Chapter 1: Day One
The first morning of peace, I wake up with a dagger in my hand.
Not in anyone. Just in my hand, under the pillow, my fingers locked around the hilt so hard the knuckles have gone white. It takes me a full three breaths to remember why there's no alarm bell, why nobody is shouting my name down a corridor, why the light coming through the shutters is the soft, lazy gold of a Tyrrendorian morning instead of the grey of a pre-dawn muster.
The war is over. We won. I keep having to tell myself that, like a word in a language I'm still learning.
I let go of the dagger.
The other side of the bed is empty, but it's still warm, and the room smells like cedar and smoke and the faint metallic bite of a storm that hasn't happened yet. That last part is me. It's always me. My signet hums under my skin when I'm restless, and apparently I'm restless even when I'm unconscious.
"You're thinking loud enough to wake the valley," Tairn says.
He's not in the room, obviously. He's somewhere on the ridge above the house, probably sprawled across a full acre of sun-warmed rock like an enormous black cat who has opinions about taxation. But his voice lands in the middle of my head with the same gravel it always has.
"Good morning to you too," I tell him.
"It is a morning. I'll reserve judgment on good."
"We're on leave. Seven whole days. You could try being pleasant."
"I was pleasant once. It was a mistake. Sgaeyl still brings it up."
I'm smiling at the ceiling when the door opens, and Xaden Riorson walks in carrying two mugs of tea and wearing nothing but a pair of loose black trousers and the expression of a man who has been awake for hours, planning.
That expression should worry me more than it does.
He's barefoot. I'm not sure I've ever seen him barefoot outside of a bedroom. The rebellion relic curls down the side of his neck and over his shoulder, dark against brown skin, and the scar that cuts through his eyebrow is sharper in daylight. There's a new one along his ribs, pink and puckered, that I haven't stopped looking at since the menders let him go. He catches me looking at it now.
"It's healed," he says.
"I know."
"You're glaring at it."
"I'm glaring at the person who gave it to you. He just isn't here anymore, so you get the overflow."
His mouth tips up on one side. He sets one mug on the nightstand beside me and keeps the other, then sits on the edge of the bed, and I watch him do it carefully, the way he does everything now, like the world might still go off under his feet if he moves too fast. We all do it. Rhiannon flinches at slammed doors. Ridoc made a joke at dinner last week, and when nobody laughed fast enough, he looked around the table like he was counting us.
"I made a plan," Xaden says.
"Of course you did."
"For the week."
"Of course you did," I say again, and pick up the tea. It's exactly how I like it. Of course it is. "Do I get to see it, or is this one of those things where I find out on day five that there was a secret plan inside the plan?"
He gives me a look. It's a very specific look, one I've seen across a sparring mat, a war table and a battlefield, and it says, I deserved that, and also, please stop.
"No secrets," he says. "I'm out of the secrets business. Retired."
"Very mature of you."
"I'm a mature man, Violence."
The name still does something to my stomach. Two years of hearing it in every tone from threat to prayer and it still lands like a hand at the base of my spine. I hide my face in the mug.
"Fine," I say. "Show me the plan."
He doesn't have it written down. He doesn't need to. He just starts talking, ticking points off on his fingers, and I realize about thirty seconds in that it's an operational briefing. He's broken our leave into phases.
"Day one, rest. We don't leave the house. Day two, the market in the lower city, because you said you wanted to see it without anyone asking you to inspect the wards. Day three, we fly to the coast."
"Is there a contingency for weather?"
"There's a contingency for weather."
"Is there a contingency for the dragons?"
He stops. Looks at the window. "There's no contingency for the dragons."
"Then it's not a plan," I say. "It's a hope."
The dragons, it turns out, have their own plan.
We go out to the ridge after breakfast, because Andarna has been sulking in my head since dawn about not being invited to watch me eat, and because I need to stretch my knees before they start their usual complaints. The house Xaden chose sits on a shelf of rock above Aretia, half carved into the hillside, with a garden that somebody's grandmother planted and nobody has weeded in twenty years. From the top of the ridge you can see the whole city, its new walls pale against the old ones, smoke rising from a hundred chimneys that weren't lit two years ago.
Tairn is exactly where I pictured him, a mountain of black scales and bad temper stretched across the sunniest rock in Tyrrendor. Sgaeyl lies beside him, her navy scales gleaming like deep water, her daggertail curled around the both of them. Andarna is perched on an outcrop above them both, keeping an eye on everything, the light catching her scales in shifting, oil-on-water colors that I still can't get used to.
All three of them turn their heads at the same time when we come up the path.
It is not a welcoming movement.
"Oh no," I say under my breath.
Xaden puts a hand at the small of my back. "What?"
"They're looking at us like the review board."
"That's just Sgaeyl's face."
"I heard that," Sgaeyl says, and I don't know if she means it for me or for him or both, but Xaden stops walking, so I'm guessing both.
"Silver One," Tairn rumbles. "Your mate has been pacing the kitchen since the fourth hour. He moved the same chair four times."
I look at Xaden. Xaden looks at the sky.
