Chapter 29 The Seventh Moon #3
“I never want to see you like that again,” said Aurienne.
More softly she added, “That’s why I gave back the ring.
So ties would be cut. So you wouldn’t have—a reason, ever again.
We’re on the verge of war—of years of wars.
” Her voice became an emotion-pressed whisper.
“Please promise me I’ll never see you like that again. ”
“I can promise, but you know exactly what our promises are worth.” Mordaunt reached for her hands. He wasn’t wearing his gloves. His thumbs passed over her knuckles. “I saw your bones. I should never be able to say that sentence.”
The pond had taken the hagstone. Aurienne no longer bore its weight. There was only the lightness of Mordaunt’s touch.
His breath punctuated the fog with a paler shade. “I’d do it again,” he said. “And again and again.”
Was it madness or was it a confession?
Were they the same thing?
The air between them grew rarefied, fragile. Precarious joy and fear warred in Aurienne. He hadn’t pushed away her hands again—he had reached for them himself. Had she not extinguished any feeling he might have for her? Was his deofol right? Could he still…?
“I came here tonight to cast away the hagstone,” said Aurienne. “I wanted to come to a place of healing to do it.”
Osric’s eyes went to her bare clavicle, then caught her eyes again.
“I pulled out the slow-turning knife,” said Aurienne.
She found that her hands were shaking. She had just taken back her exiled heart. This was reckless. This was self-destructive. This was a leap of faith.
She was going to tell him that she loved him.
Hurt might follow. She deserved it if it did. She would risk heartbreak in this moment of new-healed fragility. She would find a bit of her own wildflower bravery.
“All this time, I thought I was healing you, but you were also healing me.”
He bent his head towards her. Their foreheads touched.
“We can’t be,” he breathed. “Tell me we can’t be, one last time. Gods, give me peace.”
“I won’t,” said Aurienne. “I can’t.” She clutched his hands in her shaking ones. “For so long my hands have been defined by my abilities, my tācn, my Cost. But they’ve been empty—so empty. Hands should have other hands to hold. I want them to be yours.”
In his gaze, wretched pain, wretched hope. “But it’s impossible.”
“So was healing you,” said Aurienne. Her voice caught. “So was—me falling in love again.”
He stared at her, uncomprehending, or hardly daring to comprehend. Their breaths crossed how souls touch.
She slipped her trembling hands on either side of his face. He was a blur through her tears.
The words—the impossible words, the words she had thought she would never say again—tumbled out of her.
“I love you.”
She spoke them against his mouth, and against reason and logic and pragmatism, and in defiance of the divisions of Order and of absolutes and of her own fear.
“I love you, and if it’s not too late, if I haven’t destroyed what might have been, if we can have any sort of life together—whatever it looks like, I want it. I want to be with you.”
When he did not answer immediately, the quiet left her in agony; there was only the sound of sea fret and her heart-blood, drip-dripping away in the silence. She could not bear to look at him; she could hardly stand.
Then his words came—helpless, almost frenzied. “But I’m a vile wretch—a criminal—a Fyren.”
“I know what you are. And I know what you are beyond those things.”
“I have nothing to offer you but the devotion of a man who has never been devoted, the love of a man who has never loved—”
Hope churned Aurienne’s blood and pounded in her ears. It wasn’t too late. She found the courage to look up. Was it her tears that blurred him and made his eyes so bright, or his? He brought her hands to his lips. Hope was the feeling of his warm breath against her skin.
“It would never have been too late,” he said.
“I love you. I would have loved you in defiance of your rejection, and I will love you, in spite of any of your objections. I had no heart to give, until you, and now it has passed to your keeping—and it’s yours—it’s yours—and it will be yours, whether you want it or not. ”
Aurienne, in a half sob, said, “I want it.”
“If I’m to heal this horrid, fatal ache—it’s you. If I’m to fall on my knees, it’s before you—”
“If I’m to be happy, it’s with you.”
That left him stunned. Aurienne reached for him and kissed love—love irrevocable, love grief-laden, love impossible—upon his lips.
He swept her into his arms; her heart was irradiated with happiness; he smelled of blackthorn smoke; her face pressed into a cloak of darkest velvet, tucked and strapped all over with promises of violence; he was inevitably the Fyren, inevitably himself, and yet she loved him, and his eyes were full of light.
The fog raised them towards the heavens, or the heavens billowed towards the earth, and they were simultaneously there, and in a faraway place, both umbrous and luminous.
And impossibilities didn’t matter, because a hundred years hence, none of this would matter, because she loved him, because they were just two souls in moonlight.
There, at the twilight of the year, at the edgeland, in that hallowed place studded with stones like bones, on the fault line between worlds, again and again, she told the man she loved that she loved him.