For two days she could not look him in the eye.
It was not that she avoided him. That would have been simple, and he would have noticed at once. She did everything she always did. She sat beside him at breakfast and passed him the honey. She walked the garden with him in the evenings and listened to him name the first stars. She checked the arm, though there was almost nothing left to check, and when she bent over it with her needle she kept her eyes on his wrist and her voice light and ordinary. It was only that every time he turned toward her, something in her turned away, quick and small and ashamed, like a hand drawn back from a stove.
He saw it. Of course he saw it. He had spent thirteen years learning to read the weather of other people's silences, and he was not a man who missed a change in the light. On the first evening he watched her across the supper table with a faint crease between his brows. On the second he opened his mouth to speak, and she said, too brightly, that Garrick's cough was much improved, and he closed it again.
He did not push. That was the worst of it. He had promised to ask, and he asked, every time, in his careful, awkward, tender way. *Would you like me to sit with you? Would you like to be alone?* And every time she said, *Sit with me,* because she could not bear to say anything else, and then sat beside him with the Warden's voice running behind her eyes like a thread through a needle.
*He would be free.*
*You would lose only what you do not yet know you have.*
She went over it in the infirmary, grinding willow bark until her wrist ached. She went over it in the garden, on her knees, with her hands buried in cold black earth. She tried every question she could think of and lined them up in her notebook in a neat column, and each one turned, when she looked at it squarely, into a door that opened onto another door. What would she lose? How long would the Pact last? Who had carved her name? What happened to a keeper who was no longer needed? The answers, she was fairly sure, were all in the keeper's own terms, and the terms were in a language she could not read.
On the third night she could not bear it any longer.
He had gone up before her, saying that he wished to look at a ledger. It was a lie, a small one, the kind a man tells when he wants to leave a woman alone with her thoughts and cannot think how to say so. She sat in the library with the green book open on her knee and did not read a word. The fire burned down. The rain, which had come on again at dusk, ticked softly on the slates. She sat there until the candle drowned in its own wax, and then she stood up, and set the book on the shelf, and went up the north stair in the dark.
She did not go to her own room.
She stopped in front of the tall black door with the iron ring. A thin line of yellow light lay along the sill. Three weeks ago she had stood here with a stack of dead men's papers in her arms and demanded that he deny them. Ten days ago he had said, in a cracked voice, *I withdraw it. You may come into my room.* She put her hand on the iron, and it was cold, and she did not knock. She pushed.
The door swung inward without a sound.
He was standing at the window with his back to her and his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. There was no ledger. The desk was bare. He had been looking out at the rain-dark lake, with his hands braced on the sill, and he turned at the sound of the latch with his face already open and already asking.
"Liora," he said.
She crossed the room. She did not remember doing it. She crossed the cold flagstones in her bare feet and her thin gown, and she did not stop at three paces or two or one, and she put both hands against the front of his shirt and kissed him.
It was not like the other times. There was nothing slow in it, and nothing careful. It was hard and hungry and a little desperate, and she felt him go rigid with surprise, and then felt the surprise break. His hands came up and closed on her shoulders, and for a moment he kissed her back with a force that rocked her on her heels. Then, with an obvious and terrible effort, he lifted his head.
"What is wrong?" he said.
His voice was rough. His breath came fast. His eyes were very dark and searching, and she could not look into them.
"Nothing."
"Liora."
"Nothing. Please." She had her forehead against his collarbone. She was shaking. "I don't want to talk. I don't want to think. Please, Dravek. I want you to..." She could not finish it. "I'm asking. I'm asking you to."
He was very still.
She felt him weigh it. She felt the old reflex go through him, the careful, solemn, *I should not,* and she felt him set it aside, with an effort she could feel in his hands. He had promised to ask, and he had promised to believe the answer. And she had given him an answer, and it was true, as far as it went. She did want him. She wanted him with every nerve she owned. She simply wanted him, tonight, for a second reason that she could not say aloud, and she knew it, and she let him believe the first one.
