Chapter 4: The Hush Tide
The water did not answer her the way the sea at home did, but it was close enough that Wren's chest ached the first moment she saw it.
Riven had said only that he wanted to show her somewhere, no explanation offered beyond that, and had arranged, through some quiet negotiation with Priska that Wren did not fully understand, an afternoon free of her usual duties. They walked out past the last terraced garden of the household grounds and down a narrow path she had never been shown, through a stand of trees that grew taller and stranger the further they went, trunks pale as bone, leaves that caught the light and held it, glowing faintly from within like something had swallowed the sun and not quite finished digesting it.
"Emberwood," Riven said, when she asked. "I don't bring people here."
"Why me, then."
He kept walking without answering, and Wren studied the back of him as they went, the careful way he moved through the trees, ducking branches that did not need ducking, hand occasionally brushing the pale bark as though greeting something he had not seen in a long time. There was a version of him out here she had not met yet in the household, looser through the shoulders, quieter in a way that had nothing to do with caution. She thought of the soldiers at the Emberball match, their careless talk, the way he had simply walked into the dark rather than let them see what it cost him, and understood, watching him now, that Emberwood must be the place he went instead of walking into the dark. It was, she realized, the closest thing to a confession he had offered her without words at all.
"I used to think everyone here was the same shape of cruel," she said, when the silence had stretched long enough that she trusted her voice not to shake. "I'm starting to think that isn't true. I don't know what to do with that yet."
"Neither do I," Riven admitted, glancing back at her, something unguarded flickering across his face before he caught it and put it away again. "I've spent a long time being useful to my brothers because it was safer than being anything else. I don't entirely know how to be around someone who might want more from me than that."
"I'm not asking you to be useful to me."
"I know." A small, almost startled huff of breath, not quite a laugh. "That might be the strangest part."
He didn't answer that directly, only kept walking, and Wren let the silence sit, because she was learning, with him, that silence was not always refusal. Sometimes it was only a man deciding, slowly, how much of himself he could afford to hand over.
The trees opened onto a wide, still pool fed by some hidden spring, its surface so calm it held the glowing canopy above it in perfect, doubled reflection, so that for one disorienting moment Wren felt as though she were standing at the center of two forests, one right side up and one down, with the water as the only seam between them.
"They call it the Hush Tide," Riven said. "It's mine. Or it was, before anyone thought to ask whether a Ward could own anything, which was before any of us were Wardens at all." He crouched at the water's edge, one hand trailing the surface, and for the first time since she'd known him he looked less like a man carrying a weight and more like a man setting one down, briefly, somewhere he trusted it wouldn't be stolen. "I used to come here when I was young. Before Ironhold, before any of this. I still come here when I need to remember there's a version of me that existed before I became what everyone needs me to be."
Wren sat beside him, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched, and found she didn't want to move away. "Tell me," she said. "Whatever it is you won't say out loud anywhere else. I won't repeat it. I don't have anyone to repeat it to."
He was quiet for a long time, long enough that the light through the canopy shifted perceptibly, and when he spoke it came out low and careful, the voice of a man handling something sharp.
"The Aeríne took me when I was younger than you are now. Not stole, exactly. Claimed, the way Ironhold claims arrivals through the Veilrent, except their law runs the other direction. Any male child born within a day's flight of their border can be called for the Anchor rotation if the Wells run low enough. Mine did. I spent six years tied into a Well that was failing faster than they could stabilize it, feeding it whatever the Aether crisis demanded a body give up, until there was so little of me left that even they decided I wasn't worth keeping anymore and let me go." His hand had gone still on the surface of the water. "I came back to Ironhold with scars I couldn't explain to anyone who hadn't been there, and I found that Ironhold's answer to what happened to me was to offer me a different kind of ownership instead, one where I got to hold the leash instead of wear it. My brothers built this household out of the wreckage of what was left of me, and I told myself, for a long time, that having power over someone else was not the same thing as what had been done to me." He looked at her then, and something in his face had gone raw and unguarded in a way she hadn't seen from him before. "It was still the same thing. I only understood that properly the day they brought you into the intake room, and I watched you ask to go home, and I recognized the exact shape of what I used to feel standing where you were standing."
Wren did not reach for him right away. She let the confession sit in the space between them, honoring the size of it, and only after a long moment did she say, quietly, "That's not your fault. What happened to you."
