There were nine hours in the dark when Alaric believed he had killed her.
He would remember them afterward not as a sequence of events but as a single unbroken sensation, like being held underwater. He had come back to himself slowly, the red fading from the edges of his sight and the roaring in his skull subsiding into silence, and the first thing he knew was the taste in his mouth. Iron and wine. Her blood, still warm on his tongue. The second thing he knew was that she was no longer holding him.
She lay across his lap on the furs, her head fallen back over his arm, her face the color of tallow. The cut in her forearm was still open, a long dark mouth, and it had stopped bleeding because there was nothing left to bleed. Her lips had gone blue. Her eyelids were bruised and translucent. He pressed two shaking fingers against her throat and found a pulse so faint and slow that for a terrible moment he mistook it for his own.
"Valeria."
She did not stir.
"Valeria." He heard the cracked sound his voice made and did not care. "Malakor. Malakor, she is not breathing."
"She is breathing." The alchemist was already on his knees beside them, a pale smear of a man with a small vial clutched in his fist. His hands shook so badly he spilled half of it. "Shallow, but she is. It is the cold, the toxin's recoil, it is shutting her down from the extremities inward. My lord, I need you to hold her jaw."
"What is that?"
"A thing I made. A thing I should have told you about." Malakor was weeping openly now, tears running unchecked down his thin face. "She carried it in her sleeve. I gave it to her yesterday. It may slow the retaliation. It may do nothing. It has never been tried."
"Then try it."
He tipped it between her lips drop by drop while Alaric held her head steady, whispering her name, and the cell filled with the sound of their combined breathing, ragged and desperate. When the vial was empty, Malakor sat back on his heels and pressed his fingers to her wrist, his eyes closed, counting.
Nothing happened for a long time.
Then Malakor's shoulders sagged. "A little stronger," he said hoarsely. "Not much. But stronger. The cold has stopped climbing."
Alaric had not known he was holding his breath until it left him in a noise that was half sob, half laugh. He bent over her and pressed his forehead against hers, and stayed there, listening to the fragile rhythm of her breathing, and understood with perfect, terrible clarity what he had done.
He had let her.
He had been half-gone, drowning in the curse, but he had known. Somewhere in the fog he had known that she was giving too much, that the quantity was past safety, and he had not found the strength to pull away. He had drunk and drunk like a starving animal, and she had let him, because she loved him, and because he was too weak to refuse.
The man she had called not a monster had very nearly killed her anyway.
*
She slept for two days.
He did not leave her side. He had Kaelen's cot dragged into the healing quarters, in the quiet corner behind Malakor's tables, and when the surgeons tried to turn him out he looked at them until they stopped. He sat in a chair by her bed and watched her sleep. He held her hand. He listened to her breathe. The gash in his own side had closed overnight into a puckered pink seam, the essence's black threads fading from his veins as though they had never been, and he found that he hated it. He wanted to be in agony. He wanted the pain to be a debt he could pay.
Kaelen found him there on the second afternoon, hauled in on a crude crutch with his thigh swathed in linen, his face drawn and gray.
"You are supposed to be in bed," Alaric said without turning.
"So are you." Kaelen lowered himself carefully into the neighboring chair. "The enemy has not attacked since the night of the gate. They are probing. A raid on the south wall at dusk yesterday, a few crossbowmen along the treeline this morning. The ram is gone, taken back to the camp." He paused. "Their scouts say the commanders have been conferring since dawn. There is a great deal of activity."
"They are waiting."
"For what?"
"The moon." Alaric looked at the sleeping woman's face. "Tonight is the full moon. Malakor says the alignment is tonight. I think Cedric means to try again at the hour it peaks."
Kaelen was silent. Then he asked, quietly, "How is she?"
"Alive." The word cost him. "Malakor says the worst has passed. She will wake today or tomorrow. He does not know what the damage will be."
"She saved you."
"She nearly died saving me." He heard how his voice sounded and could not soften it. "She is the bravest person I have ever met, Kaelen, and I cannot allow her to be brave on my account again. I will not."
The captain looked at him for a long moment, and whatever he saw there made him lower his eyes. "My lord," he said after a time, with great gentleness, "she will not thank you for deciding it for her."
"I know."
"And you will decide it anyway."
"Yes."
Kaelen sighed, a long heavy breath, and did not argue. He only reached across, with a hand that was not quite steady, and gripped Alaric's shoulder, and left it there for a while.
