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Two things caught Aloy’s attention in quick succession from the moment she got within sight of the Memorial Grove – the humid breeze promising a storm that she was glad didn’t catch her on the road, and the scent of roasting duck drifting in from the cook fires. The second had her veering toward the arena without a second thought. The distant roll of thunder couldn’t ward her off.
The first bite was damn near ecstasy after a solid four days of nothing but dried rabbit meat and trail bread. She didn’t even bother counting out the shards for the meal and practically threw twice as many as the cook asked for across the table before she dug in. She didn’t regret it.
She perched herself near the arena gates once her stomach was sated. Her attention was piqued by a low conversation between two guards busy tending to their weapons.
“I heard Commander Atekka is delayed,” one muttered to the other. “Won’t be arriving for another three days.”
The second guard chuckled. “Three days. Might as well be four. She’s impossible to find the first night she spends in the Grove, and not a soul will tell you differently.”
“Besides—”
“Not a soul, Kidda.” The older Lowland Clan woman was grinning, a gleam in her eye as she tapped her fingers playfully against the younger one’s spear. She was still smiling as she brought a finger to her lips. It was the last glimpse of her Aloy got before she finished eating and turned toward the throne room.
She didn’t have the time to indulge in gossip, no matter how curious she was. Not now anyway. She had business to attend to.
The throne room was empty, save for Dekka lingering near the dais. She caught Aloy’s eye and nodded her over. “Champion,” the Chaplain greeted her. “Walking like a woman on a mission. I suppose you’re looking for Chief Hekarro.”
Aloy shot her a smile. “Hi Dekka.”
“Glad to see you haven’t forgotten me.” Dekka arched a brow, her tone sharp and playful. “I’m honored. And your timing is good – the Chief is waiting for you below.”
“In the server room?” Aloy’s brows furrowed as she strode up the steps and leaned over to gaze down the shaft into the chamber that AETHER had made its home for all those years. She could barely make out the edge of a shadow shifting against the dim lights.
Dekka seemed to read her question before Aloy ever said a word of it, and she lingered beside her and followed her gaze along the ancient ladder. “He was uniquely…intrigued by what occurred in the Grove when the visions re-ignited. Marshal Kotallo has been helping him make sense of the technology below. You’ll find him there too.” She gestured for her to go ahead.
There was an odd little glint in Dekka’s eyes. The skin around them wrinkled as she smirked.
Aloy didn’t spare it too much thought. She shrugged and headed down. She didn’t need to descend more than a few feet before she heard a few echoed words below.
“…the glyphs are not Carja.”
Hekarro’s voice sounded intrigued. Bordering on bemused.
“These are simpler than Carja glyphs, in my opinion at least. Even easier to learn.” Kotallo. He had an excitable lilt to his voice. Aloy could almost picture an unobtrusive little smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. “The spoken language itself is the same, helpfully enough.”
“So many centuries between us and the world of the Old Ones, and yet we speak the same tongue.” Hekarro let out a quiet chuckle. “Preserved by this…APOLLO you mentioned, yes? What remained of it. Ten above, the world is truly a more massive place than I ever imagined.”
He almost sounded like he was talking to himself more than anyone else. It made Aloy smile in much the same way she’d imagined Kotallo doing as she dropped off a low rung and found solid ground underfoot again.
Both men turned to face her from further inside the chamber, and she greeted them both with an amicable nod. Her eye was drawn, suddenly, to Hekarro’s temple. And the Focus sat there. Aloy tapped her own and grinned when the scan registered his as active and online.
“It seemed overdue,” Kotallo said in answer to her unspoken question. He glanced at Hekarro with a slight smile.
The same one Aloy had pictured for him, she noted. She turned to the Chief and shot him a pointed glance.
“You were resistant when I brought it up last time I was here,” she noted.
Hekarro hardly took it as a slight. He met her gaze and held it. “Marshal Kotallo made a strong case. As did you. And when considering them both, well…” He trailed off with a thoughtful little hum, reaching up to pluck the Focus from his temple and study it. He seemed to weigh it in his palm, like it weighed more than it seemed. “We live in a new world. I would be both shortsighted and a hypocrite if I shied away from that.”
“I only remember using one of those words,” Aloy mused.
“The other was implied. Rightfully so. Rest assured, I have been thoroughly convinced.” Hekarro turned to press the Focus into Kotallo’s hand. “I’d like to consult with Dekka before I delve any further into this maze. I think she’d benefit from one of the devices as well. I doubt she’ll take much convincing.”
“Less than you, I’d bet,” Aloy was snarking before she could help it. It got a genuine laugh out of Hekarro – one that echoed through the chamber.
“We can speak above. Over a meal, I think.”
“I ate already. And actually, what I was hoping to speak to you about is down here.” She pushed past both of them without another thought, striding toward the long-silent console at the far end of the room. It whirred to life under her touch, and neither Hekarro nor Kotallo moved to stop her.
Kotallo was the first one to ask, though. He did so with his hand pressed easily against her upper arm. It was a gentle touch. Familiar. He didn’t pull away as he spoke and neither did she. “Is there anything lingering here after AETHER fled?”
She fought back a shiver that threatened to spark across her shoulders and turned to look at him with a disarming smile. “No. Nothing worrying. But maybe something valuable.” As she spoke, she pulled up a large, curving holo-screen that flickered above the console. Kotallo squinted at it as Aloy scrolled through its contents.
Hekarro was lingering just a few paces away from her left shoulder, studying her instead. Or maybe studying both of them.
She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. She noted just how cool her skin felt when Kotallo’s fingers slipped away again. Instead of lingering too long on that thought, she left the screen for a moment and turned to face the Chief.
Alright, maybe barging in and rifling through the place had been a bit rude. He didn’t seem offended.
“Chief Hekarro,” she sighed. “AETHER wasn’t idle while it was here. I think some of the information here might help us track down more on the other…entities like it. Ones we’re missing.”
Hekarro looked thoughtful for a moment. “These…subordinate functions,” he mused, glancing between her and Kotallo as Aloy stared at him. “Components of this GAIA of yours. Your man-made ally.” Seeming to notice just how befuddled she had to look, he nodded and tapped his temple. “Marshal Kotallo has been explaining a great deal. More than I ever expected from his initial reports. I must admit I’m intrigued. Perhaps even eager to meet her and judge her motivations for myself.”