"I know that. Knowing it and living inside it are different things."
"I know that too." She turned toward him fully now, drawing her knees up, watching the doubled forest tremble on the water's surface. "My father went out on a clear morning and never came back, and the sea took him without asking anyone's permission, and I still love it more than I've ever loved anything on land, because it's the one place I get to choose how much risk I take. Nobody chose for me. That's the whole of it. It isn't about the water being safe. It's about the choosing." She looked at him. "You didn't get a choice, either time. Not with the Aeríne, and not really with this, if what you're telling me is true, that your brothers built all of this out of what was left of you rather than out of anything you actually wanted."
"I chose you," Riven said, and then seemed startled by his own words, as though he'd meant to say something smaller and this had come out instead. "I mean. I chose to bring you here. That much, at least, was mine to choose."
"Why?"
"Because you're the first thing in years that's made me want to remember who I was before I stopped being allowed to want anything." His voice had gone rough. "You ask people how they are. You noticed I didn't look at you and you asked why instead of assuming I was simply cruel. Nobody's done that for me since before the Wells. I don't know what to call the thing I feel when you do it, but it isn't nothing, and it frightens me more than the Wells ever did."
Something in Wren's chest went warm and heavy at once, a feeling she recognized only distantly, from before, from a life that had involved crushes on boys at the harbor who had never once made her feel the way one honest sentence from this careful, wounded man had just made her feel. "It isn't nothing to me either," she admitted, the words costing her something to say out loud, because saying them made them real in a way that silence never had. "I keep telling myself not to feel anything here that isn't survival. It's not working very well where you're concerned."
Riven looked at her for a long moment, searching her face for something, permission maybe, or proof that she meant it, and Wren, understanding what he was looking for, closed the small distance between them herself rather than making him ask.
The kiss was brief, gentle, more a question answered than a claim staked, his hand coming up to rest, feather light, against her jaw as though he expected her to pull away and wanted to make it easy for her if she did. She didn't pull away. When they parted, both of them a little breathless, a little disbelieving, Wren felt something stir low in her chest, warm and strange, a heat that had nothing to do with the flush climbing her throat, a small bright ember of sensation she could not name and did not, in that moment, try to.
"I'm not broken," she said softly, mostly to herself, marveling at the discovery. "I thought this place had already taken that from me. Being able to feel something that isn't fear."
"You were never broken," Riven said, low. "I want that to be true for both of us, someday."
They sat by the water until the light through the canopy began to dim toward evening, talking of small things now, her father's boat, his six brothers who were not truly his brothers, the strange doubled forest reflected on the Hush Tide's surface, and it was only as they finally rose to make the walk back that Wren caught, at the very edge of the trees, the faint impression of movement where nothing should have been moving at all, a shift in shadow too deliberate to be wind.
"Riven." She kept her voice low, gripping his sleeve. "Someone's watching us."
He went still instantly, every trace of the softness from moments before folding itself away behind a soldier's stillness, and scanned the tree line with narrowed eyes. Whatever, or whoever, had been there was already gone, no sound of retreat, no further sign, only the settling quiet of Emberwood closing back over itself as though it had never been disturbed at all.
"Could have been an animal," Riven said, though his voice didn't quite believe it, and his hand did not leave the hilt at his belt for the rest of the walk home.
Wren said nothing, but the warmth in her chest had gone cold and watchful now, replaced by the old, familiar caution she had carried since her first hour on Kaelith, and she found herself wondering, with a dread she couldn't quite name, exactly how much of what had just passed between them had been seen, and by whom, and what it might cost them both if the wrong person had been the one watching.
They walked the rest of the path in a silence that felt entirely different from the one that had carried them out here that afternoon, and it was only as the household lights came into view through the last thinning of trees that Wren became aware, for the first time since her fingers had touched the pulsing seam of light beneath the wreck, of a faint warmth low in her chest that had nothing to do with fear or with Riven's mouth against hers, a small persistent heat like a coal banked too close to catching, there and then gone again before she could decide whether she had imagined it. She pressed a hand flat over her sternum without meaning to, and Riven noticed, glancing sideways at her with a question in his face that she did not yet have an answer for.
"It's nothing," she said, though it did not feel like nothing, and she filed the sensation away with everything else she was learning to carry and not yet explain, one more strange unopened door in a house that seemed determined to keep giving her more of them than she could ever find time to walk through.