18. The Last Night #2
And underneath the heat, the whole time, was the grief—because we both knew.
Every slow, deep stroke was a thing being said and a thing being lost in the same motion.
He held my gaze the way he had the first time, and what was in his face was too large for either of our tongues, and the word for it—the word he was not allowed to speak across the line between his people and mine—sat behind his teeth the way it always sat, held back with the same care he held the rest of himself.
He didn’t say it. He never said it. He was Morrkai and I was Lunari and the word was a blade with a war asleep in it, and even tonight, even here, even with both our lives in ruins around the bed, he would not bring that down on us.
But I felt it the whole time, lodged and burning and unsaid, and it was nearer and more naked than anything his body did.
He said my name instead. Sera. Over and over, into my hair, against my pulse, the small permitted sound he poured everything the forbidden word carried into—and when the end took us it took us together, his whole shaking enormous weight coming down over me as it broke through him, the careful fraction abandoned at last, the full mass of him pressing me down into the bed.
I held the whole grieving size of him against me and felt his breath go ragged at my neck and did not, for once, want to be anywhere outside my own body taking notes.
I was in it. I was only in it. For the length of that one breaking I was nothing in the world but a woman holding the thing she loved.
? ? ?
We lay after in the dark with the fire fallen to embers and the two packed cases against the wall, and he kept the long heat of himself curved around the whole of me, one huge arm across me, and neither of us slept, because sleep was a waste of the hours we had left, and we’d both learned, this season, exactly what the hours we had left were worth.
Twice more before the bell we turned to each other in the dark—slower each time, quieter, gravity instead of fire—learning each other the way you memorise a thing you’re about to lose, until there was no part of him my hands didn’t know and no part of me his mouth hadn’t grieved over.
I thought about asking him to say it. The word.
Just once, here, in the dark, where there was no border and no line and no one but us—I thought about asking him to break the one rule he’d never break and give me the thing he’d held behind his teeth through all of it, the night before and tonight and all thirty-eight nights at my door.
I had nothing left to lose. The Order had taken everything they could take.
What was one more forbidden thing, said in the dark, to a woman already unmade.
I didn’t ask. Because I understood, lying in the warm dark against the grieving size of him, that the not-saying was the last careful thing he had left to give me, and that he was giving it the way he’d given everything—holding back the thing that would cost too much, so that I would not have to pay the cost. The word, said across the line, did not only bind us.
It brought down a great deal more than us.
He would not hand me a thing that beautiful and that ruinous on the last night I’d have him—and I understood, at last, that the holding-back was not the absence of the word. It was the truest form of it.
So I didn’t ask him to say it. I held him instead, and let him hold me, and we spent the hours we had left awake in the dark, wasting none of them on sleep or on speech, because there was nothing left to decide and nothing left to defend and nothing to do with the night but spend it—slowly, with both hands, the way you spend the last of anything you love.
? ? ?
The first bell came up grey through the window, the way it had the morning he’d left me to go and lie. This time it was my turn to go.
I dressed in the dark. He watched me do it, the way I’d once watched him, and when I was ready he stood—seven feet of him unfolding in the low light, the horns, the dark, the heat I was about to walk away from—and I crossed to him one last time and laid my hand flat to his chest, over the heart, where he’d put mine the morning he left, and felt it going hard and steady under my palm.
“What will they do with you,” I said. It was the only thing I hadn’t been able to ask all night.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It isn’t decided.” A pause, and then, because he had never once lied to me except the once, under oath, to save me—“Whatever they decide, it isn’t ash. The keeper’s seen to that much. There’s a road left for me. I don’t yet know where it goes.”
“Find me on it,” I said.
I felt the words land in him. I felt the great careful frame go still around the wanting. “Sera?—”
“I’m not the Emissary anymore. I’m not the Untouched.
I’m not anything they have a name for, which means I’m not anything they have a rule for, either.
” I pressed my hand harder to his chest. “There’s no Vow left to break.
No border I’m sworn to keep. Whatever I am now, I’m a woman with nothing left to lose and an old line in her blood and a homecoming the Order broke her for—and I am done, do you hear me, I am done being kept from the one true thing I ever reached for.
So find me on the road. However long it takes. Wherever it goes. Find me.”
He didn’t say the word. Even then. Even with me asking him, in everything but the saying, to spend the rest of both our lives finding out whether it could ever be spoken across the line without bringing the line down.
But he bent, and kissed me, slow and grave and certain, the kiss of a man making a vow he wasn’t allowed to make in words—and against my mouth, so quiet it was almost only breath, he gave me the nearest thing to it the rules would let him give.
“On my blood,” he said. The same words he’d swept his lie out on, handed back to me now clean, made true. “On my standing. On the thing I’m not allowed to say. I’ll find you, Sera. There isn’t a road in either world long enough to keep me from it.”
Then the escort was at the door, and there was no more time, and I went—down the cold corridor and out of the emptied chambers and down the mountain road, away from Vordaan, away from him, a woman with no name for what she was and one true thing finally, wholly hers, walking out into a life with no shape to it yet and the whole of it in front of her.
I did not look back. Looking back is a thing you do once and pay for a long time; he’d taught me that, on a road going the other way.
I kept my eyes forward. And I carried the unspoken word down the mountain with me, lodged and burning and mine, the way I mean to carry it however long the road turns out to be—certain, for the first time in my unmade life, that the next time I hear a knock at a door it will be him, and that when it is, there will be no wall left anywhere in me to keep him out.