Bjorn said nothing. I took that as my invitation. “Yuki agreed,” I said.
“Yuki agreed to the plan we made when we still believed you might obey him.” Bjorn’s face did not change. “That plan no longer fits.”
I said nothing.
“You are choosing the other path.” Bjorn had always known which version of me would arrive before I had finished becoming him.
“I owe you an apology,” I said.
Bjorn looked at me. “To me?”
“Yes. My father will take your silence today as defiance. He will hear loyalty in every voice that repeats him and treason in every voice that does not. When he runs short of obedience, your name will be the next one he calls.”
Bjorn watched me.
“And I know what that will cost you inside our clan,” I said.
For a long moment, he did not answer. “You know what it costs me,” he said. “Not how I feel about it.”
“No,” I said. “I do not.”
His gaze moved past my shoulder.
Through the archway behind me, Catalina was watching the back of my head. I could feel the weight of her attention as surely as a hand between my shoulder blades. She had been trained to read conversations she could not hear, to measure silence by posture, delay, breath, and the careful arrangement of bodies in a room.
Bjorn brought his eyes back to mine. “I am not angry with you, Rhain.”
“I am not asking you not to be.”
“I know.” He paused. “That is what I came to tell you.”
He drew a slow breath, and something in him shifted. Not enough for anyone else to notice, perhaps. But Bjorn had never been a dramatic man. If he shattered, I suspected he would do it politely.
“I wish I had been as brave as you.”
I looked at him.
“There was a woman,” he said. His voice remained even. His hands stayed folded. Only the sentence betrayed him. “From a rival clan.”
He paused, and for one moment I thought that would be all. That he had already given me the largest truth he could bear to hold in daylight. Then he said, “I let her go because I was afraid.”
There was nothing useful to say.
Forgiveness would have been presumptuous. Absolution, obscene. He had carried that sentence for longer than I had been alive, and on this morning, of all mornings, had chosen to lay it down where I could not step around it.
I waited while Bjorn held the look one breath longer. Then he stepped past me into the corridor and walked toward the gallery without turning back.
I stayed in the alcove a moment longer before I followed. Catalina and Graves were waiting where I had left them. Neither of them asked what he had said.
Catalina’s hand found mine again. “Ready?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
Her thumb moved once at the back of my hand. Small and deliberate. A pressure that said she had heard none of the words and understood anyway.
We moved to the council chamber, where everything my father had built was waiting to find out whether I was as brave as Bjorn believed me to be.
* * *
