in his expression — recognition of the name, or at least of what the name implied, the de doing its usual work of announcing itself before anything else could.

  "Right," he said.

  "Does that mean something to you?"

  "It means," he said carefully, "that the armor I stacked against the wall over there makes more sense now."

  She almost smiled. Almost.

  "You should sit down," he said, nodding toward the nearest pew. "You're gripping that pew hard enough that I'm concerned about the structural integrity of a two-hundred year old bench."

  She looked at her hand. Released it.

  "I'm fine."

  "You keep saying that," he said. "It keeps not being completely true."

  She looked at him.

  He looked back — and this time he didn't look away first, and neither did she, and the morning came through the open door between them and the silence was not uncomfortable exactly, just full, the kind that happens when two people are in the same room with something large and haven't decided yet what to call it.

  "Sit down, Elysse de Carvaine," he said. Quietly. "You nearly died."

  She sat down.