This Time, I Asked Him

I stared at him.

"Do you want to end it?"

His answer came so quickly it nearly collided with my question.

"No."

I let out a breath. "Then you might have started there."

He looked away, rubbing his thumb over the ring on his own hand.

"I wanted you to know the choice existed before I told you how much I dislike it."

"How much?"

His mouth tightened.

"Elara."

"I would like to hear it."

He turned toward me fully.

"I want you in my rooms and at my table. I want to complain about your books appearing on every surface and find them there again the next morning. I want to hear what you think before I have to spend an hour persuading you to tell me. I am tired of calculating how little I can ask for without making you feel obliged to give it."

My eyes burned.

"That is quite a lot," I said.

"I warned you about the selfishness."

I took his hand.

"I do feel grateful. You saved my life. You stayed beside my bed when I could not bear to be alone. Those things matter to me. They are part of loving you. They don't make the rest of it imaginary."

He closed his fingers around mine.

"I know what it is to stay somewhere because I have nowhere else to go," I continued. "This feels different. I can imagine leaving you. I can imagine finding work and a room and living quite adequately. It sounds awful. I would spend every breakfast wanting to tell you something."

His forehead came down against mine.

"I could visit," he said.

"You would be unbearable in a small rented room."

"I have been excellent in cellars."

I laughed into his shirt, and he held me until the laughter became something softer.

"I want a life with you," I said. "I also want work that is mine. I want to help restore the boundary houses, and I want to come back to these towns without feeling I am asking permission to leave you."

"I can manage that."

"Some days you will manage it badly."

"Almost certainly."

I drew back enough to look at him.

"Then some days I will remind you."

He kissed me with the sort of relief that made my knees unreliable.

We went north the next morning.

At the city gates, I looked back once. The cathedral still stood, scarred above its doors. Men were taking down the royal muster banners. Ordinary people crossed the square carrying baskets, arguing about prices, making room for the work of living.

I did not feel healed. I felt able to leave.

At Blackthorn Keep, Tavin met us with a loaf he had helped bake. It was shaped, he informed me, like a dragon.

"The wings collapsed," Nell whispered.

"I can see that," Ronan said solemnly. "A condition with which I am familiar."

We ate it with too much butter in my sitting room. Later, when the keep had quieted, I carried my books through the connecting door.

Ronan watched from his bed.

"Are you moving in?"

"The books are. I am still considering the wardrobe."

He lifted the blankets on the empty side.

"A promising negotiation."

I climbed in beside him, and the ease of it made my chest ache.

Spring reached the mountains slowly. Snow withdrew from the terraces. The broken balustrade was repaired, although Ronan refused to let the mason remove one scarred stone I had washed with shaking hands.

I asked him why he wanted to keep it.

"You were there," he said, as if that explained everything.

In the mornings, I worked with the keep's librarian and the human wardkeepers. We made clean copies of the original compact, restoring the words that had been cut away. Dragons came to lend fire to the eastern basins. Across the river, people learned again how to hold their side of the agreement.

The work was slow. Two houses had to be rebuilt from their foundations. At another, the keeper refused to enter until Ronan arrived without soldiers and listened to her grievances over terrible tea.

He returned with three pages of requests and a headache.

"You might try sweetening the tea," I said.

"I am trying to rebuild relations between nations."

"That seems a reason to offer biscuits."

He took biscuits on his next visit. He refused to tell me whether they helped. The keeper sent an appreciative note to Nell.

News came from the capital in ordinary packets. Isolde had been stripped of authority by the council while her crimes were tried before representatives of the border towns. Her household accounts and the records of the prison were opened. The guards who had killed my father were named in testimony; his safe-conduct letter was returned to me with its broken seal.

I read it beside the window until the light failed.

Ronan sat nearby, saying nothing. When I finally set it down, I went to him.

Cedric's public account cost him his command and the honors attached to it. The council required him to answer for his part in the imprisonment and the attempted sacrifice. He did not send me another request to meet.

I was glad.

Some evenings, I still woke with a hand at my throat. Ronan learned to say my name before touching me. Some nights he woke already standing, looking for a door that was not locked anymore.

We grew familiar with one another's difficult hours.

