25. Aldric
ALDRIC
The goblet trembles in Clara’s hands. Her eyes are enormous, glassy, fixed on some point beyond my shoulder, beyond the cellar, beyond the century.
“Clara. What did you see?”
She sets the goblet on the shelf with care, then she looks at me, and there is something in her face I cannot read.
“I need a moment.”
“Clara—”
“A moment, Aldric.” She holds up one hand. “Just—one moment.”
She moves past me and up the stairs, and I stand there like a fool for exactly three heartbeats before my body understands what my mind refuses to.
She is walking toward the gate.
I take the cellar stairs three at a time. Through the kitchen. Down the corridor. Her pale hair flashes ahead of me through the atrium, through the roses, and she doesn’t run, though she walks with a soldier’s conviction.
“Clara, wait.”
She doesn’t wait. The double doors stand open. The courtyard spreads before her, and the gate rises beyond it, black iron against the afternoon sky, and I have besieged cities with far more composure than I possess now.
“Clara, whatever the witch showed you… Whatever she said—” My voice cracks and fails me. “Do not leave. Not like this. Not after this morning, not with my cruelty as your last memory of me.”
She crosses the courtyard. The worn cobblestones. The weeds I never cleared because no one came to see them.
“Give me a chance to do it properly.” I’m following her like a dog.
I don’t care. “To woo you. I have done everything backward. I know I have done everything backward. I threatened you before I fed you. I kept you before I knew you. Let me start again. Let me court you like a man instead of hoarding you like a dragon. I will learn your century. I will learn your words. I will learn what a water heater is, and a Yelp, and I will never again speak to you the way I spoke to you in that cellar, I swear it on—”
She reaches the gate.
Her hand closes around the wrought iron handle.
“Clara, please.”
The gate swings open.
There’s no resistance. The hinges give like they’ve been oiled for centuries and waiting, and the forest lies beyond her, green and gold and endless, and the whole world stands open at her feet, every road, every city, every life that does not contain me.
“I love you!”
The words tear out of me and echo off the stone, and I stand in the center of my courtyard with my ruined heart blazing through my shirt and nothing left to lose.
“I love you, Clara. I have no right to it. I know what I am. I know what waits for you out there. There is light and warmth and machines and people with whole faces. And I cannot offer you one thing that world cannot, except this: no one in it will ever love you the way I do. No one can. They have not had centuries to learn what emptiness is, so they cannot know what you are worth.”
Clara freezes with her hand on the open gate.
Then she turns, and there are tears on her face.
“You enormous idiot,” she says thickly. “I wasn’t leaving.”
I cannot move. “You—the gate—”
“I was checking.” She swipes at her cheek with her sleeve.
“The witch, in the vision. She said the curse was already broken. I had to know if it was true before I… I couldn’t say anything until I knew, because what if it wasn’t, what if I got your hopes up and the gate didn’t—” She laughs, the sound tearful. “It opened, Aldric. It just opened.”
I look at the gate. At the iron that has held me longer than most nations have existed. It hangs ajar in the breeze like any farmer’s fence.
“Broken,” I repeat. The word has no meaning. I turn it over like a foreign coin. “How? How is it broken? Seven centuries, Clara. We tried everything—”
“Not everything.” She wraps her arms around herself.
“The witch built it with an ending. It was never meant to be forever. It was made to break the moment her descendant came to your gate and truly loved you.” Her chin lifts.
“It broke because I fell in love with you. Sometime between the fish and the orchard and you warming my socks by the fire, you undead disaster. That’s it. That’s the ending.”
My heart stops. I hear the words, but I can’t comprehend them.
“You love me.”
“Yes.”
“Me.” I gesture at myself, at the grayed skin, the hollow eye, the ribs, the ruin. “You have seen all of it. You have seen the bone.”
Clara rolls her eyes. “I’ve licked some of the bone, Aldric, keep up.”
“You love me.” I say it a third time, because perhaps my ears have stopped working, finally decayed.
“I do. And she knew I would.” Clara shakes her head slowly. “She saw you coming, years before you came. She could have stopped you. Killed you. Instead, she let her village burn and turned you into a revenant, because in every future where you died, I die alone. She preserved you for me, Aldric.”
I stop listening. I will untangle her words later, in the days to come, or years, or decades. Because only one thing is important right now, and she loves me.
I cross the courtyard.
“Aldric? Are you—your face is doing something—”
I pick her up, and her arms wrap around me, and her legs come around my waist, and I kiss her.
I kiss her like I’m drowning and she has the air I need to breathe.
Her hands fist in my hair, and she’s laughing and crying into my mouth, and I taste salt and strawberries and the entire rest of my existence.
I kiss her until she is breathless and boneless and makes that small sound against my lips that I have hoarded like treasure since the first night.
Only when I finally lift my head do I notice my surroundings.
To our left and right is the Black Forest and behind us... The gate stands behind us. Behind us. The courtyard, the keep, all of it is behind us, and I’m standing on ground my feet have not touched since the Holy Roman Empire held it.
“Clara,” I breathe.
“Mm?” she hums against my neck.
“We are outside.”
Clara goes still against me. Turns her head. Looks at the gate, the keep, the forest surrounding us.
“Huh,” she says. “So we are.”