Chapter 2: Day Two
The dispatch isn't a war.
I read it three times on the front step while the aide, a tired captain named Orrin who used to stand outside my mother's office looking like furniture, waters his horse at our trough. Xaden stands beside me with his arms crossed and his shadows coiled so tight around his boots they look like a second pair.
"Well?" he says.
"It's not venin," I say. "Nobody's dying."
His shoulders drop maybe a quarter of an inch. For him, that's collapsing in relief.
"It's from the Archives," I say, and my voice does something odd on the last word. "From Basgiath. They're rebuilding the scribe quadrant. They want a new curator for the restricted collections. Someone who knows the old texts, and the true histories, and can read Tyrrish and Lucerish and…" I stop, because I'm babbling, because my hands have started to shake. "They want me."
My father's job. Near enough. The job I trained my whole life for, before my mother marched me across a parapet and made me a rider instead.
Xaden is quiet for a heartbeat too long.
"That's good," he says. "Violet, that's good."
He means it. I can hear that he means it. But he also takes one small step back, and I feel the space open up between us like a draft under a door.
Orrin clears his throat. "They'll want an answer within the month, Lieutenant. No rush. I'm told to say there's no rush." He looks between us, seems to sense he's standing in the middle of something, and swings back onto his horse with the speed of a man who survived a long career near the Sorrengail family by knowing when to leave.
We watch him go. The goat is back. It watches him go too.
"We don't have to talk about it now," Xaden says.
"Okay."
"It's day one. Rest."
"Day one is over," I say. "It's dark."
"Then day two." He takes my hand, and his thumb runs over my knuckles, and I let him change the subject because I don't know what I want to say yet, and because he looked so happy with dirt on his arms an hour ago that I'd like to get back there, if there's a way back.
Day two goes to plan for nearly an hour.
The lower market in Aretia is a riot of noise and color, so different from the grim supply lines I got used to that I keep stopping in the middle of the street just to stare. There are stalls selling fried dough and blue glass and bolts of cloth dyed the deep, rich red of Tyrrendor. Someone is playing a fiddle badly. Someone else is shouting at the fiddler to stop. There are flowers in buckets, actual flowers, sold for no reason except that they're pretty.
"I want all of it," I say.
"You can have all of it," Xaden says.
"You can't say that. You're a duke. People will hold you to it."
"Let them." He pays for a paper twist of candied almonds and hands it to me without looking, scanning the crowd the whole time, and I elbow him in the side.
"What?"
"You're doing it again."
"Doing what?"
"Checking the rooftops."
He pauses. His eyes flick to the roofline, then back to me, and he has the grace to look caught. "There's a man on the cooper's roof."
"He's fixing the tiles, Xaden."
"He's fixing the tiles," he agrees, very reasonably. "Badly. Like a man with a crossbow under that tarp."
I look. The man on the roof drops a hammer, swears, and slides two feet before catching himself on the gutter.
"Yes," I say. "A master assassin."
He breathes out a laugh through his nose and stops scanning. For a while it works. We walk. I eat almonds. He lets me drag him into a bookseller's stall where I spend an indecent amount of time running my fingers along spines, and he leans against the post with his arms crossed and watches me with an expression I can't read, until I look up and catch it and he doesn't look away.
"What?" I say.
"Nothing."
"That's not a nothing face."
"You look like this at the Archives," he says. "When you're reading. Like there's nobody else in the room."
I put the book down. "Is that bad?"
"No." He tilts his head. "It's the only time you look like that. Not on Tairn. Not with me." A pause. "Not ever, with me."
Before I can tell him that's wrong, that it's a different kind of quiet and he's comparing apples to dragons, someone in the crowd shouts my name.
Not my name. My title. "The lightning wielder!"
And then it's chaos.
I don't know how word gets around a market so fast. One minute we're two people in plain clothes, the next there's a crowd. Most of it is lovely. That's the hard part. An old woman presses a loaf of bread into my hands and tells me her grandson came home because of us. A blacksmith tries to give Xaden a knife, a beautiful one, and when he refuses, insists, and when he refuses again, tries to give it to me. A young rider from the second wing, barely out of the quadrant, asks me to sign the inside of his flight jacket and turns the color of a Tyrrish banner when I do.
But it's a lot of people. And it's loud. And somewhere in the middle of being thanked by the fortieth stranger, I realize my hands are buzzing, and the hair on my arms is standing up, and above the market, in a sky that was perfectly blue a minute ago, a cloud is turning dark.
