“Then let it,” she answered, and kept it where it could dream in peace.
The palace kept new hours now. Kitchens served broth for the healers and early bread for the builders. The great hall stayed empty until it was needed—like a temple whose god had finally decided to work among its people.
Her vigil had no prayers. She read to him: grain ledgers, lists of the living found among the ruins, a child’s letter asking how to spellenough. When her voice gave out, she simply breathed beside him, her palm on his chest, feeling the slow rhythm that promised he still fought his way toward waking. Sometimes she whispered the phrase they had created together that first winter—two words that weren’t a spell and worked better than any she knew. Sometimes she said nothing at all, because silence is what you hear when you’re learning how to live again.
On the seventeenth night, something shifted under her hand—a second pulse, thin and searching. The Shadow was stirring, not to consume, but to listen. His brow creased, as if even in sleep he felt the weight of control. She brushed it smooth with her thumb.Not yet.
Azfar came once, watched her watching Rakhal, and sighed. “You’re ruling the old way,” he said. “From a chair beside a bed.”
“It’s the only throne that lasts,” she replied, and he left with a nod that meant she was right.
Shazi brought reports—grain tallied, levies ended, a fight in the Orvane Ward broken up with only pride wounded. Three petitions for banners bearing Eliza’s name, all refused with politeness that stung worse than anger. She left fruit when she could find it and always avoided looking at Rakhal for long.
Eliza slept in a chair until Maera finally dragged in a mattress. “Lie down where he can feel the weight,” Maera said. “Bodies like that need anchors. Even wolves.”
Eliza obeyed for once. She lay beside him, over the covers, her palm on his chest. The candle guttered in a hidden draft. The room smelled of tallow and pine sap and something sweet she couldn’t name—perhaps the walls remembering someone else’s rule. She spoke quietly about the boy with the broom-spear learning to tie proper knots, about the bells that rang themselves wrong three times and how she’d let them, because the city needed proof that mistakes didn’t kill anyone anymore.
“Come back,” she murmured, eyes closed, her mouth near his ear. “At your own speed. Don’t wait for permission.”
He twitched. Just a finger—the scarred one. It caught hers and released, as if the world had burned and cooled in the same breath. She laughed and cried together, the laughter winning only because it had forgotten how to lose.
The next night his fingers curled around hers and stayed. Heat moved slowly into his skin, a warmth not quite human, the low ember of something deciding to live. The Shadow hummed faintly at the edge of the room—no longer hungry, only watchful. When Eliza lifted her hand, it did not follow. When she pressed her palm again to his chest, it settled.
“Good,” she whispered to him, to the Shadow, to the city learning its own heartbeat.
She fell asleep like that, her head against him, his breathing rough and then steadier. Somewhere, a guard sang half a river song; somewhere in the Orvane Ward, a woman gave birth and named the child after her mother instead of a victory.
Near dawn, the ring at Eliza’s throat stirred once. Not bright—alive. A cat’s eye in low light. She touched it without waking and found it warm, the warmth of something waiting to begin again.
Chapter
Seventy-Three
He woke like someone who had been underwater and remembered, in the last good second, that he knew how to swim.
Light first. Not much. The kind that hides in the seam where curtain doesn’t meet wall. Breath next—someone else’s, steady and near. Weight—hand on chest, head on shoulder. Scent—tallow, cedar, clean wool, smoke he wanted to apologize to for having used so much of its kin. Sound—the city, muted, not stealthy, just respectful: wheel rumble, a hawker’s short call, the clink of a pot lid set down instead of slammed.
He turned his head. The world followed a fraction late; he waited for it to catch up. Eliza slept beside him, tangled in the day’s exhaustion, mouth soft, hair doing the work of a crown without the indignity. The ring at her throat—his last memory of its light like a wound—lay dull as pewter against skin. He lifted a hand. It shook as if the air were heavier than before.
He touched the ring lightly.
Eliza’s eyes opened. She looked at his hand on the ring, then at his face.
“Say it,” he whispered. His voice sounded as if someone had walked with it all night, and it hadn’t minded.
She did. Two words. Their words. They went into him like water under the tongue after fever.
Memory followed—the bridge, the court, the king’s eyes clearing at the end. The dead rising at his call and not needing him. The braid. The red. The Shadow speaking with his mouth and the silence that came after. Guilt arrived, large as a second body, ready to crawl inside his skin. Eliza lifted a hand and brushed it aside the way you move a loyal hound when your ribs can’t take the weight.
“No,” she murmured. “Not first.”
He would have argued. She overrode him with work. She tipped a cup against his mouth. The water, meant to be clean, tasted of wood and pennywort; the Keep’s pipes weren’t yet right. He drank as if modesty could be learned retroactively.
The door opened and didn’t bang—no one in this palace dared anymore. Shazi slid in like a blade into a sheath, slower than usual, less likely to laugh where it might break something tender. Azfar followed, staff absent, as if he’d earned a morning off from holding up the world.
“Well,” Shazi said, then skipped the next three impolitic thoughts. “You’re uglier than yesterday.”
Rakhal almost smiled. “I feel worse.”
