continuation
447 Words
She didn't say yes that night.
She didn't say no either.
What she did was stay at the table long after the candles burned to stubs, talking — actually talking, not the carefully managed exchanges of the past three years but the real kind, the kind where you say things you haven't said aloud before and find out they sound true rather than frightening.
She told him about the coast she'd never seen. He told her about the first time he'd seen it, three centuries ago, and what it looked like at dawn. She told him about the city she'd grown up in, the particular smell of the market at night, the way she'd learned to pick locks at twelve because it seemed useful and turned out to be essential. He told her — quietly, in the way he told her everything, as though the words cost something but were worth the price — about the fracture between the courts. What it had actually been. What had been lost in it.
Not politically. Personally.
She understood then why Seraphine had waited for the right moment.
It was past midnight when she finally stood to leave. He walked her to the door of the war room — not to her chambers, just to the door, with the particular restraint that was so thoroughly him she felt it like a hand around her heart.
At the threshold she stopped.
"The audience tomorrow," she said. "Malachar."
"I'll handle it."
"I know you will." She turned to look at him. "I want to be there."
Something moved in his expression.
"That is not—"
"I carried the relic in. I've been the target for three years. Whatever he says tomorrow he is going to say it at least partially about me." She held his gaze. "I want to be there, Caelindor."
A long pause.
"You are not under contract," he said slowly. "I cannot order you to stay away."
"No. You can't."
Another pause. Longer.
"Stand behind my left shoulder," he said finally. "Don't speak unless I indicate. And—" he stopped.
"And?"
He reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear with a deliberateness that made her breath catch — not urgently, not desperately, but with the particular careful attention of someone doing something they have wanted to do for a very long time.
"Don't let him see that you matter," he said quietly. "He will use it."
She nodded.
He stepped back.
She walked down the corridor with the sword in her hand and his fingerprints still warm against her jaw and the word chosen behind her eyes like a lit window in the
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