The armor is heavier than it looks.

Bronze plates stacked like slabs of butchered flesh, still damp from where the blood seeped through the padding underneath. You drag the basin toward you with your foot, the water already murky from the last time he wore it.

No one told you to kneel. You just do.

He doesn’t speak.

He’s not looking at you, not exactly—but he’s there. Sitting cross-legged on a low bench across the tent, wrist braced against his knee, head tilted in the way a man watches a dog that doesn’t quite obey.

You don’t raise your eyes. You don’t ask questions.

The sponge is too small, the cloth too thin. Blood flakes off in dry petals, sticking to your hands, your wrists, beneath your nails. You scrub harder, not because he told you to, but because you don’t know what he’s waiting for.

He hasn’t spoken since you entered. He hasn’t given you a task beyond this, but he hasn’t dismissed you either.

You try not to shake.

The silence is the worst part. Worse than the blood, worse than the heat in the tent or the way the bronze smells of meat. It stretches between you like a pulled tendon, too tight to breathe through.

You glance up once. Just once.

He’s watching.

Not in the way men usually watch—no hunger, no flicker of interest. Just… observation. As if you were a fly pinned to a board and he was trying to decide which wing to take first.

You lower your head again.

You’re not sure how long you stay there. Your knees have gone numb. Your arms ache from holding the armor just so, from scrubbing and lifting and placing each piece down without sound.

You don’t dare make a noise.

Once, you drop a gauntlet. It hits the ground with a dull thud. The sound is nothing, small, meaningless.

But in the quiet, it feels like thunder.

You glance up again. His head hasn’t moved.

Still, you know.

That small mistake cost you something. Not punishment. Just… knowledge. That he saw. That he marked it.

You place the last piece down carefully, aligning it with the curve of the others.

He still hasn’t spoken.

You stand.

He doesn’t dismiss you.

You wait.

There’s a war drum somewhere in the distance—training, perhaps. A laugh from outside. Men shouting about meat. A crackle of fire.

Still nothing from him.

And then, finally, a slow blink. Barely a movement at all. And then he spoke.

“Your smell disgusts me.”