"I have rehearsed losing you. Every road since the checkpoint. I run the version where the bounty hunter is faster, where the beam in the tower lands a foot left, where I don't reach the crevice in the pass in time." He sets the records aside on the table without looking at them, which I have never once seen him do. "I have stood inside that fortress on fire and not feared death the way I fear that. Dying I understand. I've made my peace with it three separate times. The thought of you simply not being—" He stops. "Nothing in me has a wall built for it. I keep waiting to find one and there isn't one there."
I should have an answer ready. I don't. Whatever I expected to feel hearing it, what actually moves through me is closer to vertigo—the floor going out a second time, in a room thirty meters above where it first did.
"Don't say it to comfort me," I manage.
"I've never comforted anyone in my life." A breath. "I'm telling you what's true because we may not get another room to say it in."
The honesty of that lands harder than any softness could. I cross the gap between us before I've finished deciding to and crouch in front of him, almost touching his knee against my arm.
"I love you." It comes out of me plain, no flourish, no apology around it. "Not in spite of any of it. I can't pretend the fire away or call us even or tell you we were both just used and so none of it counts. People died who didn't deserve it." His face doesn't change but his hand finds my wrist, light. "And I love you. Both of those are true at once. I've stopped trying to make them take turns."
At first, he says nothing. Then he does the thing I don't expect, the thing that undoes me more than any words. He reaches up and unbuckles the armor plate at his left shoulder—the side he guards, the side he turns away from rooms—and works it free, and then the one beneath it, setting both on the warped table without ceremony, without checking my face first to gauge what the unprotected line of him will cost. He's never done that where I could watch. In the cabin it was dark and he made me earn every button. Now he simply lets the weight come off, in light, within my line of sight, and sits there in the ruined shirt with the worst of himself unshielded and his hands loose on his knees.
"There," he says, and that single word carries everything he can't.
I put my palm over his heart still going steady under all that damage, and he covers it with his own and holds it there, and neither of us moves to make it more than it is.
"After this," I say into the quiet, "if there's an after. I keep trying to picture it and it won't hold."
"Try anyway."
"Somewhere with light," I say. "Not a fortress. Not a borrowed room. Somewhere that doesn't make either of us sleep facing the door."
He goes still.
"That sounds dangerous," he says.
"Domestic?"
"Hopeful."
"Yes," I say. "That too."
It's fragile, the picture. I can feel how thin it is even as I build it, a thing made of breath that should have burned and a valley full of men who want us dead. But he leans into it. I watch him try it on—a life where his hands aren't reaching for a weapon first—and I watch him almost believe it could belong to him, and that almost is the most dangerous, most precious thing in the room.
"I have spent years surviving losses by making them useful," he says quietly. "Names into reports. Grief into strategy. Pain into command. But I cannot make you useful enough to survive losing you."
"You aren't required to make me useful." My forehead drops to rest against his. "You just have to let me stay."
We stay like that, two ruined people thirty meters above the worst night of both our lives, breathing the same cold air, and for one suspended stretch the fire below and the cordon above belong to some other story. His hand stays at the bare place where the armor came away, and mine stays over his heart, as if neither of us knows how to step back from proof once it has been given.
Boots on the broken stair. Fast, uneven, hauling breath—one of Drogan's mercenaries, taking the steps two at a time. Leoric is on his feet with his hand on the armor before the man clears the door. The shoulder plate goes back on first, then the one beneath it, each buckle fastened in quick, harsh motions, erasing the last several minutes like they never happened.
"Captain." The soldier braces on the frame. "Scouts on the ridge. The cordon's closing from every side. Torches. Fast." He swallows. "They're coming up the valley."
Leoric looks at me once. Whatever we just built, we don't get to keep it as a soft thing. We get to keep it as a reason.
"Then it's tonight," I say, and reach for the records.
24
LEORIC
The map of the fortress goes onto the warped table in pieces: Drogan's memory of the lower routes, Theren's sketch of the cordon line, and the original perimeter plan from one of Osrel's cases. Drogan stands over it with his arms folded, iron rings in his beard catching the lamplight every time his jaw moves. He has the expression of a man deciding which part of a building he would most enjoy dropping on someone. I take what's accurate from each and discard the rest. Runners first, because they need the longest light. Two to Vaelis with the trade-house seals copied in Corrine's hand. Two more to the human settlements along the eastern crossing, with instructions to repeat what they were told and nothing further; rumor spreads faster than dispatch, and rumor is what I need ahead of Varek's drafted declarations.
"Lower vault entries narrowed to one," I tell Drogan. "Collapse the secondary. If they reach the archive, I want it to cost them every minute."
"I can make a corridor very expensive," Drogan says. "People rarely appreciate the artistry."
