Chapter 59: The Third Album
Cassian was out the workroom door before anyone could stop him, and the flash of a portal cracked the hallway air like struck flint. He was gone. Evander stood in the doorway, watching the empty space where his husband had been, and turned back into the room.
"He went for the wine," Evander said.
"He went for the wine," Aneara confirmed from the corridor, steering Mira back inside with a hand at her elbow. Mira shook her off, but there was no real resistance in it. Her eyes went to the shelf, to the low cabinet, and something in her sharp face turned inward.
"I bought a case of moonberry red eleven years ago for exactly this," Mira said. "I drank it. All of it. Alone. It was a bad decade." She crossed to the cabinet, and her palm hovered over the warding, which hummed a low, sour note at her approach. "He'll be back in four minutes. Goldenpine cellars run deep and he knows where Aneara keeps the good vintage."
"I know where I keep the good vintage," Aneara said. "It is not in Goldenpine."
"It is now," said Mira, and broke the ward.
The sound it made was quiet, a sigh of released magic, but Violet felt it in her teeth. The cabinet door swung open and there it was, between a jar of river-clay and a bundle of dried lavender. The third album. Newer leather, less scarred, the wire on its spine brighter, because it had been made later. Because it covered later.
Violet did not move toward it.
She looked at it the way one looks at an old scar on someone else's body, with sympathy and distance and no desire to touch. Mira lifted it out with both hands and set it on the slate table beside the first two, and the lamp light fell across its cover, and the room waited for her.
"I can't," Violet said.
It came out plain. No apology in it, no flinch. Just the truth, said the way her husbands had taught her to say true things, and Evander straightened off the door frame because he heard what she was doing with her voice even as she said the hardest thing.
Mira nodded once. "I didn't think you'd watch it. I've never watched it whole myself." Her thumb moved over the cover. "But they should. They asked. And you asked me, three hundred years ago, never to lie to you by omission, so I won't lie to them with one."
Violet's eyes went to Evander, then to the door Cassian had torn open.
"Go," Evander said quietly. "The garden. We'll be here."
She went. Not fast, not fleeing, just at the pace of a woman who had decided something and was executing it. The workroom door let her out into the corridor, and the corridor's iridescent windows threw their rainbows across the marble under her feet, and she walked through bands of violet and green and gold like wading through shallow light, and she did not look back.
The garden at dusk in the fae realm was a slow riot. Plants grew with opinion here; a climbing vine had already swallowed half a trellis since dinner, and the flowers opened as she passed, not politely, but with a proprietary lean, tracking her like cats. Violet found a stone bench beneath an old rowan and sat, and the cold of it came up through her skirts and she let it.
She could hear the workroom through the lit windows above. Not words. Just the murmur of a room where a thing about her was being looked at without her.
Her hands, resting on her knees, had gone steady. That was the strange part. Fifty years ago her hands would have shaken. Fifty years ago she'd have stayed in the room and watched every page and come out smaller. Tonight her hands were steady and her body was warm, all the way through, warm in a way she had not been for three hundred years before two wolves had put their palms on her.
The door below opened and closed. She didn't have to look. Cedar and sun-warmed skin arrived at her shoulder before the shadow did.
"We will be one glass short without you," Cassian said. He didn't sit. He stood at the end of the bench, a big dark shape against the lit window, and his golden eyes had gone the flat bright color they went when the wolf was close to the surface. "Evander's opening it. I told him to wait."
"You didn't have to," Violet said.
"I did." His jaw worked. "Vi. Listen. Mira showed me a month ago. I thought I understood." He stopped, and his hand opened and closed at his side. "I've been standing in that room for two minutes and I want to put my fist through a wall, and I haven't even opened it yet."
"Marcus isn't worth a wall."
"Marcus is worth exactly one throat," Cassian said, low, "and I'm glad every day that Evander was the one who answered the gate that morning instead of me."
Violet reached out and took his hand. It swallowed hers. She held it, feeling the tremor in it that his voice didn't have, and she pulled him down onto the bench beside her, and he came, and his heat poured into her side like standing near a kiln.
"Then don't rewatch it for Marcus," she said. "Watch it for me. Because the little fool in those pages is the reason the woman on this bench has hands that don't shake."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he bent and pressed his forehead to hers, wolf-gentle, and breathed her in, jasmine and caramel, and stayed like that until the door above opened again and Evander's voice came down through the garden, one word.
"Cassian."
They went up together.
