Page 56 of The Shattered Rite
Names make graves in the mind. This one made purchase.
Eliryn.The syllables cut clean. More important was the way the room breathed when she said it. People lean toward a fire before they remember to be afraid of it. The staff did that—leaned, then blinked like they’d caught themselves. He did not care to share the first speaking of her name with flour-stained hands and boys with soft bones. But he took what was given.
The dragon brushed him—lazy, confident, a claw across glass.
He tasted the old impulse to dismiss all of it—the boy with the bruise, the baker’s hands, the man who watched the doorway whenever anyone said too much. None of them were his problem. None of them were the mandate.
But Eliryn laughed, low and unguarded, and the laugh moved the marks along her throat like embers waking. She added to the room—heat, ease, the kind of attention that leaves people standing taller than when they arrived. He had spent his life subtracting. The arithmetic offended him. It fascinated him more.
He couldn’t hear every word from the rafters; he didn’t need to. Hunger met with kindness. Questions met with caution. The small miracle of names exchanged in a place that punished names. And beneath it—her steadiness under scrutiny, the way she let the room study her and refused to be reduced by it.
He waited until she left.
Only then did he allow the thought he’d been refusing since the hall: the distance had become intolerable. Watching was a kind of starvation.
He descended the way shadows do—by not being where light expects. He walked the corridors, letting the castle align its inches around him, learning which torches drifted from their hooks, which stones warmed when she passed. The place had begun to keep her shape. He would, too.
He turned her name once, silent.Eliryn.Currency. Tool. Key.
He could spend it with the sovereign and buy approval. He could spend it on the staff and buy loyalty. He could spend it on himself and buy nothing—except the thing he wanted.
He wanted to speak to her.
Not as a voice from a height. Not as a pressure she felt and couldn’t place. Face to face. The kind of speaking that plants a stake and makes ground admit it’s been claimed.
He would choose the time: a corridor with no witnesses; a stair-turn where sound goes soft; a place the dragon could feel him and decide to wait. He pictured her turning toward his voice—the precise angle of chin that means calculation instead of fear. He pictured the moment her eyes—whatever they were now—fixed where he stood andsaw.The thought uncoiled in him like a patient animal made to sit too long.
He had thought himself content to be the ending. He was not. He intended to be the interruption. The constant. The problem she learned to account for the way men learn the weight of a weapon they mean to carry every day.
He would give her no choice but to look up. And when she did, he would give her a name to use back.
Malric set his route: kitchens to the service stair that bled into the living wing, then the blind corner before the warded hall where footsteps betray their owners. He adjusted his breath,loosed his shoulders, let the castle’s hum climb into his bones until his pulse matched it.
He had a name now. He had a direction. The rest was work.
The castle has learned her shape.
He’ll teach her his.
Chapter 10: Shadows That Know Your Name
"Knowledge does not protect you. But it might prepare you."—Unknown
Eliryn wandered.
The warmth of the kitchens still clung to her like a fading cloak, but the castle beyond those heavy doors was vast and colder—its stone corridors humming with silence, its air threaded with a hush that made her feel like an intruder. She hadn’t meant to stray far from her quarters, but curiosity gnawed at her, as did restlessness. The trials loomed, and every instinct in her healer’s mind told her that information—truth—was the best medicine for fear.
But the Citadel did not give up its secrets easily.
She passed grand staircases and closed archways, narrow windows that looked down on gardens cloaked in moonlight. Once, she paused before a massive tapestry depicting an ancient dragon alighting on a mountain pass, gold-threaded fire curling from its mouth. Another time, she turned a corner and found two guards in black armor speaking low in a tongue she did not recognize. They fell silent the moment they saw her, eyes sharp, unreadable.
She kept walking—slower now, but not turning back. They didn’t follow her, but a prickling unease crawled along her spine.
Someone was watching her.
More than once, she glanced behind her, catching only shifting shadows cast by flickering sconces. But the feeling did not go away.
Vaeronth,she whispered silently.
