Chapter 56 The Gift
The Gift
The next morning, the bed is cold when I wake. Cold enough to tell me he has been gone for some time. My hand moves across the sheets before I am fully conscious, searching the space where his warmth should linger, and finds only linen that has long since surrendered whatever heat it once held.
I keep my eyes closed and listen.
I know from our time in the cave together that he sometimes runs at dawn. He will come back. The house remains almost silent. There is no footfall in the corridor, no low scrape of the outer door, no rush of water poured into the basin. Even the wind passes the shutters without disturbing them.
When I open my eyes, the room is already bright. Light stretches across the floorboards, touching the foot of the bed, the chair where I left my dress, the table near the hearth. It is later than I expected.
He would not remain away this long without reason.
I sit up slowly, pressing my palm to my sternum as if I can moderate the uneven rhythm there.
The memory of last night returns with clarity: the way I reached for him without hesitation, the way my body responded in the grass before I could think to restrain it, the certainty that overtook inexperience.
My cheeks flush as I remember how loudly I moaned under the cool night sky, how we lay afterward pretending to watch the stars while stealing glances at each other. How we had returned back inside but barely ate the food I finally prepared because we could not keep our mouths apart.
I sigh. The night was perfect, but the truth is that he has known women before me. I have known no one. Perhaps I did not satisfy him. Perhaps he had to leave, to go elsewhere to get the satisfaction he craves.
The imbalance presses harder in his absence.
I try to recall whether I moved too quickly, whether I mistook hunger for something deeper.
It is absurd to dissect the night this way, and yet the mind searches for fault when confronted with silence.
If he woke beside me and felt regret, he would not announce it.
He would simply remove himself from the inconvenience.
I stand. The floor is cool beneath my feet. His cloak is gone. His boots are gone. The knife he keeps at his belt is gone.
I pour water into the basin, more for the sound than the need. The quiet presses inward. He mentioned Threns only once since we arrived, dismissing them as distant in this stretch of countryside, but forests do not announce their dangers.
He runs alone. He hunts alone. Strength does not make a body untouchable. The pitcher trembles in my hands before I realize it is not the house shifting but my own fingers.
I dress carefully, forcing each tie into place, anchoring my breath in the small discipline of fastening fabric. The window stands open and I scan the hills beyond the house. Nothing moves.
Time stretches while I wait. The light climbs higher along the wall, thinning into afternoon. The fire diminishes slowly, collapsing inward until only embers remain.
If he has chosen to leave, there is nothing I can do to retrieve him. The thought is clean, and because it is clean, it is dangerous. I have been left before. I know the rhythm of it. It begins with quiet and ends with understanding.
I remember the haze of fever after one particularly violent whipping when I was a child.
The Baron had beaten me until the skin along my back split too deeply for even the healer’s needle to close.
Days later the heat took me. I could not open my eyes.
My body felt both heavy and distant, as though I were already slipping somewhere unreachable.
I remember the healer’s voice drifting above me, hushed but urgent. I do not think the child will make it. Someone must retrieve the Baron. Tell him he must come see her.
I remember when he arrived. His presence was unmistakable, gruff and cold beside the bed, the scent of leather and horse and authority clinging to him.
I should have recoiled. Instead I felt relief so intense it almost hurt.
I was still so desperate then, still foolish enough to believe I could earn something from him that resembled tenderness.
“Will you stay at my side, Father?” I had asked, my voice barely more than a rasp.
“Yes,” he replied, the word heavy and reluctant, but spoken all the same.
I remember the warmth that followed, the easing in my chest, the way I allowed myself to fall back into sleep believing I would not wake alone.
When I opened my eyes again, the chair beside the bed was empty.
For what felt like hours, perhaps longer, I lay in the dark room sweating through sheets that had not been changed, speaking softly to myself so I would not dissolve into panic.
I told myself he had stepped away. I told myself he would return. I told myself not to be dramatic.
Another day passed. I heard the healer’s sharp intake of breath, the cluck of her tongue. “The child was left alone for two days?” she demanded. “Where was the Baron? Why did no one give her food or water?”
A servant answered with a low scoff. “He departed within minutes of visiting, took Lady Yvara to Borsa, it is gemstone season there. He ordered that none of us feed her or attend to her. Said it would be simpler to let her die. Said…the child deserved to do it alone, that she was a burden.”
I remember the way the words moved through me, not as shock, but as something colder. Something that clarified more than it wounded. That was the day I understood the pattern. That was the day I promised myself I would never again expect anyone to stay.
Perhaps that is why Colsar’s silence yesterday, when I told him I loved him, did not wound as deeply as it should have. Some quiet, older part of me had already accounted for it.
A single tear slips down my cheek before I can stop it. Why did you allow yourself to believe anyone would stay?
Below, I can hear the outer door open.The sound carries through the house with unmistakable clarity. A moment later his step crosses the threshold, unhurried, grounded.
He appears in the doorway of the bedchamber with mud along his trousers and wind still caught in his hair, as though the last several hours have been ordinary.
