Chapter Forty-Seven #2
I did not bother denying it. “What excuse did he give you for leaving early?”
“The excuse matters little.” Noé shrugged, his gaze fixed straight ahead.
The pounding of the rain meant our entire conversation had been reduced to a screaming match—I could see his neck muscles straining as he spoke, yet his voice, when it reached me, was still muffled.
“He’s always transparent when it comes to you.
I saw through him during the Vainglory—I did so this time, too. ”
I love you…I have loved you from the moment I laid eyes on you. Eliot’s words dripped through me; guiltily, I shoved the memory of them away. “He wanted to make amends.”
Noé’s laugh took me by surprise. When I looked over at him again, he was smiling. “Of course,” he muttered. Then, louder: “What, because of the dinner?”
My expression must have given me away.
Shaking his head, Noé called out, “And did you? Amend?”
For some reason, the question made me abruptly weary.
Eliot and I should have amended—it was all I’d wanted, all I’d prayed for in the depths of the night while Noé rested, unaware and unconscious, to my side.
And yet, more than anything he’d confessed to me, it was my own words which haunted me the most.
I said I would not love him, so I do not love him. In the end, that was the only important thing, wasn’t it? I’d made a promise, and I intended to keep it, regardless of whether I was doing so for Eliot or in spite of him.
Everything else…It was only a girlish fantasy, one I should have cast off long ago.
I gritted my teeth. “Does it matter?”
Noé chuckled. “Honestly?” he said. “Not at all. You’ve reduced me to such a pathetic wretch that you could probably chase after a thousand men, and I’d still be here, waiting like a fool for you to return.
” The toe of his shoe dug into the gravel; a spray of crushed shells knocked against my exposed ankle as he continued moodily, “Be with Lear if you wish—be with whomever you wish. It makes no difference.”
Heat speared me at his words. Stopping where I was, I twisted to face him. “Why do you insist on saying things like that?”
My tone was harsh. He lifted his chin, eyes flashing in the dark. “Perhaps because I mean them.”
Unthinking, I stepped up to him. “Take it back.”
He returned my glare. “No.”
“Take it back!” I moved to shove at his chest, only to feel my breath catch as, once again, the heel of my boot slipped against the rain-slick ground. My weight went out from under me; eyes wide, Noé grabbed at my wrist, attempting to yank me upright.
Instead, my momentum carried us both down. For a terrifying moment after I hit the ground, my body slid along the gravel, dragged toward the cliff edge and the invisible death I knew awaited me beyond—but then Noé’s arms were around me, closing over me and pulling me away.
My head was tucked beneath his chin. I could feel him breathing—could feel the desperate, panicked heave of his inhales, his grip so tight around me, as if he were terrified to let me go. Mud caked me from my fall, freezing and damp, and yet, clutched against him, I was impossibly warm.
Suddenly, I was crying. “I know why you chose me as your victor.”
Noé stiffened. He pulled back to look at me, his gaze wary. “Why?” he asked.
I swallowed. “Your father cares for you,” I said.
“You understand that, just as you must have understood that no matter how you tried to hide your desire to kill him, at some point your walls would break, and he would glimpse it in your mind. If you’d enlisted any other witch in your plot to bring him down, your father would have dispatched them at once.
The only girl he’d hesitate to do away with would be one you were attached to—one you truly loved. ”
Rainwater was in my eyes; I blinked it away.
“That’s what you meant when you said I would have always won your Vainglory, isn’t it?
That is why you were so grateful Eliot brought me to you.
My Wit mattered little—your affection was the determining factor.
I was your victor because I was the only one who had your heart.
The only one who could plot against your father and survive. ”
Even if he didn’t admit to it, I knew it was true. Bastian had as good as confessed, hadn’t he? He’d let me live because his son loved me.
But he hadn’t realized Noé had chosen me for that very reason.
Noé sighed. One of his hands was in my hair; I felt his fingers tangle in my waves.
“I never meant to burden you with it,” he said.
“I needed someone who could survive long enough for me to scheme with. Someone whose death warrant I wouldn’t be signing when I slipped a ring on her finger.
But if you’d turned me down when I proposed to you at the end of the Vainglory, I would have let you go.
Even now, Lovett—if you want Eliot, if you want neither of us. The choice is yours to make.”
I knew it was. It was precisely what made this all so hard.
My tears were hot. “I promised him I would not be with you.”
Noé’s gaze went tender. Delicately, without pushing me off him, he reached up and wiped a smear of dirt from my cheek. “What does a promise matter?”
“Because it’s the last one I ever gave him,” I replied.
“Because I wish to do one single thing right in his eyes.” Rain beat into my skull, drumming against my neck; I did not feel it.
“He chose Clio over me, Noé. She tried to kill me—has tried to kill me twice now—and yet still, he accepts her stories, her truth, over mine. Because I betrayed him when I accepted your proposal, and she never has.” I hesitated, my sobs coming more freely.
“Because, at his core, he has never thought me good enough to wed.”
It was true. Hadn’t Eliot told me himself, during the Vainglory, that he would never marry a silkwitch? Because of the way his kind treated us, he’d said then. Because he did not wish to be like his father, like the other Weavers he knew.
He’d changed his stance—but not for me.
“Why has he convinced you that you are not good?” Noé’s hand cupped my chin, tilting it gently up toward his. “Sweetheart, you have always been good.”
It was such a simple thing to say—so simple, and so wildly, terribly false. “I have not.”
At my answer, he dropped his head back, exhaling.
“All right,” he responded a moment later.
“You are mistaken, but, fine. You think it matters in the slightest to me what you are?” He shifted onto his side so that we were lying in profile, splayed out together in the middle of the road.
“Before you, Lovett, I was nothing but a grudge. I existed solely to spite those who doubted me, so that I might hang my influence over their heads. When we first met, I saw how desperate Eliot was for you—sought you out during the Vainglory precisely because I knew what it would do to him, to witness me taking that which he wanted most. But you…”
He sighed, reaching to tuck a tendril of mud-spattered hair behind my ear.
The brush of his fingers against my temple made my stomach clench—cold and warm all at once.
“You are the only cause I have ever had,” he told me fervently.
“Be my moral compass. Tell me right from wrong, and I will obey your teachings. Good, bad—whatever you name yourself, I will be also.”
I laid a palm on his face. “I am a deadly cause,” I said. “If you marry me, I will do everything I can to reveal the origins of Weavers’ magic. You will never have power, Noé. You will never be a sorcerer.”
Noé’s expression was pitying. “I have never been a sorcerer,” he replied. “All I have been is yours.”
I kissed him then. His lips were icy, frozen by the rain, but I leaned into them, letting his mouth numb my own.
Both our clothes were soaked through, our skin like wax, bracingly cold.
Around us, the storm beat, chilling us further with every second, and I could have lived in it—there in the mud, with my dress soiled and my hair a snarled mess—could have dwelled there quite contentedly forever, so long as I did so with him.
When we broke apart, his fingers were still knotted in my waves, my forehead braced against his. “I love you horribly, Lovett,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”
I tucked my thumb below his bottom lip. “I love you, too,” I answered. My tears had stopped once I’d kissed him, but now they started up again, flowing in earnest down my face. “I don’t understand why. You’re the worst person I know.”
He laughed at that. “Come here.”
I did, shifting closer to him and slipping my knee between his. Pulling his head back, he nudged my chin higher, locking his gaze with mine.
“You love me?” he asked softly.
I nodded. At my response, something shifted in his stare—an opening, as if deep inside him, a key, long neglected, had finally been turned.
His smile was gentle, and I lost myself in it. “Then what have we to cry about?”