What She Kept Alive

The ring opened before dawn.

I fell onto the same marble where my body had died. There was no stain left. Someone had polished the floor so thoroughly that I could see Seraphine reflected beneath me.

She wore a different robe. I hated myself for noticing.

"Stand," she said.

"I don't have legs that work anymore."

Her mouth tightened. A thread of magic lifted me, arranging my soul into its human shape. I stood without feeling the floor.

"We must dissolve the life oath."

The words sounded absurdly ordinary. Like asking me to close a window.

I looked at the faint gold line across her wrist. Its twin circled mine. We had made the oath when her magic core was broken and the court physicians told me to stop wasting remedies.

I had offered her half my life.

She had refused until fever took her voice. Then she held my hand while I spoke the words, too weak to argue, and we survived together.

"You said nothing could separate us while it existed."

"This is necessary."

"For him?"

She did not answer.

"A life oath grows into the soul, Seraphine. Cutting it isn't removing a bracelet."

"I know."

Her fingers trembled once before she steadied them. I saw it and despised the little spark of hope it struck in me.

She drew the gold thread from my chest. Memories moved inside it: her fever breaking, my first successful human transformation, her hand closing around mine under a table while a lord called me an animal.

"Hold still."

"Where would I go?"

She cut the first strand.

I pitched forward. Her arm caught my shoulder, the movement swift and instinctive. For a breath, I rested against her.

Then footsteps sounded outside the hall.

She withdrew her hand.

I struck the floor hard enough for light to fracture through my chest.

"Again," I said before she could tell me to endure it.

The second strand broke. Somewhere far away, bells began ringing for morning prayer. I counted them because counting was easier than begging.

By the seventh bell, the final strand had snapped.

The gold around her wrist vanished.

I waited to feel empty. Instead, I felt myself leaking away, pieces loosening like wet paper in water.

Seraphine knelt sharply. She pressed a green stone into my brow, and its warmth fastened the broken edges together.

I knew that stone. The last heart of a forest that no longer existed. She had carried it untouched through a fever that nearly killed her.

"Why waste it?" I asked.

Her gaze met mine, and for an instant she looked almost angry with me.

"A damaged soul cannot survive the binding. Absorb it."

Of course.

She was keeping her gift in good condition.

Lucien entered as she peeled the familiar seal from my throat. That removal hurt less. I watched the mark crumble between her fingers and felt one small, unexpected relief.

For the first time since arriving in this world, no one owned my shape.

I had no body in which to use that freedom, but it was mine.

"He will obey only the sword's master afterward?" Lucien asked.

Seraphine rose.

"The old seal will not interfere."

Lucien smiled. "Then we should begin purification. His resentment has become quite pronounced."

"Perhaps that's because you framed me."

He looked wounded. "Lady Seraphine, you hear how confused he is."

She permitted the rite.

They bound me within a silver circle. Lucien approached with three narrow stakes, each inscribed with prayers I had once heard spoken over the dying.

"These remove corruption," he said.

The first entered my shoulder.

Pain burst through me without the mercy of a body that could faint. I bit down on nothing. My hands curled around invisible air.

Seraphine watched from outside the circle.

I looked directly at her and refused to ask.

Lucien drove the other two stakes together.

My chest split open in light.

"Enough."

Seraphine was beside him before the word finished. She shattered the remaining stakes in his hand.

"That intensity was not authorized."

Lucien bowed quickly. "I wanted to spare him a prolonged procedure. I didn't realize he was so fragile."

She dismissed him.

When the doors closed, she opened a wound over her own heart. Two bright drops fell into my broken soul. I remembered how much power such blood cost her.

"You could find another spirit," I said. "Why trouble yourself?"

She pressed her hand harder against her chest.

"Stop talking."

Warmth swallowed the pain. I woke later with my head against her shoulder in a place that had no walls.

White trees grew beneath a dark sky. A small house stood among them, its roof crooked in a way I recognized. We had built that house together, long before she returned to court.

This was her inner sanctuary.

She had once told me that opening it to another soul was more intimate than sharing a bed. A guest could break the mind that sheltered them.

"Why didn't you tell me it hurt?" she asked.

I stared at her.

"Would you have stopped?"

Her arm tightened around me.

"You must preserve your strength."

"For Lucien's sword. Yes. You've explained."

I pushed away. Beyond the trees, something shook the dark sky. Her emotion, perhaps, but I would not make another kindness out of something she refused to name.

She returned me to a glass soul lantern in our old rooms.

By afternoon, Lucien arrived with servants.

"Remove everything contaminated by his presence."

I watched them lift the leather vest I had sewn for her. The stitches wandered. She used to claim they confused enemy blades.

Lucien dropped it into the hearth.

Next came our wooden doll. We had made it during a rainstorm, arguing about the face. She carved a scowl. I painted a smile over it.

"Our unfortunate child," she had called it, setting it between our cups.

Lucien snapped it at the waist.

"A familiar imagining himself a father. How embarrassing."

The wine followed. Ninety-nine jars, one for each winter we had survived. We had planned to open the hundredth when we could finally stop running.

The servants broke them in the courtyard.

Wine spread between the stones. Nobody looked toward the lantern.

I had thought leaving would be the hardest thing I ever did.

Watching those jars break taught me otherwise.

"Wayfarer," I said when the room emptied. "Can you remove memories?"

"I can seal the experiences bound to this realm. The emotional attachments will become inaccessible with them."

I looked at the broken doll burning beneath the vest.

"Do it when we leave."

"You may lose more than pain."

"I know."

I did not want to keep loving her in a world where she could no longer reach me.