*Weekly updates* "There are no leashes now, no bindings," she says, her voice a dark lullaby in the flickering candlelight, "and it is their sacrifice that gave us this. Nothing can ever repay it. No one can ever take it from us. So now, in this hal...
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There's a new missive today. Ben has made contact. It's only one sentence, three words, seven letters:
I have it.
He'll want to meet up, want to consolidate now. Bring the brain and the hand back together, so they can pull that goddamn bow string.
It's the rational thing to do.
But Iaves is sitting here, on his log, staring down the dirt road. And he has no inclination to move.
Another part of his brain has grown back, slow and painful, while he's sat out here. It's the side that doesn't think much in words, just feels. And it's tingling with a kind of knowing, a gut feeling about today.
Today might just be Iaves's day.
So he'll sit here a while longer and see.
The others are restless; he can sense how they shift and move, how they glance at his back. They're good men but they're Smith-Skillers—married to ember and steel, deaf to the impression of the beings around them. They don't understand the low hum, what it means to breathe through everything scuttling around you and pick up on the changes. The signs.
Spitfire and closer than blood as she may have been, Meg didn't get it either and, for all of his brilliance, Ben sure as shit never thought like that. As deftly as those cogs and wheels twitched and clicked in his well-ordered mind, it never could feel the way this feels.
If Iaves inclines his mind toward it now, he reckons Mennit has some kind of stomachache; Jokul, the one with the smokes, is hankering for another huff. The Brothers of Wren, newly arrived, are strained about something. Probably the state of things, given how many of their supply lines have been set on fire. How everything is starting to collapse around them. They and all the others around them give off these feelings like beacons, emitting the strongest emotions wide and loud for those who will listen. Those who can listen.
Iaves doesn't think all Beast-callers have this. Allayria sure as shit didn't, which strikes Iaves as very interesting, very interesting indeed. Maybe it's because she never really bonded with another creature. Heinous bitch that she is.
The thought of the Paragon boils his blood, and Iaves shifts, and the men behind him do so too, though their movements are more hopeful than irate. They know the letter's contents and they burn at the edges to move, to go back, find Ben and execute what they've all been spinning toward.
Machines, Iaves thinks, not unlike Ben. It's not an unkind thought; outside of the two other Beast callers they have been his constant companions now and, though they are not Ben or Meg, they are good men to have at his back, here, now, even if they burn to forge ahead to their task, to smite it and mold it into completion.
But Iaves doesn't have the patience for the kind of wait that would ask for, not anymore; and just as he thinks so, he feels it: a hum like a thrumming string, passing through a Beast-caller a few paces back. There's a flicker, a flash from up high, amidst clouds and whipping wind: in his mind there is an instant of a winding road set in the middle of a long stretch of forest, and on that road, like little pebbles, is a horde of red-decked soldiers ringed around a mounted posse, garbed in ceremonial furs, led by a golden-haired couple Iaves recognizes all too well.
He stands up from the log.
Yes, today is Iaves's day.
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A/N: No, Iaves, no!!!!
Next chapter features a familiar face but a new inner monologue... any guesses who?
Chapter Notes: The trio freed these Solveig Smith Skillers in Partisan's "The Hunted and the Hunter."
