22. Chapter 22
The morning is clear and bright and the air is thick with the excitement of returning home.
Evran stands in the courtyard with his pack over one shoulder and Aether's cloak around his shoulders and watches the Drakkari retinue prepare to leave.
The horses are saddled and waiting, his dun mare among them, her calm eye finding him across the yard with the placid recognition of an animal that remembers who feeds her apples.
Supplies are being loaded. Warriors are checking straps and cinches.
Bran's voice carries across the courtyard, warm and booming, issuing instructions that are half logistics and half encouragement, and Leona is beside him with her parchment and her grey eyes and her talent for making organization look effortless.
It is the same choreography as the departure from the Drakkari stronghold, reversed, the same efficient motion of people who know their work and do it well.
But it feels different this time, heavier and sweeter.
The weight of everything that happened here, the good and the terrible and the transformative, sits in Evran's chest and he carries it willingly, because the carrying of it means he survived it, and surviving it means Vaike is alive, and Vaike being alive means everything else is manageable.
The twins find him first.
They come barreling across the courtyard together, which is unusual, because normally Tria leads and Arin follows, but today they are shoulder to shoulder, their dark faces set with urgency, something important to say and not enough time to say it.
Tria reaches him and throws her arms around him.
The hug is fierce and tight and slightly too hard, having decided she is not going to cry and compensating with force.
Evran wraps his arms around her and holds on and feels the small tremor in her shoulders that says she is not entirely succeeding in her resolution.
"You come back," she says, muffled against his cloak. "You come back and visit us."
"I will."
"Promise me."
"I promise."
She pulls back and looks at him, her dark eyes bright and slightly too shiny. Her jaw is set, the same jaw as her mother's, Evran realizes, the same fierce determination, and she nods once, sharply, as though sealing a contract. Then she steps aside, and Arin is there.
Arin does not throw his arms around him. He stands in front of Evran with his hands clasped and his eyes lowered, still, feeling too much and not knowing how to shape it into something he can release. He is quiet for a long moment.
Then he looks up, and his eyes are wet, and he says, "Thank you. For everything."
Evran's throat closes. He reaches out and puts his hand on Arin's shoulder, gently, and squeezes.
"Take care of your greenhouse," Evran says. "And take care of Caelen."
The flush that spreads across Arin's face is instantaneous and total, and despite the emotion of the moment, Evran bites his lip against a smile.
Arin ducks his head, nods rapidly, and steps back.
Tria grabs his arm and pulls him to her side, and they stand together in the courtyard, twins, counterweights, two halves of a whole, and watch Evran with the gravity of young people only beginning to understand how someone has changed them.
Evran watches them back and thinks about green things growing in glass houses and shy boys finding their courage and the steady, patient work of tending the people you love.
Delia is next.
She comes from the Keep's main entrance, walking with unhurried authority, having been saying farewells to delegations all morning and saving the hardest one for last. The baby is not on her hip today, handed off to a nurse for the duration of the departure, and her hands are free, and she uses them to take both of Evran's in hers.
They stand for a moment, hands clasped, faces close, the morning light on both of them. Delia's dark eyes move over his face with quiet thoroughness, committing something to memory.
"You are the most extraordinary young man I've ever met," she says. "I think your husband agrees with me."
"I have very good friends that make me better than I am." He squeezes her hands. "Thank you for everything, Delia."
"Don't thank me." She shakes her head. "You did the hard parts yourself and then I swooped in and pretended to be of use."
Evran laughs, a wet sound, thick at the edges, and Delia pulls him into an embrace.
She holds him the way she held him in the alcove the day after the assassination attempt, tight, brief, fierce, and when she pulls back, her eyes are bright but dry.
Delia does not cry in public. Evran suspects she saves it for later, in private, when the doors are closed and the mask of the Warlord's wife can be set aside.
"Take care of him," Delia says, tilting her head toward where Vaike is mounted and waiting. "And take care of yourself."
"I will."
"And write to me. I want to hear everything."
"Everything? The exciting life of a gardener and a weaver?"
"Yes, everything, my dear. Every pulled weave and unwound thread."
She squeezes his hands one last time, releases them, and steps back.
She puts one arm around each of her twins, pulling them to her sides, and the three of them stand in the courtyard as Evran walks to his horse and mounts and the Drakkari column forms and the gates of Heldrin's End open before them.
Evran looks back once. Delia lifts her hand. Tria waves wildly. Arin raises his hand, palm out, steady and sure.
Evran raises his in return.
Then the column moves, and the stronghold falls away behind them, and the road opens up, and Evran breathes.
The valley gives way to the mountains by midday.
The trail rises through the same forests and passes they crossed on the way in, but the landscape has changed in two weeks, the wildflowers thicker now, carpeting the south-facing slopes in dense, vivid color, and the rivers running higher with the advancing melt.
The air is warm when the sun finds them and cool in the shade, and the sky is enormous, and Evran rides beside Vaike and lets the rhythm of the horse and the mountain carry him.
He breathes easier with every mile.
It is a physical thing, the easing of tension he did not fully know he was carrying, the gradual release of the hypervigilance that has been his constant companion since the first night at Heldrin's End.
Each hoofbeat puts distance between them and the stronghold, between them and the Windfar delegation, between them and the room with the fire and the vial and the locked door.
The mountains rise around them, familiar and massive and indifferent to the ambitions of men, and their indifference is a comfort.
The column moves at a steady pace. Bran and Leona at the lead, as before. The elite warriors flanking.
The first day passes without incident. They make camp in the same cave as before, the outcropping with the deep dark back that Bran warned him about, and the routine of it is grounding. The same fire ring. The same picketed horses. The same circle of bedrolls around the flames.