"Are you certain?" he said quietly.
"Yes."
"You will tell me if that changes."
"I'll tell you."
"At any moment. For any reason."
"I know. I said it. I meant it." She lifted her face. "Dravek. Please."
He bent his head and kissed her again.
This time he did not hold back. The tension went out of him like a drawn breath released, and he caught her up against him with an arm around her waist and a hand in her hair, and the world turned to heat. She heard herself make a sound she did not recognize. His mouth moved from her lips to her jaw to the hollow beneath her ear, and her knees went, and he held her up, and she felt him laugh against her throat, low and unsteady.
"I have you," he said.
"Don't let go."
"I will not."
He lifted her. It was not a grand gesture. He simply bent and took her under the knees and carried her the four steps to the narrow gray bed that he had never had a reason to want until now, and she clung to his neck with her face hidden in his shoulder and breathed in cedar and cold iron and woodsmoke and him. He set her down on the edge of the mattress as though she were made of glass. Then he knelt on the floor in front of her, and took her bare feet in his hands, and said, "May I?"
She did not know what she was agreeing to. She said yes anyway.
He did not hurry. That was what undid her. She had come to him wanting to be carried away, wanting speed and heat and oblivion, wanting to be too busy to think. And he met her with a slowness so exact and so attentive that it left no room for escape. He asked at every step. He asked quietly, against her skin, and waited for the answer before he moved. He undid the ribbon at her collar, and the buttons of her gown, one by one, with fingers that were not steady. She stood to let it fall. The air of the cold room touched her bare shoulders, and she shivered, and his hands came up at once to warm her.
"Cold?"
"No."
"You are shivering."
"It isn't the cold."
He made a low sound in his throat. She tugged at his shirt, and he let her, and when it came away she pressed her palms flat against his chest. The skin was warm. It was as warm as her own. The lines that had once crawled across it were a pale gray ghost, scarcely there, and beneath her hand his heart was going like a hammer.
She pushed him back onto the bed, and he went, and she climbed after him.
She wanted it fast. She told him so, in a whisper, against his mouth, and she felt the answering shudder go through him. She wanted him all at once, with no space left between them for anything else to stand in. She pulled him down over her and wrapped her legs around his hips and arched against him, and he said her name in a voice that cracked down the middle. For a while there was nothing else. There were only hands, and heat, and the rough wonderful drag of his breath against her throat, and the slow wet slide of his body into hers that made them both gasp and hold perfectly still.
"Is this..." he said, shakily.
"Yes."
"Say it again."
"Yes. Dravek, yes. Please."
He moved.
It was urgent, and it was not gentle, and it was not meant to be. She dug her nails into his shoulders and met him, and the narrow bed creaked beneath them, and the rain beat on the shutters like a hundred small hands. She heard herself cry out. She heard him answer, hoarse and broken, with her name and with other words that she did not quite catch. She felt the heat gather low in her body and climb, and she chased it with a kind of fury, and she kept her eyes shut tight, because if she opened them she would have to see his face.
And he would see hers.
It was a very small thing that stopped her. It was not a sound. It was a weight. His hand, which had been braced beside her head, shifted, and came down and laid itself against her cheek. It was warm and open and trembling, and it did not grip. It only lay there, as a hand lies on the brow of a feverish child. And he said, very softly, into the dark above her, "Liora. Look at me."
She shook her head.
"Please."
"I can't."
He stopped.
He did not draw away. He did not do anything but go quite still, holding himself above her on his elbows with his forehead pressed to hers, breathing in great ragged gulps. She felt the shake in his arms. She felt the effort it cost him. And she felt, with a sick lurch of shame, the hot spill of tears that she had not known she was holding, running out of the corners of her shut eyes and down into her hair.
"You are not here," said Dravek.
"I am."
