"What is that," she says. Not a question.
"Administrative continuity documents. In the event the proceedings?—"
"In the event you don't survive the proceedings," she says. "That's what those are."
I don't answer. The answer is obvious enough that saying it out loud would be an insult to her intelligence, and I have never insulted her intelligence.
She crosses to the desk in four strides and picks up the top document and reads it and I watch her expression move through several things, one after another, too fast for me to track all of them. What she lands on is anger — the cold precise kind, not the hot kind, which is in some ways worse.
"You put my name on the protection transfer as the administrative successor."
"Yes."
"You were planning this before the tribunal order came."
"I was planning for the possibility?—"
"Sevareth." Her voice cracks on my name, just slightly, and she puts the document down and presses her hand flat on top of it. "Look at me."
"I told you," she says, very quietly. "I told you in the archive room after I read the pact records. I told you in the bedroom the night you couldn't sleep. I told you every way I can tell a person something: you are not doing this alone. We are not doing this the way you planned to do it before I existed in your life." She holds my gaze. "Burn those documents."
"The protections need to?—"
"We will handle the protections together and both of us will be alive to enforce them." She's not raising her voice. She doesn't need to. "I found the ritual. I know what it requires. I know it's not easy and I know what you'd be giving up and I am asking you anyway because you promised me you weren't going to do this alone. That promise includes not dying while I'm in the next room trying to prevent it."
The room is very quiet.
I go through the documents. Forty years of preparation for an ending I'd already accepted, everything arranged so that the things worth preserving would survive after me. It is the most thorough plan I've ever made. It is also, I realize, the plan of a man that stopped believing he was worth saving.
Slowly, I pick up the documents. All of them. I carry them to the fireplace.
She doesn't say anything while I do it. She doesn't need to. She just stands there, arms crossed and her jaw set and her amber eyes watching me with the particular steadiness of a woman who made a decision several weeks ago and has been waiting for this exact moment to make sure I honour it.
The papers catch and curl and the fire takes them and the plan I made for my own death turns to ash while Mireya stands at my shoulder and watches it burn with me. It takes less than a minute. Forty years of making peace with an ending, gone in less than a minute.
I am surprised to find I feel lighter.
"The siege line will close within the week," I say, when it's done.
"Then we have a week," she says. "Tell me everything you know about the chamber under the archive."
"You found it."
"I found it. Vaustren attacked me in it. I found the ritual." She meets my eyes. "And I have three weeks from the queen before she moves on the house, which means we have a window and we need to use it." A beat. "I'm not losing you. This is not a thing I am willing to negotiate on."
I reach out and take her hand, and she lets me, and her fingers wrap around mine with the same certainty she brings to everything — complete, grounded, absolute.
"Alright," I say. "Then let's make a plan."
She almost smiles. Almost. "Now you're speaking my language."
25
MIREYA
The siege line breaks at dawn.
I know it before I hear it — there's a quality of sound that changes when a city stops being tense and starts being at war, something in the air pressure, something in the way the birds go silent all at once. I'm already dressed, already at the window, when the first explosion shakes the east wing's glass.
