22. Posy
— ? —
Posy
I march Valerian back into the diner because the treaty says I eat, and I’m not eating in a booth while he bleeds with dignity in a parking lot.
“The treaty specified that you eat,” he points out, upright now, steadier for the little he took but still moving like a cathedral that’s been asked to jog. “It made no provision regarding my location.”
“I’m amending it. Article two: you sit where I can see you.”
“Unilateral amendments are not how treaties function.”
“They are when one party fainted and the other one bled across a county. We’re both compromised negotiators. Inside.”
He protests exactly once more, on principle, with no force behind it.
I use the librarian voice. He files in through the door ahead of me, put-upon, regal, a king under escort to his own coronation, and every head in Rosie’s swivels to watch the bloodstained man from earlier get seated by a woman with gauze on her temple.
We are, unquestionably, the best thing to happen to this diner all year.
The counter has rotated to watch, coffee cups suspended mid-lift.
Somewhere in the kitchen, a spatula has gone quiet, and I can feel the story being drafted in real time, the one this town will tell for a decade: the Thornwick girl fainted at Rosie’s and a man came through the door looking like the losing end of a war, and honey, you should have seen the way he looked at her.
Let them draft it. Every word will be true.
The older waitress, the one who called him, appears before we’ve settled. Her name tag says DOTTIE. She looks Valerian over, torn between alarm and approval.
“You made good time, honey.”
“Your call was the kindness of a stranger,” Valerian says, with complete sincerity and zero volume control, “and I am in your debt for the rest of my existence.”
Dottie blinks. “It was a phone call, sweetheart.”
“Nevertheless. The debt stands.”
“He’s dramatic,” I tell her. “Thank you. Really.”
“You just take better care of yourself, hon.” She squeezes my shoulder, then jerks her chin at Valerian. “And you, whatever you tangled with out there, maybe don’t.”
“It was a door,” Valerian says gravely.
Dottie looks at the dried blood at his collar, the gray still fading from his lips, the general ruin of him. “Must’ve been some door.”
“It has opinions about me.”
“Well.” She decides, visibly, not to pursue it, in the grand tradition of waitresses everywhere who have seen too much before nine in the morning. “Doors win sometimes. Sit down before you fall down.”
She sails off and returns almost immediately with a tall orange juice I didn’t order, sets it in front of me, and taps the rim. “On the house. For the fainter. Drink all of it.”
I drink all of it. The treaty has witnesses now.
While Valerian studies the laminated menu with visible mistrust, I fire off a text under the table.
Riley. Alive, safe, sorry about the 5 a.m. call and the hanging up.
Long story. The man is real and he’s currently afraid of a menu.
I’ll explain everything soon, I promise.
The reply comes back in four seconds, all caps: ALIVE IS NOT AN EXPLANATION.
SATURDAY. I’M COMING SATURDAY. HAVE THE MAN AND THE FULL STORY READY, AND IF IT’S A CULT I’M PULLING YOU OUT BY THE HAIR.
I decide that’s the best outcome available.
My answer gets filed under Saturday, next to a bottle of wine.
Mircea slides into the booth across from us mid-sip, folding himself in with that boneless elegance, sunglasses pushed up in his hair.
“So,” he says brightly. “Breakfast. My treat. What does one order to celebrate surviving both a fainting spell and a romantic hemorrhage?”
“Waffles. We’re getting him waffles.”
Valerian turns to me with an expression of genuine betrayal. “I do not eat human food.”
“You don’t eat waffles because you’ve never had waffles. There’s a difference.”
“Mircea said human food is disappointing.”
“Mircea also said the seven oldest families called boxing you a mercy, so maybe stop citing Mircea.”
Mircea puts a hand over his heart. “She wounds me with my own words. I’ve trained her too well.”
A second waitress takes our order, younger, ponytailed, and she does a small double-take at Valerian that I recognize, because I did the same thing over a fire poker once.
He’s pale and wearing dried blood at his collar, and he still looks the way ruins look, expensive and slightly dangerous to climb on.
“Waffles for the table,” Mircea orders. “Coffee, endless. And whatever the lady with the head wound wants, plus one of everything with iron in it.”
“Spinach omelet,” I sigh. “And bacon. He’ll make me a list otherwise.”
“I will make it anyway,” Valerian says.
“He’s begun composing it,” Mircea confirms. “I can see it happening behind his eyes. Item one: iron. Item two: rest. Item three: a formal inquiry into why his bride keeps a body with only one blood supply.”
“Item three is legitimate,” Valerian says.
