Chapter 26
Nyxiana
Iwake up in his bed with the valley already bright outside the balcony door.
I’m still in what I had on last night. So is he. Our boots are by the bed. There’s nowhere in this realm I have to be for another hour, and I haven’t woken up in another person’s bed in longer than I can put a number to.
His arm is across me above the waist. It went there somewhere in the night. He’s warm the whole way down my back and I lie there and let that go on longer than I need to.
I fed badly in Vampiria and I’ve been on the short end of it through four realms since. A sleeping man with his pulse an inch off my ear is the worst place in this castle for me to be lying. I don’t get up.
“You’re quiet this morning,” he says.
I put my hand over his arm and leave it there.
The light off the valley has moved a good way up the wall by the time either of us speaks again.
Then he gets up and dresses. I watch him from the bed. His hair is pushed up on one side where he slept on it and he leaves it that way.
“I’m going to walk the grounds,” he says. He sits on the edge of the mattress to get his boots on. “Myself. Not with an escort.”
“They’ve given us everything since we walked in.”
“That’s what I don’t like about it.”
He looks back at me once from the door with his hand still on it, then pulls it shut behind him.
The room goes quiet. I lie there a moment before I get up. His shirt is over the back of the chair. I put it on and go out to the balcony for the air.
There’s a man at the rail with his back to me.
I go still in the doorway.
I know the signature before he turns around.
It’s the same one I’ve read for years off wreckage he left behind him, off the marks on three women I would die for, off ward stones with his work laid down in the foundation, off every ugly thing that’s happened to this pack since the first time he came for it.
In all of that it was never attached to a face.
He turns around.
He came here to talk, not to fight. That’s the first thing and he’s made sure of it. His hands are empty and he keeps them where I can see them.
The second thing is that he’s beautiful, I wasn’t ready for it.
Most fae are. This is the kind people turn around in the street for.
Dark hair pushed back off a high forehead, gray coming in at one temple and nowhere else.
High cheekbones, a long jaw, a mouth that looks like it’s enjoying something.
Tall and lean, in a plain dark coat with nothing under it to hide a weapon in.
His face settled somewhere in its forties a long time ago and stayed there.
Nothing about him looks like what he’s done.
He’s standing at the rail of another man’s guest quarters as though somebody put it at his disposal.
I stay exactly where I am.
Under the signature I already know, there’s another one running beneath it, older and rotten through, decades of his own work layered down over the top of whatever he started as.
“Say what you came to say,” I tell him. “Then get off this balcony.”
“I came to talk.” He doesn’t move off the rail. “Not to fight you. You of all people know the difference between the two, so let’s not pretend it is.”
“You have until I decide otherwise.” He stays where he is.
“The third one is in the Purification Chambers,” he says.
I don’t answer that.
“You have two. The third one you were never going to find, because it isn’t in an archive and it isn’t in anybody’s history. It’s in the Chambers, under a floor I walked on for a long time before you were born.”
“Why would you hand me that?”
“Because I need them together as much as you do.” He watches the valley while he says it. “Not for your reasons. That’s all you’re getting from me on it.”
Down in the valley the birds are still at it, the same as they were before he turned around.
“You’ve read what’s in that room downstairs,” he says.
“I know what’s in it, because I read it first. Then I spent three hundred years finding the same account in nine other archives, every one of them sealed the same way this one was.
So, we can skip the part where you tell me I’m mistaken about the facts. ”
“I wasn’t going to tell you that.”
“No.” He almost smiles. “You weren’t.”
He turns and puts his back against the rail so he’s facing me properly.
“Every court in every realm sits on it,” he says.
“Every throne, every tribunal, the Inter-Realm Accord you serve. All of them take their authority from the judgment of men who sealed a living world and cut the memory out of everyone they carried off it. That’s not a wrong somebody did once.
That’s the foundation. You don’t repair a foundation like that. You take the building down off it.”
“You take the building down and it lands on people who had nothing to do with any of it.”
“Which people?”
“All of them. Every single one who was born into it and never had a say.”
“Name me one of these systems that has ever protected the innocent when protecting them was expensive.” He doesn’t raise his voice, hasn’t raised it once.
“Your healer. When her sister was murdered, the tribunal’s answer was to put Lyanna in a marriage she didn’t want, so the court could go on looking legitimate through the scandal.
