Chapter 43: Be My Counsel
The portal closed behind Cassian and the smell of the fae realm came with him, beeswax and violets clinging to his coat like a passenger. He shook it off in the corridor outside the east studies and walked fast. Not ran. Kings did not run through their own palace. But his stride ate the marble in gulps, and a pair of guards flattened themselves against the wall as he passed.
Evander's office door was shut. It was always shut. It had a ward on it that turned away anyone carrying gossip, which had once made for a very funny afternoon with the Lord Chamberlain. Cassian knocked twice, sharp, and did not wait for the answer.
Evander sat behind a desk buried in requisitions, reading glasses low on his nose, a pen moving in that small precise hand of his. He looked up. He did not take the glasses off. That was his version of raising an eyebrow.
"You were gone four hours."
"It was five," Cassian said. "You'll want to hear all of it." He shut the door and leaned against it, and the slate came out from inside his coat, held flat in both hands like something that might wake up.
Evander set the pen down.
That was the thing about a hundred years of estrangement followed by two months of marriage repair. Evander had learned to read him again. The pen going down meant Cassian, sit, talk, and Cassian pulled the chair up without being asked and set the slate on the desk between them.
"I went to Mira," he said. "For the albums. The ones they started when they were girls."
"I know what the albums are."
"You don't know what's in them." Cassian tapped the slate. The charm held, and the photograph moved. A woman in a smithy's apron rolled to the ribs, scorch marks across the thighs, curls escaping their tie in every direction, held up a half-finished blade to the light and turned it, scowling at the edge with total absorption. The leather strip in her hair swung as she moved. Her forearms were dusted with freckles and older burns, and the muscle there was not decorative. It was earned.
Evander did not move for a long moment.
Then he took the glasses off. Folded them. Set them down next to the requisitions with a care that meant his hands needed something to do, and leaned forward until the lamplight caught the blue of his eyes.
"Turn it again."
"She does it every few seconds. Look. She finds a flaw and she goes back in." Cassian dragged his finger across the slate and the little figure looped: blade up, turn, scowl, hammer raised, blade up again. "That's the forge at the Academy. Third year. She bought the anvil with three months of allowance and carried it up four flights herself, which is why her shoulders look like that."
"Like that," Evander said quietly.
"Like Dawn's," Cassian said. "I mistook her for Dawn. From behind. In a photograph. I have kissed that shoulder this morning and I looked at a picture and thought, there's my empress, why is she holding a sword."
Something happened at the corner of Evander's mouth. It might have been the beginning of a laugh. It got halfway and turned into something else, something lower and more careful, and he reached out and stopped the photo with one fingertip, on the frame where Violet held the blade level with her eyes.
"She's happy," he said.
"She's loud." Cassian's voice cracked on it. He cleared his throat. "Mira turned pages for an hour, Evander. An hour. Every decade, every revel, every duel. There's a photo of her hexing the graduation podium because the headmaster got her name wrong. Nightshade, out of the lectern, in front of the whole assembly, and she bowed. There's one of her arm-wrestling a minotaur-blooded warlock while Mira holds the coins. There's the green dress."
Evander looked up. "The fountain."
"The fountain. I asked for a copy of that one too. It's mine." He said it without apology and Evander, surprisingly, nodded, as if wolves filing things were a natural law he'd already accounted for. "But the forge one's yours. Mira said so. She said, give Evander the forge one, keep the fountain for yourself, and then she threw me out before Aneara came home and made her explain why a king was crying on her floor."
"You were crying."
"I was perspiring sentimentally." Cassian pushed a hand through his hair. "Evander. I need to say some things and I need you to let me get through them, because I've been composing them on a portal for two hours and they're not going to come out in order."
Evander leaned back. He pulled a stopper out of the decanter at his elbow and poured two fingers of the dark plum spirit they kept for negotiations and other disasters, and set it in front of his husband. Then he poured one for himself.
"Go."
Cassian took the glass but didn't drink. He turned it in his fingers, watching the lamplight.