We also learned less solemn things. He could not sing. He cheated at cards by watching my face. He liked having his hair brushed but would rather face an army than ask for it.

He discovered that I was untidy with ink, competitive about word games, and capable of holding a grudge against a badly written book for days.

It was a satisfying collection of discoveries.

At the first spring gathering, he finally took me to a ball.

I wore the green gown with its altered collar. He wore black, which did not distinguish the occasion, but Nell had persuaded him into a waistcoat embroidered with gold.

He looked magnificent and mildly annoyed. I loved him so much that I had to stop in the doorway.

"Something wrong?" he asked.

"No. Come here."

He bent when I caught his collar. Several conversations stopped while I kissed him.

"An excellent start," he murmured.

We danced badly for the first few steps because I kept looking at his face. Then he drew me closer, and I remembered how to follow a rhythm without surrendering all decisions to the person holding me.

Halfway through the evening, he asked whether I wished to leave.

"With you?"

"I did promise."

I took his hand.

On the terrace above the valley, a small table waited beside the repaired balustrade. There were candles, bread, and a bottle of wine. Mara stood beside Nell, looking suspiciously pleased with herself. Tavin held a cushion so carefully that I thought it must contain something breakable.

Ronan stopped.

"Elara."

"This is my arrangement," I said. "You may complain after I finish."

He looked from the table to the three witnesses, then back to me.

I took a folded paper from my sleeve. My handwriting shook a little at the bottom, where I had rewritten the last line too many times.

"I don't want to erase our first oath," I told him. "I chose you then. I understood what I was doing, even if I didn't understand you yet. But there were soldiers on the stairs, and I was bleeding on your hands. There were things I didn't have time to say."

He reached for me. I took his hands and turned them palm upward.

"The first time, I asked you to save my life. This time, I am asking you to share it."

His eyes closed briefly.

"I want your bad temper before breakfast. I want the books you bring me when you cannot think of a reason to knock. I want a place beside you when things are difficult and when they are so ordinary that we forget to be grateful for them."

My voice trembled. I steadied it.

"Ronan Blackthorn, will you stay married to me?"

He laughed, breathless, and drew my hands against his chest.

"Yes," he said. "For as long as you will have me. And when I become difficult, I trust you will remember that you proposed this with witnesses."

Nell sniffed. Mara handed her a handkerchief without looking away from us.

Tavin presented the cushion. On it lay our rings, which I had borrowed that afternoon under the pretense of having mine resized.

Ronan shook his head at me as I slipped his back onto his finger.

"Devious woman."

"You married me after watching me steal a knife."

"I should have paid closer attention."

He put my ring on my hand, brushed his thumb over the healed burn beneath it, and kissed me while the candles shivered in the spring wind.

Later, when our witnesses had left us with the wine, he held out his hand.

"Come with me."

I raised an eyebrow.

His mouth curved. "Would you like to come with me?"

"Much better. Where?"

He glanced toward the open sky.

My stomach dropped, then rose with an excitement I could not quite contain.

"Slowly," I said.

"At first."

I took his hand and followed him beyond the candles, toward the wide terrace where there was room for his wings.

The change was easier this time. He stepped away from me, and the air shimmered with heat. Then the black dragon lowered himself along the terrace, one wing folded flat to make a path to his shoulders.

I climbed with considerably less grace than I had imagined.

"If you laugh, I am getting down," I warned him.

A low rumble moved beneath my knees.

I settled between the ridges at the base of his neck. The stone was a long way below, and he had not even stood yet.

My ring warmed.

I put my palm against his scales.

"I am ready."

His wings opened.

The terrace fell away so gently that I did not understand we had left it until the candles became small points of light. I caught my breath, pressed closer to his neck, and felt the steady strength moving beneath me.

We rose above the keep. Windows glowed along the mountainside. Farther south, the paired boundary houses shone on opposite banks of the river, their light meeting over the water.

Ronan turned into the wind. I laughed, startled by the sound of my own happiness in all that empty sky.

He circled back at once, checking on me.

"I am all right," I said, stroking the warm scales beneath my hand. "You can go a little faster."

His answer traveled through the ring before his wings moved.

We flew toward the last light over the mountains, and I lifted my face to meet it.