Lord of the realm

Chapter 260: Family Emergency

Martha’s voice was firm.

"Whatever questions you have, they’ll wait. Right now, I need to speak with him alone."

Sofia and Dane exchanged a look loaded with reluctance and approximately forty different objections. But something in Martha’s expression stopped the arguments before they started. She was not asking.

They went out. Sofia paused at the tent flap and looked back at the young man with an expression that was half warning and half reverence. Then the flap fell closed behind them.

Silence.

Martha and the young man looked at each other across the small space of the tent.

Outside, she could hear her team moving around the camp, checking equipment, trying to act normal. She could hear Sofia and Dane’s voices, low and urgent, undoubtedly arguing about being excluded.

Inside the tent, it was just the two of them.

Martha studied him carefully. She knew that Jaenor had come out of the wall, which was a tomb. She heard how the tomb was present in the valley from Dane. She still can’t believe that he was alive all these years in that closed space.

Was he even human?!??

The archaeologist in her was noting everything. The physical youth didn’t match the ancient quality in his eyes. The way he held himself, completely still in a way that living people rarely managed, as if stillness was something he’d practiced for so long it had become default.

He was studying her too. With those impossible, deep black eyes that moved across her face with an intensity that should have been uncomfortable but somehow wasn’t.

Martha clasped her hands on the table.

"You came from that wall," she said.

It wasn’t a question, but he nodded anyway, a single, clean movement.

"The sealed space behind the wall," Martha continued, keeping her voice measured and professional. Her scientist’s training was the only framework she currently had to work with.

"You were inside it."

Another nod.

"For how long?"

He considered the question briefly. "I don’t know."

His voice was low and even. The rustiness she’d heard immediately after he woke was already gone, replaced by something smooth and careful. The voice of someone choosing each word with intention.

"Are you dangerous?"

The question came out more directly than she’d planned. But it was the question that mattered most, the question that everything else depended on. She was sitting in a tent in a remote valley with a being she knew nothing about, essentially, and her entire team was just outside.

The young man looked at her for a moment.

Then something happened to his face.

He smiled.

It was brief and small and genuine, and it transformed his features entirely. For just a moment, he looked exactly like what his face suggested—a young man, tired and slightly overwhelmed, finding something unexpectedly familiar in an entirely unfamiliar situation.

"No," he said.

"I’m not evil. I’m not a lord of anything. I’m just..."

He paused, searching for words that fit a situation that had no precedent. "I was sealed because people were afraid of what I was. Not because of what I’d done."

"People," Martha repeated carefully.

"Or gods."

His eyes sharpened slightly.

"Both, I guess."

Martha was quiet for a moment. Outside, the camp sounds continued, normal sounds. Equipment was being checked, voices were exchanging information, and the ordinary noise of a research team was doing ordinary things while their lead researcher sat in a tent with something that was very much not ordinary.

She thought about the voice that had called her name in the night. The memories that had come with it. The absolute terror and absolute love she’d felt standing in front of that wall as it crumbled.

She thought about saying his name without understanding why she knew it.

She was about to ask about all of it, about the memories and the connection and what it meant that she’d been drawn here across an ocean by something she still didn’t have words for, when her phone buzzed.

She glanced at it automatically.

It was an unknown number; she picked it up as it kept ringing.

It was Kate’s voice, and she said that she was in a hospital.

Then the blood drained from her face.

"Kate? What happened to her? Is she ok—"

The voice at the other end came distorted, but Martha heard them clearly. It was about Kate, so she was paying extra attention. Then the voice spoke in a faster tone and relayed the matter again which made Martha’s face pale.

"I’m coming," Martha said without hesitation.

"Right now. I’m leaving right now."

She was already standing, reaching for her equipment bag, her mind shifting into emergency mode with the efficiency of someone who’d handled field crises before. She ended the call and looked at the young man who was watching her with quiet attention.

For exactly three seconds, she considered her options.

She couldn’t leave him here. She didn’t know enough about him to predict what he’d do, how her team would react, what would happen if Andraste’s patrol came back through, or what Sofia and Dane would attempt if left unsupervised with direct access to the being they’d spent years trying to find.

She couldn’t tell her team the truth about him, not yet. There were too many variables and too many connections to the Council’s oversight of this dig.

And she couldn’t leave Kate waiting.

"You’re coming with me," she told him, pulling her bag from under the cot.

"I have a family emergency. I need to get to Kharsen City immediately."

She expected resistance. Questions, some version of "I just woke up after three hundred years of imprisonment, and you want me to follow you!"

He simply nodded.

"Okay."

Martha stared at him for half a second. Then she moved to the tent flap and called outside.

"Sofia, Dane, pack whatever you have. We’re leaving in twenty minutes."

She didn’t want them to stay here either; they are a variable that she doesn’t want the military to find out.

Sofia appeared instantly, as if she’d been standing six inches from the tent.

"Leaving? Martha, we just found—"

"Kate’s been in an accident. She’s in the hospital." Martha kept her voice steady.