Malakor came an hour later, gray with fatigue, a stack of notes under one arm. He checked Valeria's pulse, lifted her eyelids, pressed his palm against her forehead, and then stood for some time looking down at her with an expression Alaric could not read.
"Speak," Alaric said. "Whatever it is."
"She will recover. I believe that now." Malakor lowered his voice, though there was no one else near. "But there is something you must understand, my lord, because it affects everything that comes next. When she gave you that quantity, she did not merely lose blood. She spent the compound itself. The thing in her veins that answers the curse. It is not an endless well. It is a slow harvest, built over twelve years of exposure, replenished by her body at a rate I cannot predict."
"How long?"
"Weeks. Perhaps longer. Until it returns, her blood will be as ordinary as yours or mine." The alchemist's mouth twisted. "Her scent will fade, too. Tonight she will be able to ease you very little, if at all. She is spent."
Alaric stared at the sleeping woman. A strange, cold calm settled over him, the calm of a man who has just been handed a reason he did not want.
"Then that settles it," he said.
"My lord?"
"Whatever she might have offered me tonight, she has nothing left to offer. If I let her come to me, I will drain what little she has rebuilt." He stood, and his voice was very quiet. "I will go down to the cell alone, Malakor, and I will not call for her, and you will see to it that no one lets her follow me."
"She will not forgive that."
"I know," Alaric said. "I would rather be unforgiven than responsible for her death. I have done a great many things I regret. I will not add that one."
He did not see Malakor's face as he turned away. If he had, he might have recognized the expression there, the grave, helpless pity of a man who has watched this same mistake made before, by better men, and seen where it led.
*
She woke at sunset.
Alaric knew the moment it happened. Her fingers tightened in his, faintly, and her lashes fluttered against her cheek. He bent over her, his heart hammering, and watched her gray eyes open and wander dazedly across the ceiling before they found his face.
"You are very ugly when you are worried," she said in a whisper.
The laugh that burst out of him was wet and broken. He pressed her hand to his mouth, her knuckles, her palm, not trusting himself to speak, and she let him, her gaze soft and a little confused. Her body felt like something borrowed, heavy and slow, as though the blood she had given had taken all the warmth in her with it. The cold lay in her fingertips and the hollow of her throat, a thin, patient chill that no blanket reached. She had lived with that cold after the second moon. This was different. This was deeper, and quieter, and it did not feel as if it intended to leave.
She said nothing of it. She looked at the man bent over her hand, at the dark circles beneath his eyes and the stubble shadowing his jaw, at the unguarded terror that still lingered in every line of him, and thought that she would have borne ten times the cold to see that terror ease. When he finally lifted his head, her expression had sharpened.
"How long?"
"Two days."
"The siege?"
"Holding. Kaelen and the garrison have not lost the wall." He swallowed. "You gave me a hundred and forty measures, Valeria. Malakor counted. A hundred and forty."
She was quiet for a moment, absorbing it. "I remember stopping at a hundred," she said slowly. "Or not stopping. I do not remember."
"You did not stop."
"No." She did not look sorry. "You were still turning. I could feel it. If I had pulled away, it would have won."
"You could have died."
"I know."
"You almost did." He was gripping her hand too hard and forced his fingers open. "Malakor's tincture brought you back, and by what luck I do not know. A hair's breadth, Valeria. A single breath."
"Alaric." Her voice was quiet and very steady. "I would do it again."
The words went through him like a blade.
"No," he said.
"I would. You know I would."
"No." He rose from the chair, unable to stay seated, and walked three steps to the window and back. The last light of the day lay red across the stone, and beyond the glass the moon was already rising, enormous and gold, its lower rim brushing the black line of the eastern ridge. "You will not. I will not permit it."
"You will not permit it?" Something cold entered her voice. "I thought we had settled this."
"We had settled it when the stakes were smaller. Tonight--" He stopped, turned to her, and spoke carefully, as though every word were a stone he was laying in a wall. "Tonight is the full moon. The curse will come, and it will come harder than it has ever come, because the essence is still in my blood and the alignment is on us. If I let you come near me, if I let you give me anything, I will take it, Valeria. I have no strength to refuse. You have seen that. And I will not take your life to buy mine."
"It is not yours to refuse. It is mine to give."
"It is both of ours." His voice cracked. "I cannot be what Cedric is. I cannot be a man who feeds on someone else's life, however willingly it is offered. I would rather burn."
She stared at him. Then, with painful effort, she pushed herself up against the pillows, her face white, her arms trembling. "You do not get to make yourself a martyr and call it love."
"It is not martyrdom."
