Chapter 3: Day Three, Early
The dragons drop us on a beach and leave.
They don't even pretend otherwise. Tairn lands on a crescent of pale sand at the bottom of a cliff on the far western edge of Tyrrendor, waits for me to slide off his foreleg, and then launches straight back up into the sky with a wingbeat that sprays half the beach into my hair. Sgaeyl follows. Andarna does a slow, deliberate, mocking loop above us before she goes.
"Tairn," I shout into my head and out loud, both at once. "Tairn, you get back here."
"No."
"We don't have supplies."
"There is a fishing hut at the north end of the cove. It has a roof, a hearth and a barrel of dried fish that has been there since before your grandmother was born. You will survive."
"How long are you planning to leave us here?"
A long, rumbling pause. "Until one of you says something true."
Then the bond goes quiet. Not cut, never cut, but shut, like a door pulled to, and when I reach for him all I get is the warm, stubborn wall of a dragon who has decided he's done listening.
Beside me, Xaden is staring at the sky with the expression of a man watching his horse leave without him.
"Sgaeyl too?" I ask.
"She says," he says slowly, "and I'm quoting, that she has bonded a fool, and that she will return when the fool has located his spine."
I make a sound that is half laugh and half sob and entirely undignified, and he looks over at me, and some of the tightness goes out of his face.
"Well," he says. "At least it's a nice beach."
It is a nice beach. That's the worst part.
The cove is a perfect bowl of rock cupping a strip of sand and a sea so clear I can see the ripples on the bottom. The cliffs are streaked with red and gold. Gulls wheel overhead, yelling at each other. The fishing hut at the north end is exactly as advertised: one room, one hearth, one ancient barrel that neither of us is brave enough to open, and a pile of nets in the corner that look like they could be mistaken for a bed by somebody very tired and very generous.
We don't talk. Not at first. He makes a fire, because making fires is a thing he knows how to do, and I walk the tideline, because walking is a thing I know how to do, and the sun goes down slow and orange over the water while we orbit each other at a careful distance like two people who just had the worst fight of their relationship and then got kidnapped by their pets.
Eventually I run out of beach.
When I come back to the hut, he's sitting on the step outside it with his forearms on his knees, watching the last light go. He's left exactly enough room on the step for me. I sit in it.
The sea breathes in and out. The fire pops behind us.
"I wrote two letters yesterday," he says.
I wait.
"I told you they weren't official business. That was true, technically. They weren't from the Duke of Tyrrendor." He laughs once, without much humor. "They were from me. One to the Assembly. One to Jesinia, at the Archives."
My chest goes tight. "Why would you write to Jesinia?"
"To ask how much it would cost to rebuild a library." He doesn't look at me. He's looking at the water. "Aretia had one, before the rebellion. My father used to take me. It was full of Tyrrish texts that Navarre burned when they took the city, and since we've been rebuilding, it's just been a shell. I wanted to know what it would take to fill it again. Who we'd need. I wanted to know if it was possible before I asked you whether you…" He stops. His jaw works. "I was going to tell you on day three. That was the plan. Day three, the coast, I'd show you the numbers, and I'd ask if you'd ever want to build something like that. With me. Here."
The sea breathes in. Out.
"And then the dispatch came," I say quietly.
"And then the dispatch came, and you looked at it like you'd been handed your father back, and I thought: what kind of man asks her to give that up for a burnt-out building and a duke who doesn't know how to take a day off." He finally turns his head. His eyes are very dark in the dusk. "So I didn't ask. I told you to go. I know it was wrong. I knew it was wrong while I was saying it. I just didn't know how to stop."
I think about Sgaeyl on the ridge. We are curious to see what remains when nothing is trying.
This, I think. This is what remains. A man who plans everything because he's terrified of the one thing he can't plan for, which is somebody choosing him.
"You said something in the street," I say. "That you're scared I'll pick you because you're the only thing I know how to do."
He flinches. Small, but I see it.