Xaden notices before I do. Of course he does.
His hand closes around my wrist. Shadows spill from the alley mouths and slide between us and the crowd, not threatening, just there, a soft wall of dark that makes people step back without quite knowing why.
"We're leaving," he says.
"I'm fine."
"The sky disagrees with you."
He gets us out. He's very good at getting people out. Within two minutes we're on a quiet side street that smells like bread ovens, and I'm leaning on a wall, breathing, while the cloud above the market slowly thins back into nothing.
"Sorry," I say.
"Don't."
"I ruined day two."
"You didn't ruin anything." He's standing too close and also not close enough, looking at me with that stillness again. "Take the job."
The words drop between us like a dropped plate.
I lift my head. "What?"
"The Archives. Take it." He says it fast, like he's been holding it since last night and it's burned his tongue. "You hate this. The crowds. The titles. You've hated it since the day your mother put you on that parapet. You want the stacks and the old maps and the quiet. I saw your face yesterday when you read that letter. Take it."
"And you'll be here," I say slowly. "In Aretia."
"I'll be here."
"Running Tyrrendor."
"Someone has to."
"And we'll, what? See each other at festivals?"
"I'll fly down," he says. "Sgaeyl can do it in a few hours. Every week. More."
It's a good answer. It's a reasonable, mature, generous answer, and it makes me so angry that the hair on my arms stands up again.
"You've already decided," I say.
"I haven't decided anything. It's your choice."
"No, you've decided what my choice is. You decided last night. That's why you stepped back on the porch. That's why you've spent all morning checking the rooftops instead of looking at me." I push off the wall. "You think I'm going to leave, so you're getting it over with. You're handing me the door so you don't have to watch me walk through it."
His jaw flexes. "That's not…"
"Then what is it?"
"It's me not standing between you and the thing you want," he says, and his voice cracks open, just slightly, just enough. "I took your whole life away from you once already. I lied to you for a year. I got you dragged into a war you didn't choose. You finally get one thing that's just yours, and I won't be one more person who takes it."
The street goes very quiet. Somewhere a baker is singing.
"You didn't take my life," I say. "You were in it."
"Violet."
"I chose you. Over and over. With full information, eventually." I hear my voice shake and hate it. "You don't get to un-choose me on my behalf because you're scared I might pick a library."
"I'm not scared you'll pick a library," he says, low and fierce. "I'm scared you'll pick me because I'm the only thing you know how to do."
That one goes in clean, between the ribs, the way only he has ever managed.
I don't have an answer. I genuinely don't. Because yesterday I asked myself who he is on a Tuesday, and I didn't know, and I don't know who I am either, and maybe he's right. Maybe everything between us was built for a war, and the war is over.
Neither of us says anything for a long, terrible minute.
Then a shadow drops across the street.
Not his. A real one. Huge, winged, blotting out the sun, and it's followed by a second, and then a gust of wind that blows flour off every windowsill on the block. People scream. The baker stops singing.
Tairn lands in the market square at the end of the street, which is not big enough for him, with a crunch that I'm fairly sure was a fruit stall. Sgaeyl lands on the rooftops beside him, her talons sinking into the tiles, and Andarna drops onto the bakery chimney, which immediately starts to crumble.
"Get on," Tairn says.
"Tairn, you just landed on somebody's apples."
"I will pay for the apples. Get on."
"We're not going anywhere. We're in the middle of…"
"We are aware of what you are in the middle of," Sgaeyl says, and from the way Xaden's face goes blank, she's said it to both of us. "We have been listening to the two of you circle the same wound for two days. It is unbearable. We are going to the coast."
"Day three," Andarna adds helpfully. "We're doing day three early."
"You can't just…"
"I am a dragon," Tairn says. "I can just."
And before I can argue, before Xaden can argue, before either of us can find one sensible reason not to, Sgaeyl lowers her shoulder in an unmistakable invitation, and Tairn swings his great head down until his eye, gold and ancient and furious, is level with mine.
"You can climb, Silver One," he says, "or I can carry you. I have carried you before. You did not enjoy it."
I look at Xaden. Xaden looks at me.
For the first time since the porch, I see something on his face that isn't careful. It's a very small, very reluctant, utterly beaten smile.
"I don't think," he says, "this was in the plan."