“Her motivations are about as hard-wired as you’ll ever find,” Aloy said on a quiet exhale. “You can trust her. I could see about getting you formally introduced one day soon. In the meantime, you could always reach her over the Focus. After you’ve consulted with Dekka.”
“Speaking of which, Kotallo—”
A single look and a nod toward the ladder was all it took for Kotallo to offer a quick salute and stride toward the exit. He only paused to glance back at her and shoot her one more smile.
It made Aloy’s stomach flip.
She turned back toward the console before Hekarro could say a single word about it. Not that he would. He probably hadn’t even noticed.
He lingered near a wall sconce, studying its flames. “Kotallo is a changed man,” he mused once they were alone. He looked from the fire to her, just in time for her to make the mistake of looking up and catching his eye. “After getting a single taste of the knowledge contained in this network you’ve built, I can hardly say I’m surprised. Still…I think it has as much to do with the company he’s kept of late.”
He’d noticed. He’d definitely noticed. And if she didn’t get it under control fast he was going to notice her blush too. She did a piss-poor job of sounding casual as she cleared her throat and shifted her weight from one foot to the other.
She focused on the holo-screen that she’d summoned again in front of her. Maybe if she kept her attention honed in on that instead of the way her arm was still tingling, the blush would go away before he saw it. She could only hope—
CRITICAL SERVER BOOT ERROR. SECURITY PROTOCOL AL-14 RE-SET ENGAGED. RE-BOOTING HYDRAULIC LOCKS.
The computer-generated voice was half-corrupted and grating, making Aloy grimace as she frantically searched through the display for the source of the alarm. A security system re-set? There was no way it was still functional.
Above, the clang of metal on rusted metal made the room seem to shudder. Hekarro cursed as he strode over to gaze up the shaft.
“Aloy,” he barked. “What in the name of the Ten is going on?”
“Ahh…”
The syllable seemed to get halfway out of her throat and get stuck there. She shook it off and turned back to the screen.
“It’s a system re-set. Server security system—”
Kotallo’s voice crackled over her Focus, tinged with something that she couldn’t quite place as anger or panic. Maybe both, stubbornly reined in like a snapping pair of Sawtooths. “Aloy, what—”
“—in the name of the Ten is going on. I know, I know.” She straightened up from the console and bit back a curse of her own. “Hekarro’s fine, Marshal. He’s still down here with me.”
“There is a massive metal door between the two of you and the rest of the Grove.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“Aloy—”
She would have been lying if she’d said she didn’t get a kick out of the growl in his voice just then. She didn’t linger on that thought for more than half a breath. “It’s a system re-set,” she said again. She studied the ticking clock in front of her on the screen, squinting at it. “Seems like the server security system is in better shape than I thought. AETHER must have knocked a few things loose when I captured it. The system is re-initializing and then it should lift the lockdown automatically once it’s done.”
She could hear Kotallo drawing a steadying breath. Maybe she imagined it. “How long?”
“According to this…about four and a half hours.”
She met Hekarro’s eye as she said it, trying to look apologetic. He looked about as happy as Kotallo sounded.
“Are you safe?”
Oh, there was a softness to Kotallo’s voice when it bloomed over her Focus again. He sounded quieter, like he’d ducked into an alcove to get a moment away from whatever chaos was erupting above. It made heat swoop in her belly, and she followed his lead and stepped around to the other side of the console. Hekarro didn’t seem keen to intrude.
“I’m – we’re fine. It’s just the two of us down here, and I’m not looking to become an assassin anytime soon.” She tried to picture him fighting the urge to chuckle at that. “What are you going to tell Dekka?”
“Dekka is the one keeping the Chief’s Guard calm at the moment. Something that I should offer some assistance with. Aloy, just—”
“We’ll be fine,” she insisted again. She finally turned to glance at Hekarro again. “Four hours and some change until that door opens back up. And if it doesn’t…I’ve got a healthy store of blastpaste stashed away.”
Not the best option. She hoped it wouldn’t be needed.
Kotallo sighed over the open communication channel. “Be safe,” he said, quietly. Fondly. For a moment she heard him turn and bark a few orders at one of the guards before the channel closed.
She and Hekarro lingered in silence for a breath. For two. He finally broke it.
“Am I understanding correctly that we have no option but to pass the time?”
Aloy nodded, wincing a bit. “There’s ventilation,” she mused, gesturing up at the old, rusty vents far above their heads. “Ancient, of course, so we won’t get much air flow, but we won’t suffocate anytime soon.” She let out a sigh. “Might get a little stuffy in here.”
If Hekarro minded that, he didn’t show it. “Something that won’t kill us,” he said with one eyebrow arched, and Aloy nodded.
She grimaced a breath later. “Yeah…you might not be so forgiving in a while. I just got back from almost a week out in the desert and I haven’t exactly had the chance to bathe yet…”
That got him to laugh, of all things. “I’ve endured worse, I have no doubt.”
She hoped.
She lowered herself to the floor, crossing her legs and letting out a sigh. A four-hour system reboot wasn’t the worst possible thing to happen. Far from ideal either, but short of blowing the doors off there wasn’t much to be done for it. She’d consider that sooner if it didn’t seem like more trouble than it was worth. The last thing she needed was to get the Chief of the Tenakth killed in a cave-in because she got impatient.
Silence. A long silence. It was broken after a minute or two, by someone’s stomach rumbling loudly.
And it certainly wasn’t hers.
She shot Hekarro a questioning look, and he relented with a sigh. “The demands of my station take much of my time.” If he were capable of looking sheepish, she thought he would have just then. “And it isn’t uncommon for that to include time for meals.”
“You…haven’t eaten?”
She almost felt bad for shrugging off his offer of a meal, even if she wasn’t hungry.
“If you’re concerned about me starving to death before we see the sun again, you can soothe those worries now. I will live.” There was the slightest quirk of a smile at one corner of his mouth. Aloy returned it as she fished a bundle of Lowland trail mix out of one of her packs and tossed it to him.
He caught it handily and studied it, then her. Aloy shrugged. “I usually pick some up whenever I have the chance,” she said. “I can see why the Tenakth like it – good provisions for the trail.”
Hekarro was already cracking a nut between his teeth, and both of them winced at the resounding noise it made as he did. Though his may have had more to do with the abuse of his molars.
“Ah…sorry. I’ve had it on me for a while now. It might have gone a little stale.”
“That’s one word for it,” he chuckled – chuckled! – before he gingerly ate a bit more in silence. “It’s appreciated nonetheless.”
