15. Valerian
— ? —
Valerian
I hear everything from the gate.
Every mile of the return, her heartbeat threading closer through the dusk. The engine’s obscene purr. My cousin’s voice, easy and bright, narrating speed limits while my bride laughs in the passenger seat of his absurd car, and the laugh is the worst part, because it’s her real one.
A day. I gave him a single day, and he has her laugh.
It isn’t faithlessness I fear. She came home glowing and unbruised, and her heart does the specific thing it does only for me; I’d stake my crown on her, if I still had one.
What has its hand around my throat is simpler and uglier: he can drive her places.
He can walk out that gate and buy her coffee in the sun and stand beside her in the world, casual as breathing, and I can stand at this boundary and bleed for every inch of it.
He has a century of ease to offer. I have a manor and a two-hour rule.
Jealousy, I’m discovering, is mostly a case you build against yourself.
The car stops. The engine dies. Neither of them moves, and I don’t either, because if I move before I’ve mastered myself, I will say things that can’t be reshelved, and I promised her better than that. So I stand at my boundary with my fists closed over nothing and let the silence do the talking.
Posy gets out first. She comes to me the way you approach a horse that might spook, careful and unafraid at once, and hands me a grocery bag.
“We got food,” she says. “And answers. Some of them were even real.”
“That’s good.” I take the bags. All of them. “You’re well? Unhurt?”
“I’m fine, Valerian.”
“The drive was tolerable?”
“The drive was illegal and he bought me pie.” She’s studying my face, cataloging what I’m not saying, and being read this easily by a mortal woman is its own peculiar surrender. “Are you okay?”
“Perfectly composed.”
Mircea unfolds from the driver’s seat, stretching, sunset catching all that ink and insolence, and his eyes meet mine over the roof of the car with a glint I’ve known for three centuries.
“Cousin,” he starts. “What a warm and expressive welcome.”
“Take the bags inside, Posy,” I say quietly. “Please.”
She looks between us. Whatever she reads there, it decides her, and she gathers the groceries and climbs the steps, and I wait until the front door closes behind her heartbeat before I let the evening have its real agenda.
“Spar with me, cousin.”
Mircea’s eyebrows lift. “Is this about the girl or your wounded pride?”
“Choose your weapon.”
He shrugs out of his jacket and lays it over the car with more care than he’s ever shown a living creature. “Both, then.”
We walk to the wild half of the garden, the half I haven’t yet tamed, where the grass grows knee-high and the old thorn hedges make a rough arena, and we face each other in the last of the light, the oldest stance either of us owns, worn smooth on the training courts of another world.
He rolls his shoulders. I remove my shirt and hang it on a thornbush, because I know she’s found the terrace by now, I can hear her heartbeat arrive at the railing and stumble over itself, and there is no law, mortal or immortal, against fighting jealousy with every available resource.
“Shameless,” Mircea observes, stripping his own shirt off. “Utterly shameless. She’s watching, you know.”
“I know.”
“You’re going to show off.”
“I’m going to win. The showing off is incidental.”
He grins, and then he moves.
He’s fast. He was always fast, faster than me on my worst days, and a century of soft living hasn’t dulled him the way I’d hoped.
His first strike whistles past my jaw close enough to part the evening, and then we’re in it, trading blows through the long grass, and my body remembers this the way it remembers language.
Block, pivot, the old rhythm. He fights the way he talks, all feint and sudden honesty.
“Rules?” he asks, ducking under my guard and putting a fist into my ribs that I’ll feel for an hour.
“No fangs. Nothing broken.”
“You’ve gone soft.”
“Nothing broken of hers.” I catch his next strike on my forearm and answer it, and he skids back through the grass, delighted. “The furniture is hers. The hedges are hers. Attempt to land me in her roses and I will bury you beneath them.”
“Domesticated,” he marvels, spitting into the grass. “The Scourge of the Northern Court, worried about roses.”
“The roses,” I say, and take his feet out from under him, “are load-bearing.”
