17. Valerian #2
“She loved you,” I say quietly, when the sobs begin to ease.
“All of this, the house, the decades of guarding a monster in a box, she did because she loved you. And she left you the one thing that matters most. The knowledge that whatever you choose, you choose freely, owing nobody anything. Only choice.”
“She left me the key,” Posy whispers against my chest. “And she made sure I’d know it was never a debt.”
“That she did.”
She pulls back, wiping her eyes. “The exchange. That’s what breaks the curse. Me becoming like you.”
“So it seems.”
“And I’ve always been the one who could do it. Since the moment I opened the box.”
“Since before you were born, if your grandmother has it right.”
She looks at me for a long moment, amber eyes searching my face for I don’t know what.
“I need time,” she says finally. “This is a lot. I need to think.”
“Take all the time there is.” I cup her face in my hands and brush away the last of her tears with my thumbs. “I waited a hundred years in the dark for you. Waiting in the light, in this house, with you in it, is not a hardship.”
“I need you to hear the other half,” she says. “Because everyone keeps telling me it’s my choice, and nobody will tell me what they want. Gran wrote a whole letter around it. You keep handing me the pen and standing back. So tell me, Valerian. Not what you’ll accept. What do you want?”
The question strips me down to the studs.
“I want you at my side for the length of forever,” I say, because she asked, and she’s earned the unarmored answer.
“I want your heartbeat in the room for every century I have left. I want to watch you discover what you become when time stops being a countdown. I want it so badly that I don’t trust myself to say it more than once, so I am saying it now, completely, and then I am putting it down and never using it to weigh your scale.
That’s the whole truth. Do with it what you need. ”
She absorbs that with her eyes shining, and for a moment I think the conversation has found its bottom.
Then she reaches out and lays her palm flat on my chest, over my shirt, over the scars beneath it, and I know what’s coming before she says it, because I promised it to her in a bed a week ago and have been quietly hoping the debt was forgotten.
“You owe me a story,” she says. “Tomorrow, you said. It’s been a lot of tomorrows. Today we’re doing truth, so: the scars. All of it.”
So I tell her.
I tell her about the war that gave me the first ones, the long one, the one that ended with seven exhausted families and my name on a unification no one loved.
I tell her about the treaty years, the peace I bled to hold together, and how peace, it turns out, is the more expensive purchase.
And then I tell her the part I’ve never said aloud: that when they came for me, it wasn’t enemies.
It was my own council. The seven oldest houses, the ones I’d spent two centuries binding together, voting in a closed room and arriving with silver and a box, and calling it, to my face, mercy.
A king too dangerous to kill, too stubborn to exile, too useful as a legend.
So they folded me into the dark and told my kingdom I was resting.
“The last scar,” I finish, guiding her fingers to the starburst over my heart, “is the seal. Their signatures are in it. Every one of those seven houses is written on my skin, and I have had a century to memorize the penmanship.”
She’s quiet for a long moment, her hand pressed over the mark, her thumb moving slowly, as though she could erase names with friction.
“And the road,” she says then, without moving her hand. “The one you went gray about in the library, week one. ‘Ask me again when you trust me more.’ I trust you more, Valerian. So finish it. What does the box actually seal?”
Of course she kept it. She keeps everything; it’s the librarian in her.
“A road between my world and this one,” I say.
“The journals had it right. The box was never only my prison; it’s the lock on that road.
Where the door itself sits, I was never told; I was inside the box when your grandmother moved us both, and she was too careful a keeper to write the address down.
But this house hums at a frequency I remember from the old roads, lowest near that bolted door you cataloged, and I take the long way around the kitchen, and I have chosen, in a century of accumulated cowardice, not to test the suspicion.
I should have told you the first week. I feared that if you knew you were holding a border and not just a man, you would look at me the way people look at borders. Guarded things invite guarding.”
“Idiot,” she says softly, with no heat at all. “I’d already decided to guard you.”
We sit with that a while, her hand over my heart, the letter open beside us, no secrets left standing in the room. And then she straightens, and I feel her gather herself, and she asks the harder one.
“What if I decide I can’t? What if I want to stay human?”
“Then I will love you as a human for as long as you live.” Saying it takes a toll I pay without haggling, because it’s true.
“And when you’re gone, I will carry you with me, the only warmth I ever knew.
Your grandmother made certain you’d know this is a choice.
A choice means either answer is allowed, Posy.
I will not hold you to a destiny you didn’t request.”
Her eyes fill again.
“You’d do that? Stay bound here forever, if I…”
“I would do anything for you. We’ve established this. It remains in effect.”
She doesn’t respond. She wraps her arms around me and holds on, and we stand there in the gold light for a long time, her heartbeat slowing against my ribs, the letter lying open on the desk with its patient, outsized love.
Eventually she pulls away, wiping her eyes, and turns back to the drawer. “There’s more in there. Behind where the letter was.”
She reaches into the hidden compartment and draws out a photograph.
She inhales and doesn’t let it go.
A baby, tiny and new, wrapped in a soft blanket, cradled in the arms of an older woman with silver hair and warm eyes.
“That’s me,” Posy whispers. “And that’s…”
“Your grandmother.”
“I didn’t know she ever held me. Mom always said they never…” She stops. Turns the photograph over.
On the back, in her grandmother’s hand:
My darling Posy. Home.
She presses the photo to her chest and cries, and I hold her, and I let her grieve the woman who built this entire world around her without ever being allowed inside it.
And I try very hard not to think about the other thing.
That the door out of my prison has been in her hands since the beginning.
And that a strange, tidy line in a dead keeper’s letter is sitting on the desk behind us, unexplained.
Do not be alarmed by what it signs in your name.
I find, as the light fades, that I am somewhat alarmed.