Page 74 of Broken Vow

I looked at the envoy of the north and gave her the small grave courtesy of one lady to another, and I found my voice, and it came out thin but it came out mine.

“Thank you for your understanding and support, dear Envoy.” Each word its own labour, and worth it. “I am more grateful than I can say for your friendship, and for your kind offer to help with the wedding preparations. I am sure a perspective from inside this court will help the esteemed Empress arrange everything far more easily.”

It landed. I had said yes to her protection out loud, in front of the court, and made myself part of the wedding in the same breath, helpful and smiling and impossible to be rid of now. The envoy’s eyes changed. She had come into this hall to acquire a useful little noblewoman, and she had just watched the noblewoman take the deal up and turn it over and hand it back improved, and what sharpened in her face was the pleasure of a player who has found another player where she came for a prize.

Then I turned to the emperor, because the last of it was his.

“I hope Her Majesty will not mind seeing rather more of this humble country noble.” I held his eyes and let him hear all of it, the staying, the refusal to disappear, the fact of me, here, not going anywhere he could arrange. “I will make sure that the next time we meet, I am more presentable.” I let the room hold, one breath, the picture of how I looked, barefoot and bloodless in a coat that was not mine, in the middle of his hall, and I let him understand that I had turned the worst thing he had ever done to me into a remark about my dress, and that I would be back, composed, and that he would have to look at me across every hall in this palace for the rest of his careful life.

He did not answer. Any answer would have cost him the room.

“Now please excuse me.” I gathered the coat, and Cael’s hand came under my elbow without my asking, and I let it stay there because the floor was very far away and going farther. “I feel I should return to my chambers and recover properly from this nasty sickness. It has been with me, I think, since the day I had to leave my village to come here.”

And I turned my back on the throne of half the world and let the commander walk me out, and I did not look to see whether I had been dismissed, because I had not waited to be.

The doors were a long way off. I kept my chin level the whole length of the floor and my feet under me, and I spent the very last of myself on the walk, building each step out of nothing, because the one thing I would not do was fall down in that room. Behind me stood the two of them, the envoy’s bright amusement and the emperor’s heavy, unmoving silence, and I carried that weight out of the room like the only thing I had earned all night.

We crossed the threshold. The doors began to swing shut behind us, and the moment the throne room was out of sight, the moment there was no one left to perform for but the man holding me up, I let it go, all of it, the spine and the chin and the story. My legs stopped being mine. The floor swung up and the dark came down over it fast and total, swallowing the gold light and the long hall and the last of the sound, and somewhere in it a grip closed hard around me before I reached the stone.

“I have you,” he said, from very far above. “You’re clear. You did it. I have you.”

Chapter 38

The shrine had a roof again.

I came up the lane in the late gold of the afternoon and stopped at the gate, mended and rehung, and for a moment I only looked, because the place had changed so much that I wanted to take it in before Auden saw me and changed it further. The fallen tiles were back on the roof. Someone had whitewashed the little wall. There were people in the yard, a handful of street children carrying water and a bent old man sorting kindling and a girl no older than ten up on a stool with a brush, painting the door frame a clean deep blue, and in the middle of all of it was Auden, on his knees in the dirt with a boy beside him, the two of them setting a flat stone into a path, and Auden was letting the boy do half of it wrong and not fixing it.

That was the thing that stopped my breath. Not the roof. That he was letting the boy set the stone crooked, and leaving it.

The man I had met would have done all of it himself in the dark, alone, and called it peace. This one knelt in his own swept yard with a child’s clumsy stonework under his hands and a dozen people moving around him who he had let come close enough to help, and he looked up, and he saw me, and his whole face opened.

“Liora.”

He came across the yard and I went to meet him and he took me into his arms without a word, and I put my face against his neck and breathed him in, incense and woodsmoke and warm bread, the first thing in this whole country that had ever felt like safety, and I held on.

When I lifted my head he kissed me.

It was slow and certain and complete. He framed my face in both his hands, his thumbs at my cheekbones, and he kissed me deep and without any hurry, and the warmth of it travelled the whole length of me and settle in my chest where the mark sat, a warmth blooming out from under my breastbone until my fingers ached with it. There was a whole season inside that kiss. The first time he let the fox sleep by his fire and asked it no questions. The morning I gave him a home he did not believe he was allowed to want. The dark I had nearly died in while he ran across a city with my cure in his arms. All of it, pressed into the place where his mouth met mine, and I kissed him back with everything I had survived to be able to.

And then we let it ease, both of us, at the same moment, his forehead coming down to rest against mine, our breath mixing in the small space between, and we stayed there. Not because we did not long for more. Because there was too much still unhealed in each of us to spend it now, and we both knew it, and we held still in it together, his pulse hard under my hands and mine no quieter, and did not reach for the rest.

“You are better.” He half said it, half asked it.

“I am better.” I drew back enough to look at him. “I came to say thank you. For the cure. For carrying me. For sending Tsuki up that wall.” My voice caught and I let it. “I would not be standing here.”

“Everyone was afraid for you.” His hands had not left my face. “Selene would not eat. Rainthorn brewed three things she swore were not for worrying and drank them all herself.” A breath of a smile. “We were all afraid.”

“I know it now.” I covered one of his hands with mine. “I am still cursed, Auden. The brew holds it back, most days. Some days it holds less. There is not much of it left and what comes after will be weaker, and so I have to find the witch, or find another road, because I will not live the rest of my life rationing out the days I get to keep my own body.”

“And how do you mean to do that?”

I told him. It came out of me clear and certain, and somewhere in the saying of it I understood how much had changed since the gallery, since the fox in the wall, since the throne room.

“Everyone at that court thinks they know what I will do now. They think the frightened country girl who fell into the envoy’s lap will keep her head down and be grateful and do as she is steered. So I will do the opposite. I will walk straight into the middle of it. I will let the envoy believe she has me, and I will learn every rule that court plays by, because she does not know the half of what was done to me and I do not intend to tell her, and a person who knows more than the people handling her is not a pawn for very long. I have to learn how deep Drystan still sits inside this curse, whether I need him to lift it or whether I can do it without ever looking at his face again. And I cannot learn any of that from the outside.” I lifted my chin. “So I will be on the inside. As myself. On my own account.”

Auden looked at me for a long moment, and something moved behind his eyes that was close to pride.

“You have your feet under you again,” he said. “That is the thing I most wanted to hear. Not the plan. That you are the one making it.” He let his hands fall and took one of mine instead. “And that you are not leaving.”