9 #2
"She found me when I was an infant. Never told me where, or how, or why — only that I was left somewhere I shouldn't have been, and she couldn't leave me there.
" Her thumb traced the edge of the half-carved block without seeming to notice she was doing it.
"She raised me on wardcraft and practical sense and absolutely no patience for self-pity, which I resented at the time and am grateful for now.
She died when I was twelve. I watched it happen.
I've spent six years since trying to carve small enough that whatever came for her never has a reason to come looking for me. "
"I'm sorry." It felt inadequate the moment I said it, two small words asked to carry substantially more weight than they were built for, and I watched her register that inadequacy too, though she didn't hold it against me.
"You didn't do it. There's nothing to apologize for.
" She looked up at me then, something raw and unguarded in her expression that I hadn't seen since the market, before rank and Council business had taught us both to be more careful with each other.
"I don't tell people that. Not the real shape of it.
Dobrin knows pieces. No one knows all of it. "
"Do you know who did it?"
"No. I never saw them clearly. Wolfsbane on the blades, which tells you something — ordinary bandits don't bother arming themselves for wolves specifically unless they had a certain reason to expect one.
" Her voice had gone carefully flat in the way I recognized now as her wardsmith's precision applied to something considerably more painful than craft.
"I used to think it was simply bad luck.
Wrong place, wrong night. I've stopped believing that, somewhere in the last two weeks.
Too many things have started lining up that shouldn't. "
"The gap in the archive."
"The gap in the archive. The murals. A birthmark I've never once questioned in eighteen years, sitting on the back of my own neck like it's been waiting this entire time for someone to ask the right question about it.
" She said it lightly, though I heard, underneath the lightness, a fear she wasn't yet ready to name directly, and something in me ached to close the distance between what she suspected and what I already knew, and couldn't, not yet, not without breaking a promise I'd made to people who weren't in this room to release me from it.
"Why tell me?"
The question hung between us longer than I expected, and when she finally answered, her voice had gone quieter still, almost surprised at her own honesty.
"I don't entirely know. I think some part of me stopped being able to keep things from you somewhere around the second day, and I've been pretending otherwise ever since because the alternative is markedly more frightening than the pretending. "
Something in my chest cracked open at that, wide and sudden, and I found myself reaching for her hand before I'd fully decided to — not the way I'd seized a soldier's wrist in the market, nothing urgent or involuntary about it, only slow and deliberate, giving her every chance to pull away before my fingers closed gently around hers.
She didn't pull away.
"I have things I'm not telling you either," I said, low, honest in a way that cost me considerably more than her confession had cost her.
"Not because I don't trust you. Because the timing of it isn't mine alone to decide, and I'm terrified that once I do tell you, it changes everything between us in ways I can't take back. "
"That's not much of a comfort."
"No," I agreed. "It isn't. But it's the truth, and I'd rather give you an honest fear than a comfortable lie."
She studied our joined hands for a long moment, something working behind her eyes that I couldn't fully read, and then, slowly, she turned her palm up against mine, fingers threading through in a gesture that felt far more significant than its simplicity should have allowed.
"Then I'll wait," she said, quiet, "for as long as your timing needs. But I want you to know I'm not waiting blindly. I'm going to keep looking, on my own, whether you tell me or not."
"I'd expect nothing less."
We sat like that a long while, hands joined over a half-carved restoration ward, sunlight moving slow across the archive floor, and I understood, with a clarity that settled somewhere between joy and genuine dread, that whatever careful distance either of us had been maintaining had just quietly, irrevocably, come undone.
A messenger found me before supper, breathless from the climb up from the lower gate, with a sealed letter bearing Lord Denholt's formal crest and a request, phrased with exactly enough courtesy to feel like a demand, for a firm wedding date within the month.
I read it twice, standing in the corridor with the last of the archive wing's warmth still sitting strange and unfamiliar in my chest, and understood, with the particular clarity that unwelcome mail always seemed to bring, precisely how little time I actually had left to reconcile the two halves of the life I currently seemed to be living.
Halmar found me still holding the letter an hour later, and didn't bother pretending he hadn't already guessed its contents.
"The Denholts grow impatient," he said, without preamble, in the tone of a man who considered impatience entirely reasonable.
"As does this Council, Your Highness, if I'm to speak plainly.
The exemption you granted the wardsmith bought her protection.
It did not buy you indefinite delay on a matter this kingdom's northern security genuinely depends on. "
"I'm aware of what it did and didn't buy, Halmar."
"Then perhaps it's time this Council heard your intentions plainly, rather than continuing to read them secondhand through gossip and closed archive doors.
" He said it without malice, which somehow made it land harder than hostility would have.
"I don't say this to wound you. I say it because I've watched this kingdom's stability rest on careful, deliberate choices for thirty years, and I'd rather see you make one now, openly, than watch you drift into a decision the Council makes for you instead. "
I didn't have an answer for him that wasn't either a lie or a confession I still wasn't ready to make in a public corridor, so I gave him nothing at all, and let him take my silence for whatever conclusion he chose to draw from it.
I found myself, walking back toward my own chambers that evening, thinking not of Sorcha, or the Council, or the political catastrophe currently gathering around a wedding date I had no intention of honoring and no plan yet for how to avoid it honorably.
I thought of a hand turning up against mine in an archive wing full of dust and old light, and understood that whatever careful, patient timing I'd promised Ilinca, the world outside that archive door had already stopped waiting for either of us to be ready.