"You are somewhere very far off. I can feel it." His voice was low and gentle and entirely without reproach. "I do not mind that you are frightened. I would never mind that. But I will not be a place that you go to in order to be elsewhere. Not if it is going to cost you what it is costing you now."
"That's not what..."
"Is it not?"
She opened her eyes.
He was looking down at her. His face was very close. It was flushed, and wet at the lashes, and hollowed with the strain of holding still, and in it there was no anger at all. There was only a grave, attentive tenderness, and underneath it, very faint, the old fear. He was afraid that he had asked for too much. He was afraid, she saw, that she was doing this out of kindness, or out of pity, or because she thought that she owed it. He was waiting to be told that he had misjudged her.
It was the fear that broke her. Not her own. His.
"No," she whispered. "It isn't kindness. I swear it isn't. I want you. I want you so much that it frightens me." Her voice cracked. "I'm afraid, Dravek. I'm afraid of losing this."
It was true. Every word of it was true. It was only not the whole of the truth, and she knew that he knew it, and she saw him decide, with a visible and generous effort, to take what she had given him and ask for no more.
"Then be afraid with me," he said.
He lowered his head and kissed her, softly, on the corner of her mouth, where a tear had run. Then on the other side. Then on the closed lids of her eyes, one after the other, slowly, as one seals a letter. She felt something in her chest give way, and she turned her face into his neck and held on, and the tears came in earnest, silent and shaking, and he did not say a word. He only held her. He stayed inside her, warm and still, and stroked her hair, and let her weep against his throat for as long as she needed.
When it eased, he began again.
He moved against her slowly, without any urgency at all, as a man rocks a boat in a quiet sea. She felt it differently now. It was not an escape. It was a place she was being kept in, with his arms around her and his heartbeat under her cheek, and she stopped running from it. She wrapped herself around him. She said his name into his skin. She opened her eyes and held his gaze, and did not look away, even when the heat built, and spilled, and took the breath from both of them in a long, shaking, helpless cry.
He followed her a moment after. She felt it go through him, the whole length of his body, and she held him through it with both arms and both legs and every ounce of strength she had. He buried his face in her shoulder and said something into her skin that she could not make out. She thought it might have been a prayer. She thought it might have been her name.
They lay tangled for a long time afterward, in the rumpled dark, with the rain going on outside and the fire sunk to a glow. His weight was warm on her, and she did not want him to move. Her heart slowed. Her breathing steadied. She traced one finger down the line of his spine, slowly, over the old pale scars, and felt him sigh.
"It is quiet," he murmured, into her hair.
"I know."
"Quieter than it has any right to be. After a night like this." He lifted his head and looked at her, and his eyes were soft and heavy and very tired. "I thought that it would be restless. When you were so unhappy."
"I wasn't unhappy."
"No?" He did not argue. He only brushed a damp strand from her cheek with his thumb. "Then I am glad that I was mistaken."
She closed her eyes. She wanted to tell him. The words rose in her throat, whole and ready. *There is a voice in the lake, and it has made me an offer, and I do not know what to do.* She could feel the shape of them, cold and clear. She had only to open her mouth.
He was already half asleep. His arm lay heavy across her ribs. His face, in the dim glow, was open and trusting and younger than she could bear, and she thought of what the Warden had said. *A man who is happy does not pay.* She thought of the way he had flinched at the lake. She thought of the fact that, tonight, for the first time, he had asked her to look at him, and that she had looked, and had seen a man who had no idea what she was carrying.
She said nothing.
He slept. She did not. She lay in the narrow bed that smelled of cedar and rain and the two of them, with the weight of the secret pressing down on her chest like a stone laid on a grave, and she watched the shadows move across the ceiling until the gray began to climb the shutters. The ring on her finger was warm. The key lay cold against her breastbone, between her body and his.
She had said that she was afraid of losing this. It was the truest thing she had said to him in three days.
It was also, she knew, the very thing that she was in the act of doing.
