Chapter 35
‘Ezer,’ he breathed.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.
She hadn’t seen him since yesterday.
His normally perfect warrior’s braid was loose. His cloak was rumpled, not pressed, and his eyes were wide, like he hadn’t expected to find her standing there either, her hand on the door.
‘I was …’ He looked over his shoulder, like he was searching for some sort of excuse. Then he sighed and said, ‘I came to apologize.’
‘Why?’ Ezer asked.
‘Because I lied to you. Because you deserved to know the truth, even if it would break you.’
‘Do I look broken to you?’ Ezer asked, and stepped out of the doorway, closing it shut behind her. ‘Do I look like some fragile, feeble thing?’
‘No,’ he whispered.
And though he was three times her size, right now as he stood before her, he seemed small.
He looked like the broken one.
‘You look brave,’ Arawn said. ‘You look bold, and …’ He paused. ‘And angry, Ezer, which you have every right to be. I shouldn’t have lied. They teach us that as one of the first laws. We promise to uphold it when we take our vows, and despite myself, when it came to you … I still broke it.’
‘Why,’ she said again.
‘Because …’
‘One chance, Arawn.’ She held up a finger, her eyes locked on his. ‘You have one chance right now, and if you do not tell me the truth … I will walk away from you. I will leave this place tomorrow, come sunrise, and you will never see me again. Even if I survive.’
He let out a breath.
‘If?’
‘I’d be lying if I said when,’ Ezer told him.
His eyes shone silver at their edges. He was holding back tears.
Please don’t say it was to protect me, Ezer thought. Please don’t say it was to keep me safe.
Because she wanted, just once, for someone to let life happen to her in her way.
To let her fall if she was to fall, because at least that was freedom. At least that was living.
‘I did it … to protect myself,’ Arawn said. ‘Because …’
He glanced away.
‘Look at me, Arawn,’ Ezer said.
His eyes opened. And he looked like he could hardly stand as he said, ‘Because I didn’t know you that day in the tower. All I knew were my orders, and they were to deliver you here, to have you become any other soldier.’ He sighed. ‘But you aren’t any other soldier. You are …’
‘What am I?’ Ezer asked.
Her heart was beating against her rib cage. Move closer to him, her body said, but her mind …
Gods, her mind was sick of being manipulated.
And she couldn’t stand the thought of being hurt again by someone else’s actions, like she was a rock tossed about in the sea.
‘You are stubborn,’ Arawn said. At that, she recoiled.
‘What?’
He nodded and stepped a little bit closer. ‘You are crass, and you are curious to your own detriment, but I adore how much it keeps me on my toes. And you are perhaps the messiest eater I have ever met. Worse than Six.’
She glared at him then. ‘If this is supposed to be a slew of compliments, Arawn …’
‘You are brilliant with her, and you are bold to spend your days with Kinlear, and gods, the way you speak to people, the way you challenge them … the way you do not falter, not even when it comes to a shadow wolf … it’s like you aren’t even afraid, Ezer.’
He stepped a little bit closer.
This time, she did not back away.
‘You are everything I am not. Everything I wish I could be, because you do not bend to the will of anyone but yourself.’
‘That’s not true,’ she said.
Her entire life had been about bending to the will of others.
She was sick of it. Sick of being told who she was by people who had their own opinions of her. But every word Arawn had just said … he was right.
Because he saw her.
He saw her when she didn’t even see herself yet.
‘I didn’t tell you at first,’ he said, ‘because it’s my duty to hold the secrets of the Citadel. Why would I offer that up, risk penance and punishment, for a stranger? For a woman in a tower with a mountain of debt upon her head?’
He sighed.
‘And when I did get to know you … why would I wish to break someone who seemed already broken? Because I was broken, too, Ezer. I couldn’t even conjure a flame to save you, but you didn’t need me to.
You saved me, and then you saved yourself in those woods, and however you did it, I don’t know.
And I don’t care. Because … everything about you, that’s what I love. ’
Her heart started to thump at that word.
Love.
He stepped closer still. ‘And once I knew who you were … I couldn’t speak the truth aloud.’
‘It wasn’t your choice to make,’ Ezer said.
‘I know that. And I was going to tell you, but the more I got to know you, the more time we spent together, the more you challenged me and frustrated me … the more you began to step into who you are here … the more I realized, Ezer of Rendegard, that you could not be broken. But I could.’ He swallowed, and his hands shook at his sides.
