Chapter 63 The Second Truth
The Second Truth
"That is your first truth," I say. "What is the second, Colsar?"
At first he does not answer, his attention fixed somewhere just past me as though he is deciding whether to say it at all.
Then he looks at me. "You," he says.
I do not move. "What about me?"
He holds my eyes, but there is a hesitation in him now, something less certain than before. "Most siakars are taught what happens after they take a wife,” he says. "What it means. What it does to them. Especially after she gives birth."
The healer's words return, uninvited. It becomes difficult for the siakar to be elsewhere for long.
"There is a pull," he says. "A need to remain close. To anchor. It is not only desire. It is instinct, and it does not lessen when there are children involved. It becomes stronger."
“I was not," he continues, "taught any of it."
I wait.
"I did not know what it would feel like," he says. "Only that it was stronger than anything I had known."
"My father told me what it was," he says. "When it happens, it takes over everything. The need for contact. The pull."
"And you were afraid of it," I say.
"I was afraid of what it would make me," he says.
"Siakars are not built for this. We are solitary creatures.
Cold ones. My mother is proof of that." Something moves through his expression.
"And I did not know if you would want to be on the other side of something that consuming.
So I held it back. And I hid behind every practical reason I had to do so. "
"So you chose distance."
"I went to my father," he says. "I asked him what it meant.
What I should do." His jaw tightens. "He told me to create distance.
To control it before it controlled me. The soldiers were missing.
The undead were spreading. He said to distance myself if necessary, but that I could not afford to let it take me over. Not then."
"And you listened."
"I did not know what else to do." The answer comes quietly but it carries more than anything he has said so far.
"I thought it would be temporary. A few days.
A week at most. Long enough to understand it.
Long enough to make sure I would not—" he stops briefly, then finishes it anyway.
"lose control of something that could affect more than just us. "
"And instead," I say, my voice even, "you disappeared."
"I was here," he says.
"You were not with me."
The distinction holds between us. He does not argue it.
"I thought you were safe," he says.
"I was," I reply. "That was not the problem."
The silence that follows is heavier than the ones before it, but clearer somehow, the shape of everything finally visible now that the reasons have been said out loud.
"I did not understand what it would feel like from your side," he says.
"No," I answer. "You did not."
I look at him for a long moment, at the man who had held a kingdom together and trapped men out of a mountain pass and burned a court to ash, and had still not known how to simply stay in a room with me and let me carry some of it with him.
"I am not asking you to choose between me and the kingdom," I say. "I am asking you to stop deciding what I can hold."
He says nothing for a moment.
Then, "I hear you."
Not I understand or I will try. Just that. Simple and direct and without the polish of something rehearsed.
"I will not pretend to be a victim of circumstance," he says after a moment, his voice lower now, stripped of the force he carried into the room. "But the truth is I have no idea what I am doing."
I hold his eyes.
"I never saw this done well," he continues. "There was no model for it." His hand shifts slightly at his side, as though he is resisting the instinct to reach for something he cannot quite name. "That is not an excuse. I know that."
I say nothing.
"I want to do it right," he adds, quieter now. "All of it. You. Them. This." His breath catches slightly before he continues. "And I do not know how to do that without getting parts of it wrong."
The honesty of it sits between us, unguarded in a way I have not seen from him before.
"And?" I ask.
He looks at me then, fully, whatever he had been holding finally giving way to something more exposed.
"I want you to love me anyway," he says, his voice dropping almost to a whisper. "I am trying. And I know I am doing parts of it badly."
My chest tightens but I do not move.
"I am asking you to stand in it with me," he continues. His eyes do not leave mine. "Help me fix it."
The room holds.
I look at him for a long moment, at everything he has just put down in front of me, raw in the way that only comes from someone who has run out of other options.
I have loved him through worse than this. I step forward and take his face in my hands, and I feel him go completely still beneath the touch, as though the contact itself is something he had stopped allowing himself to expect.
"Then we fix it," I say quietly. "Together. But you have to let me in, Colsar. All the way in. Not the parts you think I can handle. All of it."
He pulls me into him and holds on, and I let him, my arms coming around him, and we stay there in the quiet of the map room while the palace moves on without us, and for the first time in a very long time it feels like we are standing in exactly the same place.
His hand shifts, and for the first time I see it, a faint tremor in his fingers that he does not attempt to hide.
"I am consumed by you," he says. "You were my queen long before anyone placed a crown on your head."
He exhales, slower this time, but it does nothing to ease what sits beneath it.
"But now it is something else entirely."
"Why?" I ask.
He is quiet for a moment, his attention dropping before coming back to me, and when he looks at me there is nothing guarded left in it.
"Because you just gave me everything I ever wanted."
Something in my chest gives way at that, sudden and complete, the last of the distance I had been holding cracking open before I can stop it.