"She was the loudest thing at that school. Three hundred students, Mira said, and you could find her by sound. Mira said hearing her was home." He looked at the frozen photo. "And then we turned to the third album. The new one. Fifty years of her getting smaller, page by page. Higher collars. Sleeves down. A shawl at a dinner. At the edge of every revel, half turned away, one arm tucked in like she'd caught herself holding it." He drank then, all of it, and set the glass down hard enough that the inkwell jumped. "The smile never leaves, Evander. That's what I can't get out of my chest. She smiles in every single photograph. It just gets thinner."
Evander's jaw had gone to stone. Cassian knew that face. It was the face the Ironveil pack saw before sentences got carried out.
"Mira missed it," Cassian said. "Her best friend, ten feet away the whole time, missed it, because Vi was so good at posing. She picked her own dresses. She smiled on cue. And Marcus."
"Marcus." The name came out flat.
"One year with him. Charming, Mira said. Genuinely charming, that's the rot of it. And every time she outshone him, the temperature dropped, and she learned to read it so well she started doing his silencing for him. Before he could. Fifty years, and the last ten of it after he was already gone, because by then it was skin. It was habit." Cassian met his husband's eyes. "Twenty years ago he made a joke about a woman whose hands were stronger than his. She laughed at the joke. And she never touched a forge again."
The office was quiet. Down the corridor, someone's boots went past at a walk, unhurried, a palace doing palace things. Evander's thumb moved once across the edge of the slate, over the frame where the laughing woman held her blade up to a light that no longer existed anywhere except in the charm.
"I read her reveal notes," he said at last. "I thought I understood them. I catalogued them. Insecurity, jealousy, a man who could not bear a brighter fire. Filed." His voice was very even, which from Evander was a shout. "I did not understand a damn thing. We married a woman who spent fifty years learning to take up less room, and we put her in a throne room. In a crown. In front of both packs."
"And she's doing it," Cassian said. "Every session, every circular, every wolf calling her Queen Violet. She's doing the hardest thing she's ever done and she thinks we don't see it. She negotiated her desk like her life depended on it because the desk is the only part of queenhood she can predict."
Evander stood. It was abrupt for him; he was a man who stood on schedule. He walked to the window, where the last of the afternoon light came down over the training yard, and stood with his hands clasped behind him, and Cassian let him be, because he'd seen his husband think before and knew the shape of the silence.
When Evander turned around, his eyes were wet and his voice was not.
"I designed her a workroom with an east window. I designed a forge room before I knew she was an artificer. I thought I was giving her a hobby." He came back to the desk and put both hands flat on it, on either side of the slate. "I was giving her back a limb she cut off to survive a man who did not deserve one year of her, and it was an accident, and I do not know how to feel about the fact that we were right for reasons we didn't know."
"You're going to have to be the level-headed one." Cassian said it simply. "That's what I came to tell you. The photos, that's half of it. This is the other half." He pulled the second thought up out of his chest like a splinter. "If Marcus ever comes to this palace. If he shows up for another year of apologizing, another fifty years of sorry, the way he apparently did the first time. If I see his hand anywhere near her back."
"You'll rip his head off."
"I will rip his head off, Evander. I have thought about it for the length of a portal ride and I am not going to grow out of it. Three hundred and forty-nine years old, mate to the most extraordinary woman in two kingdoms, and I want to bite a warlock's throat out over a joke he made twenty years ago." Cassian spread his hands. "That's not what's best for her. I know it's not. She'd be mortified. She'd spiral, and then she'd forgive me, and then she'd shrink a little more, because somewhere in that head of hers it would become one more thing her fire cost somebody." He exhaled. "So that's yours. If he comes. You hold the leash. You're the level-headed one, as always. Because I can't promise, and you can."
Evander looked at him for a long time.
Then he came around the desk, took Cassian by the back of the neck the way he had on the first day of their marriage two hundred years ago, and pressed their foreheads together.
"You would rip his head off," Evander said, "and I would hold the door for you, and we would both be wrong, and I would rather be wrong with you than right with anyone else alive. Yes. I'll hold the leash. It's what I'm for."
"You're for a great deal more than that."
"Today I'm for that." Evander pulled back and his thumb caught at the corner of Cassian's eye, unembarrassed, thorough. "Say the rest. There's a rest. I can hear it circling."