“You’ve kept your speed,” he pants, circling. “The box was kind.”
“The box was a box.”
“And yet you come out of it and land this.” His eyes flick toward the terrace, deliberate provocation. “A bride who blushes at the mention of you. A keeper’s manor. A garden you’re growing her like a court gift. Cousin, if I’d known captivity came with such prizes, I’d have…”
I hit him.
It’s not elegant. It’s every unanswered year arriving all at once, and it takes him across the jaw and puts him in the grass, and I stand over him with my chest heaving and the words come out before I can dress them properly.
“Where were you?”
Mircea doesn’t move.
“When they came for me. When they carved the seal into my chest and folded me into the dark.” My voice has dropped somewhere subterranean. “You vanished that same season, cousin. A century, I turned it over. Every version of the story. Tell me the true one.”
For a moment there’s no charm anywhere in his face, and he looks older than the ink and the car, tired and unreadable.
“Not tonight,” he says quietly. “Not with an audience whose heartbeat you’d rather listen to. But you deserve the answer, and you’ll have it. That’s half of why I came.”
“And the other half?”
He sweeps my legs.
I hit the grass, roll, come up in time to catch his follow-through, and the conversation is over because the fight is back, harder now, both of us working out a century of questions through the only language that never lied between us.
One of his two blows splits my lip, and the copper of my own blood blooms across my tongue, and from the terrace comes a small, escaped sound that has no business at a sporting event.
I find her eyes across the garden and smile at her with blood on my teeth, and her heartbeat does its finest work of the evening.
He lands two. I land five. The grass is flattened in a widening circle, and above us on the terrace, Posy’s heartbeat has settled into a rhythm I know intimately, quick and climbing, and her scent on the evening air has nothing to do with fear.
She’s not watching a fight anymore.
She’s watching me. I can chart it without looking: the catch and stumble of her breath when I move fast, the small sound she made when the shirt came off that she thinks the wind covered, the way her weight keeps shifting against the railing, restless, thighs pressed together beneath that terrace shadow.
Half the blows I throw now are for Mircea.
The other half are for her, and she knows it, and her heartbeat has stopped pretending otherwise.
She’s watching me, and I have never fought better in three hundred years.
I take him down with the next exchange, a lock we both learned from the same swordmaster, my knee on his chest and my hand at his throat, and the garden goes quiet except for two sets of breathing and one racing human heart.
“Yield, cousin.”
“Fine, fine.” He slaps the grass, laughing, wholly unbothered by the hand at his windpipe. “You’ve made your point. She’s yours. Message received.” Then, pitched up toward the terrace, gleeful: “He’s showing off for you, little bride! The shirt was a tactical decision!”
“Shut up, Mircea.”
“He used to practice that scowl in mirrors!”
I release him and stand, and I don’t look back at him, because I’m already looking at her.
She’s at the railing in the last purple light, exactly where I placed her by sound an hour of heartbeats ago.
Her hands grip the rail hard enough to whiten her knuckles.
Her lips are parted. Her flush goes down past her collar, and her eyes are moving over me, my chest, the grass-stained line of my shoulders, the sweat, with the same open hunger she wore in a steam-filled bathroom doorway, except this time she isn’t pretending to do research.
I cross the garden slowly, giving her the full length of the walk to decide what to do with her face, and she doesn’t decide anything, she just watches me come, rail creaking under her grip.
I climb the terrace steps still breathing hard, shirt abandoned to the thornbush, grass-stained and sweat-slicked and thoroughly aware of the picture, and stop in front of her, close enough that her warmth reaches me over the cooling air.
Her eyes finish their circuit of my chest and arrive at my mouth and stay there, and neither of us pretends that’s an accident.
Below us, Mircea retrieves his jacket and makes himself scarce with a tact I’ll never admit he possesses.
Posy looks up at me. Grass in the wind, dusk settling, her heartbeat the loudest thing in the county, and neither of us says anything at all, because there’s nothing left in the space between us that words would improve.
She takes my hand.
She pulls me inside without a word, and I go where my queen leads.