Lord of the realm

Chapter 263: The women of the past and present

She gestured, and Sofia and Dane filed in, presenting themselves with the particular awkwardness of people trying to look like something they weren’t in front of someone perceptive enough to notice the performance.

"Sofia," Sofia said, extending her hand.

"I’ve been assisting Dr. Buchanan at the dig site."

"Dane," Dane said.

"Surveying consultant."

Kate shook their hands with polite attention, her gray eyes reading them both in the way of someone who’d spent decades in corporate environments where reading people was a survival skill.

"And?" Kate looked past them at the corridor.

"There’s someone else."

Martha turned.

Jolthar was standing in the doorway.

He’d stopped there naturally, in the threshold between corridor and room, and his eyes were fixed on Kate with an expression that had stopped all his usual careful observation. He wasn’t processing the new woman. He was just looking.

Kate looked back at him with a small, polite frown, the expression of someone who didn’t recognize a person but was trying to be courteous about it.

"Hello. I don’t think we’ve met."

Jolthar said nothing.

The silence lasted perhaps four seconds, which was long enough to become noticeable. Martha watched him from across the room with a slight tension she couldn’t fully explain.

He was staring at Kate the way someone stared at a photograph of a person they’d loved—recognition of essential qualities rather than physical specifics. His jaw was slightly tight. His deep black eyes had seemed to vibrate a little, as if struggling to contain some strong emotion.

Then he blinked, and the expression was gone.

Replaced by something controlled and neutral.

"Forgive me," he said. He stepped into the room and inclined his head toward Kate in a gesture that was courteous but carried a formality that belonged to a different era.

"I’m glad you weren’t seriously hurt."

Kate studied him for a moment with raised eyebrows, then looked at Martha.

"Friend of yours?"

"He helped me at the site," Martha said, which was true.

"I’ll explain more later."

Kate accepted this with the particular patience of someone who had fifteen years of experience with Martha’s habit of bringing home strays from excavation sites, human and otherwise.

"Well. Thank you for looking after her. She’s terrible at looking after herself."

"I’ve noticed," Jolthar said.

Martha gave him a sharp look. He met it with absolute innocence.

The conversation moved to practicalities after that. The accident, the hospital assessment, the discharge timeline, and arrangements for Kate to rest at home.

Sofia and Dane took positions near the window, trying to be professionally invisible, watching Jolthar with the focused attention of people who’d been told to wait and were not good at waiting.

After twenty minutes, Martha stepped out to speak with the attending physician, and Kate requested water from the small service station down the corridor, which Dane volunteered to fetch with the eagerness of someone grateful for a task.

Sofia stayed, watching Jolthar from across the room.

He’d taken a position near the doorway again. Standing with that absolute stillness, his eyes moving between Kate and the corridor where Martha had disappeared.

Sofia crossed her arms. Her voice was low enough not to carry.

"You know who she is, Kate Buchanan."

It wasn’t a question.

Jolthar didn’t look at her.

"No," he said simply.

"But she reminds you of someone."

He remained silent.

Sofia studied his profile for a moment. The controlled expression, the tight jaw, the eyes that kept moving to Kate with a quality she couldn’t quite categorize.

Although he looked like he was not thinking anything, inside his mind, there were all sorts of thoughts running havoc. Because of the woman he just saw, Kate Buchanan.

She looked just like Magdalyna, with exact facial features and body too. She reminded me of how Magdalyna looked when she first met him.

He didn’t say anything; he just went out of the room.

*

When Kate had dozed off under mild sedation prescribed by the attending physician, and Martha was filling out paperwork at the nursing station, and Dane had returned with water to find his services no longer needed, the two of them drifted into the corridor.

Jolthar sat on a bench outside Kate’s room.

His forearms rested on his knees. His eyes were focused on the middle distance, on nothing visible to anyone else.

The hospital moved around him, nurses with tablets, orderlies with equipment, visitors navigating with the particular distracted urgency of people worried about someone they loved.

He was completely still in the middle of all of it.

Sofia and Dane stood perhaps ten feet away, leaning against the corridor wall.

They didn’t speak. There was an unspoken agreement between them that this wasn’t a moment for their questions, their theories, or their carefully prepared arguments about the resistance and the Council and the need for his help.

They just watched him.

Because the being sitting on that hospital bench wasn’t wearing the weight of three hundred years in any visible way—no dramatic grief, no overwhelming disorientation, no rage at his imprisonment. He wore it the way old stone wore weather.

It had shaped him, but it wasn’t crushing him.

What was visible was something quieter.

He was thinking about two women sleeping in rooms around him.

Martha Buchanan, who’d heard him calling through three centuries of divine sealing and had come. Who’d stood in front of a crumbling wall without fear and spoken his name with a mouth that didn’t consciously remember knowing it. Who’d made tea for the bones of a memory she couldn’t access and called it academic interest in pre-Divergence settlements.

Rosaine, not Rosaine. The woman who had loved him unconditionally is living a new life, with no memory of him.

She was happy.

He’d seen that clearly in the first minutes of watching her with Kate. The kind of happiness that was structural rather than circumstantial, built into the architecture of a life rather than found in individual moments. She had work she loved, a person she loved, and a home she was clearly eager to return to.

She’d died waiting for him to come home.