He didn’t seem like one to complain, even if Aloy’s teeth were aching with empathy. She caught herself rubbing her cheek before she forced her hand down to her side again.
She cleared her throat, drawing Hekarro’s gaze before she’d worked out what she wanted to say.
“We um…we might be able to pass the time if we had something to…talk about?”
Hekarro raised a brow. “You never struck me as the type interested in talking for talking’s sake.”
“No,” she relented. It pained her, how damn right he was.
An even longer silence. Broken only by his chewing. She swore she could hear Dekka yelling not far off from the locked hatch above. If she hadn’t imagined it entirely, the sound faded a moment later.
Aloy drew a breath.
“Have you…had the chance to see Morlund’s floating orb out in the desert?”
It was all she could think to say. Hekarro stared at her for a moment, a piece of fruit leather pinched between his teeth.
“East of here?” he asked after he’d swallowed it. “That flying contraption lit by colorful visions? I’ve heard the scout reports, outlandish as they sounded at first.”
“They’re not antagonizing the desert clan at least.”
“Far from it.” Hekarro had an eager little glint in his eye as he spoke. “Apparently it’s become a bit of a leave-time attraction for desert clan soldiers.”
“What about you?”
“Me?”
“Is that the kind of thing you’d want to do with your leave-time?” When he didn’t answer, Aloy leaned forward and rested her forearms against her knees. “Do you…get that kind of thing? Leave-time.”
He crunched down somewhat thoughtfully on a particularly stale seed and focused somewhere over Aloy’s head. “Not in recent memory, no.”
“But could you?”
“Tell me, Champion, when did you last take any leave-time?”
Suddenly she understood why Hekarro had stared at her when she’d asked. She felt inexplicably ridiculous for asking the question in the first place. Leave-time. Of course she couldn’t take leave-time. She rested where she could, stopped to catch her breath when she needed to, and tried to take detours in stride.
Security system re-sets too.
“Point taken,” she sighed, letting herself lean back against the wall and study the vents above.
They were too degraded for her pullcaster to get a good grip, and even if she could get the grate covers off, she doubted she could get up there to begin with, let alone fit through the vent opening. It wasn’t wide enough for her shoulders and judging from the duct-work it only got narrower as it went.
“Have you found an escape route?” Hekarro asked. From his expression, he already knew the answer. It almost made him sound glib.
“No,” she relented anyway. “Ah…I wasn’t saying any of that out loud, was I?”
“I assume you weren’t intending to?”
A hot flush prickled up her neck. “I was, wasn’t I?”
“At ease, Champion,” Hekarro chuckled. “I didn’t hear a word.”
He was either being truthful or charitable. She would take either at the moment, but she hoped for the former. She didn’t get long to ruminate on it before Hekarro spoke up again.
“I’ve heard from more than one person about your habit of getting lost in your thoughts.” More than one. Kotallo was included in that, she had no doubt. That made her cheeks heat up all over again. “There is much to be said for a mind that works quickly.”
And a mouth that has been known to outrun it, according to a few people on her travels. At least she managed to keep that thought quiet.
He’d put aside the rest of the trail mix, so maybe his molars were complaining louder than his stomach. He glanced at it, then back at her, his expression unreadable. “You must have been on the trail quite a while. In the desert, you said.”
“Mostly,” Aloy relented. It was little more than small talk, but it was better than silence even if it wasn’t something she usually bothered with. He seemed to agree, and the common ground was comfortable enough. “I camped out near the Stillsands a while and then passed through Scalding Spear. Just long enough to resupply.”
Her nose wrinkled as she thought back on that night in the desert market, stars clear and bright overhead in the cloudless sky. She’d been there once before, with Kotallo, and he’d excitedly ushered her toward a stall selling charred scorpions before challenging Drakka to a spar in the melee pit. It had come to a draw, but only because Kotallo had gone easy on him.
It brought a smile to her face.
Before the inevitable blush could follow it, she fixed her attention on her cuticles. “I didn’t linger,” she said with a cough. “Did get myself cornered by a merchant selling something called bloodseed fruit.”
That got Hekarro’s attention. More than she could have ever expected. “Some Desert-born Tenakth consider it a delicacy.”
“A sticky delicacy.”
And that got him to laugh. It was oddly infectious. “Indeed. But one I haven’t had in a very long time.” Silence stretched out between them and settled in the still air as his expression dimmed. He brushed his thumb along one knuckle and studied the sconce nearest to him. “It was a favorite of my brother’s, long ago, when we were still young-bloods fresh in our training.”
Aloy barely heard the second half of that sentence, fixated as she was on how it had opened. She blinked at him, like she’d fallen asleep halfway through and dreamed it. “Your…brother?”
“Something surprising?”
“Just…I never knew you…” She curled her fingers against the edge of her own vambrace, just to give them something to do when they itched. “Nobody ever mentioned it.”
She almost felt like she knew what he was going to say next. Maybe it was the way his jaw set or the slight shadow cast across his eyes when he looked at her next. Either way, it hardly dulled the sting when he nodded.
“His tags have rested back in Thornmarsh since before I took the title of its Commander.”
Aloy frowned, but didn’t turn away. “What would he have thought of you becoming Chief?”
He surprised her by laughing again. “He would have called me a fool for thinking I could take the Memorial Grove. Then he would have stormed it by my side without a breath’s hesitation.” A smile lingered on his face as he cast his gaze up toward those frustratingly narrow vents and drew a thoughtful breath. “Tenakko was a fierce fighter. Terrifyingly so. He would have made a fine Marshal.”
There were a hundred questions she could have asked, but Aloy finally settled on one that had stuck surprisingly stubbornly in her mind. “How did he find his way out to Desert Clan territory before?” When Hekarro looked at her again, she shrugged. “From what I hear, the clans weren’t exactly welcoming to one another before you took the throne.”
Hekarro’s expression shifted into one that she’d never seen on him before – contemplative and nostalgic, focused somewhere far away. It seemed somehow warm. “He would throttle me for telling this story, truth be told.”
“It won’t leave the vault,” Aloy promised.
That seemed to tickle him. He drew a thoughtful breath. “He had a lover, back when we were still claiming our first ink. A Desert Clan girl. It didn’t last, but she used to sneak him bloodseed fruit during their meetings. Among other things.”
Aloy could imagine.
“Probably better than stale trail mix,” she offered. It was probably true of both the fruit and the other things too.
“Indeed.”
