Chapter 25
Nyxiana
We walk back through the castle without saying anything.
The guest wing has gone quiet. The lamps in the corridor have burned down to a low amber along the floor. Doria is still working at my skin in here, thinner at this hour, steady as a pulse I can’t put a finger on.
At my door we say goodnight. Neither of us means it. He goes on down the corridor to his own room, four doors along.
Then I’m alone with the door shut behind me.
I try to work. The archive is the useful thing to be thinking about and it’s the safe one. Which shelves we didn’t reach. What the tapestry did while I was reading. Whether Lachlan knows what’s under his own house.
None of it holds.
There’s a guard on the stair two floors down.
He’s bored and his boots are wet. I have him whether I want him or not, the same as I have the cook, the steward, the woman with the wine.
Tonight the whole castle comes through me and none of it is loud enough to cover the four doors between his room and mine.
I catch myself in the black glass of the window when I finally move. My eyes have gone gold at the edges.
That has meant the same thing for decades. I’m nearer the edge of my own control than I’ve let myself notice. The dragon in me got there first.
There’s the other thing under it and I know exactly what that is too. The last time I fed to full was before Drakoria. Yesterday morning in the quarter came to about a third of what I went down there for. My hands have been steady all week because I make them be.
The last passage is still sitting where I left it this afternoon. I read it with him at my shoulder, close enough that his sleeve was against my arm. I translated every line on that page out loud except the one about him. It took me about as long as it takes to move my eyes down four lines.
He asked me what had changed. I told him the material was heavier than I expected.
Every person who ever kept that man handed him a version of the truth. Today I did it too.
I go out into the corridor. The plan is to walk until this is tired out of me. Left, away from his door, down the long stretch to the stair at the empty end of the wing.
I go right.
Four doors. I’m standing in front of his before I’ve put a single sentence together.
I knock.
It opens fast. He wasn’t asleep. He wasn’t lying down. He was standing near that door with the whole night in front of him.
He’s still dressed. Collar open, sleeves shoved back off his forearms, archive dust in his hair where he’s run his hand through it. His shoulders take up most of the doorway. He has one hand high on the doorframe and he leaves it there.
He waits.
I’ve walked into every room of my life with the first sentence already picked. I walk into this one with nothing.
He steps back and lets me through. The door shuts behind me.
His room is the twin of mine. Pale stone, heavy bed against the far wall, a door standing open onto a balcony over the valley. The only light comes up off the streets below. It crosses the ceiling in opal and gold and green.
He doesn’t ask me why I’m here.
Any other man would. He’s been the one nobody asks his whole life. He won’t do it to somebody else.
That’s worse than being asked.
So I talk first.
“On the balcony,” I say. “You put a step between us before I could. You decided what that meant.”
“I decided you’d changed your mind.”
“I hadn’t.”
He takes that without any expression at all. It doesn’t go anywhere near his face.
“You could have said so at the rail.”
“I know.”
“You didn’t.” He isn’t accusing me of it. He’s putting it where it goes. “So I filled it in with what I had.”
“With what every other room has handed you.”
“It’s a good record,” he says. “Nine times out of ten it’s right.”
I read everyone. I don’t aim it and I can’t switch it off.
It started before I could walk. Every room I have ever walked into hands me all of it whether I want it or not.
Standing in front of this man I get his heat, his height, the dust in his hair.
Nothing else. He’s a wall with a light behind it.
So I tell him that, because it’s the only true thing I have that I can give him.
“I read everyone,” I say. “Four hundred fae in that hall the first night, all of them at once, every one of them wanting a thing off me. I read the guard on the stair tonight without turning my head. I read the woman who left the breakfast outside my door before I was awake. I read Lachlan through two floors of stone the night we came in.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
I shrug. “It’s my life.”
I take hold of the back of the chair by the window.
“I’ve never got at you. Not once. Not from a hundred yards, not from here. Standing in this room, nothing is coming at me. You’re the only person who has ever done that.”
He takes a breath and lets it out. His hand comes off the doorframe.
“You read me when I had my hand on that stone.”
“The map answers to you. That’s why the reading ran through you.”
It’s the answer I gave him coming down off that ridge, word for word. It stops the same distance short of the question.
He doesn’t ask again.
He could. He’s owed it twice now. He lets me keep it instead. I take that off him the same as I’ve taken everything else.
