12 #2
Kason found me alone in the archive wing that evening, well after Yeva had gone, working by lamplight on a restoration piece that had resisted my attention for three days running.
"You had a good day," he said, settling into the chair that had become, somewhere in the last month, unofficially his.
"Yeva won't stop talking about her charm.
She's already planning to carve one for Teodor, which I suspect he's going to receive with substantially more grace than the craft currently warrants. "
"She has good instincts. Give her another month and she'll actually be dangerous with a blade in her hand."
"That's either very reassuring or deeply alarming, depending on what she decides to do with the skill."
I laughed, and he watched me do it with the particular warm attention that had become as familiar to me now as my own knife's weight, and something in the quiet lamplit room shifted, the easy comfort of the day settling into something considerably less easy, markedly more charged.
"Dobrin says hello," I said, mostly to fill the silence before it became something I wasn't yet ready to name. "And that he approves of you, provisionally, on the grounds that you haven't yet given him a specific reason not to."
"High praise, from what you've told me of him."
"The highest he gives anyone." I set down my knife, meeting his eyes properly for the first time since he'd entered, and felt the pull that had never once eased in six weeks, if anything grown steadier, more certain, the longer we spent in each other's company.
"He also told me something today. That people can protect badly and still be worth trusting eventually. "
Something shifted in Kason's expression, careful and searching. "Do you believe that?"
"I'm trying to." The honesty of it cost me something to say out loud, and I watched him hear the weight of it, watched something in his own careful composure crack open in response.
"I know you're still not telling me everything, Kason.
I've stopped pretending I don't know that.
I'm choosing, for now, to trust the reasons are kinder than they feel some nights, sitting alone with all the pieces I haven't been given. "
He rose, crossing the small distance between us with a slowness that felt deliberate, giving me every chance to step back if I wanted to, and I didn't, and found myself instead closing the last of the distance myself, some old caution finally, entirely, giving way.
"Ilinca." My name, low and rough, closer than it had ever been, his hand coming up to rest against my jaw with a gentleness that undid me considerably more than urgency would have.
"I know," I said, though I didn't fully know what I was agreeing to, only that whatever it was, I wanted it, badly, the specific ache of six weeks of careful restraint finally reaching a point past bearing.
His head dipped, slow and certain, close enough that I felt his breath against my mouth, close enough that every careful wall either of us had spent six weeks maintaining seemed, finally, about to come down entirely—
The door swung open without warning, and Teodor's voice cut through the charged quiet before either of us could fully register the interruption. "Kason, there's a rider from the eastern patrol, it's urgent—"
We broke apart fast enough that I felt the loss of it like a physical wound, and watched Teodor take in the scene with an expression that shifted, rapidly, from apology to genuine regret.
"I'm sorry," he said, already backing toward the door. "This can't wait, or I wouldn't have—"
"It's fine." Kason's voice had gone rough, far less steady than the composed authority I usually heard from him. "I'm coming."
He left with one last glance back at me, something unfinished and aching still sitting plainly in his expression, and I stood alone in the archive wing with my pulse refusing to settle and the particular, specific frustration of a moment interrupted a breath before it could become something neither of us would have been able to take back.
I sat back down at my workbench, hands unsteady enough that I didn't trust myself with the knife for a long while, and turned the whole of the evening over — Dobrin's easy warmth, Yeva's lopsided little charm, the ache of Kason's hand against my jaw and the words he hadn't finished saying before Teodor's interruption swallowed them whole.
Six weeks ago I'd been a woman who carved small wards and counted coin twice and told herself, every single night, that wanting anything larger than survival was a luxury she'd forfeited the moment Katra died protecting her.
I no longer entirely believed that. I wasn't certain, sitting alone in lamplight with my pulse still refusing to settle, that I wanted to believe it again.
An urgent rider from the eastern patrol meant trouble, whatever shape it eventually took, and some old, careful part of me understood that the trouble likely had something to do with the same danger circling closer around a name I'd found carved into an old ledger's spine.
I told myself I'd hear about it in the morning, whatever it was, and that worrying at it alone in the dark solved nothing that patience wouldn't solve better.
Sleep, when it finally came, offered no rest at all — not the wolfsbane dreams that usually stole it from me, but something wide awake and restless underneath, keeping me circling the same handful of unanswered questions until dawn.