"What is it, then?"
"It is the only way I can look at myself in the morning." He closed his eyes briefly. "I have been the beast of Frostfell for six years. I do not want to be your beast."
"You are not a beast."
"I was, two nights ago, with your blood in my mouth and your pulse failing under my hand, and I did not stop." The words were raw. "Do not ask me to forgive that. I cannot. I can only make certain it never happens again."
"By chaining yourself in the dark and screaming alone."
"If that is what it takes."
"That is not a solution," she said fiercely. "It is a punishment. It is the exact thing Cedric did to you, locking you away, making you suffer so that everyone else could feel safe. I will not stand by while you do it to yourself."
"You do not have a choice."
"I always have a choice. It is the only thing they never managed to take from me." Tears were running down her face now, silent, and she did not wipe them away. "Please. Please, do not do this. Do not leave me outside the door. I could not bear it."
He crossed the room in three strides and knelt beside the bed, and took her face between his hands. Her skin was cool beneath his palms. She was shaking.
"Listen to me," he said, very low. "I swear to you, on whatever is left of my life, that I will never again take blood from you. Not tonight, not on the next moon, not if the world ends. You may hate me for it. You may call it cowardice. I will take your anger gladly and carry it to my grave. But I will not touch your blood again."
"Alaric--"
"I love you." He had never said it aloud before, and it came out plain and shaking, stripped of any ornament. "I love you more than my own life, and that is exactly why I cannot do this to you."
She made a sound, a broken sound, and her hands closed on his wrists. For a long moment they stayed that way, foreheads nearly touching, breathing the same air, two people at the end of a long road who had just discovered it forked.
"Then let me come with you," she said at last, in a very small voice. "Not to give you anything. Only to sit outside the door. You need not even speak to me."
"And hear it? Every sound?" He shook his head slowly. "No. That is the one thing I cannot let you carry."
She tried to rise. He watched her swing her legs over the edge of the bed and plant her feet on the stone, and he watched her knees fold beneath her the moment she put weight on them. He caught her before she fell, and lowered her back onto the pillows, and she lay there with her teeth clenched in furious humiliation, her eyes bright with tears she would not let fall.
"You cannot even stand," he said gently. "Rest, my heart. Let me do this one thing. Let me be the one who carries it."
"That is not fair."
"No," he agreed. "It is not."
He drew the blanket over her shoulders with great care, as he might have covered a sleeping child, and for a moment his thumb rested against her cheek, memorizing it. He had a strange, sharp certainty that he was saying goodbye, though he told himself it was only to the night. He stayed a moment longer than he should have, listening to her breathe, and fixed in his memory the exact way the silver light fell across her face, the line of her mouth, the faint crease between her brows, as if he might need to hold it against whatever the dark was about to ask of him.
Boots rang in the corridor. The door flew open, and Kaelen stood framed in it, flushed, supporting his weight on the doorframe.
"My lord. Forgive me. The scouts report movement all along the tree line. Torches. Siege towers. Cedric's banner has been raised over the center of the camp." He took in the two of them with one swift look and flinched, but did not step back. "They will be at the walls within the hour."
Alaric rose slowly. The moon had cleared the ridge. It hung in the window now, full and brilliant and ancient, flooding the room with silver light, and he felt the first deep tug of it in his chest, patient and enormous.
"Take me down to the cells," he said.
"Alaric, no--"
"Valeria." He looked at her, and it took everything he had to keep his voice steady. "Stay here. Stay with Malakor. If the gate falls, you will go to the postern, and you will not wait for me. That is the last thing I will ever ask of you."
He turned and walked out of the room.
She called his name. He did not stop. Behind him the door swung shut with a soft, final click, like the sound of a lock turning in a dark place.
Valeria lay still in the sudden silence and listened to his footsteps recede down the corridor, steady and unhurried, a man walking toward a thing he had decided to endure. She heard Kaelen's crutch tap after him. She heard the distant murmur of voices, the clatter of armor, the first low note of the enemy's drum rolling up from the valley to meet the rising moon.
She stared at the ceiling. Her whole body ached. The cold in her hands had crept to her wrists, and she thought, with the clinical detachment that had saved her life so many times before, that there was almost nothing left in her to give.
And she understood, lying there in the dark with the silver light slanting across her blanket, that giving had never been the point. She had spent twelve years being the thing people took from. Alaric was the first person in her life who had ever refused to take.
It was the most loving thing anyone had ever done to her, and she could not bear it.