“Nobody has ever knocked on my door,” he says.
“Packs came to your treeline.”
“To tell me where the line was.” His mouth moves, not quite a smile. “When they wanted work, they sent a man out to fetch me. That isn’t a knock.”
He crosses the floor. He stops close enough that I have to look up to keep his eyes.
The white goes through them and out again, fast enough that anyone not watching for it would lose it.
He has no idea it happens. He never has. It’s another thing I say nothing about.
He looks down at my hand where it’s gripping the chair back.
“You didn’t come here to ask me for anything.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You’ve been carrying it since the archive.” There’s no heat in it anywhere. “You’ll give it to me when you give it to me.”
The floor goes out from under me. None of it shows.
I could hand it over standing right here. Four sentences and he’d have all of it.
“Not tonight,” I say.
“All right.”
That’s all of it. He doesn’t ask me when.
He reaches out and takes my left wrist off the chair back. He turns it over. His thumb comes down across the inside.
The star goes warm.
My pulse jumps under his fingers and there’s nowhere to put it. He looks at my wrist. There’s nothing on my skin for him to see.
He doesn’t know what he’s holding. I do.
Three healers in two realms have looked at this mark and called it a birthmark. My mother used to put her mouth to it when I was small. Nobody has ever been able to tell me one useful thing about it.
It has never once done this for anybody.
He also has three fingers across the softest part of a hungry woman’s arm and no idea about that either. His heartbeat comes up through his thumb into my skin, slow, hard, closer than it has been since that rock in the North Range. My fangs come down against my bottom lip and stay there.
I keep my mouth shut. My arm stays where he put it.
Up on that rock in the North Range I had my palm over his heart and a bead of his blood an inch off my mouth. I came down off my toes and put a step of rock between us instead. That took everything I had that day.
There’s no rock under us tonight. Nobody is watching either of us. He’s the one who reached out.
I still don’t move.
It isn’t restraint. I’ve always had restraint; I know what that feels like from the inside. This is a straight choice between two things. His blood is the smaller of them.
“You run cool,” he says.
“I always have.”
His hand is hot. That heat goes up my arm, through my chest, low into my stomach. I stand in his room and let it.
I’ve had men. Never one I couldn’t see the whole way through before he put a hand on me. I knew what they wanted before they knew it. It made all of it small.
I have no idea what this one does next. Standing here not knowing is worse than any of it and I’m not going anywhere.
His grip changes. It settles, the way a hand settles when it has decided to stay.
“You should sleep,” he says.
“I won’t.”
He lets go of my wrist. He sits down on the bed with his forearms on his knees and his hands hanging between them.
“Sit, Nyxiana. There is quiet enough in this room for the both of us.”
The word order is old. It isn’t how he speaks. It isn’t how anybody has spoken in a very long time. Underneath it there’s a formality that belongs to a place I couldn’t put a name to.
He doesn’t hear himself do it.
I’ve spent months trying to get a clean read off this man. Tonight he hands me a sentence nobody living uses. He doesn’t know he’s done it.
I sit down.
Not on the chair. On the bed, an arm’s length from him, back against the post, feet on the stone. He stays where he is.
The talk goes small after that. He wants to know why fae bread tastes the way it does.
I have no idea and I say so. He asks how far the road runs east of this valley.
I don’t know that either. I’ve been the one in the room with the answer my entire adult life.
Tonight I’ve got nothing for him at all.
He tells me about a border he walked in Norway a hundred years ago where the snow came in sideways for nine days.
“Did anybody come out to you?”
“The farmer’s wife brought bread twice.” He takes a moment with it. “She left it on a stone and went back inside.”
Below us a door shuts. A woman laughs. The valley takes it and gives back nothing.
Every instinct I have says get up and go back down that corridor to my own room and sit with what I read until morning.
The star on my wrist is still warm.
I should go.
I stay.
At some point he puts his back against the wall behind the bed. At some point I put my head down. He doesn’t reach for me. I don’t move away from him.
Every word I said to him tonight was true. I’ve never lied to this man and I didn’t start in his room in the middle of the night.
I also told him the inside of him is closed off to me. I let him take that as all of him. I said nothing about the part that isn’t closed.
The light goes on crossing the ceiling. His breathing evens out beside me and doesn’t change again.
I’m asleep before I’ve worked out one word of what I’ll say to him in the morning.