He gave me everything he had. His silence. His food. His time. His body. His heat.
I have done nothing to earn any of it.
Three exits. I know them all. I mapped them the first week and I've never stopped updating. That should tell me something about myself.
I could stay.
Wake up every morning against this chest. Drink his bitter tea and organize his fish and argue about where the salt goes. Let him feed me until my body forgets what hunger feels like. Let him watch me with those eyes and learn me and want me and love me.
And every morning the dead would still be there. And every night I would lie against him and feel his heart beating and know that the woman he’s holding killed families in their beds. Thatthe hands he wants on his skin are the hands that placed the charge.
He thinks I'm worth keeping. He’s wrong. But he'll keep thinking it because he wants to, and I will let him because I'm selfish, and the longer I stay the deeper this goes and the worse it will be when the truth of what I am finally outweighs what he feels.
Or I go.
I'm not walking to die this time. He took that from me. I don't know when it happened — somewhere between the tea and the comb and the sound of his heartbeat under my ear. My body chose to live and I can't undo it.
But I can't stay. Not with him. Not with someone who looks at me the way he does, like I'm something worth crossing the Wastes for. The longer I let him believe that, the worse the breaking will be.
Lakthgrad. The bride market. I can trade my hands and my skills for safety. Someone who needs a tool, not a person. Someone who will use me and house me and never shake when they touch me or heat an entire hall with the force of what they feel.
I can be a tool again.
I understand how to be a tool.
I slide out from under his arm. Slow. Inch by inch. His hand twitches against the furs where my stomach used to be. His fingers curl once, searching, then go still.
He doesn't wake.
I stand over him. The embers throw enough light to see his face. Younger in sleep. The tension lines around his eyes have gone smooth. His white hair spread across the furs. His chest rising and falling. The heat of him reaching me even from here.
I get dressed. Trousers, shirt, my coat. The boots he gave me, fur-lined, still a little too big. I lace them tight. Take the knifefrom under the furs where I sleep. A skinning blade with a good edge. I slide it into my belt.
The coins from my coat pocket. I almost leave them. Then I think about the trading road and what waits at the end of it and I put them in my belt.
Boots. Knife. Coins. Nothing else.
The blanket stays folded at the foot of the bed. The book stays on the table. The ice flower sits in its dish of snow, frozen and perfect, exactly where he placed it weeks ago. I leave it all.
The comb is on the table where I set it last night after braiding my hair. Bone handle. Small carved birds worn smooth from my fingers. I pick it up.
I hold it for a long time.
He found it in a dead trader’s pack on a frozen ridge. Kept it for years without knowing why. Put it on my pillow the day he watched me fight tangles out of my hair with my bare hands. He gave it to me and then retreated before I could say thank you. That’s how he gives everything.
It is the kindest thing anyone has ever given me.
I set the comb on the armrest of his chair. In the groove where his hand has rested for seven years.
I step through the door.
The cold cuts through my coat immediately. Sharp and real after the warmth of the hall. My breath fogs. The boots crunch on the packed snow.
I walk south. I don't look back.
Behind me, the hall sits solid and dark against the gray sky. Smoke still rising from the chimney. Warm inside. The man I left asleep in the furs, his arm stretched across the space where I was.
I don't look back.