He didn’t seem inclined to say much more, but Aloy reached up to tap her Focus. It only took a moment for her to log a discrete memo before she looked back at him. A question was burning in the back of her head, and she asked it before she could second-guess the decision.
“If his tags are back in Thornmarsh…did you ever consider bringing them here?” It seemed to intrigue him, but he didn’t answer right away. Aloy shrugged and filled the silence that lingered. “Keeping them close?”
The edge of her finger brushed the Nora charm tucked under the collar of her armor. She forced her hand down into her lap as she watched Hekarro consider it.
“His tags are back in Thornmarsh,” he finally said. “But my brother is gone, wherever his memory rests. In the grand scheme, it matters little.”
Aloy pictured a familiar Nora memorial marker, framed with freshly fallen snow and bracketed by reaching branches. It was getting harder to picture clearly with every passing day. Her chest ached. She wanted to believe him, wanted it to be true.
Maybe distance was only a salve for a lucky few. Or maybe she hadn’t quite put enough between her and everything else. She certainly couldn’t escape the current reminder of her most recent escapade.
Her Focus trilled.
“Aloy.”
Kotallo sounded a bit like he was developing a case of heartburn, but his voice was still a welcome distraction from the yawning pit of her own thoughts. She indulged it gladly.
“Your Chief is still alive,” she quipped.
“Dekka will be pleased.” There was that lilt in his voice again, even if it was tinged with an edge of exhaustion. “Would you pass on a message for me?”
“Gladly. Gives me something to do.”
Aside from getting lost in her own head. Anything was better than that.
“Commander Atekka is still delayed, but Marshal Ivvira has arrived ahead of her. A Fireclaw tore through the Lowland Trail.” Any levity in his voice was gone. She could practically hear the furrow between his brows before she caught herself mirroring it. “If her word weren’t enough, the burn she took to the shoulder would confirm the report.”
Hekarro seemed to read the worry in her tone well enough, straightening up as Aloy asked after Ivvira’s condition. Stable – “Thank the Ten,” Kotallo muttered under his breath – and handling the pain with as much grit as anyone would expect. And in no danger of losing her life.
Against a Fireclaw, that was a decisive win.
“I’ll pass it on, Kotallo,” she said, holding Hekarro’s gaze as she did. “Ah…the Grove isn’t crumbling around you without the Chief topside, right?”
Across the chamber, Hekarro huffed. Not unlike a disgruntled Trampler. Kotallo’s answering snort came across her Focus a moment later. “Not quite. In no small part thanks to Dekka.”
Well thank the Ten for Dekka then.
She didn’t let Hekarro’s worry fester, and as soon as she’d signed off with Kotallo and assured the Chief of Ivvira’s condition, he let a bit of tension visibly ease from his shoulders.
“I trust Marshal Kotallo is keeping a firm hand on matters above,” he said, nodding toward the ladder and up at the sealed hatch. He didn’t even need to wait for her answer before a fond little spark glinted in his eye. “He’s always been skilled at keeping a level head in moments of crisis, but I’ve noticed a new steadiness to his hand since he returned from facing the Zenith threat.”
Aloy chewed at her thumb nail as she watched the Chief continue his musing. She didn’t say a word, but even so her cheeks were growing warm.
Hekarro shot her a warm smirk. “It seems you’ve had no small hand in tempering the man.”
Whatever that meant. Aloy didn’t let herself linger on it. At least she tried to, but the more the words echoed in her head, the more she realized just how right Hekarro was.
There was a resolve in Kotallo that had grown steadily by the day. It had sparked vibrantly in his eyes the day they’d defended the Kulrut and blazed to new heights when they’d taken down that Scorcher in the Sky Clan foothills. She could almost picture it, that fire that seemed to glint against his teeth whenever his eyes found hers and he offered that damn charming smile—
Aloy shook her head. “Maybe,” she choked.
Hekarro chuckled, and that was the last word they shared for a long stretch of time. For the moment, she had no complaints.
One and a half hours down. Another three to go.
Aloy stared Hekarro down from across the chamber, eyes narrowing as she leaned back against the wall.
“You’re shitting me,” she insisted.
Hekarro hardly seemed fazed. “Is it that hard to believe that I’m capable of making a fool of myself?”
Not quite, but the idea of him tripping ass-first into the smoldering remains of one of the cook fires wasn’t exactly an easy one to believe. Let alone try and picture.
“I was seventeen,” he said. “Barely grown into my own paint and still prone to underestimating the strength of Lowland wine.”
“Let me guess,” Aloy sighed, “if you hear the story spreading around the Grove, you’ll have me thrown into the Arena with nothing but a toy bow.”
He let out a good-natured snort. “For one thing, you’d probably consider that a good day’s exercise rather than an execution. And I’m sure there are plenty of soldiers here in the Grove who have heard the story more than once. It happens to be one of Dekka’s favorites. She credits my younger self with more than a few of her first silver hairs.”
Rumors seemed to be the least of his worries. Maybe that was for the best. After all, it didn’t seem to take long for them to spread all the way from the barracks to the cook fires.
Aloy kept her hands busy carving a few arrowheads. At the very least it made the time feel productive. It helped the walls feel a bit less stifling. She studied the latest of them as she honed it to a deadly point. “There’s another rumor I’m wondering about, actually,” she mused.
“Is there?”
“I heard a while back that Marshal Chekkatah was one of the few people to hand you a defeat, back during the clan wars.” Hekarro nodded, and Aloy continued her carving. “But a soldier told me once that he beat you in an arm-wrestling match too.”
The memory seemed to be a pleasant one, from the way Hekarro’s expression relaxed. “Not only did he best me in that, he insisted it be a condition of his Kulrut.”
Aloy snorted before she could help it. “Excuse me?”
“He completed it in the traditional way, of course. But after he’d proved himself victorious in the arena, he approached me and insisted that he couldn’t accept the title of Marshal until he had tested my strength firsthand. A fight to the death would have been rather…counterproductive in the moment, so…”
He trailed off with a deferential nod that left Aloy staring at him in utter bemusement. “And he won?”
“Honorably. Though…the Chaplains were all in agreement that his victory gave him no claim to the throne.”
“You’re shitting me,” she blurted, for the second time in less than twenty minutes.
“Ikkotah will tell the tale the very same way,” Hekarro insisted. “I have no doubt. It was always a favorite of Chekkatah’s after a drink or two of Bulwark Blaze.” His expression shifted, and before Aloy could try to suss out just what it meant, he was speaking again. “I met Ikkotah only once, years ago. He seems like quite the good man. Unsurprising, for a Marshal as honorable as Chekkatah.”
