Where Heaven Bleeds

Chapter Fourteen

They talked through the night.

It was not planned; it was the result of neither of them moving from the fire after the decision had been made, and the hours accruing around them the way hours did when neither person wanted to be the one to end the thing. Mira slept on. The frost deepened. The fire burned lower, and Aldric added wood twice without breaking whatever the conversation was doing.

He told her about it before the Crusades.

"My father was a good man who did not understand me," he said. "Which is not his fault. I was not a comprehensible boy. I wanted things he didn't have a language for, not wealth, not title. I wanted to be used well. I wanted my abilities to mean something to someone."

"Did the Crusades provide that?"

"For about eight months. The first campaign was terrible, but purposeful. I understood what I was doing and why, and why made sense to me even when the show was ugly." His voice changed slightly. "The second campaign was less clear. The third, I stopped asking because the answers were getting worse."

"What brought you home?"

He was quiet for a moment. "A letter from Mira. Not a dramatic one, just an ordinary letter about an ordinary autumn. She wrote about the harvest and a cat that had taken up residence in the barn, and a disagreement with a neighbor about a fence." He looked at the fire. "I read it, and I thought: there are fences. There are barn cats. There is a world in which a fourteen-year-old girl writes letters about ordinary things and expects her brother to come home." A pause. "I got on a horse three days later."

Seraphel was quiet.

"Your turn," he said.

"I have watched the world for a thousand years. I have seen wars and plagues, the rise and fall of kingdoms, and the slow revolution of language, custom, and faith. I have watched humanity repeat itself and evolve and repeat itself."

"And what did you think of it?"

"I thought it was overwhelming in its waste. The repetition of error, the same wounds opening in different people across different centuries. I was aware that I was watching from outside, that this shaped my perception, but I had no framework for what it would mean to be inside."

"And now?"

"Now I think waste is inseparable from love," She said slowly, constructing it as she spoke. "The same quality in humans that makes them capable of the repetition of error, the inability to hold the long view, the anchoring in the immediate, the way everything present feels more real than everything past or future, that same quality is what makes them capable of grief. And care. And" she stopped.

"And?" he prompted, quietly.

"And the particular kind of love that is specific to mortal creatures. Not abstract love. Not principal. But the love that says: you, in particular. This one. Not humanity. You."

The fire was very low. The room was very quiet.

"Seraphel."

"Yes."

"Is that what's happening?"

She looked at him, the scar, the dark eyes, the bone-tiredness that had been slowly, over seven weeks, acquiring something that looked almost like its opposite, and she did not look away.

"Yes," she said. "I believe it is."

He nodded, once. "I thought so. Me too."

She knew. She had known, in the careful way she cataloged things, for some time. But hearing him say it aloud transformed the knowledge from data into something that had warmth and weight and the specific, irreversible quality of things said between two people in a room at dawn.

Outside, the first grey light was beginning to appear on the horizon. They both saw it.

Neither of them moved.

"One more day before Uriel comes back," Aldric said.

"Yes."

"Then we'd better make it a useful one."

"Yes," she said, and found that she meant it in more than one sense, and that meant it made the light outside seem, if not less frightening, then at least worth watching arrive.

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