Then her face did the thing it had been holding off all night. It crumpled. Two tears escaped before she could stop them. She made a furious sound and dragged the back of her wrist across her eyes, angry at them for leaking.
"I hate this," she said, wet and savage. "I hate that agency. Their forms, their three strikes." She bit the rest off. "Two husbands returning me and a monster in the kitchen. That's the whole story of me out here. That's all of it." She laughed, and there was nothing good in it. "I should be packing. There's no version of tonight where my ticket's not already booked. Do you think Nezara puts me out at dawn?" She wasn't really asking me, but she was looking at me when she said it. "Do I get walked onto the next transport at first light, or will she give me a day? I want to say goodbye to Maisie."
"You're not going on any transport," I said.
"You can't know that."
"Nezara's a reasonable female. She isn't going to lay a man's sickness at your feet. None of this was your doing, and she'll see that."
"She'll see a third failed placement." Chloe said it simply, like she was the one being kind now, sparing me. "That's all the record sees. It doesn't ask who broke what. It writes you down and it sends you back." She shook her head. "I've been told no by everyone, Lorkin. Men who were sure and men who were sorry. They're always very gentle about it. And then you're on the ship anyway."
I had nothing to put against that. She wasn't wrong about how it usually went, and the truth was I didn't know what Nezara would do, only what Ineededher to do.
Chloe turned, and she saw the bed.
The little one in the corner. The one Zarcal had built to her size and set apart from his own, sanded down smooth, the blanket still turned back from that afternoon. A real kindness. The kind of thing that should have been the start of a whole life.
I watched her look at it, and I watched the last of her steadiness go out of her.
"I can't sleep here," she said, quiet, all the savage gone. "I know I have to. It's his house, and I have to be somewhere. But he came through a stone wall to get at me." She put a hand over her mouth, took it away. "How am I supposed to lie down in this room?"
And that was where the rest of my discipline went.
I'd been telling myself a story for two weeks: that the kindest thing I could do was to stay out of her way, mind my fire, hang my knives, and let a better-suited man give her the life I'd decided I would only ruin.
I'd built it brick by careful brick and been proud of how well it held. And it had put her in a kitchen with a man who woke up swinging.
I was done with the story.
"Come to the forge," I said.
She went still.
"There's a back room behind the smithy. The door bars from the inside. A good one, iron, I made it myself. You take it. You bar it. Nobody comes through it, not him, not anyone. I'll sleep out by the fire." I made myself slow down. "You don't owe me a thing for it. It doesn't have to mean anything you don't want it to mean. But you're not staying in this house tonight, you're not getting on any transport, and I'm not —"
I'm not handing you to anyone else, ever again. That was the end of the sentence. I didn't say it.
"I'm not leaving you to sleep in the wreck of someone else's worst night," I said instead.
She looked at me for a long moment. I knew that look. I'd worn it myself for years, hunting every gift for the catch in it.
She looked at the bed one more time. Then, at the doorway with no door in it. Then she bent and picked her coat up off the chair where she'd left it before the storm, when this was still a house she lived in.
"Okay," she said. Rough and small, nothing like the woman who'd worked a whole supper table at the orchard. "Okay. That sounds good."
7
CHLOE
I'd builtthe inside of Lorkin's place in my head on the walk over, and I'd gotten it wrong in every particular.
I'd expected the forge to leak into the home. Blades on the walls, maybe. Something cold and armed and braced for the end of the world, like the man. Instead, he pushed the door open into a low, warm room with a banked fire, a kettle, and a chair worn into the shape of someone who actually sat in it. And on the walls, where I'd pictured knives, there were paintings. Small ones. Watercolors. Star-figs going gold on the branch, the ridge road under a violet sky, the orchard in the rain.
"You paint," I said, like an idiot.
"They keep the walls from being bare." He said it flatly, in a way that shut the subject, and went around lighting a second lamp, and I understood I'd seen something I wasn't meant to make a thing of.
He showed me the spare room. Small, clean, a narrow bed with more blankets than one person needs, and a door of good, heavy timber with an iron bar resting in two brackets.