The wine was already open. Aneara had produced a dark bottle from somewhere without explaining where, and poured four glasses with the unhurried precision of a woman who had watched mortals and immortals alike ruin themselves over revelations for six centuries. She had placed Violet's glass at the end of the slate table, apart, facing the garden window. A place at the table that was not the table.
Violet took it. She stood at the window with her back mostly to the room, close enough to hear, far enough not to be seen by the pages. Mira noticed and said nothing, which from Mira was a kindness of historic proportion.
Mira opened the album.
"There's no good place to start," she said. "So I'm starting where it started." She turned the first page flat under the lamp.
The photograph moved. A market square, a stall of lavender roses, a warlock's hand entering frame to buy them. Then his face, and it was a good face, charming even in stillness, a crooked smile aimed just off the lens at someone. At her.
"That's the year," Mira said. "Day one. I took it without him knowing. I thought he looked fun."
"He was fun," Violet said, to the window, to the garden. "That was the whole trick."
Evander sat down in front of the album the way he sat down with battle maps. Cassian stood behind him, one hand braced on the table's edge, and the wood creaked under it.
The pages turned. Violet at a harvest festival, laughing at something Marcus had said, and the laugh in the moving frame was real, full, belly-deep. Violet showing him a rune she'd cut, leaning close. Violet dancing. The room watched the courtship of a woman who did not yet know what she was marrying.
"Stop," Cassian said.
Mira had stopped already. The photograph under the lamp was of a forge. Violet's old forge, the Gullhaven one, and in the frame she stood with a hammer halfway through its arc, and her face was lit with the open joy of the work, and off to the side, slightly blurred with motion, Marcus stood watching her with an expression the photograph preserved perfectly. Not admiration. Arithmetic.
"You can see it," Evander said. His voice had dropped into the register he used for war. "Right there. He's counting."
"He was always counting," Mira said. "She forged louder than him. She laughed louder than him. She was stronger than him and kinder than him and both of those things were, to a man like that, a debt." She turned the page.
The forge photos stopped. The next one was a dinner, and Violet in it sat with her shoulders drawn in, her arms close to her body, her smile present and reduced. The one after that, a gathering, her hair pinned back flat. The one after, a portrait almost, her hands folded in her lap, the frame still except for the small motion of her breathing, and there was a stillness in her moving image that no photograph should have had.
Cassian made a sound low in his chest, not quite a growl, worse than a growl, because it was controlled.
"Keep going," Evander said.
"You don't have to," Violet said from the window, not turning.
"Yes," Evander said. "We do."
The years moved. The photographs got quieter, not fewer. Violet's clothes going grey, then greyer. Violet standing at the back edge of group frames, half turned, as if the lens had caught her leaving. Violet at a bonfire, once, the only warm one in the run, and in it she was singing, and then the next photo was a year later and the singing was gone. There was a gap of pages, months wide, and in the gap Mira had written nothing, and the nothing said everything.
"The joke," Mira said, flat, merciless to herself as much as to him. "I wasn't there for it. She told me after. His joke about her hands. Strong hands, he said, in front of people. Like a smith's joke. And she never picked up a hammer in front of anyone again." She turned a page. "This is year ten."
Year ten. Violet alone at a window with a cup of tea, the steam the only thing moving in her.
Year twenty. Violet in a market, half the size in the frame than she'd been at the start of the album, though the frame had never changed.
Year thirty-one. Violet and Mira, and Mira's face in the photograph was angry, mouth open mid-argument, and Violet's was closed like a door.
"I fought her," Mira said. "That's what that is. I fought her for years. I lost every time, because you can't argue someone into being loud. I should have dragged her to a forge. I should have done more than fight." Her voice cracked once, very slightly, and she turned the page before anyone could answer it.
Cassian had not spoken in minutes. He stood with his knuckles white on the table, and Violet, watching the window's reflection rather than the room, saw his reflection's golden eyes fixed on the pages and burning. In his own head, in the low place where wolves keep their oldest instincts, he was back at the gatehouse, back at the east parlor, back at the moment Marcus had stood up from his tea, and he was doing with his imagination what the standing order forbade with his hands. Tearing out the throat of a man who had spent forty-five years teaching the love of his life to fold herself into bite-sized pieces.
He didn't say it. He looked across the table at Evander, and Evander, who had been raised to hold his face still through anything, looked back, and for the first time in their two hundred years Evander's face was doing what Cassian's was. The fury was shared down the bond between them like a struck bell, one note in two chests.