"He's nervous," Andarna announces, with the delight of someone who has just learned a new word and intends to wear it out. "Sgaeyl says he's never been on a holiday. Sgaeyl says he doesn't know what one is."
"I know what a holiday is," Xaden says out loud, because apparently Sgaeyl is broadcasting this to all of us now, which is a new and unwelcome development.
"Name one you've taken," Sgaeyl says.
He opens his mouth. Closes it.
I bite the inside of my cheek so hard I taste copper.
"This is going to be the longest week of my life," he says to me, low, "and I spent a year in a war."
"Our riders," Tairn says, addressing Sgaeyl in the tone of an old general reviewing troops who have failed inspection, "do not know how to rest."
"They don't know how to court," Sgaeyl replies.
"We're not courting," I say. "We're together. We've been together. There was a whole war about it."
"There was a war," Tairn says. "It was not about you."
"You know what I mean."
"I know you two have never spent a day in each other's company without someone trying to kill one of you," Sgaeyl says, and there's no cruelty in it, just that cool, measuring patience she has, the voice of a creature who has lived several centuries and found most of them disappointing. "We are curious to see what remains when nothing is trying."
That lands somewhere under my ribs and stays there.
Because she's right. I fell in love with Xaden on a parapet, in a war college, with a knife at my throat and lies stacked between us like cordwood. I loved him through a revolution and a betrayal and the worst year of my life. I know exactly who he is when everything's on fire.
I have no idea who he is on a Tuesday.
I don't think he does either.
Next to me, Xaden has gone very still in a way that means he's thinking the same thing and doesn't want me to know. Shadows gather at his feet, curling like smoke around his ankles, and I watch one of them reach toward my boot before he reels it back in.
"We're going inside," he tells the dragons.
"Day one," Andarna says, sounding thrilled. "Rest. We heard. Tairn made me listen to all the phases."
"How did you hear the phases?"
"You think very loudly, Silver One," Tairn says. "And he speaks very loudly to you. Between the two of you, the whole ridge has been briefed."
Resting goes badly.
It isn't anyone's fault. It's just that neither of us knows how. By midmorning I've reorganized the kitchen shelves, sharpened every one of my daggers, and read the same page of a Tyrrish history three times without absorbing a word. Xaden has written two letters he says aren't official business, which is a lie, and fixed a hinge that wasn't broken.
At noon we eat bread and cheese standing up at the counter, like we're about to be called away.
At one, I catch him at the window, watching the road.
"Nobody's coming," I say.
"I know."
"Then why are you watching it?"
He doesn't answer for a while. When he does, he doesn't turn around. "Because my whole life, someone was always coming. And I don't know what to do with my hands if nobody is."
There it is. There's the thing under the plan. I set down my bread and cross the kitchen and stand next to him at the window, close enough that our shoulders touch. The road winds empty down the hill. A goat is standing in the middle of it, chewing something, utterly unconcerned with the end of the war.
"I could give you something to do with your hands," I say.
He turns his head slowly and looks at me with his eyebrows up.
"Not like that," I say, heat climbing my face. "Gods. I meant the garden. Somebody has to pull those weeds before they eat the house."
"You meant the garden," he repeats, flat.
"I absolutely meant the garden."
"Violence." He's smiling now, really smiling, the rare one that reaches all the way up to the gold flecks in his eyes. "You're blushing."
"It's the altitude."
"We live here."
"Weeds," I say, and grab his hand, and drag him out the kitchen door.
We spend the afternoon on our knees in the dirt. It is the least romantic thing I've ever done, and it is, without competition, the best afternoon I've had in two years. He's terrible at it. He pulls up three of the herbs before I can stop him, and when I tell him which one is thyme and which is a weed, he stares at both like I've asked him to decode a cipher written in the dark. I'm not much better. My knees give out twice, and the second time he doesn't say anything, just shifts a folded sack under them and keeps working like it was always there.
The sun drops. The goat wanders off. At some point I realize neither of us has looked at the road in an hour.
"This is nice," I say, and immediately feel stupid, because it's such a small word for it.
He sits back on his heels, dirt streaked up his forearms, and looks at me for so long that I start to wonder if I have something on my face. I probably do.
"What?" I say.
"I've never seen you with nothing to fight," he says quietly.
"And?"
"And I don't know what you're going to want." He says it like a confession, like it costs him. "When there's no war. When you can choose. I don't know if it's me."
My heart stops being a heart and turns into a fist.
Before I can find a single word, a shadow falls across the garden. A very large one. I look up, and so does he, and there's Tairn, wings blotting out the sunset, settling on the ridge above us with a thud that shakes dirt off the garden wall.
"Your mother's former aide is coming up the road," he says. "On horseback. Carrying a sealed dispatch. Your leave, Silver One, has lasted nine hours."
Xaden is already on his feet, his hand already reaching for a blade he isn't wearing, his whole body sliding back into the shape it knows best.
And I'm still on my knees in the dirt, staring at him, with his question sitting in my chest like a stone I haven't had time to swallow.