“Item three is a design flaw,” I agree, “but I’d like to see either of you survive a paper cut without drama, so we’re even.”
Mircea barks a laugh. Valerian’s mouth does the thing where it refuses to smile and fails at the edges, and under the table his knee comes to rest against mine, cool and deliberate, and stays there while my traitor heart adjusts its rhythm around the contact and he pretends, gallantly, not to notice.
Dottie swings past with the coffee pot and refills all three cups without being asked, pausing at Valerian’s elbow.
“You get some color back, hon. That’s good. You had a complexion like my third husband when they laid him out.”
“Thank you,” Valerian says, uncertain.
“He means thank you,” I translate.
“He said thank you,” Mircea notes.
“He was thanking her for comparing him to a corpse. It needed context.”
The waffles arrive golden and steaming, and Valerian regards his plate the way generals regard unfamiliar terrain.
“What creature is this?”
“It’s… it’s a waffle.”
He leans down and sniffs it. Pokes it once with his fork. It springs back. His eyes narrow.
“I do not trust it.”
“It’s flour and milk. It’s the least threatening food humanity has ever produced.”
“It moved.”
“It’s fluffy.”
“It’s fluffy,” I repeat, and demonstrate by pressing it with my own fork. It springs back cheerfully. Valerian watches this the way he’d watch enemy troop movements.
“In my realm,” he says, “food that moves after being struck is generally returned to the kitchen. With a priest.”
“It’s aerated batter.”
“It is ambulatory batter.”
Mircea has his phone out. “Please continue. The court historians will want this documented.”
Valerian saws off a precise corner, examines it in the light, a jeweler with a suspicious stone, and puts it in his mouth. He chews with bomb-disposal focus. We wait.
“Well? Verdict?” I ask.
He sets down the fork. Considers, at length, while the table waits. “It is… acceptable.”
“He loves it,” Mircea translates.
“I said acceptable.”
“Have another bite, then. Purely for scholarship.”
Valerian cuts a second corner with the same jeweler’s precision, and then, believing himself unobserved while Mircea harasses the coffee situation, drags it through the syrup pool first. Thoroughly. Both sides.
I say nothing. I am a merciful queen. But I catalog it next to the seventeen exclamation points in my permanent file of evidence that the terror of the northern court is, underneath the cheekbones and the century, a complete and utter softie.
“The syrup was already on the plate,” he says, without looking up.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Your heartbeat said it.”
“My heartbeat is a gossip and you should stop reading her mail.”
“For him, that’s a proposal of marriage.” Mircea flags the ponytailed waitress for more coffee. “The last time he called a thing ‘acceptable’ it was a treaty that ended a war older than its soldiers.”
My body is coming back online in increments, sugar and iron reporting for duty, the wobbly cotton-wool feeling receding from the edges of things.
My temple throbs in time with my pulse under the gauze, a dull metronome, and every time it throbs, Valerian’s eyes flick to it, helpless, drawn by the sound of my blood moving somewhere it was recently misbehaving.
I’m laughing, and my temple aches when I laugh, and I don’t care, because Valerian is cutting a second precise corner of waffle with the gravity of a man who refuses to admit he’s enjoying himself, and an hour ago I was on the floor and he was bleeding across a county, and now there’s orange juice and stolen bacon and morning light on a chipped formica table.
This, I think. Whatever I choose, I’m choosing to keep this.
The ponytailed waitress comes back with syrup we didn’t ask for.
“Anything else I can get you?” she asks the table, and then, leaning in slightly, to Valerian specifically, with a smile that has decided to try its luck: “Can I get you anything else?”
Valerian doesn’t look up from his waffle.
“Do we need anything else?” he asks me.
“We’re good.”
“We’re good,” he relays to her, still not looking, already sawing his next corner, and the waitress deflates one degree, refills his coffee with professional grace, and retreats.
Mircea watches her go, then watches me watch her go, and his grin arrives with a delay, soft around the edges in a way I haven’t seen on him before.
For a moment he isn’t performing anything.
He’s just a man at a diner table watching his last living family eat a waffle next to a woman with gauze on her temple, and whatever moves through his face is old and complicated, gone before it finishes arriving, filed away with everything else he never says out loud.
“You really don’t see her, do you?” I ask Valerian.
“See who?”
“That’s the correct answer,” I tell him. “For the record, though, since we’re establishing policy: if you ever look at anyone the way you look at me, I will find out, and I will be upset, and you don’t want to see me upset, because I own a fire poker and I have documented experience.”