Page 41 of Broken Vow

Then the warmth of the connection hit me, and I recognized it for what it was.

I had felt that same warmth in the sacred grove, the door swinging open, the ease of being known. I had walked through that door with an open heart, and it had cost me my face, my voice, and my life. Warmth was the bait. It was always the bait. I had just handed a man I intended to use a dead prayer, my loneliness, and a name for the oldest wound in his chest, when I had meant to give him nothing.

I withdrew. The shutter came down over my expression, hard and deliberate, costing more because of how far I had let myself lean forward.

“It is late,” I said, my voice flat and distant. “I have said more than I intended. I should go.”

If he noticed the shift, and I knew he did, he did not pursue it. He did not lean after the warmth as it retreated. He simply nodded, granting me the space to pull back, and the grace of his restraint broke me open more than the conversation had.

I stood to leave before the dark could begin to pale toward dawn.

He rose as well, remaining at a respectful distance. He did not offer to accompany me, nor ask where I was going, nor reach for any thread that might lead to my identity. He understood that a woman who hid her face, her hands, and the origin of her prayers was a woman who would not permit herself to be followed, and he respected the boundary.

He said only one thing, his voice light, placing the words between us without requiring a reply.

“The lantern burns every night,” he said. “The gate to a place like this is never barred. You would not be troubling anyone by coming.”

I offered no answer. I could not speak without committing myself, and I trusted neither choice. I stopped at the threshold basin out of long habit and washed, hands, mouth, and brow, the cold water restoring my control. Not once did I look down into the basin, and so I did not see what the water took from me, nor that a few fine, bright silver hairs from a previous night still floated on the black surface, turning together toward a distant point.

I stepped out into the night and began the climb back toward my borrowed identity. The question he had left unspoken followed me up the hill: Would I return? My purpose required it, my heart urged it, and the guarded creature inside me screamed to run and never look back, warning that nothing that felt like this could ever be safe. I carried that conflict up through the merchants’ quarter, past the high walls of the great houses, and back into the gilded framework of a life that was not mine.

As I walked, I tried to convince myself that I had gone solely for the sanctuary, that I had achieved what I came for, and that the man was merely incidental.

By the time I reached the top of the hill, the lie had already worn thin. Someone in the world now possessed a true piece of me, freely given, that I could never reclaim.

* * *

In a windowless room within the palace, the witch was present.

Morrigwen sat before the shallow black bowl, drawn to it by a restlessness that had tugged at her spell for days, like a hound scenting prey its master cannot yet see. Three centuries had taught her to pay attention when a working grew active. She was there when the water shifted.

It moved with a single, sudden motion. The silver hairs suspended in the dark swung in unison toward a single direction. This time, as she leaned over the bowl and pressed her voice into the magic, the surface cleared completely.

A poor place appeared. She saw it clearly where previously there had been only obscure shifts in the water: lantern light beneath a sagging eave, a bell-rope, a worn stone figure of a small mercy-goddess, and a basin of dark water at a threshold near the river. A shrine in the lower city. She had a location now, a physical space to seek, and a cold smile touched her lips.

Then the image offered something more, and the smile faded.

A man was present in the reflection. The picture flickered, uncertain whether to show a fox or a woman, and the figure beside her target was blurred, but she recognized the posture. A tall, fair shape, quiet, leaning toward the seated figure with a stillness she could feel through the magic. She did not need the image to sharpen to know him. She recognized that stillness. It belonged to a man who listened before speaking and weighed before moving, an old, dangerous patience.

She had known that exact stillness once, long ago, embodied by someone she had loved and could not possess. She had broken it apart with her own hands before this girl’s grandmother was born, scattering the pieces so thoroughly that they could never assemble again, and she had spent three hundred years ensuring they remained apart. That preservation had been the quiet work of her life.

Now a piece of it sat in a poor shrine in the dark, leaning toward her quarry as though the shattered element had begun to drift back toward what it had lost.

“No,” she whispered to the water, her voice tight against the image. “Not that. Anything but that.”

The reflection trembled, fox, woman, and the quiet fair shape above them, before the spell spent its energy and the water returned to black. Morrigwen sat alone in the dark, feeling something she had not experienced in centuries.

It was not patience. It was very close to fear.

She had a place to search now, and a reason to reach it far faster than she had intended.

Chapter 19

I did not tell Selene where I went on the bad nights.

Part of me said there was nothing to tell. The rest of me was still wrestling with what had happened, unable to put words to how exposed I felt. So twice more I went down the hill in the dark, hooded and wrapped against the cold in the heavy grey shawl that covered the worst of what I was becoming. Twice more I sat with him in the poor shrine in the deepest part of the night, and nothing happened that I could have named to her if I tried. We talked, or we did not talk. He kept his distance, his silence, and his steady, undemanding presence. I kept my hood low and my hands tucked deep into my sleeves. Trust built between us without either of us deciding it, a little more each night, until I had begun, without permission from the wary thing in me, to expect him there. To want him there. To carry the thought of the shrine through my gilded days like a coal kept warm under ash.

That was the thing I could not have said to Selene. Not the where of it. The how much.