Chapter 51. My Poker Face Has Been Reviewed by a Fifteen-Year Expert, and It Failed

Chapter 51: 51. My Poker Face Has Been Reviewed by a Fifteen-Year Expert, and It Failed

I woke up... feeling like someone had taken my entire body, wrung it out like a wet towel, and then hung it on a fence to dry.

Goddamn... I know why those main characters who broke the limit are always feeling pain, and now... I do fucking get why.

Every muscle I owned was shaking. My forearms were a patchwork of purple and green bruises, my shoulder throbbed in time with my heartbeat, and when I tried to flex my fingers, they curled halfway and then just gave up, like a bunch of lazy employees on a Friday afternoon.

I lay there in the tent staring at the canvas roof and tried to remember what it had felt like to be a man who could climb a flight of stairs without a plan.

"Don’t move too fast," said a soft voice, and it was the bunny... my sweet Millie.

Millie was sitting cross-legged next to my bedroll with a bowl of warm water in her lap and a rag in her hand. She’d obviously been awake for hours.

Her hair was a mess, her eyes were red around the edges, and there were two faint gray smudges under them that made her look like she had lost a fight with a pillow and then refused to admit it.

"Mrrgghhh... Did you even sleep at all?" I croaked.

"A little..."

"Millie."

"A... very little."

"That’s not how sleep works... unless you just close your eyes and think about a dream."

She didn’t answer. She just dipped the rag in the water, wrung it out, and began to wipe the dried blood off my arm with slow, careful strokes.

Her ears were drooping a little, and she kept her eyes fixed on what she was doing, like if she looked up she might lose her grip on something.

Ding.

[LUST SYSTEM: DAILY STATUS]

[Host: Leon Levarion]

[Lust Energy: 57/100]

[Passive Decay: 2 per day. Injury penalty suspended.]

[Current Condition: Recovering]

Fifty-seven. I looked at the number for a while.

My injuries had improved enough, thanks to Apex Physique and whatever Sylvara had done to my arms, that the doubled decay had stopped, which was the only piece of good news I’d had in a week.

Still, though... fifty-seven wasn’t a number you wanted to see when you lived on a countdown.

And because I am an idiot, and also because my brain had decided it was a great time to be hopeful, and so... I thought a very reasonable thought.

’Maybe I could just top up with Millie or Elsbeth.’

’Skip the whole new partner thing.’

The reply hit me like a slap.

[Completed requirements cannot be repeated.]

[New partner required.]

[Please stop asking.]

I put a hand over my face.

"What’s wrong?" Millie asked, alarmed.

"Nothing... I just remembered something embarrassing."

"Is it the carriage full of teddy bears again?"

"Nah... It’s a different embarrassing thing."

She looked at me for a second with her head tilted, and I could tell she knew I wasn’t telling her the whole truth. But she let it go, the way she was learning to do when she trusted me.

I felt a small, ugly twinge in my chest. I wasn’t lying to her, exactly.

I just wasn’t ready to explain that I was being nagged by a magical bureaucrat about my love life and that the bureaucrat had very firm opinions about who I was allowed to sleep with.

Millie finished my arm and set down the rag. Then she took my hand, the shaky one, in both of hers and looked at it.

"I was scared," she said quietly. "When you were fighting... I know you had to."

"But every time you got hit, I kept thinking... what if he stops being Leon?"

"Hm...? What do you mean by stopping being Leon? I am me!"

"You looked so... empty. Like there was nobody home." She swallowed. "I don’t want you to turn into that... Not because of me."

I didn’t make a joke. I thought about it, and I decided the truth was better.

"I was scared too," I said. "And I think that’s okay..."

"It means there’s still somebody home, hahaha." I squeezed her fingers as hard as I could, which wasn’t very hard. "I’ll try not to let you see it again, if I can help it, that is."

"I can’t promise that I always can in any kind of situation."

"That’s fair," she said, and she leaned forward and rested her forehead against my shoulder for a moment.

