CHAPTER 331: 231: FACE OUT OF MEMORY PART TWO

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A lighter set of paws had stepped into the mud and left four neat ovals. The ovals were shallow. The animal did not weigh much. He smelled it now.

Not fox. Not a cat. Something that had eaten grass and then been startled, then settled. He tasted nothing like iron. Nothing like bile. No blood. No fight here.

He stood and kept walking until the trees opened into a shallow bowl where the light pooled. The forest’s breath changed in that bowl. It carried a sweetness that did not belong to resin and sap. It carried a clean note like a laugh made out of water. For a heartbeat he did not believe the note. He had learned not to believe kindness before he had learned his own name. Then he saw a figure.

It was a female figure.

She moved into the bowl from the far side, and for a moment even the bars of light looked as if they had moved to watch her. She was dressed in white that had not learned how to catch dirt. It hung from her shoulders and fell clean to her ankles, a simple, clever drape that let her walk as if the forest were a soft place. Her hair was pale, not quite silver and not quite wheat. It caught the light in a way that made the air around her feel softer without actually being soft. Bare feet set down with the careful confidence of someone who had always walked in places that would punish a misstep.

She was not carrying a weapon. She was not covered in dust from the road. She did not look like anyone who had walked far, and yet her shoulders had a set to them that belonged to travelers.

’Angel,’ he thought, and immediately told himself to stop thinking foolish words. There were no angels here. There were only species and ranks and teeth and the thin kindnesses of people who were lucky enough to remember how to be kind. Yet the word sat in the mind and refused to move aside. It did not need to be correct to be useful.

The shock that rolled across his chest was strange. It was not desire, which he could catalogue and set aside when he needed to. It was not fear. It had a taste of memory without the comfort of fact. A sensation rose under his ribs as if a small piece of him had stepped forward to greet someone and he was only now noticing that piece existed. He had never seen her. He knew that. He knew faces and scents with a precision that made most people seem blurry. He had never seen this one. Then why did his skin tell him he had watched her walk away many times and had not liked it.

His mind only raised two questions. Who is she? Where did I meet her?

He did not move. He did not call out. He let the sensation run through him and noted what it touched. Soul. That was where it went. Soul power rose in him in a small, involuntary climb the way a man on a high place leans forward when he hears a rope move. The part of him that had learned to open channels and send his will along them recognized a thread where no thread should be. He did not pull it. He only looked at it. It lingered like a scent that had not yet learned to be a trail.

She turned her head. She looked at him. She did not startle. If she had known he was there all along, she did not let satisfaction show. If she had not, she accepted his presence with the kind of openness that comes from either innocence or the kind of skill that makes innocence look like a weapon. Her eyes were a color it was hard to name in this light. At one angle they looked brown, at another they were pale as water over shallow stone. Up close they would probably show you a third color when you wanted them to hold still.

He stepped out of the shade because the game where two people pretend not to see each other has no use once both have seen. He kept his hands open and low. He kept his face calm. His body did the work of balancing weight and angle so that he could move any way he wanted without looking like he was about to move. His senses tasted the air around her. Nothing like the acid of the beast he had killed last night. Nothing like the oily heat of a royal guard’s scent. There was a smell of clean cloth, soap made from some simple herb, skin warmed by walking, and under it a note like old stone when it has been sitting in sunlight by a river.

He studied details without staring. Ankles that knew balance. Hands with short nails that had been cleanly cut. A faint mark at one wrist where a bracelet had once rested and been removed. No ring. No sign of bound ownership, at least in the vulgar ways borderland beast man liked to use. She held nothing except the straightness of her back.

He waited for the part of his mind that refused to stop pointing at memory to offer him a name. It kept pointing and did not give a word. He thought of Mia for one foolish heartbeat because Mia guarded a piece of his future with the same sort of steadiness this woman wore on her skin. He thought of the girl in front of him, she is somehow looking like Mia. He thought of a dream he had not admitted was a dream, in which a hand touched his face and then water closed over both of them and he woke up angry. This woman was none of those. She was a new fact.

A low level bird beast called twice from the left. It was not a warning call. It was the ordinary noise of a creature that wanted to be known in its own place. The needles underfoot did not crack. The forest held the moment the way a person might hold a bowl they had been waiting to fill.

She took two steps closer. The white fabric flowed around her shins and did not pick up a single needle. How, he thought, and then told himself to stop admiring the way she walked and start asking why she was here at all. The right side forest did not have a clan who dressed like that. It did not treat people who walked like that with courtesy.

His mouth had already started to shape a question when she spoke first. Her voice did not belong to this forest. It belonged to a door opening and letting fresh air into a room that had waited too long.

"Stranger, I am happy to see you," she said, and the word did something in his ribs he did not like. It made him feel like he had been named and kept unnamed all at once. "Can you help me? I am looking for something."