Chapter 8
After a day of socializing and worrying, Evran sleeps more deeply than he expected.
The soft bed and the thick furs and the warmth of Vaike's body behind him conspire to pull him under, and he goes willingly, his mind finally quiet after days of travel and the constant low hum of being in a new place among new people.
He sleeps with his face pressed into the pillow and Vaike's arm heavy across his waist, and the word that surfaces in the dark before consciousness fades is husband.
He is still having a hard time accepting that word.
It means so much, means everything to him, every morning waking beside this man, every evening returning to him, every meal and every silence and every moment of being known so thoroughly that there is nowhere left to hide.
Husband. He turns it over in the dark of his mind, worn smooth and warm, and it is his.
He does not know what wakes him.
There is no sound, no obvious disturbance, but something changes, something shifts in the texture of the room, and Evran surfaces from the depths of sleep not all at once but in layers, rising slow and reluctant toward the light.
He registers the change in Vaike's hold on him.
It is subtle, so subtle that anyone who had not spent six months sleeping beside this man, learning the cadence of his rest through nightly repetition until it became a language of its own, would miss it entirely.
But Evran knows. Vaike is awake, and he is not moving, and the arm across Evran's waist has gone rigid.
That is enough to tell him something is wrong.
Evran's eyes snap open.
For a single, crystalline moment, everything is still. The room is dark, the fire burned to embers, throwing only the faintest orange glow across the stone walls, and the shadows are deep and shapeless. The window is a grey rectangle against the far wall, and the shutters are open.
Vaike moves.
It happens so fast that Evran's mind cannot track the individual motions, only the result, which is that one moment he is lying in bed with his husband's arm around him and the next he is being shoved, bodily, off the side of the mattress.
Vaike's hand is flat against his back, forceful and absolute, and Evran's body leaves the bed and the cold stone floor rushes up to meet him.
He barely gets his feet under him. His hip strikes the edge of the bedframe, his palms slap stone, and his knees buckle but hold. He is on the floor beside the bed, gasping, disoriented, the world tilting as his body tries to reconcile asleep with not asleep and his heart hammers in his throat.
Then a sound, above him and behind him, on the bed where he was just lying. A grunt, low and savage, and then the crash of bodies, the creak of the bedframe, and the sharp scrape of metal on stone as a blade catches the wall and skids along it, diverted from its intended target.
Evran scrambles to his feet and turns.
In the dim light of the dying embers he can see them. Vaike, massive, shirtless, his body a dark shape wrestling in the shadows, and another figure, smaller, leaner, dressed in black, with something in his hand that catches the faint light and flashes. A blade, a long dagger, curved.
The man came in through the window.
Evran sees it now, the shutters pushed inward, the latch hanging loose, the grey rectangle of the window gaping open to the night.
The window that was locked. The window that Evran checked himself before bed, because Vaike told him to, because these are the habits you learn when you live with a man who has enemies.
Someone unlocked the latch from outside, probably with the very dagger he is now trying to drive into the Warlord's body.
On the bed, Vaike and the man are fighting.
It is brutal and fast and nearly silent, and the assassin is trained, his movements quick and precise, trying to bring the dagger down into the meat of Vaike's shoulder, his neck, anywhere that bleeds.
Vaike has the man's wrist in one hand and is forcing the blade away, his other forearm pressed against the man's throat, and the bed shakes with the force of their struggle.
Evran runs. Not toward the fight, but away from it, toward the door.
Every instinct screams at him to go back, to throw himself at the man on the bed, to scratch and claw and fight with whatever he has.
The pull of it is physical and overwhelming, the desperate need to put himself between Vaike and the blade, to do something, anything, to help.
But he knows, knows with the cold clarity that lives beneath panic, that he cannot fight an actual assassin, that if he throws himself into that struggle he will be a liability, a distraction, something Vaike has to protect instead of something that helps him.
He is a southerner with two seasons of training and hands that know looms and gardens and his husband's body, and none of those things will stop a blade.
There are guards posted right outside.
