Chapter 60: The Portal Home
The portal back to Thornhold opened onto the corridor outside the Royal Wing, and the cold of the palace rushed in like a change of season. The fae realm's warm violet dusk clung to their clothes for another breath, then the stones of home swallowed it.
Violet stepped through last. Her legs felt heavy in a way that had nothing to do with walking.
The wine, the album, the garden, the toast. It all sat in her chest like a stone that had been heated in a fire and then left to cool against her ribs. She kept hearing her own voice say the toast. One real year. She kept seeing Marcus's crooked smile on the first page, and Bramholt flat on his back in the sparks, and herself walking toward the oak with tears on her face, and all of it had happened to the same woman, and the same woman was standing now in her own corridor at an hour when even the footmen had gone to bed.
"I'm going to bed," she said.
It came out blunter than she meant. Cassian, half a step behind her with his boots already off and carried in one hand like a man who'd been raised in a barn and knew exactly which nights mattered, just looked at her.
"Good," he said. "That's the best idea anyone's had since the toast."
"I'll check the ward seals on the wing," Evander said. He was already unbuttoning his cuff, his voice level, but his eyes moved over her face the way they did over maps. Reading her. "Go on ahead. We won't be long."
"There's nothing to check."
"There's always something to check," Evander said. "Go."
She went.
The Royal Wing's door closed behind her with the soft weight of old wood, and the eight-post bed stood in the lamplight with its drapes drawn back, the furs turned down, exactly as Pell must have left it that morning. The carved wolves on the posts ran upward into shadow. It looked enormous and it looked safe and she was in it before she'd finished deciding, boots off, dress half-laced, crawling up through the furs on hands and knees until she found the warm hollow in the middle and folded herself into it.
The stone came with her. She'd thought sleep would leave it at the door.
She lay on her side with her knees drawn up and her hand pressed flat over her sternum, and the lamp burned low, and she listened to her own heart do its steady work. Fifty years of shrinking. Three months of this. Mira's voice saying it, flat and merciless, and the last page with the whole wedding party blurred behind her.
She didn't cry. Her eyes burned and she didn't cry, because it wasn't that kind of stone. It was the other kind. The kind that needed somewhere to be put down.
The door opened without a knock.
She heard them come in the way she always heard them, a doubling of warmth before the sound, cedar and cold pine smoke arriving at the threshold together. Cassian came in first, dressed down to shirtsleeves, his hair ruffled from pulling his own fingers through it. Evander followed, sleeves rolled to the elbow, the lamp of the corridor catching the silver in his dark coat's shoulders even in the bad light.
They didn't say anything. Violet watched them over the furs from her hollow.
Cassian pulled his shirt off over his head and dropped it on the chair without looking at it. Evander set his own folded, which made Cassian huff a small laugh, and then Evander sat on the edge of the bed and unlaced his boots and set them together, heel to heel, exactly.
"You're both very awake for bedtime," Violet said.
"We're not going to sleep," Cassian said.
"You're in my bed."
"Our bed," both of them said, at exactly the same moment, and Cassian grinned, and Evander's mouth did the thing it did, and the stone in Violet's chest shifted weight for the first time all night. Just a fraction. Just enough to notice.
Then Evander reached into that quiet place in himself that he reached into when he meant something completely, and the air of the room thickened. Violet felt the change before she saw it, the way she always did, a pressure in the ears like a door closing on distant weather.
The black wolf stood up where Evander had been sitting.
He was enormous. He always surprised her, even now, shoulder-high to a man and broad as a doorway, his coat dusted with frost-silver along the spine, the lamplight finding blue in it that daylight never bothered with. His ice-colored eyes found her over the furs and held there, patient, unblinking, asking nothing.
"Oh," Violet said. Her voice cracked in the middle of the single syllable, and she hated it and didn't take it back. "Oh, both of you."
Cassian was already moving. He stepped out of his trousers and shifted in one motion, mid-stride, cloth and man dissolving into fur, and the dark-brown wolf that landed on the other side of the bed was nearly black in the low light, gold-eyed, huge, and coming around the foot of the bed with a deliberateness that was completely unlike him.
He climbed up slowly. He didn't pounce. He didn't shove his nose into her hair the way he did most nights, didn't huff at her, didn't demand. He walked the length of the furs on soft paws and stopped at her hip and looked down at her lying curled around her own sternum, and the gold in his eyes had gone deep, the banked color of a fire that intends to stay all night.
Then he turned three careful circles, put one paw over her knees, and lowered himself down across her lap.
All of him. His weight settled over her thighs like a warm chest of drawers, his ribs rising and falling against her stomach, his head heavy on the furs beside her hip. He was a large animal being a small one. Wolves didn't do this, she suspected. Wolves didn't lie across a person's legs like a house cat after a long day, and Cassian had never done it, not once in three months, and he was doing it now with his whole considerable tonnage, because the wolf had understood something in the corridor or the stairwell or the door, some scent or thread of the bond, and he had decided what tonight was.