You've reached the end of this chapter
For two days she could not look him in the eye.
It was not that she avoided him. That would have been simple, and he would have noticed at once. She did everything she always did. She sat beside him at breakfast and passed him the honey. She walked the garden with him in the evenings and listened to him name the first stars. She checked the arm, though there was almost nothing left to check, and when she bent over it with her needle she kept her eyes on his wrist and her voice light and ordinary. It was only that every time he turned toward her, something in her turned away, quick and small and ashamed, like a hand drawn back from a stove.
He saw it. Of course he saw it. He had spent thirteen years learning to read the weather of other people's silences, and he was not a man who missed a change in the light. On the first evening he watched her across the supper table with a faint crease between his brows. On the second he opened his mouth to speak, and she said, too brightly, that Garrick's cough was much improved, and he closed it again.
He did not push. That was the worst of it. He had promised to ask, and he asked, every time, in his careful, awkward, tender way. *Would you like me to sit with you? Would you like to be alone?* And every time she said, *Sit with me,* because she could not bear to say anything else, and then sat beside him with the Warden's voice running behind her eyes like a thread through a needle.
*He would be free.*
*You would lose only what you do not yet know you have.*
She went over it in the infirmary, grinding willow bark until her wrist ached. She went over it in the garden, on her knees, with her hands buried in cold black earth. She tried every question she could think of and lined them up in her notebook in a neat column, and each one turned, when she looked at it squarely, into a door that opened onto another door. What would she lose? How long would the Pact last? Who had carved her name? What happened to a keeper who was no longer needed? The answers, she was fairly sure, were all in the keeper's own terms, and the terms were in a language she could not read.
On the third night she could not bear it any longer.
He had gone up before her, saying that he wished to look at a ledger. It was a lie, a small one, the kind a man tells when he wants to leave a woman alone with her thoughts and cannot think how to say so. She sat in the library with the green book open on her knee and did not read a word. The fire burned down. The rain, which had come on again at dusk, ticked softly on the slates. She sat there until the candle drowned in its own wax, and then she stood up, and set the book on the shelf, and went up the north stair in the dark.
She did not go to her own room.
She stopped in front of the tall black door with the iron ring. A thin line of yellow light lay along the sill. Three weeks ago she had stood here with a stack of dead men's papers in her arms and demanded that he deny them. Ten days ago he had said, in a cracked voice, *I withdraw it. You may come into my room.* She put her hand on the iron, and it was cold, and she did not knock. She pushed.
The door swung inward without a sound.
He was standing at the window with his back to her and his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. There was no ledger. The desk was bare. He had been looking out at the rain-dark lake, with his hands braced on the sill, and he turned at the sound of the latch with his face already open and already asking.
"Liora," he said.
She crossed the room. She did not remember doing it. She crossed the cold flagstones in her bare feet and her thin gown, and she did not stop at three paces or two or one, and she put both hands against the front of his shirt and kissed him.
It was not like the other times. There was nothing slow in it, and nothing careful. It was hard and hungry and a little desperate, and she felt him go rigid with surprise, and then felt the surprise break. His hands came up and closed on her shoulders, and for a moment he kissed her back with a force that rocked her on her heels. Then, with an obvious and terrible effort, he lifted his head.
"What is wrong?" he said.
His voice was rough. His breath came fast. His eyes were very dark and searching, and she could not look into them.
"Nothing."
"Liora."
"Nothing. Please." She had her forehead against his collarbone. She was shaking. "I don't want to talk. I don't want to think. Please, Dravek. I want you to..." She could not finish it. "I'm asking. I'm asking you to."
He was very still.
She felt him weigh it. She felt the old reflex go through him, the careful, solemn, *I should not,* and she felt him set it aside, with an effort she could feel in his hands. He had promised to ask, and he had promised to believe the answer. And she had given him an answer, and it was true, as far as it went. She did want him. She wanted him with every nerve she owned. She simply wanted him, tonight, for a second reason that she could not say aloud, and she knew it, and she let him believe the first one.