‘I could be broken if I lost you. So, I hid the truth. And it was wrong of me, and I am a coward for it, and I will spend months, years – gods, whatever it takes – trying to make it up to you.’
His words were beautiful.
They were lovely, wonderful, heartfelt things, and they slid over her and through her, making it hard to remember to breathe.
She’d been so angry with him, so betrayed by his lies, for he’d pretended for months that Ervos was dead. But somehow his wrongdoing paled in comparison to all she’d faced inside her labyrinth. The awful memories of Styerra and Erath.
And Ervos in the cell far beneath her, rotting away for murdering five innocent raphon pups. But she liked to imagine he was there because of what he’d done to Styerra, and to her.
‘I have been lied to my entire life,’ Ezer said. She hadn’t the chance to tell him about her mother, but when it came to Ervos, he knew. He understood. ‘And you expect me to forgive you? To fall into your arms and … and what then, Arawn? You’ll be king soon. And … we are not to be Matched.’
He took a deep breath, and his hands went slack at his sides, like he was surrendering.
‘I do not expect anything from you,’ he said.
‘Never, Ezer. Your choices are your own to make. I am asking – I’ll beg if I have to – if you will forgive me.
If you will trust me again. Because I’ve lived my entire life in the Citadel afraid of making mistakes.
When we make them here … we pay. When we make them against the gods, our eternity is on the line. Our magic.’
He looked at his hands. He frowned. And when he looked back up at her, his eyes were shining again.
‘I’m asking for grace.’ His voice cracked. ‘Something I have never known. From anyone.’
And the way he said it was so utterly broken, so raw and real, that she felt her walls go down.
They’d both been wronged.
They’d both faced darkness, in their own ways. She might die tomorrow. She might die and never feel love, but …
But tonight.
Just for tonight … perhaps she could.
‘We shouldn’t do this,’ she whispered. ‘It’s forbidden.’
‘I know,’ he said. And suddenly she was terrified of this ending.
But then he reached out and ran a hand down her cheek.
Towards her neck. Her collarbone. His gaze was molten as he looked back up to her.
‘I cannot live my life, Ezer, not knowing what it was like to have you. I’ll pay the penance.
I’ll pay it a thousand times, if it means one night together.
One night … where we are free to love who we please. ’
Her own eyes widened.
Because there it was again.
Love.
She reached behind her and opened the door to the catacombs. The cold and the darkness poured out. But she laced her fingers through the front of Arawn’s cloak, met his eyes, and pulled him with her over the threshold.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
‘I’m taking you some place private,’ she said as she shut the door behind them, bathing them both in darkness.
He was raising a pale brow, the way he always did when he looked at her. Like she was a question he’d happily spend his life trying to answer.
‘So you can kill me?’ he asked, and she could practically hear him smile.
‘No,’ Ezer said. ‘So I can kiss you.’
She pulled him down to her. And when their lips met, the cold was gone, and there was only fire in its place.
They reached the edge of themselves in the darkness, and when the hunger rose, and the space between them was still too much to bear …
‘I don’t know how—’ Ezer whispered against his lips.
‘Neither do I,’ Arawn whispered back.
So, they learned together.
And it was beautiful.
And fleeting.
And the choice was theirs to make.
She had no dreams in Arawn’s arms.
There was no labyrinth, no whispering wind.
She found only warmth and silence.
They stayed together in the darkness, until the rumbling of the battle subsided. The floor was their bed. His body, her blanket, and when sleep was hard to come by…
She told him everything. The book, the labyrinth, the secret of her mother. Ervos’s manipulation.
‘What if we’ve been wrong the whole time?’ Ezer asked him.
She couldn’t see him, but she could feel him all around her. The way his fingers ran up and down her spine, tracing the shape of her. Testing the feel of her skin on his. ‘In what way?’
‘What if the gods are not alone?’ Ezer said. ‘What if the Acolyte is some other sort of god? Some deeper power, intent on punishing the Five for locking the Sacred in a lifetime of laws they cannot measure up to? What if … this entire time, we’ve been fighting for the wrong side?’
His fingers paused at the small of her back.
‘What you speak of …’ he whispered. ‘It’s dangerous, Ezer.’
‘I know it is,’ Ezer said. ‘But so is this.’
Her head was against his chest, her ear pressed just over his heart so she could hear the way it beat steadily … and how it quickened when she ran her own hands across his skin. ‘I’m just wondering. What if?’
‘I wish I knew,’ he said. ‘But that is the point of faith. To question. To struggle to understand what is right and what is wrong, and in the end, all we have to trust is our soul.’