It was odd, watching Chief Hekarro, of all people, reminiscing about old friends like they were relaxing around the last smoldering embers of a late-night fire. She almost wished they had some tokeweed to pass between them, to fit the mood even more.
In absence of that, Aloy took a breath and allowed herself to risk a more intriguing line of conversation. They had time to kill, after all. May as well try and keep it interesting.
“Doesn’t seem like being a Marshal made building a relationship like that easy. But they managed it.” The idea of it made her chest cinch when Kotallo’s damn smile tripped through her memory again. She shook it off. “Would that kind of thing be different for a Commander? Or…”
Or a Chief?
She left that part out, but he seemed to hear it anyway. He held her gaze for a moment longer than was comfortable, unblinking until one eyebrow gently arched.
“That’s brazen even for you, Champion.” She was about to open her mouth to start stammering around some damage control, but his posture was still relaxed back against the wall behind him. “Clan Commanders are hardly barred from taking a mate.” He paused. Poignantly. “The same would apply to anyone. Of any rank.”
“But you’ve never…”
Stop fucking talking, Aloy.
Hekarro stared at her. It seemed she was going from brazen to obnoxious in his mind, judging from the line carving itself into his forehead.
“No,” he finally said, surprising her. It took her a moment to realize that she had no clue just what question he was answering.
“No?”
“Not formally.”
Whatever that meant. Aloy knew better than to keep digging. She glanced back at the slowly flickering readout above the console to her left, where the time stared back at her as it ticked by one painfully silent second at a time.
Her legs were getting restless.
It seemed her mouth hadn’t gotten the message about knowing better, because she was speaking again before she could stop herself. “What about informally?” Hekarro huffed – even more like a Trampler that time – and Aloy raised her hands. “Brazen. Got it.”
He stared at her, far longer than was comfortable, and she was just starting to feel the urge to fidget when he sighed. “I can hardly stop your mind from working.”
“It’s not like I can guess on a whim,” Aloy relented with a smile. “But…informally?”
He held her gaze. “Informally.”
It hung there for a moment before Aloy grasped at it.
“And this person…is she…or he…”
Hekarro sighed. “She.”
“So…she…” Aloy waited a breath, and Hekarro relented with a subtle nod. “She’s someone you’ve known a long time, probably.” It made the most sense – Hekarro didn’t seem like the kind of man who would flit from one lover to the next on a whim. It was an odd thing to imagine nonetheless.
Hekarro in love.
She was intrigued.
Aloy narrowed her eyes, turning her thoughts over one by one like she was scrolling through half-legible data, trying to make sense of it. “Is she…still alive?”
She tried to ask the question gently.
Hekarro surprised her by laughing, arms draped loosely across his knee. His pose was oddly relaxed at first glance – his shoulders pressed against the ancient stone, fingers tapping against his own calf. But a closer look revealed his spine was ramrod-straight and his gaze sharp. Still, he indulged in a thoughtful little tilt of his head.
“Very much so,” he told her.
A real answer. A pleasant surprise.
“But you aren’t together,” Aloy mused.
He wordlessly shook his head, his expression unreadable.
“Because she…didn’t feel the same way?” she said. Hekarro watched her, silent and pensive. “Or maybe she did. Maybe it was because of distance? Or duty.”
The last word seemed to send a shock through him, making him press back against the wall as he drew a slow breath. Aloy studied him.
“Because of her rank,” she breathed. Suddenly it all fell into place. “As a Marshal? Or a Commander—”
Hekarro pushed himself to his feet. “I’ve indulged this line of questioning about as far as I care to.”
Aloy’s next words were tripping past her lips before she could help it. “She’s impossible to find the first night of every visit to the Grove.”
“Pardon?” he quietly asked.
Aloy stood too, grinning in spite of herself. “Commander Atekka…I heard someone mention it. Whenever she arrives at the Grove, seems she’s notoriously hard to find until the following morning.”
She was halfway through that sentence when Hekarro strode toward her, and by the time she’d finished speaking, he was nearly toe to toe with her. It was only because he was so close that she spotted it – the slight twitch at the corner of his mouth. She wasn’t sure if it made him look more pained or impressed. Maybe it was a mixture of both.
“You have reached the limit of my patience with this subject, Champion,” he told her, lowly. His gaze was fixed on her and blazing, but his tone was steady and calm. “Choose another or we will be silent.”
A tender spot. She offered a quiet nod.
Instead of choosing a subject at all, she lapsed into silence, and Hekarro hardly seemed to mind. She didn’t either. She was used to the quiet. It was familiar. Comfortable, even. She cut a long, slow path from one end of the chamber to the other, back and forth, back and forth. Counting minutes and hoping that Kotallo wasn’t pacing too deep of a groove in the stone above.
Aloy’s fingers were sore and her head was aching. She’d crafted enough arrows to re-stock every quiver, and she was eager for some fresh air.
She pushed herself to her feet, striding over to the ladder and glancing up at the shaft above. Like she could somehow will it to open for them early. When that failed, she turned back toward Hekarro again.
“I’m halfway tempted to blast it open and be done with it.”
He looked amused. Maybe even a little tempted himself. Like her, though, the temptation was snuffed out quickly by good sense and caution. And maybe a mutual aversion to being buried under a pile of ancient rubble.
“Just how much time is left on our sentence?” Hekarro asked her, his tone marked with equal parts levity and fatigue. He masked the latter well, but she could hardly blame him, oppressively stuffy as it was getting.
“Little under an hour from the looks of it,” she sighed. “Almost wish I was slower at fletching. Could have killed more time.”
He was kneeling down to pick up one of her freshly crafted arrows, running his finger appraisingly along its shaft. “This is good work,” he mused. “One thing the Nora have always been known for, from what I hear.”
“I’m not Nora,” she answered before she gave it a second thought. It almost came all on its own.
“So you’ve said.”
She shrugged. “Not…not in any way that matters at least. I was raised by a Nora. An outcast Nora…” Aloy stared down at her cuticles and cleared her throat. “Anyway, they went from shunning me to deifying me, and I’m not sure which was worse.”
Yes she did.
She shook her head. “I grew up outside the settlements. On the edge of the Embrace. Ah…the Nora—”
“Sacred Lands,” Hekarro finished. “I’ve heard of them, though few Tenakth have ever seen them firsthand. Though I was lucky enough to meet a Nora warrior, many years ago.”
