Chapter 33
Chapter
Thirty-Three
He’s alone in the throne room when I arrive.
No guards, no courtiers. Just Adric, standing in the middle of the room with his chin lifted as he looks up at the stained-glass image of a stunning black dragon.
The realm’s five moons arc across the glass, and light streams through them, sending long bars of burnt-orange light down across the polished flagstone—reminiscent of the shadows thrown by prison bars.
I stay perfectly still, not wanting to disturb the moment. But my wanting doesn’t matter, because of course, he knows I’m there.
“You came back,” he whispers. He turns to me, and the first thing I notice is the exhaustion that seems to have seeped into every pore. “I thought I’d lost you forever,” he whispers. “Tell me that’s not true.”
I want to run into his arms and tell him that of course, it’s not, that of course, I’m still his, just as much as I’m Chase’s. But what I say is, “I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”
He flinches as if I’d slapped him.
“Beloved—”
I hold up a hand and shake my head. “Hang on a sec, okay? “I need to say something before I lose my nerve.”
He goes still, but inclines his head, and I take that as my cue.
“Finn watched you in here once,” I tell him. “I’ve never had the chance to really see you do the court thing, but he thought it was fascinating.”
I almost laugh at the confusion I see on his face—clearly this isn’t the conversation he was expecting—but to his credit, he says only, “I am glad he found the event engaging.”
“He did. He said a man had come to you about his fields. In the east, I think, but it doesn’t matter. The point is that a blight was destroying his crop, and with winter coming, he had nothing to feed his workhorses—much less his family—and he couldn’t buy the foodstuffs because of his debts.”
He shakes his head. “I’m sorry. I do not recall that particular petitioner.”
“Well, even so, you treated him right. The crown paid his debts, and the stores provided enough grain and meat to feed his animals and his family.” I pause. “Finn said you fixed it just like that, and the thing he noticed was how happy you looked in doing it.”
“He and his family were mine to care for.”
I nod. “Yeah. I get that. It was very kingly.” I walk toward him, then reach for his hands and hold them tight. “Aren’t I yours to care for? And if you ever truly wish to hang your crown over the Real, aren’t its people yours to care for, too?”
His expression hardens. “Cora, it is not the same.”
“You’re right. It really isn’t. You’ll empty your stores to a pen of goats for a family you’ve already forgotten, but when I tell you that millions of my people—including everyone I know and love—are going to die when the barriers come down, you quote bullshit about acceptable losses.
Do you maybe have a clue now about why I am really, really pissed at you? ”
“Dammit, Cora, I could help the man with the grain. I could take stores from the castle, put them in baskets, and have the baskets delivered to his homestead. You, my love, are talking about the barriers. You are asking me why I will save the canoe but not the cruise ship, and the answer is only that I can reach the canoe.”
“Then reach further, dammit. A lot further.”
“Cora.”
“No. Say it to my face first. I know all the bullshit versions. The acceptable loss of people I don’t know, while you keep my friends safe in their rooms, and the rest of the world ends outside the door.
I don’t want the soft version tonight.” I make myself hold his eyes.
“Look at me and say the real thing. You’ve decided to let my world fall. Say it, dammit.”
For a long moment, he doesn’t answer, and in the silence, the moons throw their bars of light between us.
“It’s true the barriers are failing,” he says at last. “They have been coming apart longer than your kind has had words for it, and nothing I do now will stop it. They are going to fall. That part is already decided—and not by me.”
“No? You were the Guardian. You and Chase. One being charged with keeping the barriers whole. But that ended when you—you—decided to split the Guardian in two.”
“And that, my love, is history.” Something flickers across his face, there and gone. “The barriers created prisons of whole peoples. They are a foolish division the emperor erected to badly solve a problem he barely understood. Prison and estrangement are not the answer.”
“And chaos is?”
“There may be some chaos, yes. But chaos is always inevitable. And in this case, the barriers are falling whether I wish it or not. The only question left is how they fall and that is a choice I made long ago.”
“What choice?” I ask.