The tent flap rustled. And I saw Bonette ducked inside with a steaming mug in one hand and my cloak draped over her arm, and she took in the scene with a single sweeping glance.

"Ah," she said. "The wounded hero and his nurse... Very touching."

"Here... I have tea."

"Is it poisonous?" I asked.

"Not today, Sir of Questionable Judgment."

"That’s not even my title," I said, making a judge look.

"It is now... I have decided." She set the mug in my good hand and held up the cloak.

She had sewn up the tear in the shoulder in neat, tiny stitches and washed out most of the blood. "It was a very ugly cloak when I started, and now it is slightly less ugly... You are welcome."

"Whoa~!" I stared at it. "You mended it?"

"Someone had to, you know... You would have gone into battle with a hole in your shoulder and called it ventilation."

She was right, and I hated it. I took a sip of the tea, which tasted faintly of mint and lawn clippings... ah shit, this is bussin’! And then I looked at her over the rim of the mug.

She was bustling around the tent, straightening a blanket, fussing over a stray thread while humming something under her breath. Almost feel like a maid, and I don’t want to call her that.

I respect women who know how to do work like that.

And then I start to look at her again. She was small and plain and warm, and a few hours earlier I had watched her stand on a cliff in the dark whispering to a thread of silver light.

I didn’t know what I’d seen... I told myself that.

I’d turned it over a hundred times during the night, and every time, I came up with a reasonable explanation.

Maybe she was praying...? Or she was grieving.

I can clearly hear that she was talking to the queen she’d lost, in the only way she knew how. There were a thousand innocent reasons for a woman to stand alone under the moon, and I knew exactly how it felt to suspect someone you liked.

But I also knew that the voice in the back of my head... the one that kept me alive when I was running from angry people, was not telling me to relax.

I said nothing... I drank my tea.

And I decided that if there was a knife somewhere in this story, I wasn’t going to be the one to pull it out of the drawer without being absolutely sure.

...

We buried the Nightclaw dead after breakfast.

There were two of them, a stocky woman with short brown ears named Hesta, and a lean young rider named Corvane who had joined the guard only last spring.

Velora had them wrapped in white cloth and laid in a hollow beneath the cliff, and she said the old words of House Nightclaw in a low, steady voice that never once cracked.

The rest of the riders stood at attention with their hands over their hearts.

Nobody wept.

They were soldiers, and they mourned the way soldiers do, in silence.

I really respect this culture more and more... And so I dug with all the respect I had for them.

I know I shouldn’t have... My hands were barely working, and Sylvara had told me three separate times to rest.

But I’d gotten two good people killed by bringing us into that canyon, or at least I felt like I had, and it seemed wrong to stand there with my arms folded.

So I picked up a shovel, held it in a grip that was about forty percent effective, and dug until my palms bled through the cloth.

Velora saw me. And she didn’t say anything.

She didn’t tell me to stop, and she didn’t thank me. But when the sun climbed high and the shade of the cliff began to shift, she walked over and, without a word, moved a pack so that the shadow fell across the spot where I was working.

Then she walked away, and I stood there with a lump in my throat and the strong sense that I’d just been paid a very expensive compliment.

Afterward, she gathered her riders and counted.

Two dead.

Five wounded, three of them badly enough that they could no longer fight.

That left thirteen riders who could still hold a sword, and one of them had a broken wrist that she was pretending was a sprain.

Velora’s face was perfectly blank as she said it, but I saw the muscle jump in her jaw. She wasn’t angry at me or at anyone in particular.

She was angry at the situation, at the math, and at the stupid, cruel arithmetic of a war that kept subtracting.

Sylvara looked worse than any of us. Holding the Nightfall Veil over twenty-three Wolfkin for most of a day had drained her down to the dregs, and she moved like a woman walking through deep water.

Her witch hat was gone, and her hair was a tangled lavender cloud. The little lights that usually followed her around had shrunk to three tired sparks that drifted behind her like sulking children.

"I cannot keep holding them," she told Velora, in a voice like frayed silk. "Not like this... I will fall over."

"Then what do you propose...?"

"Anchors."