"The last of him," Mira said quietly, and turned to the page.
It was simple. A street. Violet walking one way, Marcus already small in the frame, going the other, roses in a paper wrap, one loose in his hand. The photo caught the thorns biting his coat.
"That's ours," Cassian said. "The banishment. That's not in fifty years ago."
"I added it when it happened," Mira said. "I keep the album current. I always have." She looked up at Violet's back, at the window. "Turn around, Vi. It stops being about him in two pages."
Violet didn't turn. "Show them," she said.
Mira turned the page.
And the light in the room changed, because the photograph under the lamp was Thornhold. The throne room, shot from the gallery, and there in the middle distance stood a woman at a counsel table with correspondence stacked in front of her, sleeves dark, curls pinned up carelessly, gesturing at a map with both hands. Small in the frame. Enormous in it.
"That's the Advisor years," Mira said. "You arrived before they did, in this album. Look."
Evander looked. The pages moved and the photographs moved and the woman in them changed by fractions, the way a season changes. Her shoulders coming down out of their guard. Her sleeves getting rolled. A photo of her in the library asleep with a book tented over her face, and beside it, dated later, a photo of her laughing at something off-frame with her whole body, and the laugh was the laugh from the first album, the one from before, deep in the belly and pure, returning like a tide.
"We didn't do this," Evander said slowly. His fingers rested on the edge of a page, careful as with a map of a country he was about to be responsible for. "We weren't in these."
"You were," Mira said. "You're just not visible. Every photo after her third month here, she's facing the throne. Watch the direction of her. Watch her face angle across the years." She fanned four pages, forty years apart, and the woman in them was always, always turned toward the two empty chairs at the front of the room. "She was already yours. She just didn't know your names yet."
The room was very quiet. At the window, Violet's breath had gone unsteady, and she gripped her glass and watched the garden and let the room have its evidence about her.
Then the pages turned into the last season, and the album stopped being history and became testimony. Violet between two kings in a dining hall, feeding the frame's motion with a constant small laughter. Violet with love bites standing unhealed above a collar, chin up, daring the lens. Violet in a fitting room mirror in black silk, hand on hip, and the photograph had the nerve to catch her turning, the silk moving, her curves owned and shameless, her face lit like the forge photos from three hundred years before.
"Three months," Mira said. "This whole last section is three months. Fifty years of shrinking. Three months of this." She turned the final leaf.
The last page. Two months old. Lupercalia, the moonlit clearing, shot from the treeline where some wolf had stood with a moving-lens and caught it. Violet in white with lavender at her sleeves, walking toward the ancient oak, and the frame held on her face as she walked, glowing, blushing, tears and the biggest smile of her whole recorded life in the same expression, and behind her in the frame the whole wedding party of two packs blurred with cheering.
Mira laid her hand flat on the page. "That's how it ends," she said. "Not with him. With you. It was never going to end with him. I just had to keep the album open long enough."
Silence. Then the sound of Violet's glass being set down on the sill, and her voice, wrecked and furious at being wrecked.
"I said it wasn't its night."
"It's its night," Cassian said, rough. "It's its night, and it ends there." He crossed the room, and he didn't ask, he just gathered her off the window into his chest, and she came, and her face went into his neck, and his arms closed around her like a wall closing.
Evander stood over the last page a moment longer. Then he closed the album with both hands, gently, the way one closes a door on a room where a wound has finally been cleaned, and he carried it to the cabinet himself, and set it on the shelf, and did not ward it.
"It stays where the first two stay," he said to Mira. "Open shelf. She should be able to reach the whole of herself."
Mira looked at him for a long second, and then, for the first time all night, she smiled without any edge on it at all.
"That," she said, "is the first thing you've said about my albums that I agree with."
"And the wine," Aneara said into the pause, lifting the bottle, "is very nearly wasted on this much emotion. Someone sit down and drink it."
Cassian laughed against Violet's hair, and the sound of it shook through her, and she pulled back from his chest with her eyes wet and her chin set, and turned to the table where the last photograph's warmth still hung in the lamplight.
"Show me the market one," she said. "The first one. Him with the roses."
Mira opened the album to the first page again.
Violet looked at the charming face, the crooked smile, the arithmetic just barely beginning behind it, and she felt the steadiness in her own hands and the warmth in her own body and the wolf's arms still around her waist and the other wolf's eyes on her back, and she raised her glass to the photograph.
"To one real year," she said. "And the forty-five he spent paying for it."