“Whether it comes down all at once, in a single night, with nothing on the other side ready for it, and everyone dies. Or whether I monitor the fall and intervene so as to bring them down slowly, piece by piece, so that some of your world has the time and the warning to live through it.” His eyes hold mine, steady and terrible.
“I chose the second. And yes, Cora, even the second costs more lives than you can stand to imagine. I know that. I have always known it. And I am doing it anyway, because the only other path is all of you instead of some of you.”
“And you can live with that.”
“I have lived with worse.” He doesn’t look away when he says it, and that’s the part that guts me, that he won’t even pretend to struggle, won’t hand me the comfort of a man torn down the middle.
“I am older than your whole world, Cora. I have watched the sea take cities. I have watched nations end that thought themselves eternal. What is coming does not look to me the way it looks to you, and I will not lie and tell you it does. I have never lied to you. I won’t start now just to be easier to love. ”
“Then you can’t have me.”
It leaves me before I’ve decided to say it, and when it lands cold in the room, I hear his sharp intake of breath.
“Cora.”
“You heard me.” My voice cracks, and I let it. “I can’t be with a man who’d do this. I can’t stand next to a king who looks at the people I love and files them under acceptable losses.” I lift my chin and meet his eyes. “Find another way. Or find another woman.”
His eyes never leave mine. “You don’t mean that.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I do.”
“You’re asking me to choose.”
“I’m telling you to. The war-riddled world you want, or the woman you say you love. You don’t get both. Not the way you’ve drawn it.”
He’s quiet for a long time. Somewhere, a bell sounds its low double note and goes silent.
I shiver.
“The barriers are coming down whether I will it or not. Surely my brother has told you as much. The only choice I have ever had is how.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.” I close some of the space between us. “You’ve decided the only question is fast or slow. But that’s not the only question. It’s just the only one you’ve let yourself ask.”
I hold his eyes. “I’m not asking you to bring it down gentler, Adric. I’m asking you to find a way to keep the barriers up.”
“Cora—”
“You’re the oldest, strongest thing in five realms. If there’s a way to do it, you’re the guy. But you haven’t even tried, dammit.”
For a long moment, he’s simply quiet. Then he says, “Very well. I will look again. But hear me, my love. I do not believe there is a way. I have lived inside this problem longer than you can imagine, and I have never found one. But I have never looked for you.”
He dips his head, just slightly, then looks straight at me. “So I will do as you ask and look. I will not promise what I cannot give. But I will look on this, I give you my word.”
I draw a stuttering breath. “Thank you,” I say, and he inclines his head.
I take his hand. “I’m going home.”
For a moment, he looks like he’s going to argue.
Instead, he says, “There’s something you should know.
A warning.” He waits until I meet his eyes.
“My people found the place Kali held your friend. A camp at the edge of my territory, well hidden. By the time we reached it, it was abandoned, stripped and empty. They have moved on, and I have not yet found where.”
“She knows you’re hunting her.”
“She knows. And there is more. Everything we found there tells me she is not merely raiding the weak places in the barriers. She has a hand in the weakening itself. She is helping it along.” His jaw tightens. “Which is why I cannot come with you tonight. I have to find her.”
“I get it,” I say, and I do. But it doesn’t make the leaving easier. “Just find her. And be careful. She held Whistler for a long time, and we never knew.”
“Go home, Beloved,” he says. “I will begin tonight. Both things—barriers and bitches.”
I can’t help it. I burst out laughing. Then I take one final glance at this man I love despite everything.
And then, before I can change my mind, I take a long step out of the Nightmare Realm and into Chase’s apartment.
He’s asleep on the sofa bed, the covers twisted around him, printouts from the Widow Maker cameras scattered across the mattress where he must have fallen asleep going through them.
I don’t wake him on purpose. But he’s a Hunter, and he’s awake the second the air shifts. He takes one look at me standing there wrung out and hollow, and he doesn’t ask a single question. He just lifts the edge of the blanket.
I gather up the papers and leave them on the floor, then climb in, and his arms go around me before I’ve even settled, pulling me into the warm, solid line of him. I sigh, then press a gentle kiss to the chest of the other man I love.
“I’ve got you,” he murmurs into my hair, already half-asleep again. “Sleep.”
And I do.