Page 49 of Add To Hoard

"I got what I came for," I say.

It's true. The jewels are real. Bren's treatment is paid for three times over in the weight of what Maelor has already given me and whatever remains in the hoard cache is more than I know what to do with. I came to steal one thing and I am leaving with everything I needed and a thing I didn't come for and can't take with me.

"Yes," he says.

"Politics," I say. "It was always going to be politics."

"Yes."

I finally turn and look at him. He is standing just outside the reach of the firelight — coat on, hands loose at his sides, those gold eyes finding me in the dark without any difficulty at all. He looks the way he looked the first time I saw him: enormous and certain and entirely himself. He also looks like a man who has been carrying something all evening and has brought it here because there is nowhere else to put it.

"How did you vote?" I say.

He is quiet for a moment.

"Maelor."

"I voted to keep you," he says. His voice is even. "Formally. On the record."

I look at him. He looks back.

There is something happening in his face that I have not seen there before. Not the controlled stillness he shows the council. Not the patience that has no bottom to it. Something underneath both of those, something that has been sitting under six centuries of governance and discipline and getting there eventually, and it has run out of room.

"That's a lie," I say.

"It is not a lie."

"You voted to keep me and you came down here to tell me I'm leaving in three days?"

"The vote⁠—"

"How did you vote?" I say again. Quieter this time. Not a challenge. The real question.

He looks at me. The coals shift and settle. A coal drops and sends up a small thread of orange that dies before it reaches the air.

"No," he says. "Damn it."

And then he crosses the distance between us in two steps and his hands find my face and he tips my head back and kisses me, not carefully, not the way he has been careful, not with any of the restraint I have watched him exercise for twelve days, and I make a sound against his mouth that is not surprise because I am not surprised, I am only relieved, the kind of relief that lives in the body before the mind gets to it.

"I voted to take you now," he says against my mouth, "before someone makes me be reasonable about it."

I get my hands into his coat and pull.

He is already working at mine, not rough, not hurried, just certain, the way he is certain about everything, his hands finding buttons and ties in the dark without fumbling because he has excellent vision and apparently has been paying attention. My coat goes. His follows. The island air is cool against my arms and I don't care because his hands are at my waist and they are warm the way he is always warm, the warmth of a body that runs hotter than the world around it, and I have been thinking about those hands since the spring.

Since before the spring, if I am being precise about it.

"Three days," I say.

"Tonight," he says. "We have tonight."

Yes,* I think. *That's the thing about tonight. It is the only thing that is entirely ours.

He gets me down onto the bedroll — careful about it, one hand behind my shoulders, not graceless, and then he is over me and I can see his face in the last of the firelight, those gold eyes, the slit of the pupils gone wide in the dark, the burn scars at his throat that I have put my hand against twice now and will put my hand against again because I am allowed and I know it and he knows I know it.

"You should know," he says, "that I am not going to be reasonable about this?"

"I know," I say. "I'm counting on it."