"Are you certain?" he said quietly.
"Yes."
"You will tell me if that changes."
"I'll tell you."
"At any moment. For any reason."
"I know. I said it. I meant it." She lifted her face. "Dravek. Please."
He bent his head and kissed her again.
This time he did not hold back. The tension went out of him like a drawn breath released, and he caught her up against him with an arm around her waist and a hand in her hair, and the world turned to heat. She heard herself make a sound she did not recognize. His mouth moved from her lips to her jaw to the hollow beneath her ear, and her knees went, and he held her up, and she felt him laugh against her throat, low and unsteady.
"I have you," he said.
"Don't let go."
"I will not."
He lifted her. It was not a grand gesture. He simply bent and took her under the knees and carried her the four steps to the narrow gray bed that he had never had a reason to want until now, and she clung to his neck with her face hidden in his shoulder and breathed in cedar and cold iron and woodsmoke and him. He set her down on the edge of the mattress as though she were made of glass. Then he knelt on the floor in front of her, and took her bare feet in his hands, and said, "May I?"
She did not know what she was agreeing to. She said yes anyway.
He did not hurry. That was what undid her. She had come to him wanting to be carried away, wanting speed and heat and oblivion, wanting to be too busy to think. And he met her with a slowness so exact and so attentive that it left no room for escape. He asked at every step. He asked quietly, against her skin, and waited for the answer before he moved. He undid the ribbon at her collar, and the buttons of her gown, one by one, with fingers that were not steady. She stood to let it fall. The air of the cold room touched her bare shoulders, and she shivered, and his hands came up at once to warm her.
"Cold?"
"No."
"You are shivering."
"It isn't the cold."
He made a low sound in his throat. She tugged at his shirt, and he let her, and when it came away she pressed her palms flat against his chest. The skin was warm. It was as warm as her own. The lines that had once crawled across it were a pale gray ghost, scarcely there, and beneath her hand his heart was going like a hammer.
She pushed him back onto the bed, and he went, and she climbed after him.
She wanted it fast. She told him so, in a whisper, against his mouth, and she felt the answering shudder go through him. She wanted him all at once, with no space left between them for anything else to stand in. She pulled him down over her and wrapped her legs around his hips and arched against him, and he said her name in a voice that cracked down the middle. For a while there was nothing else. There were only hands, and heat, and the rough wonderful drag of his breath against her throat, and the slow wet slide of his body into hers that made them both gasp and hold perfectly still.
"Is this..." he said, shakily.
"Yes."
"Say it again."
"Yes. Dravek, yes. Please."
He moved.
It was urgent, and it was not gentle, and it was not meant to be. She dug her nails into his shoulders and met him, and the narrow bed creaked beneath them, and the rain beat on the shutters like a hundred small hands. She heard herself cry out. She heard him answer, hoarse and broken, with her name and with other words that she did not quite catch. She felt the heat gather low in her body and climb, and she chased it with a kind of fury, and she kept her eyes shut tight, because if she opened them she would have to see his face.
And he would see hers.
It was a very small thing that stopped her. It was not a sound. It was a weight. His hand, which had been braced beside her head, shifted, and came down and laid itself against her cheek. It was warm and open and trembling, and it did not grip. It only lay there, as a hand lies on the brow of a feverish child. And he said, very softly, into the dark above her, "Liora. Look at me."
She shook her head.
"Please."
"I can't."
He stopped.
He did not draw away. He did not do anything but go quite still, holding himself above her on his elbows with his forehead pressed to hers, breathing in great ragged gulps. She felt the shake in his arms. She felt the effort it cost him. And she felt, with a sick lurch of shame, the hot spill of tears that she had not known she was holding, running out of the corners of her shut eyes and down into her hair.
"You are not here," said Dravek.
"I am."