You've reached the end of this chapter
There were nine hours in the dark when Alaric believed he had killed her.
He would remember them afterward not as a sequence of events but as a single unbroken sensation, like being held underwater. He had come back to himself slowly, the red fading from the edges of his sight and the roaring in his skull subsiding into silence, and the first thing he knew was the taste in his mouth. Iron and wine. Her blood, still warm on his tongue. The second thing he knew was that she was no longer holding him.
She lay across his lap on the furs, her head fallen back over his arm, her face the color of tallow. The cut in her forearm was still open, a long dark mouth, and it had stopped bleeding because there was nothing left to bleed. Her lips had gone blue. Her eyelids were bruised and translucent. He pressed two shaking fingers against her throat and found a pulse so faint and slow that for a terrible moment he mistook it for his own.
"Valeria."
She did not stir.
"Valeria." He heard the cracked sound his voice made and did not care. "Malakor. Malakor, she is not breathing."
"She is breathing." The alchemist was already on his knees beside them, a pale smear of a man with a small vial clutched in his fist. His hands shook so badly he spilled half of it. "Shallow, but she is. It is the cold, the toxin's recoil, it is shutting her down from the extremities inward. My lord, I need you to hold her jaw."
"What is that?"
"A thing I made. A thing I should have told you about." Malakor was weeping openly now, tears running unchecked down his thin face. "She carried it in her sleeve. I gave it to her yesterday. It may slow the retaliation. It may do nothing. It has never been tried."
"Then try it."
He tipped it between her lips drop by drop while Alaric held her head steady, whispering her name, and the cell filled with the sound of their combined breathing, ragged and desperate. When the vial was empty, Malakor sat back on his heels and pressed his fingers to her wrist, his eyes closed, counting.
Nothing happened for a long time.
Then Malakor's shoulders sagged. "A little stronger," he said hoarsely. "Not much. But stronger. The cold has stopped climbing."
Alaric had not known he was holding his breath until it left him in a noise that was half sob, half laugh. He bent over her and pressed his forehead against hers, and stayed there, listening to the fragile rhythm of her breathing, and understood with perfect, terrible clarity what he had done.
He had let her.
He had been half-gone, drowning in the curse, but he had known. Somewhere in the fog he had known that she was giving too much, that the quantity was past safety, and he had not found the strength to pull away. He had drunk and drunk like a starving animal, and she had let him, because she loved him, and because he was too weak to refuse.
The man she had called not a monster had very nearly killed her anyway.
*
She slept for two days.
He did not leave her side. He had Kaelen's cot dragged into the healing quarters, in the quiet corner behind Malakor's tables, and when the surgeons tried to turn him out he looked at them until they stopped. He sat in a chair by her bed and watched her sleep. He held her hand. He listened to her breathe. The gash in his own side had closed overnight into a puckered pink seam, the essence's black threads fading from his veins as though they had never been, and he found that he hated it. He wanted to be in agony. He wanted the pain to be a debt he could pay.
Kaelen found him there on the second afternoon, hauled in on a crude crutch with his thigh swathed in linen, his face drawn and gray.
"You are supposed to be in bed," Alaric said without turning.
"So are you." Kaelen lowered himself carefully into the neighboring chair. "The enemy has not attacked since the night of the gate. They are probing. A raid on the south wall at dusk yesterday, a few crossbowmen along the treeline this morning. The ram is gone, taken back to the camp." He paused. "Their scouts say the commanders have been conferring since dawn. There is a great deal of activity."
"They are waiting."
"For what?"
"The moon." Alaric looked at the sleeping woman's face. "Tonight is the full moon. Malakor says the alignment is tonight. I think Cedric means to try again at the hour it peaks."
Kaelen was silent. Then he asked, quietly, "How is she?"
"Alive." The word cost him. "Malakor says the worst has passed. She will wake today or tomorrow. He does not know what the damage will be."
"She saved you."
"She nearly died saving me." He heard how his voice sounded and could not soften it. "She is the bravest person I have ever met, Kaelen, and I cannot allow her to be brave on my account again. I will not."
The captain looked at him for a long moment, and whatever he saw there made him lower his eyes. "My lord," he said after a time, with great gentleness, "she will not thank you for deciding it for her."
"I know."
"And you will decide it anyway."
"Yes."
Kaelen sighed, a long heavy breath, and did not argue. He only reached across, with a hand that was not quite steady, and gripped Alaric's shoulder, and left it there for a while.