Aloy gaped at him. “A Nora warrior? This far west?”
“It was far before I was even within sight of the throne. A Nora soldier – a Nora Brave – was captured just outside Thornmarsh.” There was a contemplative quirk at the corner of his mouth, making him look almost playful as he recounted the memory. “The guards very nearly killed him on site, but he requested the chance to parlay.”
“He knew how to ask?”
“I wondered how he knew as much when my scouts brought him to me. His understanding of our ways saved his life, and I could tell he was acutely aware of that. Still, when he was brought before me he only asked for one thing.”
“Which was?”
“A game of Strike.” Hekarro let his half-smile grow into a proper one. “At the time it seemed like he intended to play for his freedom.”
“Did it work?” Aloy asked, unable to resist. “Did he win?”
“I agreed to the match,” Hekarro said with a shrug. “He’d impressed me already with his knowledge of our customs. I admit he…intrigued me. He had to play with borrowed pieces, but he managed well enough.”
Aloy’s eyes narrowed. “Still haven’t told me who won.”
Hekarro smiled at her. “It matters less than what we spoke about while the match carried on. To be honest, I almost didn’t believe he was Nora at all, far as he was from home. From what little I understood of the tribe and its people, few were ever encouraged to stray from the borders of their territory.”
“That’s one way to put it,” Aloy sighed. “Reined in from leaving is closer.”
“He said something similar, if memory serves.” Hekarro seemed to mention it fondly, but his expression turned somber before he drew his next breath. “He was seeking something far west of Barren Light, he said. He never put a name to it, but I understood well enough. He described himself as a Death-Seeker.”
The second he said it, Aloy felt like the earth had frozen in its orbit. The walls crammed their way in toward her, making her struggle to remember to breathe. When she finally did, she fought to keep her expression neutral as she rasped, “H-his name.”
Hekarro stared at her.
Aloy drew a shuddering breath. “The Nora Brave…was his name Rost?”
That look in his eye…for a moment, it almost seemed Hekarro could sense the way her lungs were seizing around the question. It echoed in the quiet chamber, hanging there until he nodded. “That was the name he gave me, yes. You knew him.”
“I…I did. Did he ah…” Aloy cleared her throat. “Did he ever tell you what he was doing out west? Who he was looking for?”
“No,” Hekarro hummed, looking pensive. He was studying her. “But I know how revenge burns in a man’s eye. I saw it there across the Strike board, hot as blaze.” He dragged his index finger across his thumb nail, holding her gaze. “Beyond that, I sensed it wasn’t for me to know. Perhaps that still holds true now.”
Maybe it did. Aloy rounded her shoulders and allowed herself to rest her forehead against her knuckles. “Death-Seekers don’t typically…return home after they do what they set out to do.” She fixed her gaze on the stone below. “He did. Technically, at least. But as far as the tribe was concerned, he was—”
“Already dead,” Hekarro finished, his expression solemn.
“Right,” Aloy forced out. Her voice felt unexpectedly rough, scratching against her throat when she tried to continue. She shook her head and pressed a fist against her solar plexus. It seemed to be the brute force she needed to find her voice again. “He lived outside the settlements as an outcast, away from the tribe. Alone. For years. Until…”
Understanding sparked in Hekarro’s eyes. Aloy picked at a ragged edge on her thumbnail.
“He taught me how to hunt, how to track, how to…survive.” She didn’t look up even when she heard Hekarro move closer. “He died.”
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d actually said the words.
“How?” Hekarro asked plainly.
“The Shadow Carja. The cultists that were…trying to wake HADES…” She swallowed past a lump in her throat, pacing halfway across the chamber before she realized just how dry her mouth was. She reached for her water skin. “…who attacked the…the spire at Meridian…”
For a moment, she swore she felt hot flames against her face. Snow on her back. Her palms scraping against stone. Her chest seized. Her stomach clenched. Her hands trembled as she struggled to swallow a sip of tepid water.
“It’s why I left the Embrace. Why I came west at all. What led me to Helis in Meridian.”
She scratched at her own throat before she realized what she was doing at all. Her nostrils flooded with the stinging scent of blaze smoke and her head swam.
No. No, no, no dammit. Not now. Not here. She refused to let herself fall apart so suddenly in front of the Chief of the damn Tenakth. But it seemed to be rising like a stubborn wave and there was nowhere for it to go. Nowhere for her to go.
She tried and failed to rein in her racing heart and pressed her hand against the cool stone instead. If she could just breathe. Breathe. Breathe, for fuck’s sake Aloy—
A firm hand pressed against her shoulder. It stayed there and wandered no further.
“Breathe in,” he said. Aloy was obeying before she could give it a second thought, and her lungs burned. Her breath burst out of her on her next exhale and she dragged another in that scratched on its way down.
That was when she smelled it, that unmistakable acrid edge. It lingered even as the memories faded. She tilted her head to one side, still not looking the Chief in the eye. “Is that…blaze smoke?” Her voice was rough, but steady. Aloy was thankful for that at least.
Hekarro was following her gaze a moment later, nodding toward the vents set in the stone above their heads. “There were Bellowbacks chained in the arena this afternoon,” he mused, looking thoughtful. “It should be around the time for the evening fights. Dusk.”
The arena. The blaze. The intake for the ventilation shafts must have been somewhere beneath the balcony overlooking the arena. It was odd, feeling relief wash over her at the realization – a strange, uncanny connection to the outside that served as a momentary tether.
And at least she hadn’t been imagining the smell.
The relief didn’t last. It was displaced by a cool clarity that worked its way up her spine and pressed against the base of her skull. One more whiff of that burning, biting smoke and the memory flooded in again.
Shame settled hot in her gut. She shouldn’t have said anything. She should have let it go, curiosity be damned. And now here she was, making a fool of herself for what felt like the hundredth time that day.
“If I must keep reminding you to breathe, Aloy, you’re going to be very sick of my voice by the time we make it out of here.”
She turned on her heel, facing him for the first time in what felt like too long. He was still watching her from a few paces away.
He arched one eyebrow. “Are you steady, Champion?”
She was. Surprisingly. Enough to hold herself up on her own feet, at least. The acrid smell of the blaze smoke still burned her nostrils and set a lingering thread of anxiety vibrating in her chest. She shook it off. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I’m…”
She reached for “fine.”
She settled on a shrug and hoped Hekarro wouldn’t press. Much to her relief, he didn’t.
