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“I remember,” I admit.

“When? When did you remember we had sex before?”

“A few days ago. Just before Caranthis when we…on the landing, when you tripped. It came back all at once.” I push myself up onto my elbow. “I was going to tell you.”

She looks at me for a long moment. Her voice, when it comes, is very even. “When, exactly, were you going to tell me?”

There is no good answer to this. I know there’s no good answer to this. I try anyway. “I wanted to find the right moment. After Caranthis, everything was, you know, I didn’t want to add to what you were carrying.”

“So you let me think it was our first time,” she says. “Tonight. You let me ask you if this was about the tether, as if I didn’t know what I was walking into, as if I was making an informed choice, and you just—” She stops. Her jaw is tight. “You just let me.”

“I know.”

“I feel stupid,” she says, and the flatness of it is worse than if she’d shouted.

“You’re not stupid. I made a bad call and I’m sorry.”

“A bad call?” She gets up from the bed and I watch her pull on her nightgown with stiff, angry movements. She takes the spare blanket from the chair and drops it on the floor beside the bed. She doesn’t throw it. She just drops it.

“You can sleep down there,” she says.

“Saturna—”

“I’m not interested in the explanation right now.” She gets back into bed and turns to face the wall. “I need some time. Please be quiet and go to sleep.”

I have no choice but to listen. I grab the cushion from the chair and arrange myself on the floor, which is cold and hard and exactly what I deserve. It’s dark down here and when I turn over, I can see under the bed and I know Morena’s skull is in the shadows, staring at me with those empty eyes and judging me. I deserve that, too.

I stare at the ceiling and think about the look on her face when she worked it out and know with complete certainty that I handled this badly and that being right about the timing is not the same thing as being forgiven for the choice, and that I am going to be on this floor for some time.

The mattress moves under her as she leans over and blows the candle out.

Darkness descends.

Chapter

Twenty-Nine

SATURNA

Baz has been sleeping on the floor for the last four nights and I’ve been sleeping in the bed and neither of us has said anything about changing this arrangement. Which I guess says everything about where we are with each other.

It’s not that I don’t understand his reasoning about the whole not telling me he remembered sleeping with me thing. I do understand it. He got the memory back all at once and then he carried it for days without telling me and I can see exactly why he waited.

And yet, I’m still furious about it, because understanding a bad decision doesn’t make the impact less. He let me make choices without the full picture. That’s the part I can’t move past yet. I had sex with him thinking that he was thinking it was our first time.

Though I suppose, if you want to be pedantic about it, I also didn’t tell him it happened. But in that situation, filling him in might have done more harm than good.

In the meantime, we exist in the room together with the tense, awkward politeness of a married couple who are not speaking to each other but cannot leave each other. He gets up before me and comes back from the refectory with tea and food he sneaks out before the rest of Mortis is awake. He reads. I sew. The tether crackles between us, indifferent to our feelings about each other, doing its supernaturally structural work regardless.

On the morning of the Mortalia ball, I’m at the window with my needle and the last of the gold trim for the gown when he says, “I found something last night.”

I keep my eyes on the seam. “What kind of something?”

“A paper. Published three years ago in the Mortis archives. I think you should read it.” A pause. “Actually, I think you should let me read it to you.”

I look at him then. He’s sitting on the floor with his back against the bed, papers in his hand, and he’s watching me with the careful yet excited expression he uses when he thinks something is important and is trying not to push too hard.

I put down the gown. “How about we go to the library,” I say. “I’m not having this conversation in here.” If we’re going to have our first in-depth conversation in a while, I want it in a public place where we aren’t tempted by the other.