Violet's hand found his shoulder without her telling it to. The fur there was thick and darker than it looked, nearly black, and it was the softest thing in the palace, and she curled her fingers into it.
Evander came around the other side in the same slow silence. He stepped over Cassian's hindquarters with the exaggerated care of a large animal navigating a small space, and then he folded down along the length of the bed behind her, his body a long warm wall at her back, and he put his head down on the furs beside her pillow. His muzzle, when he stretched it out, rested a hand's width from her face.
She could feel his breath. Warm and even, stirring the curls at her temple.
She lay there between them with her hand buried in Cassian's shoulder fur and her cheek sinking toward the pillow, and the two of them breathed around her like a tide, and the room was only lamplight and fur and the two heartbeats she could hear with her ears and the third she could feel through the bond where her own chest sat.
The stone began, slowly, to put itself down.
Not gone. Nothing was gone. But lighter, the way it got lighter every time they did this thing they did, which was simply to be near her without requiring her to be anything at all. Not the Advisor. Not the Queen. Not the Valkyrie from the photograph with her hand out and her spine straight. Just a woman in a bed with two wolves, and nobody in the room asking her to be smaller or louder or anything in between.
"Hello," she said to Evander's muzzle.
One blue eye opened and regarded her.
"I know you can hear me." She said it aloud anyway, because some things deserved voice. "I know you both can. I can feel you listening."
The bond answered her before the wolves moved. It always did this when they were shifted, the thoughts coming through not as words exactly, more as pressure with meaning in it, warmth shaped into intent, but tonight the shape of it was so clear it might as well have been spoken.
Here.
That was all. Cassian first, his thought arriving through her thighs where his body lay on them, simple as a paw put down. Here. Here. Here.
Then Evander's, from behind her, cooler in texture and no less certain. We are here. You are not alone in it.
"It" being the album. It being the forty-five years. It being everything in that slate-table room that she'd chosen not to watch and had then, in a way, watched anyway through the window glass and the heat at her back and the changing sound of her husbands' breathing.
Violet's throat tightened. She worked her fingers deeper into Cassian's fur, and his tail moved once against her shins, a slow heavy sweep, and she turned her face toward Evander's muzzle and put her forehead against the bridge of his nose.
He didn't startle. He leaned into it, one ounce of pressure, and his breath washed warm over her brow, and his thought came through low and sure.
You walked out of that room at the right moment. I want you to know I watched you go and thought, there. That is the woman I married. The one who knows what she can carry and chooses it.
"And the one who sat on a cold bench like an idiot because she couldn't watch her own life in a book."
The one who knew her limits, Evander sent, with the faintest edge of steel, as though she'd insulted a general he admired. Those are not the same animal.
"Evander's right," said the bond, in Cassian's texture, which was a strange thing to feel, warmth arriving warm. Don't argue with him. He wins and then he's insufferable for a week.
Violet laughed. It came out wet and it surprised her, but it came out, and both wolves stirred at the sound of it, Cassian's head lifting off the furs, Evander's ear turning toward her like a compass needle.
"Both of you shut up," she said, still laughing, still wet. "You can't even hear me saying it properly. I'm talking to dogs."
Cassian's head came around and he pushed his cold nose into the side of her neck, deliberately, the way he did when she insulted him, and she shrieked and shoved at his shoulder and he let her shove him, all that muscle giving way an inch, his tail thumping the furs once, twice, the whole bed knocking softly against the wall.
"No, you're right," she said, settling again, her hand back in his fur. "You're right. Both of you. You were right at the gatehouse and you were right in the garden."
The lamplight guttered and steadied. Evander's body along her back was a source of heat with no end to it, the furnace-warmth that had unmade three hundred years of cold in her, and Cassian's weight on her legs was a different warmth, a pressing-in warmth, and she lay in the two of them like a stone in a riverbed.
Tell us what's left, Evander sent. Whatever the bench kept.
She thought about not answering. Old habit, fifty years deep, the reflex that folded her arms and said I'm fine and smiled smaller. It rose in her and it got as far as her teeth and then she felt Cassian's thought arrive, patient, no push in it at all, just an open door propped open.
Whenever. Or never. The door doesn't close.
"The market photograph," Violet said. Her voice came out quiet, aimed at the space between Evander's eye and her own. "The first one. He looked fun. That was the whole trick, I said it tonight, I stood there and said it like it was a clever line." Her fingers worked in the fur. "But Mira took that photograph without him knowing, and I've been lying here turning it over, and you know what I keep seeing? She caught him before I was in the frame. He was smiling at someone else in that market. That's what the crooked smile was for. I was never the point of it. I was the project that came after."
The bond was quiet. She felt them take it, both of them, felt it land and get carried, the way they carried things for her now without being asked.
He smiled at a market, Evander sent at last, slow, each part of it placed like a stone in a wall. And forty-five years later two packs stood in a clearing and cheered until the treeline shook, for you. He was never in the album's last page, Violet. Mira made sure. He gets a street, walking away, and roses shedding thorns on his own coat.
