He can’t trust his own breathing to steady, so Fray counts Beth’s breaths instead.
One, two, three, four.
His head is pounding. He’s still dizzy from blood loss, from burns, but most of all—most of all from shock. Thoughts not his own in his head. The brush of something—something huge in the background of where his mind was. Wherever it was. Like being underwater, and seeing something very far away, but still too big to understand.
He mouths the name to himself.
“Hey,” comes a voice.
It’s only long years of training that keep Fray from flinching at the surprise. Knocked from his thoughts, mercifully now only his own, he absently looks at Beth again. He counts the rise and fall of the blanket beside him. One, two, three—
“I said hey.”
Oh.
“What,” Fray says. It’s more of a creak, but surprisingly, it’s more coherent than Tin seems to be. The man is stood now at the corner of the bed Fray is hunched in, head low and shoulders high. One hand rubs at his neck; the other, at the round top of the bedpost at the foot. Tin’s eyes dart up to meet his own before skittering away again.
It’s cold here, in this room. Fray can feel it now he’s out of his armor and not in the throes of battle, and even with the furnace of Beth near at hand and the blankets over his knees all he wishes for is a hearth. Beth would probably not mind if he got closer, he thinks, but something about the prospect feels wrong, down here. He can see Tin feels it too. With only shirt and trousers, the hair that runs thick along his arms is all Tin has for warmth. It’s prickled in a body’s vague attempt at insulation. He must want the bed, Fray decides, noting all this at a kind of distance. Too bad.
“What?” Fray says again.
“Question for you,” Tin says, in a complete reversal of Fray’s expectations. It locks Fray with surprise long enough for him to continue. “That, uh. That god of yours. Adelaide. The one that wants me dead.”
Panic seizes ever so slightly at Fray’s chest. He must pause and quell it before he can gather himself enough to answer. “What of her?”
Tin’s doing a good impression of a blind man himself, looking everywhere but at Fray. Like the conversation will come easier if he doesn’t have to make eye contact. Maybe it will. “She ever say why?”
Fray opens his mouth, because he knows the answer. Fray closes it again, because he doesn’t.
A terrible thing, uncertainty.
Yet as much as Tin frustrates him, as much as the unceasing innuendos and ass-grabbing make him wish he’d struck the psion down and never fallen from grace, this is not the same man. Fray’s education was in histories and swordplay, but he’s always been good with people. This is a Tin discomfited, a Tin come humbly seeking. Fray cannot find cruelty in himself for him now. “No,” he says, soft so that Beth will not wake. “I had thought she did, but …”
It had seemed so obvious before. Before Marco, who never shone with Adelaide’s mark, before the dreams, before—before whatever just happened to him, not an hour ago. Mind touching mind, sacred barriers breached. Why, he wonders again, how? Fray has never dabbled in those dark arts, that forbidden thing. He is a soldier of Adelaide. Did she not protect him?
Tin says, “But?”
Why was Marco never marked for death? Why had Adelaide’s holy fire not come over him when that man with the books, all but bristling with psionic power, spoke to them?
Why had Fray not been struck down upon accepting his gift?
“I was wrong,” Fray says, and swallows the shame that curdles in his throat. “I don’t know why she picked you.”
Tin makes a sound, half-snort, half-growl. “Figures,” he mutters, and swipes at his nose. There’s nothing there. Fray thinks about black blood. Fray thinks about Constance, unable to see Tin at all. “Never did truck with gods. Bunch of fucks, the lot of them.” But his shoulders droop. He shifts his weight from foot to foot, and at last looks Fray in the eye. “You lying?” he says, but there is no venom in it. “You sure?”
Fray feels Beth breathing beside him. One, two. A long beat. Too long. He moves to check on her, but as he does, she returns to her normal pattern. Three. Four. Her face contorts a fraction. Dreaming, maybe.
Dreams he might reach out and touch, maybe.
Despite himself, he again forms the name on his lips, silent.
Fray’s not sure of anything anymore.