He is still catching his breath, hair pushed back from his face, skin flushed with exertion. There is no guilt in him, no distance. Only the simple fact of his return. And something in me, something that has braced for years against empty chairs and closed doors, falters.
He came back to me. The want in his eyes undoes the fear before it can take hold. It is not diminished by absence. If anything, it is clearer for it. He did not leave to escape me. He left and returned, as though there had never been another outcome.
I understand it then, quietly and without spectacle. He is not my father, or my brother, or any of the men who taught me what departure feels like. He does not disappear to punish or withdraw to instruct. He leaves and comes back. Not out of obligation, but because this is where he intends to be.
I reach him before I can stop myself. My hands catch at his shirt and I press my mouth to his with more urgency than I intended. He stiffens briefly, then his arms close around me, solid and warm. When I pull back, my vision blurs enough that I have to blink to clear it.
His eyes move over my face, my trembling hands, the half-fastened laces at my side. “I thought you would still be asleep,” he says quietly. “I went farther than usual.”
“You were gone,” I manage.
“I know.”
“I did not know,” I say, trying to keep my voice from breaking, “whether you had gone to hunt…or to leave.”
“I did not know,” I continue, “if perhaps last night I had not been enough.”
His hand moves to the back of my neck, firm and certain. “If I go,” he says, “it will never be to escape you.”
He rests his mouth briefly against my hair. “I do not walk away from what is mine.”
“And I did not wake with regret,” he continues. “You are not a novelty. You are not a mistake.”
He steps closer. “You are everything.” The word is delivered without embellishment, which makes it harder to dismiss. I bury my face in his chest, not wanting him to see the pain, the fear, the doubt that is there. And yet I know somehow he does.
“I brought you something,” he says.
“For me?”
He answers by taking my hand and leading me from the room. The stairs beneath the house narrow as they descend, the air cooling and thickening with the scent of earth. I do not ask where we are going. I already know this is not a charm or a trinket.
When he opens the final door, my father sits tied to a chair in the center of the room.
His coat is gone. His collar is torn. A leather satchel lies at his feet, parchment spilling from it. For a moment, I do not move.
“He was on his way to the Office of Wills and Trades,” Colsar says. “Your brother is of age. The transfer papers were prepared.”
He gestures toward the satchel. “I intercepted him.”
“You brought him here,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He looks at me. “Because he owes my wife an apology. For his behavior at tea. And for every year before it.”
My father pulls against the restraints. “You presume too much.”
“Apologize,” Colsar says.
My father laughs. “She was insolent. As she has always been. She responds to discipline.”
His eyes cut toward me. “You were born from filth,” he says softly. “And you behave like it.”
He spits on the ground. “Whore.”
Colsar moves without hesitation. The knife appears, his hand forcing my father’s mouth open. The sound that follows is immediate and wet. Blood spills down his chin as something strikes the floor.
My father’s scream collapses into a broken animal sound, the only sound he can make now that he does not have a tongue.
Colsar releases him. My father slumps against the ropes, choking on blood, the sound of it wet and animal in the quiet room.
For a moment I simply watch him, waiting for the old instinct to return, the one that once made me soften when he suffered.
I search for it out of habit, the way a hand reaches for a scar long after the wound has healed.
It does not come. The girl who once needed his approval is not standing in this room anymore.
I do not look at what lies on the floor. Instead, I crouch and pull the satchel toward me. Property deeds. Holdings. Accounts.
“So many coffers,” I murmur. “So much for you. And for Mysin. And your precious Yvara.”
For most of my life I believed freedom meant leaving him behind, slipping quietly beyond the reach of his house and his name. I thought survival would come from distance alone.
But standing here now, with his blood staining the floor and the proof of his power laid bare in my hands, I understand that freedom may look different than I imagined.
For a moment my eyes lift to Colsar. His expression does not change, but there is no hesitation in it either.
Whatever I choose, he will stand with me.
“I want it all.” I hold the first document in front of him. “Every property. Every account. Every holding in your name.”
Colsar presses a quill into his shaking hand.
“You will sign,” I say calmly, “or we kill you and inform the court you murdered yourself out of shame.”
Blood drips slowly onto the floor. “You will not be able to contradict the story.”
He stares at me for a long moment, then he signs. One document, then another, the ink mixing with blood. When the last sheet is finished, I gather them carefully. Colsar leans close to his ear.
“In the morning, you will be placed on a ship. Perhaps you depart on a diplomatic errand. Or perhaps we’ll simply say you abandoned your responsibilities to go on holiday.
” Colsar laughs cruelly. “The Baron abandons the realm for rest amidst a Thren crisis? That one may piss my brother off enough to never marry your sweet Yvara.”
My father shakes his head weakly. “You will work. Indentured. Lower decks.”
I meet Colsar’s eyes and give the slightest nod. He understands. He strikes him once at the base of the skull. My father slumps forward. The room falls quiet.