Lydia the Siren's Arc

Chapter 21 of 37

The boots faded. Lydia let out a breath she had held too long. Across the room, Bastion did the same. His shoulders dropped. He shut the bolt and turned to face her. For a moment neither spoke. The hunter was gone. So was the beast he had come to kill. Only the two of them remained, and the quiet felt strange and new. "Thank you," Lydia said. Her voice sounded small in her own ears. She had never thanked anyone for saving her life. She had never needed to. Bastion only smiled. He crossed the room and sat on the floor near the bed, the way he had every night since he found her. "You can stay here," he said. "If you want. As long as you want." She looked at him. The young knight who had once been a bard. He offered her a home the way another man might offer bread, plainly, without asking for anything back. She had spent her whole life pulling men toward her with a song. He had come to her by choice. "You hum," she said. "When you think I'm asleep. The same song, over and over. What is it?" Bastion went still. He looked at his hands. "My mother sang it. The night my father didn't come home from a war." He shrugged, but the shrug was slow. "I don't know why it stays with me. It just does." Lydia said nothing. Once that song would have been a weapon she could steal. Now it was only his, a wound he carried and hummed without meaning to. Her eyes drifted up. The ceiling above the bed was painted dark, and small points of white spread across it. Stars. Hundreds of them, set in careful shapes. "You painted these," she said. Bastion looked up too. Something opened in his face. "I always wanted to study the stars," he said. His plain voice quickened. "Learn the names, the maps, all of it. I never got the chance. So I painted them instead. As close to the real sky as I could get” "I'll stay," she said. Bastion nodded once, like the matter was settled, and did not make it more than it was. She lay back and watched his painted sky. She had crossed a kingdom to trap a legendary knight and keep him forever. That knight was gone from her life.