"You are somewhere very far off. I can feel it." His voice was low and gentle and entirely without reproach. "I do not mind that you are frightened. I would never mind that. But I will not be a place that you go to in order to be elsewhere. Not if it is going to cost you what it is costing you now."
"That's not what..."
"Is it not?"
She opened her eyes.
He was looking down at her. His face was very close. It was flushed, and wet at the lashes, and hollowed with the strain of holding still, and in it there was no anger at all. There was only a grave, attentive tenderness, and underneath it, very faint, the old fear. He was afraid that he had asked for too much. He was afraid, she saw, that she was doing this out of kindness, or out of pity, or because she thought that she owed it. He was waiting to be told that he had misjudged her.
It was the fear that broke her. Not her own. His.
"No," she whispered. "It isn't kindness. I swear it isn't. I want you. I want you so much that it frightens me." Her voice cracked. "I'm afraid, Dravek. I'm afraid of losing this."
It was true. Every word of it was true. It was only not the whole of the truth, and she knew that he knew it, and she saw him decide, with a visible and generous effort, to take what she had given him and ask for no more.
"Then be afraid with me," he said.
He lowered his head and kissed her, softly, on the corner of her mouth, where a tear had run. Then on the other side. Then on the closed lids of her eyes, one after the other, slowly, as one seals a letter. She felt something in her chest give way, and she turned her face into his neck and held on, and the tears came in earnest, silent and shaking, and he did not say a word. He only held her. He stayed inside her, warm and still, and stroked her hair, and let her weep against his throat for as long as she needed.
When it eased, he began again.
He moved against her slowly, without any urgency at all, as a man rocks a boat in a quiet sea. She felt it differently now. It was not an escape. It was a place she was being kept in, with his arms around her and his heartbeat under her cheek, and she stopped running from it. She wrapped herself around him. She said his name into his skin. She opened her eyes and held his gaze, and did not look away, even when the heat built, and spilled, and took the breath from both of them in a long, shaking, helpless cry.
He followed her a moment after. She felt it go through him, the whole length of his body, and she held him through it with both arms and both legs and every ounce of strength she had. He buried his face in her shoulder and said something into her skin that she could not make out. She thought it might have been a prayer. She thought it might have been her name.
They lay tangled for a long time afterward, in the rumpled dark, with the rain going on outside and the fire sunk to a glow. His weight was warm on her, and she did not want him to move. Her heart slowed. Her breathing steadied. She traced one finger down the line of his spine, slowly, over the old pale scars, and felt him sigh.
"It is quiet," he murmured, into her hair.
"I know."
"Quieter than it has any right to be. After a night like this." He lifted his head and looked at her, and his eyes were soft and heavy and very tired. "I thought that it would be restless. When you were so unhappy."
"I wasn't unhappy."
"No?" He did not argue. He only brushed a damp strand from her cheek with his thumb. "Then I am glad that I was mistaken."
She closed her eyes. She wanted to tell him. The words rose in her throat, whole and ready. *There is a voice in the lake, and it has made me an offer, and I do not know what to do.* She could feel the shape of them, cold and clear. She had only to open her mouth.
He was already half asleep. His arm lay heavy across her ribs. His face, in the dim glow, was open and trusting and younger than she could bear, and she thought of what the Warden had said. *A man who is happy does not pay.* She thought of the way he had flinched at the lake. She thought of the fact that, tonight, for the first time, he had asked her to look at him, and that she had looked, and had seen a man who had no idea what she was carrying.
She said nothing.
He slept. She did not. She lay in the narrow bed that smelled of cedar and rain and the two of them, with the weight of the secret pressing down on her chest like a stone laid on a grave, and she watched the shadows move across the ceiling until the gray began to climb the shutters. The ring on her finger was warm. The key lay cold against her breastbone, between her body and his.
She had said that she was afraid of losing this. It was the truest thing she had said to him in three days.
It was also, she knew, the very thing that she was in the act of doing.
You've reached the end of this chapter