Nobody on that bench was protecting a soul but themselves. ”
“That was your doing.”
“It was my opening. They built the door. I walked through it.” He lets that sit.
“Or take the angels. A wolf comes to the Council with his mate already dead and they let him bargain for her. They take the bargain, let him walk out of there without telling him what he’d just agreed to pay.
He’s still walking around not knowing. That’s your Council.
That’s the institution I’m supposed to leave standing on the grounds that innocent people live under it. ”
My hand has closed down on the rail.
“We’re done,” I say.
“You didn’t sleep in your own room last night,” he says.
There’s nothing in the way he says it. He isn’t accusing me of it and he isn’t enjoying it. He’s telling me how long he’s been close enough to know.
“Get off this balcony.”
The words come out wrong. Not the meaning, the sound. My voice catches partway across them and I have to take the sentence again from the start to finish it.
He hears it happen. I watch him hear it.
My left wrist goes warm.
The star does this. It always has, since I was a child, and nobody has ever been able to tell me why.
His eyes go to my wrist.
They don’t stay there. He brings them back up to my face the way a man is polite about something he wasn’t meant to see. Staring would have been easier to take.
“I’m not asking you to join me,” he says. “I know better than that. You’ve spent your whole life inside these institutions and they’ve been good to you personally. Nobody puts that down over one conversation on a balcony.”
“Then what.”
“Stand aside.” He says it the way another man would ask for the salt. “When it comes. Don’t put yourself in front of it. That’s all I want from you, and I’d rather have it now than have to work around you later.”
Two things occur to me at the same time.
I could end this here. He’s on a balcony that isn’t his, on a realm he doesn’t hold, both hands open and empty, with nothing between him and me but four strides of stone.
Everything this pack has lost since the night he first came for it ends in the next four seconds if I want it to.
Nobody has ever had him like this. Nobody is going to have him like this again.
Or I let him finish, let him walk, and carry every word of it around inside me with no one to hand any of it to.
I don’t work it out in my head. My body does it without me. Four strides. Less than that at speed. The angle from here to his throat, what it takes to put a man that old into stone, whether the rail holds or goes over with him.
Then I move.
I cross the balcony faster than anything on this realm can follow. My hand closes at his throat. His back meets the rail hard enough to knock the sound out of him. I hold him there. My grip stays exactly where I want it, short of what it would take, and he gets to feel the difference.
He doesn’t fight me, doesn’t reach for anything. Both hands stay open at his sides the entire time.
I bring my face down close to his.
“You’re right about the crime,” I tell him. “You’re wrong about what to do with it. If you come at my people to prove a point, this is what’s waiting for you. I won’t stop where I stopped just now.”
He looks back at me from four inches away with my hand around his throat, his pulse steady under my fingers.
“You’ll understand it before this is finished,” he says. “I’d rather you understood it sooner.”
I let go of him.
He straightens his collar, then turns and walks the length of the balcony toward the garden wall. There’s a gap in that wall that wasn’t there when I came out.
I look away for a breath.
When I look back the gap is stone again. There’s nobody on this balcony but me.
I put both hands on the rail and hold on. Then I make myself breathe.
My hands are shaking. Not much but enough that I can see it against the stone.
Underneath the shaking, all of it is sitting there waiting for me. The Chambers. A floor he walked on before I was born. Every word he said about the tribunal and the Council, all of it true, none of it anything I can hand to another living soul.
The birds are still at it down there. Nothing in this valley knows what just happened on this balcony.
I stay at the rail until my hands quit. It takes longer this morning than it’s taken in years.
Valen comes back up from the grounds a while later. He’s got the look he wears when he’s walked a perimeter, found it clean, and doesn’t believe a word of it. There’s grass seed on his boots and the wind has been through his hair.
“Anything?” I ask him.
“Everything’s exactly the way they said it would be.” He sets his pack down. “That’s my whole report.”
He looks at me for a moment, the same look he’s given me every day since the North Range.
“I’ve got something,” I say. “The court records from yesterday. There was a reference in one of the older ones to the Purification Chambers, offhand, in a list. I didn’t think anything of it at the time.”
“And now you do.”
“Now I do.”
He believes me, has no reason not to.
What I told him is true and it isn’t what happened.
So, now there are two of them in here. Faelan on this balcony, and what the archive said about Valen. I am carrying both into the next realm.