Chapter 5: What the Lantern Knew

I found Kian in the barn the next evening, not because I needed anything, but because I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about his open palm on the breakfast table, and some reckless part of me had decided one more night of not testing the theory was one night too many.

He was crouched by the far stall, working a rattling hinge back into place on an old lantern, though I suspected, watching him, that the hinge had stopped being the actual point of the exercise sometime around the third night in a row he’d found a reason to be out here alone. He looked up when the door creaked, and something in his face eased that I hadn’t realized was tense until it wasn’t.

“You came back,” he said.

“I did.”

“Tell me if I’m wrong,” he said, setting the lantern down carefully, “but I don’t think you’re here about the hinge.”

“You’d be right.”

He stood, slow, giving me every chance to change my mind, to laugh it off, to make this into something smaller and safer than what it actually was. I didn’t take any of those chances. I crossed the barn instead, closing the distance between us until I was close enough to see his breath catch.

“I need to say something first,” I said, and he went still, waiting, giving me the room to get it out however clumsily it came. “I don’t know how to do this. Any of it. Being wanted without a catch attached. My whole life, wanting has come with conditions I couldn’t meet … be smaller, be different, be less. I don’t know what it looks like when it doesn’t.”

“It looks like this,” he said simply. “Whatever you’re bracing for, it isn’t coming. Not from me.”

“You can’t promise that. Nobody can promise that.”

“No,” he agreed. “But I can promise I’m not going to be the one who breaks it. I’ve had a long time to think about what kind of man I want to be, standing in my sister’s shadow, watching everyone assume I stepped back from Thorneheart’s leadership because I wasn’t strong enough for it. I know what it feels like to be underestimated for reasons that have nothing to do with what’s actually true about you. I’m not going to do that to someone else. Especially not to you.”

“I’ve been thinking about your hand,” I said. “All day. I know how that sounds.”

“It sounds like exactly what I’ve been thinking too.” His voice had gone low, rough at the edges. “I haven’t been able to work today without my mind going back to it. What it felt like. Whether it would happen again.”

“Only one way to find out.”

I reached for his hand before I could talk myself out of it, threading my fingers through his slowly, giving the moment room to arrive instead of rushing it.

The jolt came anyway, sharp and immediate, but this time neither of us pulled back. This time we let it happen … a current of heat that ran up both our arms and settled somewhere behind my ribs, exactly where the bond-mark sat, exactly where it had been burning, faint and unexplained, since the night Cassian rejected me.

“That’s not static,” I whispered. “That’s not coincidence. That’s…

“I know what it is.” Kian’s other hand came up to cradle my jaw, careful, giving me every chance to step back. I didn’t. “I’ve known since the training yard, if I’m honest. I just didn’t trust myself to say it out loud, because I didn’t want it to be wishful thinking dressed up as something real.”

“Say it now.”

“Mate,” he said, the word cracking slightly on its way out, like it cost him something precious to spend it. “I think you’re my mate, Ivy. Not the kind a ceremony assigns you in front of two hundred witnesses who don’t actually care whether it’s true. The kind you find on your own, in frost-dead grass, on a night when the whole world’s telling you you’re not worth choosing. I chose you before I had any proof the moon goddess agreed with me. Now I think she does too.”

My chest cracked open, wide and terrified and impossibly warm all at once.

“I think I might feel the same,” I whispered. “I’m just not as brave as you are about saying it first.”

“You don’t have to be brave about it tonight. Just honest.”

“Then I’m terrified,” I admitted, “and I want this anyway. I want you anyway. That’s the most honest thing I have.”

He didn’t wait for anything else. He leaned down, slow enough that I could have stopped him, and kissed me … soft, questioning, like he was asking permission with his mouth instead of his words. I answered by curling my free hand into the front of his shirt and kissing him back, fierce and certain in a way nothing about my life had been in nineteen years, the jolt between our joined hands settling into something warmer and steadier the longer we stayed like that, tangled together in a barn that smelled like hay and lantern oil and, underneath it, something that felt unmistakably like home.

When we finally broke apart, both of us breathing unsteadily, he rested his forehead against mine.

“I know this is fast,” he said. “I know you barely know me. I’m not asking you to promise me forever tonight.”

“I know.” I let myself smile, small and disbelieving. “I think I’d like to find out what forever might look like anyway. Slowly. If you’re patient enough for that.”

“I’ve got nothing but time,” he said, “and nowhere else I’d rather spend it.”

We stood there a while longer, hands still joined, the lantern forgotten on the floor beside us, and for the first time since the night my own family had watched me be discarded without a single word in my defense, I let myself believe that something good was allowed to happen to me without a catch hiding somewhere inside it.

“Can I ask you something,” I said, “and have you actually answer it, instead of being careful with me the way you and Dorian have been about everything else this week?”

“Always.”

“Does this … whatever this is, whatever the jolt means … does it worry you? Being tied to something that came with no ceremony, no witnesses, nothing anyone else can point to and call official?”

He considered the question seriously, the way he considered most things, instead of rushing to reassure me. “No,” he said finally. “I think ceremonies are for people who need an audience to believe something’s real. I don’t need two hundred witnesses to know what I felt in that training yard, or what I’m feeling right now, standing here with your hand in mine. Nobody talked me into this. Nobody’s father invoked a clause to force it. I chose it. You chose it. That’s the whole ceremony, as far as I’m concerned.”

“I like that answer.”

“Good. I meant it.” He brought our joined hands up, pressed a slow, careful kiss to my knuckles, and I felt the jolt again, softer this time, warmer, like something settling into place instead of announcing itself. “I know we still have to figure out what this means, practically. Whether it changes anything with Maren, with Dorian’s theories, with whatever Ironwood decides to do once they realize you’re not coming back. I don’t have answers to any of that tonight.”

“I don’t need answers tonight.”

“No,” he agreed, quiet. “Tonight I think we’re allowed to just have this.”

I didn’t know yet how many more catches were still coming … how quickly the war at the border would arrive, how much my own sister’s jealousy would cost us both, how many hard choices still waited on the other side of this one soft, unguarded night. That night, in that barn, with his hand warm around mine and no audience but a forgotten lantern and a rattling hinge that had never really needed fixing at all, I didn’t need to know any of it.

I only needed to know that for once, wanting something hadn’t cost me anything at all.