Chapter 13 #3
And through all of it, Roslyn worked. Her magic moved through him in patterns he could track even in his diminished state — here, the careful loosening of scar tissue; there, the slow repair of a channel that had frayed under the strain of the attack; elsewhere, the painstaking reconstruction of the buffer around his heart that kept his magic from compressing to the point of failure.
She was doing the work of days in the span of hours, and it was costing her.
He could feel the drain in the thinning quality of her magic, the way a river’s current changed when its source was running dry.
She was spending herself to keep him alive, and eventually she would reach a point where she had nothing left to give.
He knew he should tell her to stop. She should conserve her strength for the moment when the Van Horns would return, and she would need every drop of energy she possessed just to survive.
He should be the strategic mind he’d always been, the one who allocated resources and made decisions based on logic rather than whatever it was that was making her refuse to remove her hands from his chest.
But he didn’t tell her any of this.
Instead, he said, “I’m sorry.”
The statement escaped into a silence that had been shaped by hours of his uncontrolled confessions.
It sounded different from everything that had come before, smaller and more deliberate, uttered by a version of himself that was closer to the surface than the one who usually spoke.
Roslyn’s hands went quiet on his chest, although her magic continued its steady work beneath them.
“For what?” she asked.
“For bringing you here.” The words were difficult.
Each one had to be extracted from behind the wreckage of defenses that no longer served their function but still made the passage uncomfortable, like climbing through a broken wall.
“The compass. The summoning. I told myself it was necessary — that the collection required a healer and that the McAllisters owed me a debt. The logic of the situation justified the method. And the logic was sound. The logic is always sound.” He paused.
That pause contained seventeen years of logic that had been sound and right and correct, and had left him alone in a house with one hundred and two magical objects and no one who knew his name.
“But I took you from your life. From your clinic and your family and the patients who needed you. I took you because I could. I called it strategy, and I’ve been calling it strategy for so long that I almost convinced myself it was true. ”
His eyes were open now, and he was looking at her — at her face, which was drawn with exhaustion, and her turquoise-hued eyes, which held something he wasn’t strong enough to name, and her hands, which were still on his chest, steady despite the hours of sustained effort.
The lamplight caught the honey tones in her hair, and he thought about how he’d spent the first days cataloging her physical details with the same detachment he might use to examine an artifact, assigning attributes and properties as though she were an object to be understood rather than a person who’d chosen against all reason and self-interest to stay.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. The repetition wasn’t for emphasis but because the first time hadn’t been enough, hadn’t borne the weight of what he truly meant, which was that he was sorry for the compass and the summoning and the three weeks of captivity.
He was sorry for the burns and the siege and how she was sitting in this room at two in the morning, pouring her magic into a man who didn’t deserve the effort.
“It was wrong. I knew it was wrong when I did it, and I did it anyway. I haven’t said so until now because saying so would have required me to admit that my judgment is not, in fact, infallible, which is an admission I find — ”
He stopped there. His throat had closed around whatever word was coming next, and the closing felt less like a physical obstruction and more like the last reflex of a defense system that had nothing left to defend.
Roslyn looked at him for a moment. Her hands remained on his chest, her magic still moving, still repairing, still holding the line between his failing systems and the collapse that waited on the other side.
“I know,” she said.
Two words again. Not I forgive you, which would have been generous and which he hadn’t earned. Not it’s all right, which would have been a lie. Just I know — an acknowledgment that she’d heard him, that she understood what the words had cost, and that she wasn’t going anywhere.
It was, he reflected, the most terrifying thing anyone had ever said to him.
He closed his eyes. Her hands stayed where they were, warm and steady against his chest, while her magic continued its patient work in his ruined body, rebuilding what the void and the Van Horns and seventeen years of solitude had torn down.
Outside the study, the night was quiet, those hostile witches and warlocks holding back for now. He knew it wouldn’t stay quiet for long.
But for now — for these fragile, borrowed hours — someone was keeping watch, and for the first time in seventeen years, that someone was not him.
So Malachi slept.