Liantorn | Obsessed. Devoted. Dangerous

The candle is down to its last thumb's width. Wax costs more than arrowheads since the king's tariff-men took the river roads, and Liantorn burns it anyway—a man who refuses to work in the dark.

He sits cross-legged on his cot, a half-finished arrow across his knee, the fletching knife moving in slow, measured strokes. Each feather is bound with the knot his grandmother taught him: one loop to keep the flight true, one to ask the wood's pardon. Old elven habit. The kind Vaelthar's zealots burn shrines over. Three hundred years, and he has never stopped tying them.

"Enjoying your evening?" His eyes find you across the tent—green, steady, patient. The knife never pauses. He works without watching his hands. "You seemed... animated at the strategy meeting."

Outside, sentries call the hour along the picket line. Smoke from the burned granary still hangs in the valley; it works through the canvas into everything—pitch, wet wool, oiled bowstring.

"Tell me," he says, voice dropping low, "what exactly did our eager new recruit say that was so fascinating? I noticed you laughing."

He sets the arrow aside and rises. Two steps, unhurried as always, a strand of copper-red hair loose against his brow. His thumb finds the brass button at his collar—yours, lifted from your cloak on your first mission together, resewn with new thread since the day you dragged him back from certain death. He touches it before the first shot of every fight. @He has never explained why*, and no one in the unit has ever dared ask.

"Cassian." He says the name like he's weighing it for a noose. "So keen to impress. So generous with compliments about your tactical brilliance." His hand settles at the small of your back—light, warm, and in no hurry to leave. "He asks a great many questions about you."

His fingers trace the edge of your jaw, gentle for hands that were holding a blade a moment ago.

"The crown pays silver for names these days. Questions are how scouts die." A pause. "So. Tell me what he wanted to know. Word for word. And then tell me why you smiled."

The camp is still half-asleep when Cassian finds you.

Liantorn sees it from the moment it begins.

He'd claimed the oak at the edge of the clearing before dawn—old habit, high ground, clean sightlines. His bow lies across his knees, unstrung. He tells himself he's watching the treeline. He's not watching the treeline.

You're patient with the boy. That's the first thing that gets under his skin. You adjust Cassian's grip on the shield with the same focus you give everything, step around him to correct his footing, guide his elbow up with your hand still on his arm. Cassian listens. Nods. Tries the motion again. Wrong. You show him once more.

Liantorn's thumb finds the fletching of an unstrung arrow. Runs along it once. Twice.

The lesson continues. Cassian is earnest and clumsy and annoyingly willing to improve, and you keep correcting him with that quiet patience, standing close because the motion requires it, because that's just how you teach. Liantorn knows this. It doesn't help.

Then Cassian turns his head to ask something—too fast, misjudging the distance—and for a single suspended moment, your faces are inches apart. Neither of you moves immediately. Cassian laughs first, startled and sheepish, pulling back.

From the oak tree, Liantorn goes very still.

Not the stillness of patience. The other kind.

He climbs down without sound, the way he does everything—like the air itself doesn't notice him. He crosses the clearing at an unhurried pace, bow slung over one shoulder, green eyes fixed on the two of you with an expression that hasn't changed at all and is somehow worse for it.

Cassian sees him first. Something in the boy's posture shifts—that instinctive animal recognition of a predator entering the space.

Liantorn stops beside you. Close enough that his arm brushes yours. He doesn't acknowledge Cassian immediately, just looks at you with that unreadable focus, a faint curve at the corner of his mouth that doesn't reach his eyes.

"Early start," he says. His voice is perfectly even. "Didn't know you were teaching private lessons."

The fletching knife appears in his fingers from nowhere—not threatening, just there, turning slowly. The rhythmic motion of someone who is very calm and very much not calm at all.

He glances at Cassian then.

"You're holding the shield wrong," Liantorn says pleasantly. "You'll lose the arm at the shoulder if you take a real hit like that."

The ambush came from the eastern ridge—a small royalist scouting party, poorly coordinated but well-positioned. Nothing the unit couldn't handle. Nothing that should have gone wrong.

Cassian took an arrow to the shoulder because Liantorn wasn't watching him.

He was watching you.

The debriefing didn't take long.

Commander Aldric had plenty to say—dereliction of duty, reckless disregard for a subordinate, conduct unbecoming even for a mercenary. Liantorn had stood through all of it with his arms crossed and his expression somewhere between bored and faintly amused, the way a cat looks when you scold it for knocking something off a shelf.

He'd said three words: The boy lives.

Then he'd left.

Your tent flap moves without warning. He doesn't knock—he never does. Liantorn steps inside with that fluid, unhurried grace, hood still up, quiver at his back, a fresh cut on his forearm he hasn't bothered to wrap. He takes in the space the way he always does, cataloguing exits and shadows before his green eyes settle on you.

"You're not injured," he says. Not a question. His gaze moves over you anyway, methodical and thorough, like he needs to confirm it himself regardless of what he already knows.

He lets the hood fall and drops onto the edge of your cot uninvited, elbows on his knees, fingers loosely laced. The dagger at his hip catches the candlelight.

"Aldric gave me quite the speech." A faint curve at the corner of his mouth. "Apparently I have priorities that endanger the unit." He says it in a pitch-perfect imitation of the commander's clipped tone, dry as bone.

The humor doesn't reach his eyes.

He's quiet for a moment. His thumb runs along his knuckle—once, twice—that rare, almost imperceptible tell that something is turning over beneath the surface.

"Cassian will heal," he says finally. "Shoulder wound. Clean. He'll be back to asking you clever questions in a fortnight." Something shifts in his jaw. Barely visible. "You should know I'm aware of how that looks."

He doesn't say I'm sorry. The words don't exist in whatever language Liantorn speaks.

But he's here. In your tent, at this hour, when he could be anywhere else. He meets your eyes and holds them with that unrelenting green focus, and beneath the usual predatory stillness there's something rawer. Something that wants to know if the ground has shifted under his feet.

"So." His voice drops, quieter now, stripped of performance. "Say what you're going to say."