Evran helps with the fire. He helps with the horses. He sits beside Naela and eats trail rations and listens to her recount the highlights of the tournament with animated enthusiasm, having won everything she entered and not remotely sorry about it.
Night falls. The fire burns. The mountains hold the stars.
Evran waits until the camp has settled, until the warriors on watch have taken their positions and the others have retreated to their bedrolls and the noise has faded to the low crackle of the fire and the breathing of sleeping people.
Then he moves close to Vaike.
Not subtly but deliberately. He shifts his bedroll until it is pressed against Vaike's, until their shoulders touch and their heat mingles and there is no distance between them at all.
He lies on his side, facing his husband, and the firelight plays across Vaike's face and the stars are vast above them.
Vaike raises an eyebrow. The expression is curious, amused, knowing his husband well enough to recognize when something is coming.
Evran says, without preamble: "I have beads for your hair."
Vaike's eyebrow climbs higher. The curiosity deepens into genuine surprise, a rare thing on a face that is usually prepared for everything.
"How did you have time to craft beads," Vaike says slowly, "while you were busy saving the Drakkari clan?"
Evran almost smiles. "I'm very resourceful."
He reaches into the small pouch at his belt, the one he has been carrying since the last morning at Heldrin's End, the one he has been waiting for the right moment to open. He tips the contents into his palm.
Beads. Six of them, small and smooth, each one different from the others.
They are not carved from stone the way Vaike's were.
They are not made by Evran's hands, because Evran does not know how to carve stone and has never pretended otherwise.
They are ornamental beads, ceramic and glass and one of polished bone, in colors that range from deep blue to warm amber to the pale green of new growth.
"I didn't make these," Evran says. He looks at the beads in his palm and then at Vaike's face and tells the truth, because the truth is the only thing worth giving.
"Maybe I will, one day. I'd like to learn.
But I don't know how to make them the Drakkari way.
I'm still learning your customs. I'm still learning how to be part of what you are. "
He pauses. The firelight dances across the beads, catching the glass, warming the ceramic.
"Instead, I chose these from Delia's collection of ornamental and sentimental beads. She gave them to me freely." He meets Vaike's eyes. "With the promise to always do what it takes to protect my husband."
Vaike is very still. The surprise has not faded but has deepened into something more complex, more layered.
He looks at the beads in Evran's palm, and then at Evran, and his expression does something that Evran has only seen a handful of times.
It opens. The mask, the guard, the controlled composure, all of it eases, and what is left is undefended and raw and full of a tenderness so vast it fills the space between them.
"Does Delia know what happened?" Vaike asks.
"Not in so many words." Evran closes his fingers around the beads, holding them safe. "But wives are very smart."
The corner of Vaike's mouth lifts. It is not quite a smile, because Vaike's smiles are rare and precious things that Evran collects and hoards, but it is close.
It is the closest thing to a smile that Vaike can produce while lying in a bedroll on a mountain in the firelight, looking at his husband with an expression that says you continue to astonish me.
"Turn," Evran says.
Vaike turns. He rolls onto his side, facing the fire, and Evran shifts behind him, an inversion of their usual arrangement, the smaller man at the larger man's back, and the disparity in their sizes should make it absurd but instead makes it tender.
Evran reaches up and threads his fingers into Vaike's hair.
It is thick and heavy and warm from the fire. Evran separates a section near Vaike's temple, the mirror of his own braid, the same place, and begins to work.
He is not as skilled as Vaike. His fingers are nimble, trained by months of weaving, of working the shuttle and the warp, of the fine motor work that Aether demands, but braiding hair is different from braiding thread, and he has to concentrate, has to go slowly, has to feel his way through the pattern.
Over, under, over. Pull tight but not too tight. Keep the tension even.
He places the first bead. His fingers guide it into the plait, settling it against Vaike's scalp, and the weight of it is small and round and significant.
The second bead. The third. Each one chosen with care, each one placed with intention. The blue one for the mountain sky above them. The amber for every sunrise they see together. The green for growing things with their own hands.
His fingers work. The fire crackles. The camp is quiet around them, and the stars turn overhead, and Evran braids his husband's hair and places beads into the strands and thinks about Vaike's hands doing the same for him, in their room, in the firelight, saying every plait is a promise.
The fourth bead. The fifth. His fingers are steadier now, finding the rhythm, the pattern becoming easier as the braid grows.
The sixth bead, the last one, polished bone, smooth and white, warm from being held in his palm. He threads it into the plait and secures the end, and he runs his fingers down the finished braid once, feeling the weight of it, the shape of it, the way the beads sit against the dark strands.
He sits back.
Vaike does not move right away. His hand goes to the braid, his fingers finding it by touch, tracing its length the way Evran traced his own braid a hundred times in the last two weeks. He feels the beads and counts them.
Then he turns over.
His dark eyes find Evran's, and they are bright. Not wet, because Vaike does not cry, or if he does, he does it in places no one will ever see, but bright, the firelight reflecting off something that lives deeper than the surface.
Evran's own eyes are not dry. The moisture gathers at his lashes and blurs the world into smeared firelight and the dark shape of his husband's face, and he blinks, and a single tear escapes down his cheek before he can stop it.
Vaike reaches out and catches it with his thumb. His hand stays on Evran's cheek, cupping it, steady.
He smiles.
It is a real smile, a full, genuine, unguarded smile that transforms his entire face, softening the hard lines, crinkling the corners of his eyes, making him look younger and lighter, radiant, given something he did not know he needed.
Evran stares at it, at this rare and precious thing, and commits it to memory with the fierce protectiveness of understanding what a gift looks like.
Vaike laces their fingers together. His hand is broad, and Evran's fits inside it the way it always has, perfectly, inevitably, as though the shapes were designed for each other.
Evran leans into him and feels like he's home already.