"You were right to be scared of it," I say, and his eyes close. "I was scared of it too. I've been scared of it since we got here. I've spent two days watching you fix hinges that weren't broken and wondering if we're only any good together when someone's trying to kill us." I pull my knees up, wince, and rest my chin on them. "So I've been thinking about it. All afternoon. On a very nice beach."
"And?" His voice is barely there.
"And yesterday was the best day I've had in two years," I say. "You pulled up the thyme. You couldn't tell a weed from a carrot. My knees gave out and you put a sack under them without saying a word, and we didn't look at the road for an hour, and nobody tried to kill anyone. That wasn't a war. That was a garden. And I didn't want it to end."
He's looking at me now. Really looking. The last of the light catches the gold in his eyes.
"I don't know who you are on a Tuesday," I tell him. "I want to find out. I want a lot of Tuesdays. I want to find out if you snore when you're not exhausted, and whether you're going to be insufferable about the market now that you've seen one, and how badly you'll kill every plant I ever give you. That's not the only thing I know how to do. That's the thing I want to learn."
Something moves through his face that I've only seen a few times. Once, in a hatching ground. Once, when I woke up after a battle and he was still holding my hand.
"And the Archives?" he says roughly.
"I'll write to Jesinia myself," I say. "And to the Archives. I'll tell them I'll consult. I'll fly down when they need a translation. I'll steal a few of their duplicates for our shelves, which I'm sure Jesinia will pretend not to notice." I tilt my head at him. "And then I'm going to come home and build a library in Aretia. With a duke who doesn't know how to take a day off. Because it's mine. Because I'm choosing it. With full information."
For a long moment he doesn't move at all.
Then he lets out a breath that sounds like it's been in him since the porch, maybe since a lot longer than the porch, and he reaches for me.
He kisses me the way he did the first time, on a parapet in the dark, like it's something he's been forbidden and has decided to do anyway. His hand slides into my hair. Mine finds the front of his shirt and holds on. The sea goes on breathing behind us. The fire pops. Somewhere very far off, at the very edge of my mind, I feel a door that was shut ease open by about an inch, and a vast, smug warmth leans in to listen.
Xaden pulls back just far enough to rest his forehead on mine. His eyes are still closed.
"I love you," he says, as if he's never said it before. As if it's the first time, and maybe it is, the first time without a war standing behind it.
"I know," I say. "I love you too. Even on Tuesdays."
He laughs, really laughs, the sound startling a gull off the hut roof, and pulls me into his lap on the step like the nets and the barrel of ancient fish and the whole cold sea don't exist.
We stay there until the stars come out. We don't make a plan. Not one. It's the most terrifying thing I've ever done, and I've done some truly stupid things.
The dragons come back at dawn.
I wake up curled against Xaden on the pile of nets, both of us smelling of smoke and seaweed, his arm heavy across my waist. There's a thump outside that shakes the whole hut, then another, then a smaller one and a cascade of falling pebbles as something lands on the roof.
"Good morning," Andarna sings into my head. "Did you say something true? Tairn says you did. Tairn says it was very loud. Tairn says he regrets having ears."
"I do," Tairn says darkly. "Deeply. Silver One, your mate laughed for twenty minutes. Sgaeyl thinks he has been replaced."
"Tell Sgaeyl," Xaden mumbles into my hair, not opening his eyes, "that I located my spine."
"She heard," I tell him. "She says it's smaller than she expected."
He groans.
I lie there for a moment, in a fishing hut at the end of the world, with the sea hushing outside and three dragons arguing on the beach about whose idea this was. I don't reach for a dagger. I don't even think about it.
Then Tairn's voice drops into my mind again, lower, almost careful, in a tone I've heard maybe twice in two years.
"There is one more thing, Silver One. While we were gone, Sgaeyl and I went to the Vale."
My eyes snap open.
"The Empyrean has heard the war is over," he says. "And they would like to know what, exactly, you intend to do about the egg."