Malakor came an hour later, gray with fatigue, a stack of notes under one arm. He checked Valeria's pulse, lifted her eyelids, pressed his palm against her forehead, and then stood for some time looking down at her with an expression Alaric could not read.
"Speak," Alaric said. "Whatever it is."
"She will recover. I believe that now." Malakor lowered his voice, though there was no one else near. "But there is something you must understand, my lord, because it affects everything that comes next. When she gave you that quantity, she did not merely lose blood. She spent the compound itself. The thing in her veins that answers the curse. It is not an endless well. It is a slow harvest, built over twelve years of exposure, replenished by her body at a rate I cannot predict."
"How long?"
"Weeks. Perhaps longer. Until it returns, her blood will be as ordinary as yours or mine." The alchemist's mouth twisted. "Her scent will fade, too. Tonight she will be able to ease you very little, if at all. She is spent."
Alaric stared at the sleeping woman. A strange, cold calm settled over him, the calm of a man who has just been handed a reason he did not want.
"Then that settles it," he said.
"My lord?"
"Whatever she might have offered me tonight, she has nothing left to offer. If I let her come to me, I will drain what little she has rebuilt." He stood, and his voice was very quiet. "I will go down to the cell alone, Malakor, and I will not call for her, and you will see to it that no one lets her follow me."
"She will not forgive that."
"I know," Alaric said. "I would rather be unforgiven than responsible for her death. I have done a great many things I regret. I will not add that one."
He did not see Malakor's face as he turned away. If he had, he might have recognized the expression there, the grave, helpless pity of a man who has watched this same mistake made before, by better men, and seen where it led.
*
She woke at sunset.
Alaric knew the moment it happened. Her fingers tightened in his, faintly, and her lashes fluttered against her cheek. He bent over her, his heart hammering, and watched her gray eyes open and wander dazedly across the ceiling before they found his face.
"You are very ugly when you are worried," she said in a whisper.
The laugh that burst out of him was wet and broken. He pressed her hand to his mouth, her knuckles, her palm, not trusting himself to speak, and she let him, her gaze soft and a little confused. Her body felt like something borrowed, heavy and slow, as though the blood she had given had taken all the warmth in her with it. The cold lay in her fingertips and the hollow of her throat, a thin, patient chill that no blanket reached. She had lived with that cold after the second moon. This was different. This was deeper, and quieter, and it did not feel as if it intended to leave.
She said nothing of it. She looked at the man bent over her hand, at the dark circles beneath his eyes and the stubble shadowing his jaw, at the unguarded terror that still lingered in every line of him, and thought that she would have borne ten times the cold to see that terror ease. When he finally lifted his head, her expression had sharpened.
"How long?"
"Two days."
"The siege?"
"Holding. Kaelen and the garrison have not lost the wall." He swallowed. "You gave me a hundred and forty measures, Valeria. Malakor counted. A hundred and forty."
She was quiet for a moment, absorbing it. "I remember stopping at a hundred," she said slowly. "Or not stopping. I do not remember."
"You did not stop."
"No." She did not look sorry. "You were still turning. I could feel it. If I had pulled away, it would have won."
"You could have died."
"I know."
"You almost did." He was gripping her hand too hard and forced his fingers open. "Malakor's tincture brought you back, and by what luck I do not know. A hair's breadth, Valeria. A single breath."
"Alaric." Her voice was quiet and very steady. "I would do it again."
The words went through him like a blade.
"No," he said.
"I would. You know I would."
"No." He rose from the chair, unable to stay seated, and walked three steps to the window and back. The last light of the day lay red across the stone, and beyond the glass the moon was already rising, enormous and gold, its lower rim brushing the black line of the eastern ridge. "You will not. I will not permit it."
"You will not permit it?" Something cold entered her voice. "I thought we had settled this."
"We had settled it when the stakes were smaller. Tonight--" He stopped, turned to her, and spoke carefully, as though every word were a stone he was laying in a wall. "Tonight is the full moon. The curse will come, and it will come harder than it has ever come, because the essence is still in my blood and the alignment is on us. If I let you come near me, if I let you give me anything, I will take it, Valeria. I have no strength to refuse. You have seen that. And I will not take your life to buy mine."
"It is not yours to refuse. It is mine to give."
"It is both of ours." His voice cracked. "I cannot be what Cedric is. I cannot be a man who feeds on someone else's life, however willingly it is offered. I would rather burn."
She stared at him. Then, with painful effort, she pushed herself up against the pillows, her face white, her arms trembling. "You do not get to make yourself a martyr and call it love."
"It is not martyrdom."