Instead, he let out a sigh. “Atekka and I fought together from the first day of her formal training, when I had only just received my first ink.” Aloy picked her gaze up from her cuticles. She turned to look at him, finding him with his hands pressed against his hips, facing away from her with the torchlight casting long shadows across his cape.
“You were forthright,” he said with an easy nod. “Moreso than I think I’ve ever seen you. It only seems fair that I offer something in return, wouldn’t you agree?”
She almost laughed. It came out as something closer to a cough as she blinked. Well, it would be a waste not to take him at his word.
“Atekka mentioned something close to that once,” Aloy mused. “Since you were bare-armed youths, she said. You’ve known each other a long time then.”
“Decades. Far longer than is worth lingering on.”
Not just a tender spot. An old tender spot, Aloy quietly thought.
“For years we fought together like two warriors who shared a single beating heart,” Hekarro said, studying the rafters overhead. “That was how the stories described it, at least. She was my fiercest ally on the field of battle. My unyielding second in command when I led my first squad.”
An ally. A squadmate. Aloy studied him like she could uncover the words he’d left unsaid if she just looked hard enough.
He didn’t seem eager to say much more. And yet…he’d been the one to speak again, and something in his eyes made Aloy wonder why. It almost felt as if there was a part of him that wanted the story told, if only to indulge in the memory one more time. Indulgence didn’t fit him, she thought. But here he was, turning his words over and over in his mind before he finally shook his head.
“My first love,” he quietly admitted. Aloy stared at him. It took her far too long to realize that her mouth was hanging open and even longer for her to remedy it, but Hekarro hardly seemed to pay it any mind. “As much as I wish I could claim that’s a secret, it may be the worst kept one in some corners of the clanlands.”
It was the most vulnerable admission she’d heard from him all day. Maybe in all the time she’d known him. “Am I allowed to ask?” she quipped.
“I doubt you would hesitate either way,” he fired back. “Go on.”
“Why didn’t you ever…” Aloy sighed, shoulders rounding. “Couldn’t you…”
“A Chief claiming to stand for a united tribe, sharing a bed with the Commander of his home clan?” He arched a brow and shot her a look that said everything it needed to in less than a breath. The weight that rested across his shoulders seemed to double in the same moment. “There is no room for any formal pledge of that kind.”
That piqued Aloy’s attention. He knew it did, from the way he raised his guard. It didn’t dissuade her. “But…informally?”
Hekarro regarded her with a quiet, thoughtful gaze as he crossed his arms and let the silence linger. Finally, he sighed, “Informally…she’s impossible to find the first night she arrives at the Memorial Grove.” He ran his thumb along the edge of his vambrace, looking pensive. “As for courting her…well, we’ve accepted that’s best left for younger warriors now.”
She would have had to be blind to miss the way he looked pointedly at her when he said those words.
Aloy stared at her feet. “How would one go about…courting a Tenakth anyway?”
Hekarro studied her for a moment. A long moment. She resisted the urge to fidget. “That may depend on many things.”
“Such as?”
He leaned back against the stone, canting his head easily up toward the rafters. “A person’s home clan. Their position. Their reputation. An old Lowland tradition is a night of hunting in the Stand of the Sentinels.” A beat. “And the Sky Clan…I’ve heard from more than one soldier that they tend to be partial to a spar. At daybreak, if memory serves. Ideally in fresh snowfall.”
Aloy couldn’t help but think back on too many early-morning warmup sessions to count, just outside the Base’s eastern entrance. It had become something of a routine for a time. The first hints of sunlight had stained his skin such a warm, lovely shade of rosy orange and the frequent flurries had left an endearing touch of snow in his hair.
Hekarro drawing a thoughtful breath drew her attention again, and she fought back a burning in her cheeks.
“You hardly need my permission to court any of my Marshals,” he said plainly, and Aloy’s heart nearly stopped. “But I would ask you to be…candid with your intentions.”
“And by that you mean…”
“Tell the man, for fuck’s sake.”
Aloy stared at him, mouth agape. No matter how much she felt like a beached tuna, she couldn’t seem to force it shut again.
REBOOT COMPLETE. RELEASING HYDRAULING LOCKING MECHANISM. STAND CLEAR. STAND CLEAR. STAND—
The stilted, staticky voice cut out as a heavy metallic thunk rang through the entire chamber. It rattled Aloy all the way up to her teeth, and she scurried over to the base of the ladder just in time for light to pour in from above.
“Ah-ha!” she laughed, beckoning Hekarro over with a wide, delighted grin. “Free at last!” She nodded at the bottom rungs. “After you, Chief.”
He shot her a deferential – and unmistakably grateful – nod.
Aloy was only halfway up when noise erupted overhead, voices barking orders one over another until she could barely make out any one of them. She peeked over the ledge just in time to watch Dekka herding what looked like half the Grove out of the throne room, and Kotallo stopped mid-sentence to catch her eye over Hekarro’s shoulder.
She was grimacing as she hauled herself up. “Alright Marshal – let me have it.”
Kotallo glanced at Hekarro for a moment, and the two of them seemed to have a whole damn conversation in the next three seconds as they stared at one another. When Hekarro moved next it was to reach up and pat Kotallo on the temple before urging him over to her.
She felt her cheeks getting hot all over again. She played it off as nothing but a side-effect of a few hours in a hot, stuffy basement. Believable enough.
Kotallo shot her a questioning glance. “Let you have it?”
“This was…technically my fault.”
“Technically.”
“All my fault,” she sighed. “And I don’t exactly know the protocol for how to make amends for locking your Chief in a vault for a whole afternoon. Ah…so maybe I could just start with an apology?”
She stared at him, feeling hopeless. Kotallo let out a long sigh and stepped in closer, his hand brushing her bare elbow and making her shiver.
“Are you alright?” he asked, so gently that she almost tipped backwards down the shaft below. She shook it off just long enough to step down off the dais with him.
“Yeah,” she insisted. “Fine. We both are. It…wasn’t bad conversation, actually.”
“I’m not surprised.” Kotallo was smiling, a little enigmatically. It made heat swoop in Aloy’s stomach.
But he was looking back at Hekarro as he was swarmed by Dekka and about ten other people wearing every shade of paint Aloy had ever seen in the clanlands. She returned Kotallo’s touch from earlier, reaching out and brushing his arm before she thought better of it, and his attention fixed itself on her once more.