"That's a good photograph."
"It's my favorite photograph in all three books," Cassian's voice said through the bond, and there was nothing playful anywhere in it. "Mira doesn't know that. She thinks the wedding one is the good one. The street one is the good one."
Violet smiled into Evander's muzzle. "You two are bloodthirsty."
"We're wolves," both of them sent, at once, which startled a laugh out of her again, and the furs shook with it, and Cassian's tail beat the bed in answer.
She settled after that. The laugh did something the crying hadn't, and the stone went down fully now, set into its place, and she felt sleep coming up through the warmth like water through sand. Her eyes were closing before she'd decided to let them.
But there was one more thing. It had been sitting behind her teeth since the garden, since before the garden, maybe since the night at the gatehouse when two kings had looked at her like that, and tonight had wedged it loose.
She got her eyes open. Evander's muzzle was still there, close enough that her breath moved his whiskers. Cassian had gone heavy and limp across her legs, but his gold eye was open too, half-lidded, watching her from the furs.
"I need to say something before I fall asleep," she said. "And I need you not to argue with it, either of you, because I've had wine and I'm in charge."
Agreed, Evander sent. Provisionally.
"Provisionally," she repeated, and huffed, and then the words came and she let them out in the order they'd been stacked in her chest all night.
"I don't deserve you."
Both wolves went still. She felt the protest start to build through the bond, two thoughts rising at once, and she pushed through it before they could land.
"No. Let me finish, you agreed provisionally, this is the provision. I don't deserve you in the way people say that when they haven't been paying attention. I know exactly what I brought to this. I know I'm powerful and I know I'm funny and I know I once put Bramholt on the ground in front of forty students." Cassian's tail thumped. "That's not what I mean. What I mean is that I spent fifty years learning to be small, and when you found me I was mid-sized at best, and flinching at my own hands, and you two, three hundred and fifty years old, two kings, a hundred years of silence between you and your own wreckage to sort out, you looked at me and you didn't say come back later when you're fixed. You didn't even say it quietly. You just started loving me at whatever size I was, and you kept loving me while I grew, and you never once made the growing feel like a debt." Her voice had gone rough. She let it. "You've been so good to me. So kind. So patient. Mira fought me for thirty years and lost, and you two never fought me at all, you just left the door open until I walked through it, and I love you. I love you both so much it doesn't fit in my chest and I'm a large-chested woman with a lot of room in there."
Cassian made a sound against her hip that was a laugh trying to be a growl, and the bond flooded warm with it, but underneath the humor she felt the other thing arrive, the thing they both meant, arriving together for once with no texture difference at all.
And we love you, it said. At every size. Past this one too.
You are not a debt we are repaying, Evander added, from just behind her ear, and his thought carried the weight of the man under the wolf, the one who pressed a nightshade sprig in a book for three days and said nothing about it. You are the reason the door stayed open on our side. A hundred years, Violet. We were not fixing you. We were learning to be worth walking through to.
She couldn't answer that. It went through her and settled somewhere the words didn't reach, and instead of answering she did what her hands had learned to do these three months, what they had always known how to do before the fifty years, which was to reach for what she loved without shrinking.
She stretched her arm along Evander's side, over the frost-silver of his shoulder, and her other hand was already in Cassian's fur, and she laid her head down gently on the black wolf's neck, her cheek against the warmth of him, her curls spilling over his coat.
Evander's chin came to rest over her hair.
They lay like that while the lamp burned down, three heartbeats in one room, two of them finding the third's rhythm without effort. Cassian's weight on her legs grew heavier as he sank toward sleep, and she felt his thought going soft and unspooled at the edges, half dream already, one more thing pushed through the bond before it dissolved.
Rings Thursday, it said, drowsy, golden. Ondrel. Three of them. Then the whole court can look at our hands and know.
"Then Wintercourt," she murmured into his neck. "And I'm at the center of the high table, and I'm wearing my marks, and my crown has my quartz in it."
Our quartz, the bond said, both of them, sleep-heavy, and the lamp guttered once more and gave up, and in the dark the eight posts stood with their carved wolves running, and the bed held all of them, and Violet slept without the stone, her hand buried in Cassian's shoulder, her head on one husband and her back held by the other, warm from the inside out.
She woke once in the deep hours, briefly, to the sound of shifting. Two men again, moving in the dark with the unhurried coordination of wolves rearranging a den. Cassian lifted her legs, slid in under the furs beside them, and gathered her against his chest without waking her fully. Evander came around her other side and drew the furs up over all three of them, and his hand, in the dark, rested a moment over her heart as though checking that the stone was still down.
It was.
"Sleep," he said, aloud, barely a breath.
And she did, all the way through until the pale light of a Thornhold morning came through the drapes, and Cassian's mouth found her shoulder, and the day began the way their days began, with kisses that had never once stayed at three.