"What is it, then?"
"It is the only way I can look at myself in the morning." He closed his eyes briefly. "I have been the beast of Frostfell for six years. I do not want to be your beast."
"You are not a beast."
"I was, two nights ago, with your blood in my mouth and your pulse failing under my hand, and I did not stop." The words were raw. "Do not ask me to forgive that. I cannot. I can only make certain it never happens again."
"By chaining yourself in the dark and screaming alone."
"If that is what it takes."
"That is not a solution," she said fiercely. "It is a punishment. It is the exact thing Cedric did to you, locking you away, making you suffer so that everyone else could feel safe. I will not stand by while you do it to yourself."
"You do not have a choice."
"I always have a choice. It is the only thing they never managed to take from me." Tears were running down her face now, silent, and she did not wipe them away. "Please. Please, do not do this. Do not leave me outside the door. I could not bear it."
He crossed the room in three strides and knelt beside the bed, and took her face between his hands. Her skin was cool beneath his palms. She was shaking.
"Listen to me," he said, very low. "I swear to you, on whatever is left of my life, that I will never again take blood from you. Not tonight, not on the next moon, not if the world ends. You may hate me for it. You may call it cowardice. I will take your anger gladly and carry it to my grave. But I will not touch your blood again."
"Alaric--"
"I love you." He had never said it aloud before, and it came out plain and shaking, stripped of any ornament. "I love you more than my own life, and that is exactly why I cannot do this to you."
She made a sound, a broken sound, and her hands closed on his wrists. For a long moment they stayed that way, foreheads nearly touching, breathing the same air, two people at the end of a long road who had just discovered it forked.
"Then let me come with you," she said at last, in a very small voice. "Not to give you anything. Only to sit outside the door. You need not even speak to me."
"And hear it? Every sound?" He shook his head slowly. "No. That is the one thing I cannot let you carry."
She tried to rise. He watched her swing her legs over the edge of the bed and plant her feet on the stone, and he watched her knees fold beneath her the moment she put weight on them. He caught her before she fell, and lowered her back onto the pillows, and she lay there with her teeth clenched in furious humiliation, her eyes bright with tears she would not let fall.
"You cannot even stand," he said gently. "Rest, my heart. Let me do this one thing. Let me be the one who carries it."
"That is not fair."
"No," he agreed. "It is not."
He drew the blanket over her shoulders with great care, as he might have covered a sleeping child, and for a moment his thumb rested against her cheek, memorizing it. He had a strange, sharp certainty that he was saying goodbye, though he told himself it was only to the night. He stayed a moment longer than he should have, listening to her breathe, and fixed in his memory the exact way the silver light fell across her face, the line of her mouth, the faint crease between her brows, as if he might need to hold it against whatever the dark was about to ask of him.
Boots rang in the corridor. The door flew open, and Kaelen stood framed in it, flushed, supporting his weight on the doorframe.
"My lord. Forgive me. The scouts report movement all along the tree line. Torches. Siege towers. Cedric's banner has been raised over the center of the camp." He took in the two of them with one swift look and flinched, but did not step back. "They will be at the walls within the hour."
Alaric rose slowly. The moon had cleared the ridge. It hung in the window now, full and brilliant and ancient, flooding the room with silver light, and he felt the first deep tug of it in his chest, patient and enormous.
"Take me down to the cells," he said.
"Alaric, no--"
"Valeria." He looked at her, and it took everything he had to keep his voice steady. "Stay here. Stay with Malakor. If the gate falls, you will go to the postern, and you will not wait for me. That is the last thing I will ever ask of you."
He turned and walked out of the room.
She called his name. He did not stop. Behind him the door swung shut with a soft, final click, like the sound of a lock turning in a dark place.
Valeria lay still in the sudden silence and listened to his footsteps recede down the corridor, steady and unhurried, a man walking toward a thing he had decided to endure. She heard Kaelen's crutch tap after him. She heard the distant murmur of voices, the clatter of armor, the first low note of the enemy's drum rolling up from the valley to meet the rising moon.
She stared at the ceiling. Her whole body ached. The cold in her hands had crept to her wrists, and she thought, with the clinical detachment that had saved her life so many times before, that there was almost nothing left in her to give.
And she understood, lying there in the dark with the silver light slanting across her blanket, that giving had never been the point. She had spent twelve years being the thing people took from. Alaric was the first person in her life who had ever refused to take.
It was the most loving thing anyone had ever done to her, and she could not bear it.
You've reached the end of this chapter