He crosses the room in three strides. The door handle is cold under his hands and he fumbles it, fingers clumsy with adrenaline, and for one terrible second it does not turn and he thinks it is locked, they locked it from outside, they are trapped, but then it gives, and the door swings open, and the corridor is lit with torches and there are two guards at their posts and Evran's voice tears out of him.
"Help! In here, now!"
The guards are moving before the words are finished. They push past Evran and into the room, swords drawn, and behind them comes the sound of boots on stone, more guards roused from further down the corridor, responding to the noise.
Evran turns back to the room. He cannot leave, cannot stand in the corridor and wait while the sounds of struggle come from inside the room where his husband is fighting for his life.
The guards have their swords leveled, but they do not need them.
Vaike has the assassin pinned to the floor, one knee pressed against his throat, the man's arm twisted at an angle that must be agony.
The dagger has been flung aside and lies on the stone near the foot of the bed, gleaming dully in the ember-light, and the man beneath Vaike's knee is struggling weakly, desperately, the last resistance of a body that knows it has already lost. Vaike's expression above him is something Evran has never seen before.
Evran has seen Vaike angry, has seen him stern, displeased, cold.
This is something else entirely, something beyond all of those, risen from a place deeper than any of them and settled into his face with a terrible, focused calm.
This is the face of the Warlord who woke to find a blade being driven toward his sleeping body, toward the body of his husband sleeping beside him, and has responded with a violence that lives in the deepest parts of survival.
The guards take the assassin into custody. It takes two of them to secure his arms while Vaike rises, slowly, his knee leaving the man's throat with a control that says he is choosing to let go and could very easily choose otherwise. The assassin gasps, wheezes, goes limp between the guards.
More footsteps in the corridor. Naela arrives, her blonde hair loose and wild from sleep, a hand-axe in each fist, and she takes in the scene in a single sweep: the open window, the dagger on the floor, the assassin being held, Vaike standing over him bare-chested and breathing hard. Her jaw tightens.
"Secure the wing," she says to someone behind her, and her voice is calm, clipped, the voice of a warrior taking command. "No one in or out until I say. Wake Bran and Leona." She moves to the window, checks it, checks the ledge outside. "He came up from the courtyard. There may be others."
Evran is standing just inside the doorway.
He does not remember crossing back into the room, but he is here, bare feet on cold stone, wearing nothing but the thin sleeping clothes he went to bed in.
His hands are shaking, and his whole body is shaking with them, a fine, uncontrollable tremor that starts in his core and radiates outward, and he cannot make it stop no matter how firmly he tells his muscles to be still.
He runs to Vaike's side.
Vaike catches him, one arm and then both, pulling him in tight against his chest. Evran's hands press flat against the broad planes of Vaike's torso, searching, feeling for something he cannot name but needs desperately to confirm.
Wounds. Blood. Something wrong. His fingers move across warm skin and find nothing but the solid, living heat of his husband's body, and the relief of it is so intense it nearly buckles his knees.
"Are you hurt?" His voice is thin, too high, not his own voice.
"I'm fine." Vaike's hand cups the back of his head, pressing him in. His heartbeat is fast beneath Evran's palm, the only sign that what just happened affected him at all. "He didn't get the blade in. I'm fine."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure. Look at me. Evran. Look at me."
Evran pulls back enough to look. Vaike's face is close, dark eyes intent, jaw set, a scratch along his cheekbone where the struggle must have caught him but nothing else.
No blood, no wounds. Evran's hands move over his shoulders, his arms, his sides, checking and rechecking, and Vaike lets him do it, lets him satisfy himself that everything is intact, standing patient and still beneath Evran's frantic hands, knowing that this is what Evran needs right now and willing to give him as long as it takes.
Then Evran's gaze falls to the dagger on the floor.
It is wrong. The blade is wrong, darker than clean steel, and along its edge there is a sheen that catches the ember-light in a way metal does not. A purplish tinge, oily and iridescent, coating the jagged edge.
The blade is poisoned.
Evran stares at it, and the trembling intensifies until his teeth are chattering and his hands are useless and the room feels very far away.