THE LAST WATCH

The fire had burned down to embers by the time the thing outside stopped circling the cabin.

Mira sat with her back against the door, knees pulled to her chest, listening to the wood settle and crack. Across the room, in the only bed, her little brother Tomas slept the way only an exhausted nine-year-old could sleep, through fear, through cold, through the low scraping sound that had been moving around the outside walls for the last hour.

“Mira.” The voice came from the corner, low and rough. Captain Aldous Reyne sat where he’d dragged himself after the fight on the ridge, one leg stretched out stiff in front of him, soaked through at the thigh with blood that had stopped being red an hour ago and gone the color of rust. “Come here.”

She crossed the room and knelt beside him. In the dying firelight his face looked grey, his eyes too bright.

“You should sleep,” he said. “I’ll keep watch.”

“You can’t even stand.”

“I don’t need to stand to watch a door.” He tried for a smile and mostly managed a grimace. “Mira. Listen to me. When your mother gave you both to me at the river crossing, what did I say to her?”

Mira’s throat tightened. “You said you’d protect us. Both of us. No matter what.”

“And have I broken that promise yet?”

“No,” she admitted. “But,”

“Then I’m not starting tonight.” He reached out and gripped her hand, and his fingers were cold, colder than they should have been, and that frightened her more than the sound outside ever could. “Whatever’s out there, it wants in because it knows what’s in here. Two children and an old soldier who can’t run. It’s patient. It thinks it just has to wait me out.”

“You’re not old,” Mira said, which was the only part of that sentence she could argue with.

“Closer to old than I was yesterday.” This time the smile reached his eyes. “Mira. I need you to do something, and I need you to do it without arguing with me, because we don’t have time for you to win the argument, even though you probably would.”

She nodded, not trusting her voice.

“There’s a hatch under the floorboards by the hearth, your brother found it this afternoon chasing that lizard, remember? It leads down to the old root cellar, and the root cellar has a drainage tunnel that comes out past the tree line, near the creek. I checked it myself before the sun went down. It’s tight, but you’ll both fit. Tomas first, then you. You go quiet, you go fast, and you don’t look back at this cabin no matter what you hear.”

“And you?”

“I’m going to make sure whatever’s out there has something more interesting to look at than two kids slipping out a drainage pipe.”

“You can’t fight it, you can barely,”

“I don’t need to beat it,” Aldous said gently. “I just need it to still be looking at this door when the sun comes up. Things like that, the ones that hunt at night, they don’t like the light. If I can hold it here until dawn, it’ll go back wherever these things go, and you’ll both be long gone, and safe, and that’s the only part of tonight that has to go right.”

Mira stared at him. Outside, the scraping had stopped. Something, large, and patient, had gone very still.

“You promised my mother,” she said, and her voice came out smaller than she meant it to. “Not just to keep us alive. You said, you said you’d come back too. All three of us. You said it at the river.”

For a moment Aldous didn’t answer. The fire popped, sending up a thin curl of sparks, and somewhere outside, low against the wall, something exhaled, a sound too large and too slow to belong to anything that breathed the way people did.

“I know what I said,” Aldous murmured. He reached up with his free hand and, with surprising gentleness, brushed a strand of hair back from her face, the same gesture, Mira realized, that her mother used to make. “And I meant it when I said it. I still mean the part that matters most. You get back. Both of you. That was always the real promise, Mira, underneath the words, the part your mother actually needed me to keep. The rest of it was just me trying to make a scared woman feel better about handing her children to a stranger.”

“That’s not fair,” Mira whispered, and felt the first hot tear slide down her cheek. “You don’t get to decide which part of the promise counts.”

“No,” he agreed softly. “But I get to decide which part I keep, when I can’t have both. And I am not, ” his hand tightened around hers, one last time, with more strength than she’d thought he had left, “, going to let you wake your brother up to tell him I broke it.”

He let go of her hand, and with effort, with a quiet grinding of teeth that told her exactly how much it cost him, he pushed himself up against the wall until he was sitting straight, sword laid across his lap, eyes on the door.

“Go on, now,” he said, and his voice was steady again, the voice he used giving orders, the voice that had gotten them this far. “Wake your brother quiet. Hatch by the hearth. Go.”

Mira looked at him for one more long moment, at the grey face and the steady eyes and the sword he could barely lift, and then she did something he hadn’t told her to do.

She leaned forward and kissed his forehead, the way her mother used to do to her, and whispered, “Thank you for not breaking it.”

Then she went to wake Tomas, and pried up the floorboards by the hearth with hands that wouldn’t quite stop shaking, and didn’t look back, not once, even when, just as the hatch closed above them and the darkness of the tunnel swallowed them whole, she heard the door of the cabin splinter inward, and Captain Aldous Reyne’s voice rise up, hoarse and furious and entirely unafraid, shouting at something that had no name into the last hour before dawn.