Cassian laughed, wet and short. "You always could." He looked at the slate. The photo had resumed its loop: blade up, turn, scowl, hammer raised. "I wish I'd met her like this. That's the rest. That's the whole ugly heart of it." He tapped the frozen figure. "We met her forty-five years into the shrinking. She was already quiet when she walked into that first court session, already sleeves to the wrist, already half a person polite about it. I fell for the half. I'd have fallen for this one like a building falling down." His voice roughened. "I want the forty-five years back, Evander. I want the fountain. I want the girl who hexed a podium and hauled an anvil up four flights and made three hundred students go quiet when she laughed. I'm greedy for a woman who's been our wife for two months and I'm grieving decades I never had."
Evander was quiet. Then he did something unexpected. He picked up the slate, carried it to the far wall, and hung it on the hook beside the map of the northern border, where the light hit it. The laughing woman with the hammer shoulders turned her blade in an afternoon that ended centuries ago, in the office of a king she hadn't met yet.
"We didn't lose those years," Evander said. "She did. And she got them back the way anyone gets anything back. Badly. Slowly. With people in the room." He came back and sat down and pulled a fresh sheet of paper toward him, and unstoppered the ink. "Mira said don't tell her what she was. Don't tell her what to be loud about. Build the rooms and get out of the way."
"You've spoken to Mira?"
"Mira spoke at me for an hour three days ago about dinner invitations. The content was the same." Evander's pen moved, quick and sure. "Requisition. Claybonded firebrick, oak charcoal, casting sand in three grades. Also a bench. She'll want to make her own hammers eventually, so leave the corner near the quench tank open." He glanced up. "And a notice to the gatehouse. If a hedge warlock named Marcus applies at any gate of this palace for any reason, he is to be received politely, given tea, and kept in the east guest parlor until one of us is informed. Nobody touches him. Nobody growls at him. Nobody lets him past the parlor."
"That's very level-headed."
"That's why you married me." Evander signed the first sheet and started the second. "You'll fail at staying out of her way constantly. Mira warned you?"
"She did. Lifelong discipline, getting out of Violet Nightingale's way."
"Then we'll fail together and she'll forgive us, because she forgives everything, which is the part that frightens me most." Evander sanded the page, set it aside, and finally, finally let himself look at the slate on the wall. The little figure raised her hammer. "When we give her the leathers. When she puts them on and stands in that forge room and hates us for ten minutes and then picks up the hammer. Don't count it. Don't perform it. Just be in the room."
"Just be in the room," Cassian echoed.
"And Cassian." Evander's eyes came back to him, and there was something in them older than either of their kingdoms. "The years you're grieving. She's going to give some of them back. Not all. Some. When she's ready, she'll tell us about the fountain herself, and the podium, and the anvil, and she'll tell it louder than Mira did. Our whole job is to still be sitting here when she starts."
Cassian looked at his husband across the ruined desk, at the slate glowing on the wall, at two hundred years and one century of silence and two months of learning how to do this right.
"Then we'd better clear our evenings," he said. "She has forty-five years of volume to make up."
Evander picked his pen back up. His mouth had gone, finally, fully, into the smile he saved for two people in the world.
"Clear the decade," he said. "Now get out of my office. One of us has a forge to finish and you've requisitions to bully the stonemasons about, and I have a letter to write to a woman about her dinner at the manor. Tell her the third album stays at Mira's until she asks for it. She hears everything. Let this be her choice."
Cassian paused at the door, hand on the latch, and looked back at the slate one more time. The blade turned in the light. The scowl came and went and came again, fond and fierce and twenty years from its longest silence.
"Evander," he said. "Thank you for being the level-headed one."
"Someone in this marriage has to be." Evander didn't look up from the page. "Close the door. And take the requisition with you. The firebrick arrives in three days, and I want her corner by the quench tank empty before it does."
Cassian took it, and went, and the door closed softly on the sound of a pen moving, quick and sure, in a room where a woman with hammer shoulders turned her blade in the light and would not, this time, be interrupted for anything less than the whole truth.