Chapter 29
Nyxiana
Kaspian stands in my doorway, doesn’t leave for a while after he’s said he’s leaving.
“Send word,” he says. “Any hour. I don’t care what it is.”
“I know,” I tell him.
“You say that. You’ve said it since you were nine.” He puts a hand on my shoulder and leaves it there. “Nyxi. Send word.”
Then he goes, he looks back once, from the bottom of the steps, then he’s moving, out across the yard toward the guest cabin down by the treeline.
My cabin gets very quiet without him in it.
I set down the tea I never finished. It’s been cold for an hour.
A new tread crosses the yard. It’s heavier than my brother’s.
It comes at a different pace. I know whose it is before it reaches my porch.
I’ve been listening for it since he came off the ridge and walked into this pack.
Valen stops in my open doorway with the night behind him.
His knuckles are split across both hands, the right one worse than the left.
His shirt is damp through at the collar, clinging where it’s caught on him.
There’s dirt driven into the knees of his trousers and a mark coming up along one cheekbone that will be a good color by morning.
Whatever he did with the last two hours, he did it hard.
“What happened to you?”
“You’ve known since the first time you saw me,” he says without moving from the doorway. “That’s what I heard through this door tonight. That I was never a wolf. You’ve had that since the ridge, and let me stand out there anyway.”
The cool air comes past him into the room.
“I want the rest of it. All of it. Out loud, from you, tonight.”
“Come in and sit down.”
“No.”
My pulse goes faster than I can account for.
I spend my life reading what this does to other people.
Tonight, it’s the other way around, there’s a man in my doorway who has come for the truth and me standing in my own cabin holding it.
There’s no version of what I’m about to say that arrives smaller than it is. I stop looking for one.
I put the cup down on the table. Then I stand. He isn’t going to sit down, and I’m not doing this from a chair.
“I’ll give you all of it,” I say. “As much as I have.” He doesn’t answer that.
“You were never a wolf who failed to shift. There’s nothing in you that ever could have shifted. There was never a wolf in there for you to fail.”
He doesn’t tell me to stop.
“Your blood is divine. Older than dragonfire, older than anything the dragons carry, older than my mother’s line. That’s what’s in you, what has always been in you.”
Nothing moves in his face. Nothing at all. I’ve been trying to read that face for months and I get exactly as much off it now as I ever have.
“The rest of it I read in the archive at Doria. In the sealed room, from the last page, in the old script.” I keep my voice level.
“It named a living lock. Divine-blooded, made after the catastrophe, by the founders themselves, put in place to hold the seal and to mend it when it cracked. Made, Valen. Not born.”
His hand, which has been moving on the doorframe, stops.
“While I was reading that passage your signature answered it. It came up under the page brighter and louder than I’ve ever read it off you.
It kept rising the whole time my eyes were on that line.
That’s how I knew for certain. Before that I knew there was more to you than not being wolf. I just didn’t know what.”
He’s had one hand on the doorframe since he arrived and hasn’t put a boot over the step.
“I’m telling you what the page says,” I say. “Not a softer version of it. There’s nothing worse underneath and I’m not softening any of it for you.”
Nothing about him is moving except his hand on the doorframe, holding the rest of it still is costing him.
“Made,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Made for what.”
Underneath every word of this my body is still tracking his. Where he’s standing, how far off, what his breathing is doing, what it does when I speak. The exact point he’d be at if I took a step forward.
“To hold the seal in place,” I say. “The one that keeps the divided world from coming back together. You’re what stands under it. And when it cracks, you’re what closes it. That’s the function. That’s all it said about what you were made for.”
I make myself finish.
“A man built for a purpose. Not one who got handed a life and picked what to do with it.”
He takes that standing up.
“So, there was never anything wrong with me.” His voice comes out differently, slower, and older than the one he uses on everyone else.
The words in an order nobody has used in a long time, he’s using it on me the way a man uses it on a stranger.
“I wasn’t made to shift. There was nothing there to fail at, and I failed at it for a lifetime. ”
“Yes.”
I keep my hands still at my sides while everything he’s ever believed about himself comes apart four feet in front of me. I know what he needs right now. It’s in his hands. I’m not the person who gets to give it to him tonight, so I don’t move and he stops asking about himself.
“How long?”
“Two different things,” I say. “Don’t let me blur them. That you weren’t a wolf, I’ve had since the first time I saw you at the perimeter - months. That you were made by the founders to hold their seal, I have had since I read it in that room in Doria, with you standing at my shoulder.”
“Doria.”
“Doria, for that part. Months for the other.”
“Months.”
“Months.”
He looks at the floor of my porch and then back up at me.
“On the balcony,” he says. “You gave me all of it. The world, the war, what they were afraid of, what they did about it. All of it yet you left out the part where it was about me.”
“Yes.”
“Say why.”
I could tell him I was afraid. That’s true, would land softly, he’d have somewhere to put it, because a man can forgive fear.
I could tell him I was going to tell him, eventually, when the timing was better.
That one is a lie and would be the second thing I took from him tonight. I don’t give him either.
“Because I watched what believing you were a wolf let you live through,” I say. “You built a whole life on that. Every place that ever turned you out, every pack that made you earn your place, you took all of it standing on the one story you had about yourself.” His eyes don’t leave my face.
“Taking that out from under you before you could hold what came after it wasn’t mine to do.”
“That wasn’t your call to make.”
“No. I made it anyway. Every day, for months. I knew what I was doing every one of them.”
He looks at me for a long moment.
“Would you do it again?”
“Yes.”
I say it straight. I don’t look anywhere else while I do.
He doesn’t raise his voice just steps back out of the doorway onto the porch.
The boards take his weight and give under it, once.
He doesn’t slam anything, doesn’t say one more word to me.
He turns, goes down off my porch and starts across the yard toward the trees.
I could say his name and he’d stop. I know that better than I know anything else about him.
My hand comes up an inch off the doorframe, I catch it there and put it back.
I don’t call after him, instead I watch him the whole way across the yard until the dark past the treeline takes him.
Somewhere out in those trees he’s walking around with nothing left to be angry at.
He doesn’t even have the wolf anymore. He carried it his whole life as a fault he had to work off.
It was the only part of himself he was sure of and I’m the one who took it.
When I can no longer see him I go inside, put my back against the door and stay there a while, the cabin dark around me. My hands are steady. They’ve been steady the whole way through. That’s the thing I’m good at, it’s never been useful to anybody.
I would do it again tomorrow but knowing that takes nothing away from watching him carry the rest out of here. There’s still the rest. Faelan on a balcony in Doria, everything he said to me, nobody in this pack knowing a word of it. I don’t do anything about that tonight either.
The cabin is quiet. The tea still on the table where I left it. I’ve run every step of this hunt from four moves ahead. I have no idea what happens next.