Chapter 21 — What the Dead Man Knew

Kael did not let me walk back to the house alone.

He did not ask permission this time, and I did not refuse him, which told me more about my own state of mind than I cared to admit. We walked the orchard path together in silence, Corvin trailing a careful distance behind, and I spent the whole of it turning the dead man's message over in my head like a stone I could not stop touching.

Tell the girl she is not the only one who remembers.

Not tell Liora. Not tell the Vale daughter. Someone had known to call me the girl, as though the words carried a weight that needed no name attached, as though whoever gave that order assumed the message would find me regardless of what name I answered to. It was a small distinction. It sat in my chest like a splinter anyway, working its way deeper with every step back toward the house.

"You've gone somewhere else," Kael said, when we reached the edge of the orchard wall.

"I'm thinking."

"About the message."

"About who would know to send it." I stopped walking, and he stopped with me, patient in a way that still surprised me every time I noticed it. "Whoever arranged tonight didn't just want me dead, Alpha Draven. If they had, they'd have sent better men, or more of them, or simply waited for a night I wasn't walking with a trained Gamma's lessons in my legs. They wanted me frightened. Frightened enough to reach for whatever advantage I have and use it carelessly."

"You think this was a test."

"I think," I said slowly, "that someone wants to know exactly how much I remember, and exactly how I'll behave once I understand I'm not alone in remembering it."

Kael's jaw tightened. In the fading light his face had lost the careful composure I had come to expect from him, replaced by something rawer, something closer to the fear I had glimpsed once before in a different life, at a much worse hour.

"Then you'll tell me," he said. "Now. Whatever this is. I am done circling it, Liora, and I am not willing to guess my way through whatever danger is standing behind you while you decide, piece by piece, how much of the truth I've earned."

I looked at him for a long moment — at the sharp, exhausted lines of his face, at the blood still dried along one knuckle from a fight he had won for my sake without being asked — and felt the old, familiar temptation rise in me, the same temptation that had ruined me once already: the desire to hand this man everything, all of it, and let him carry some part of the weight I had been carrying alone since I woke into a body three years younger than my grief.

I did not give in to it. Not fully.

"I remember things that haven't happened yet," I said instead, choosing the plainest version of the truth I could bear to offer. "Not everything. Not perfectly. Some of what I remember has already stopped being true, because things are changing the moment I touch them. But I remember enough to know that someone spent years building toward something that was supposed to happen to me, in a future I no longer entirely trust, and I remember enough to know that whoever they are, they are patient, and careful, and willing to kill a man twice over to keep their plans tidy."

Kael did not laugh. He did not recoil, or call for a healer, or look at me the way I had half-expected — the way one looks at a woman who has finally, publicly, come undone. He only watched me, very still, the way he had watched me across the candlelight at Draven Hall, weighing something on a scale I still could not see.

"How long have you known this," he said finally, "about yourself?"

"Since before I met you. In this life, I mean." I hesitated, and then let myself say the rest, because the dead man's message had already cracked the door I had been holding shut for weeks, and there seemed little use pretending it was still closed. "There's another life underneath this one. I lived it once. I died at the end of it. I woke up here instead, three years earlier, and I have spent every day since trying to decide how much of what I remember I can trust."

"And I'm in it," Kael said. "The life you remember."

It was not a question, not really, but I answered it as though it were.

"Yes."

"Badly, I think," he said, very quietly, watching my face for confirmation he did not truly need. "Given how carefully you avoid telling me the rest."

I said nothing, and the silence between us was answer enough for both of us. Above the orchard wall, the first stars were beginning to show through the thinning dusk, and somewhere behind us Corvin shifted his weight, a reminder that we were not, in fact, entirely alone, and that whatever else this conversation might become, it could not become everything tonight.

"I imagine," Kael said slowly, "that whatever I did in that other life is the reason you flinched the first time I said your name. The reason you looked at me, that first night in the glasshouse, as though I were something to be carefully managed rather than simply met."

"Yes," I admitted. "That's part of it."

"Will I ever hear the rest?"

"When I'm ready," I said. "Not because I'm punishing you for something you haven't done yet in this life. Because I'm still deciding, some days, whether I'm strong enough to say it aloud without it unmaking me all over again."

Something in his expression gentled at that, the sharp urgency of a moment ago softening into something more patient. "Then I'll wait," he said. "I meant what I told you before. I'd rather have the whole truth late than a comfortable lie now."

"We'll speak of it again," Kael said, echoing his own promise from the week before, though his voice had lost its earlier patience, worn thin now by something closer to urgency. "Properly. Soon. But tonight I want guards at your gate whether you grant me leave or not, Liora, and I want you to understand that this time I am not asking your permission. A man is dead twice over because someone wanted you frightened. I will not gamble your life on the strength of your pride."

I opened my mouth to argue, out of habit more than conviction, and found I did not have the will for it tonight.

"Fine," I said. "Tonight. Not forever."

"Tonight," he agreed, "is enough to start with."