I turn back to the charts, because it’s easier than looking at him. So many years live in this little room. A kid with no father on that stool in the dark, learning the names of the stars from a dragon who never once treated him like he was less. “I really do hate how you shifters can pull a man’s mood right out of the air,” I tell him. “Takes all the suspense out of a conversation.”
Tyrion shrugs, easy, and comes around the bench toward me, his hands folding behind his back.
“What is happening, Aaron?” he asks. “Where are you going?”
“Heavy is the head, isn’t that how it goes.” I try to make it light. It doesn’t come out that way.
He puts it together on his own, and a grin comes up slow.
“I always knew Wintermoon was too small to keep you,” he says. “Even when you were a boy stargazing through your supper, I saw it. The sky does not point at ordinary men. It points at you.”
“I wish that weren’t true,” I tell him.
“The brightest stars burn the hardest, and the loneliest.” He says it like a fact of the heavens. “It is the cost of the light.”
I raise my hand. I don’t cast anything, don’t say a word, just open my palm and want it, and the room fills with stars. A whole galaxy unspools across the ceiling and down the walls, a wheel of light slowly turning, the exact spiral he has charted over his bench, and it hangs there glowing soft over the both of us.
Tyrion stares up at it. Even he has nothing to say, struck silent under a sky I made out of nothing. Then he laughs, amazed, and shakes his head.
“And I take it this is a small trick for you,” he says. “Which tells me you are capable of a great deal more.”
“I haven’t tested it.” I let the galaxy keep turning. “I don’t know yet what I can do. I don’t know what Mother Fate wants from me. I just know it’s more than this world needs.”
“There was a Blackwood coven once, long ago, before they fell to Aya Bailey.” He says it up at the galaxy, not at me. “Even then, before any of this, your bloodline could do things the Baileys never could. You come from something old and rare, Aaron. A line this world has all but forgotten.” He brings his eyes down to mine at last, and there’s no question left in him. “You will make an honorable king.”
I stare at him. My mouth won’t work. I start to bring my fist to my chest, the salute you give a man you respect. It’s the one thing my body knows to do.
Tyrion shakes his head. He steps in past my raised fist and pulls me into him instead, both arms, like he used to when I was small enough for it to swallow me whole.
I do my best not to come apart. I lose. The tears get loose and run down into the shoulder of his coat. I sniff hard and hang onto the old dragon. He holds me up, and over our heads the galaxy goes on, all that light and none of it warm.
“I hope you will visit, sometimes,” he says against the top of my head. “Come and watch the stars with me. Brother.”
I pull back. “I’ll do my best to try.”
He smiles, and that’s the thing about Tyrion, the one it took me a lifetime to learn. I don’t have to give him the route or the reasons or the long ugly shape of what I’m about to do. He just looks at me and knows, and lets the rest stay unsaid.
“This is not a goodbye,” he tells me. “The stars wheel, and they always come back to where they began. We will see one another again.”
I let the galaxy fade out of his classroom. I bow my head to him, and I go.
I wipe my face dry in the stairwell, climbing toward the library, because the next stop is Mara and I’m not ready to wear any of this where she can read it.
She’s already inside when I push through the door, her laugh carrying out to me—that bright, easy one she only makes when she’s happy all the way down. She’s tucked into one of the deep chairs in the corner, Nala leaning over Mara, one hand flat on her belly, the two of them giggling over something I’ve missed.
Mara looks up and finds me, and the laugh goes out of her.
Her smile folds up and puts itself away, worry rising in its place, and Mother Fate help me, I hate it. I hate that I’m the one who does that to her now, that she’s spent a week reading rejection off the one man who’d never turn from her.
So I do what I can. I cross the library, lean over her chair, and kiss her, slow, right on the mouth, in front of Nala and Mother Fate and everybody.
“Why so glum, honey?” I murmur against her lips.
“You.” She pulls back and glares up at me, her ears flicking. “You’re why.”
I chuckle and press my forehead to hers. “Sorry, baby.” I slide my hand down to cover Nala’s, over the swell of her belly, over our son. “Just know I couldn’t be happier than I am right now. I mean that.”
Nala squeals, claps her hands, and bounces on her heels.
