Torven exhaled through his nose. "The farms that burned last month—were those your shots?"
"Some," she said. "Not all. The geas does not always need my consent to aim me. Sometimes it only needs a commander who says sure hit and a dragon who looks like a problem instead of a prisoner."
"Vaelith," Torven said quietly.
Serenya looked at him.
"The dragon has a name in the old lists," he said. "Vaelith of the Ember Seam. Bound three generations ago after the siege of Highmarsh, not because it started the siege, but because both sides decided a living furnace was too useful to leave free. My mother wrote the name in the margin of a ledger I was not supposed to read. I remembered it when the medallion caught the light."
Callen sat down hard on a bench. "We nearly killed a prisoner because the maps called it a weapon."
"We nearly completed a ritual that would have killed the prisoner and locked the archer harder into the lattice," Torven said. "The farms would still have smoked. The difference is that afterward there would have been less of Serenya left to argue about it."
Serenya tasted bitterness. "Do not speak of me as if I am already half gone."
"I speak of you as someone I almost erased with an order," Torven said. "If that offends your dignity, good. Keep the offense. It may be sharper than my apology."
She held his gaze until the lamp smoked and Callen cleared his throat again, the eternal third voice in rooms where two people were inventing new ways to bruise each other with honesty.
From a side alcove came a dry flutter, like pages remembering wind. Serenya turned. An old woman stood there who had not been there when they entered—or who had been, if stone and patience counted as presence. Her hair was white and braided tight. She wore a grey robe marked at the collar with a dragonfly so faded it looked like a bruise. Her eyes were ordinary brown. No glow. That, somehow, made her more frightening.
"The door-word still works," the woman said. "I am almost disappointed. I had begun to hope the ridge had forgotten how to invite trouble inside."
Torven bowed, not deeply, but with the respect of a man who recognized a living remnant of the work he had inherited in pieces. "Warden-mother."
"I am Orlaeth," she said. "I am not anyone's mother unless they insist on being foolish in my hall. You brought the bow-line and the Ashmark boy and a polished spare. You also brought the smell of a nearly finished binding. Sit. Or stand and bleed on my floor if you prefer drama. I have mopped worse."
Callen made a sound that might have been a laugh if it had been braver. They sat.
Orlaeth took the lamp and held it near Serenya's face without touching her. "The glow sleeps. Good. If it slept because the shot landed, you would be hollow by morning and Vaelith would be ash with a tidy moral attached for the mapmakers. Instead you are angry. Anger is a better vessel."