Chapter 62: Nobody Had Stolen the Mouthy One

Dove carried the notice into the diner with Thorne beside her. "If he’s claiming Thorne stole me, he can explain why he threw me out before my mate ever reached the gate."

The courier looked embarrassed, but he did not put the folded notice away. His wolf ears remained flattened above hair still damp from shifting. He said the paper had reached a northern relay before the storm closed the road, and the description was difficult to mistake.

Thorne stood beside her with one hand on the empty counter. Dove could feel how still he had become. She touched his wrist once, then asked to read the actual words before anybody improved them by guessing.

The notice named her as a female removed from the Warren’s protection while under investigation. It described Thorne as interfering with the settlement’s authority and asked road crews to hold them for return. Garran’s name appeared beneath it. Ash’s did not.

"That lying asshole," Dove said. "He locked me outside, and now he wants me arrested for leaving?"

She fetched the signed expulsion order and Ash’s earlier instruction. The keeper read both beside the courier, while Thorne waited for her to finish explaining. Varek had witnessed the first order and had fetched Thorne after objecting to the second. None of that required the keeper to believe a love story. It required him to read two dates and two signatures.

The courier swore quietly. "I wasn’t going to put you in a harness and drag you north. I needed to ask."

"Then thank you for asking me. You’d be amazed how advanced that makes you in the field."

The keeper said nobody would remove her from his shelter on Garran’s say-so. He offered to make copies and send them with the next northbound message. Dove accepted, keeping the originals and asking him to include her own statement that she had chosen Thorne freely.

She did not include her next destination yet. She wanted Ash to know what his deputy had done, but she had no intention of giving Garran a helpful route map before learning who would receive it.

Edrik had listened from beside the doorway. When the courier left for food, the bear asked why a deputy had been allowed to sign an order like that while the leader was away. The question was aimed at the papers, not at Dove’s behavior, and she liked it more than the answer available.

"Because people thought someone else would stop him," she said, feeling Thorne’s hand cover hers. He did not argue with that explanation. He had come when Varek found him, and the fact that he had come still left several men who had not.

While the keeper copied the papers, an argument started at the next table. Tavin, the goat beastman who carried meals from the kitchen, was holding a metal cup beneath a worker’s nose. The worker kept pulling his hand away, insisting it was too hot to touch.

"Tavin, that’s cold water," Oren, the hare who traded his daily jar of salve, said from his stool. "I just poured it."

"I told him it was boiling," Tavin answered. He sounded frightened rather than proud. "I wanted him to stop reaching across me. Now he won’t believe anything else."

Dove looked at the cup. No steam rose from it. Oren touched the side, then put his fingers in the water while the worker stared as though the hare had shoved his hand into a stove.

"New ability observed: Persuasion," Sprout said. "The user can convince others of anything."

Dove’s stomach tightened. A man could make nonsense sound true, in a building where everyone had opinions about what she ought to do. She moved closer to Thorne and repeated the warning quietly. His hand found hers beneath the counter.

"Don’t try it on anyone else," the keeper told Tavin. "Tell him the truth."

Tavin faced the worker again. "The water is cold. I was wrong about it being hot."

The worker touched the cup, then swore. He looked from his wet fingers to the goat man, angry now that he understood what had happened. Tavin apologized twice, leaving the cup on the table as though he wanted nothing more to do with it.

Dove asked when it had started. That morning, he said, with an argument over a blanket. She did not decide that explained Garran or every bad choice at the Warren. This was a man standing in front of her, with a new ability they had just watched work.

"Then you ask before you try it again," Dove said. "You don’t get to climb inside somebody’s head just because arguing didn’t work."

The keeper made Tavin sit with Oren while they discussed what had happened. He would speak to the shelter before anyone mistook an impossible claim for useful advice. Dove kept hold of Thorne’s hand while collecting her copied papers.

In their room, she stored the originals safely and returned the borrowed wrapping to the keeper at the door. When she shut it again, Thorne was waiting beside the pad. He asked what Sprout had told her about Persuasion, and she repeated the words without adding guesses about how far it could reach.

Thorne said Tavin shouldn’t use it around her, and Dove added that nobody should be made to want something without knowing whether the choice was theirs.

She sat beside him and leaned into his arm. Thorne already knew how her shop worked. She did not need to explain Sprout again; she needed someone else to understand why this new gift had made her want a locked door.

"Your reactions are yours," she said quietly. "The coins measure them. They don’t make you feel anything."

He told her he remembered their talk at the mall, kissed her temple, and settled her closer without asking for another explanation. She let herself stay there. Being believed should not have felt like such an extravagant thing to want, but she was tired enough to appreciate it without making a joke first.

Sprout eventually offered to organize a mate-support schedule. Dove rejected it so firmly that Thorne asked what it had suggested. She told him the system wanted to manage their love life like a shop supervisor assigning lunch breaks.

Thorne suggested telling it they were closed, which made her laugh against his shoulder. Outside, the wind finally dropped enough for them to hear the roof settling. Someone knocked twice, and the keeper called through the door that a different message had arrived from the north.

This one carried Ash’s name, and it ordered Garran to stop giving commands.