“You should go,” she relented. “Damage control?”
His smile was back, a small and earnest thing. With that and a quiet nod, he started down the steps, but Aloy couldn’t quite release her grip on his wrist.
When he turned to look back at her again, she worried at her lip. Hekarro was staring at her. She could tell even without looking. It practically felt like a stalker laser burning into the side of her skull.
She swallowed and glanced up at Kotallo again. “Meet me tomorrow morning for a spar?” she forced out. “At daybreak?”
For a moment, she thought she’d left Kotallo well and truly speechless. The lasers boring into her skull abated.
“I know it won’t be snowing this far south, but…”
Kotallo seemed to choke on whatever he was trying to say. Aloy reeled.
“I…I’m trying to ask you to…Kotallo, I want to…ah…”
Fuck this. She was too far in to bail out now. Before she could second-guess herself, she pressed up on her toes, grasped Kotallo’s collar, and leaned in. Don’t overthink it. Don’t overthink it.
She was kissing him.
She was kissing him and he wasn’t pushing her away.
She was kissing him and he was kissing her back. Just for a moment. Little more than a breath before he gently pressed his palm to her jaw and drew back.
“At daybreak,” he said, fighting to keep his voice steady from the sound of it. Aloy tried and failed to calm her racing heart as he shot her a wide, warm smile. It may as well have stopped altogether when he pressed the pad of his thumb against her bottom lip, like he was trying to seal in the feeling of his mouth on hers. “I will meet you then. And I will see to this properly.”
Aloy swayed a bit on her feet as he all but forced himself away. He was still smiling at her over his shoulder as he made his way across the throne room, and she forced herself to draw another breath.
Well. That was that.
Hekarro, at least, seemed to have given them some space. When he’d taken his leave, she wasn’t sure. She’d been a little distracted.
Dusk settled into night, and to calm her racing mind as it turned over and over and over the thought of the morning to come, Aloy hiked to the training grounds just beyond the arena and spent some of those arrows she’d crafted down in the AETHER chamber. Kalla had been more than happy to leave the training targets up for her, grinning as she’d clapped Aloy on the shoulder and told her to “give Marshal Kotallo a spar he’ll never forget.”
Word traveled fast. She would have been a fool to expect any differently.
“Trying to quiet a racing mind?” came a familiar voice from behind her, and she turned on her heel just in time to spot the Chief himself. He was leaning against the nearby gate, studying her with an undeniable warmth in his expression.
“I’m…” She reached for another excuse, but it was worse than fruitless. She relented with a sigh. “When I suggested a spar at daybreak I didn’t exactly realize that would mean…waiting until morning,” she muttered.
Hekarro’s laugh cut through the humid evening air, and he waved off one of his personal guard as he stepped up beside her. “He’s an honorable man. You hardly need a reminder of that. He holds tradition close to his heart.”
A beat of comfortale silence later, he shot her a playful grin and mused, “And a bit of lingering tension can be far from a bad thing. Under the right circumstances.”
Aloy’s face blazed so hot that she thought she’d topple right over into the sand, but Hekarro was already stepping toward her again and holding something out to her. She blinked at it, taking in the image of his fingers wrapped around the grip of a beautifully crafted bow.
“That’s…a Nora bow,” she mused before she could help herself.
Hekarro offered an affirmative hum and waited for her to take it. She did and studied it closely, running her fingers along the grain and testing the tension on the string. It was immaculate, and yet obviously old.
“It was entrusted to me when I was still Commander of the Lowlands. It’s only right that it return to one of its former wielder’s blood.”
The implication of what he was saying made Aloy’s chest ache, and she stared at the bow in her hands as she tried and failed to find a single word that fit the feelings swirling between her ribs. Her fingers curled around the wood, thumb tracing the perfectly carved line up its arm.
“He…I wasn’t his blood…he raised me, but I—”
“To the Tenakth there’s no difference. You may not be Nora, but you are his blood in every way that matters. And in either case, the bow is yours. Do with it what you feel you must.”
“I…” Aloy lowered it, cradling it against her palms and forcing her breathing to keep steady until her eyes stopped burning. “Thank you.”
Hekarro turned to go with little more than a nod, but just a heartbeat later he hesitated. For a moment, he lingered, almost seeming to second-guess himself. Aloy was intrigued as she watched him, and finally, he turned to face her again.
“What I told you,” he mused, “about my brother’s tags.”
“Back in Thornmarsh,” Aloy said with a nod. Hekarro returned it.
“I was telling the truth when I said I felt no need to keep them with me. But I would be lying if I claimed it ran no deeper than that.” He let out a sigh. “I said that my brother is gone. What I should have said was that my brother is here.”
Hekarro pressed his fingers against his own sternum. Aloy studied them where his nails scraped across the vibrant blue ink there, and when she glanced back up at his face again she found him waiting for her attention.
“I carry his memory,” he told her. His expression was suddenly…drawn somehow. Vulnerable in a way that seemed foreign to him. “Hanging his tags marked his death, and I mourned as I needed to. But my brother would have hardly wanted me to mourn his death once, let alone doing so time and time again. In some ways, distance can be a salve as much as time.”
Aloy was pressing her nails into her own palms as a distraction from the tightness coiling in her chest when Hekarro reached out to touch her arm. She forced herself to look at him again, and he offered her a small, quiet smile.
It looked…sad. So much so that Aloy’s throat ached.
“Though pain can still reach out across both. You understand that as well as anyone else, I think.” He glanced down at the bow in her hands. “Rost seemed like a man who fought bravely and loved fiercely.” He squeezed her arm once before letting it go. “I have no doubt he did both for those he held dear, Aloy. Including you.”
There was no stopping the tears that forced their way down her cheeks when she tried to pull in her next breath. She wiped them away quickly and Hekarro didn’t say a word about them. “Thank you,” she choked again. Another moment more and she’d managed to get her shoulders straight again.
This time, he truly did turn to go. But he stopped once more to look at her over his shoulder. “Kotallo has always struck me as someone with those same qualities as well,” he mused, and he quirked one eyebrow as her ears went pink. “Rest where you can, Champion. And treat my Marshal with care, if you would. He is one of my best after all.”
Pride thumped in her chest, and she was smiling before she knew it.
As for sleep, she didn’t have much hope. He knew that damn well, she bet. He was already halfway down the path when she called after him. “Give Commander Atekka my regards, Chief.”
He didn’t turn, but she swore she saw the closest of his personal guard choke back a laugh.