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She nodded slowly. She didn’t believe that was all it was, and she suspected he knew she didn’t.

He didn’t ask right away. When he finally did, the question came out lower than he meant it to. He’d clearly been sitting on it longer than tonight.

“You… you had someone at home,” he said, not looking directly at her.

“Yes,” she said. It came out before she’d decided to say it. “Tomas. He was - is - kind. Steady. He, uh, wanted to marry me, but I said no and that was that.” She turned her sleeve between her fingers, not meeting his eyes now either. “I know people in the village looked at me differently after that. Like I’d broken something. Or that I was broken. It isn’t normal where I’m from to do something like that.”

She went quiet.

“The truth is I never felt for him what I was supposed to. I kept waiting to. I wanted to. I tried. I properly tried. It should have been easy to love something ordinary and good, because that should be enough.”

She made herself look up. “I used to think there was something missing in me. The piece that lets a person love someone so easily. That will allow them a family, a loving home.” She paused again and shrugged. “So, yes, I do understand borrowed warmth that costs nothing. I’ve just never been any good at the other kind.”

He turned to look at her fully now, and there was something in it she hadn’t seen from him before. She would have hated pity, but it was more like an acknowledgment, as though she’d admitted something he’d spent a great deal of effort not admitting himself.

“No,” he said. “I don’t think the part is missing in you. I think you have simply never been offered anything worth the cost of it.” He paused. “Neither have I. For a very long time.”

The room felt suddenly too small for what neither of them was saying.

“And now?” she asked, barely a whisper.

She thought he might actually answer. His jaw worked. Something moved behind his eyes, close to the surface, closer than she’d ever seen it. He stood up from the cot and walked towards her.

Then he kissed her. Not like the first time, fuelled by fury and adrenaline, but slow, almost unbearably so. His hand cradled the back of her head; hers fisted into the front of his shirt, holding on as though letting go might undo something that neither of them could put back together.

His other hand found her waist, his fingertips pressed against the fabric there as though he were marking where he needed to stop before he lost all control. She pressed her hips towards his instinctively, her back arching.

When he finally drew back, his forehead stayed pressed to hers. He took his thumb to her mouth, tracing the shape of her lips, staring intently there. She went utterly still, as if any move further would make her fall to the floor.

He didn’t move. Moving meant deciding the moment was over, and they hadn’t agreed to that yet.

He looked away.

“I don’t know how to do this without doing it terribly,” he said, his hand falling back down beside his waist.

“You don’t have to do it well,” she whispered. She touched the bottom of his jaw, and turned his face back to look at her. “As long as you’re with me, it doesn’t matter.”

“That’s the thing,” he replied, his face pained. “As long as I am with you, it does matter. That’s what they’re watching for. Because the moment they believe this matters is the moment you stop being a scribe who has caught my interest and become a door they can open whenever they need me to do something they would not otherwise do.”

His voice roughened. “I have seen what they do to Umbralyn who are known to care for something. I will not watch it happen to you.”

“But Caelith—”

“No, you— you should go, Maia,” he said. He stepped back and they lost all contact. “Before the patrol changes.”

His voice had cooled, the door closing, the walls she’d watched come down going back up brick by deliberate brick.

“No one has to know, Caelith!”

“They already do, though. That’s the thing. I—”

For a moment, it looked like he might say something else. Stay. Don’t go.

But the moment passed.

“Before you go.” His voice had changed. It was flatter; the warmth deliberately gone. “If we cross paths after this, I beg that you treat me as you would any other Umbralyn. Like Nuada, nothing more. They are watching you, Maia. Through him, through all of it. Whatever they think the shards do with you, they cannot be allowed to think it’s anything more. If you care for me at all, you’ll let them believe this meant nothing.”

“But it didn’t mean nothing.” Her voice broke on it.