Where Heaven Bleeds

Chapter Thirteen

"You should go."

He said it that same evening, by the fire, while Mira slept. He said it without looking at her, looking at the fire instead, the way he looked at things when he was choosing his words with unusual care.

Seraphel had been expecting it. She had been watching him build toward it all afternoon, the quietness, the careful way he'd managed the practical business of the day, the attention he'd paid to Mira, which was love but was also the attention of someone trying to solve things.

"You should take the three days," he said. "Go back willingly. That's the better outcome."

"For whom?"

"For you. You've done more than you were meant to. More than anyone could have asked. Mira is going to survive. Half the village is going to survive. I'll" A pause, briefer, with more weight in it. "I'll manage."

"You will not," she said, quietly.

"I'll manage as well as I would have managed without you, which is to say."

"Which is to say the plague will take you in the spring at the latest." She said it plainly, because he had always wanted plainness from her, and she owed him that now. "Without the daily treatment, the progression resumes where it was. You are not in the worst cases, but you are not safe. And you are not." She stopped.

"Not what?"

She looked at him. He had finally looked away from the fire and was looking at her, with those dark eyes that had seen too much and somehow managed to keep seeing anyway.

"I do not wish to go," she said.

She had not said it before. Had not permitted herself to say it, even in the private architecture of her own thoughts, because saying it made it real, and real things had weight and consequences. But the three days were running, and she had promised him plainness.

Aldric was very still.

"I am aware of what it means. I am aware that I am a watcher who has violated her function and every principle of non-attachment that my existence is predicated on." She kept her voice level with some effort. "I am aware that I should wish to return. I am aware that the correct thing to do is accept the three days and go." She looked at her hands. "I do not wish to."

The fire crackled between them.

"That's the first time you've said what you want," Aldric said, very quietly. "Not what you're permitted. Not what the rules are. What you want."

"Yes."

He was quiet for a long time. When he spoke again, something had changed in his voice, giving way, like ground that had been frozen all winter, beginning to move. "Mira was right. I'd given up. Before you. Not dramatically. I hadn't decided to stop. I couldn't find the reason to continue with any particular investment." He looked at the fire. "I can now."

Seraphel felt her hands warm without intending them to.

"Don't make it theological," he said. "Don't tell me it's Grace, or it's your function to restore hope in the hopeless. Just" He looked at her. "Just let it be what it is."

She looked back at him, and what it was sat between them, nameable and unspoken and very large.

"I won't go," she said.

"Seraphel"

"I know what follows. I am choosing."

He looked at her for a long moment with an expression she had no perfect word for, not joy, because there was too much grief in it for joy, and not grief, because there was too much warmth in it for grief, something between, particularly to the situation of two people choosing something difficult together.

"All right," he said.

"All right," she agreed.

Mira stirred in the bedroom and made a small sound of dissatisfaction at some private dream, and neither of them moved for a moment, listening to the old house around them and the frost outside and the fire between them, burning warm and steady in the dark.

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