Chapter 24 — The Question Kael Asked Twice

Kael returned to Vale three days later, ostensibly to oversee the guard he had insisted on posting at our gates, though I suspected, from the particular care he took to seek me out within an hour of his arrival — before he had even spoken to the captain of his own men, before he had eaten, still travel-dusted from the ride — that the gate itself had been only part of his reason for coming.

He found me in the glasshouse again. It had become, without either of us quite acknowledging it aloud, the place where we said the things too dangerous to say anywhere else — a small, private country carved out of two larger and more complicated lives, bounded by clouded glass and the sweet, heavy scent of my mother's moon-lilies. This time he did not open with news of guards or investigations. He simply stood in the doorway for a long moment, still in his travel coat, watching me among the pale flowers, before he spoke at all.

"I asked you a question a week ago," he said. "In this same room. I don't think I ever got a proper answer."

I knew, immediately, which question he meant. Have we met before. I had answered it once, that first night, with a single flat no that had bought me nothing but a longer silence and a sharper suspicion in the days that followed — a suspicion that had, I understood now, led him carefully and deliberately toward every loose thread I had left unguarded since.

"You want the truth this time," I said, setting down the pruning knife I had been holding, more for something to occupy my hands than any real purpose.

"I want whatever you're willing to give me," Kael said. "I've learned, this past week, watching you dodge and deflect and half-answer everything I ask, not to demand more than that. I don't think demanding has ever once worked on you, and I'm beginning to suspect it never will."

I turned to face him fully, and found something almost like relief in finally doing it — in letting the careful mask I had worn for weeks slip, if only partway, if only for him.

"Yes," I said. "We've met before. In the life I remember — the one that ended, and sent me back here — we met almost exactly as we met in this one. A glasshouse. A stranger's face I already half-recognized before I understood why. It felt, then, the way it felt this time: like something I had been waiting for without knowing it, though I would have died before admitting that to you."

Something moved behind his eyes, quick and unguarded — surprise, and beneath it, something warmer, gone before I could name it fully and folded back beneath the composed stillness he wore like armor. "And then?"

"And then a great many things happened that I am not yet ready to tell you," I said, honest enough to hold his gaze while I said it, though it cost me. "Some of them good. I won't pretend there was nothing good in it, because that would be its own kind of lie. But most of them were not, and the worst of them, I am not ready to hand you yet. Not tonight."

"Did I hurt you." It was not phrased as a question, though his voice rose faintly at the very end of it, as though some small, stubborn part of him was hoping, against every instinct telling him otherwise, that I would say no and mean it.

I thought of snow, and a knife beneath my ribs, and three unbridged steps of distance while I bled into the cold and he watched with a face that gave away nothing at all until it was already too late to matter.

"Yes," I said quietly. "You did. Badly enough that I do not think either of us will fully understand the shape of it until I'm ready to say more."

He absorbed that in silence, his jaw tight, his eyes fixed somewhere past my shoulder on the tarnished old mirror in the corner, and I watched him carry the weight of an accusation he did not yet understand, could not yet defend against, had no memory of earning — and chose, I could see it plainly in the set of his shoulders, the deliberate stillness of a man holding himself in check, not to argue with regardless.

"Then I suppose," he said finally, low and rough, each word chosen with obvious care, "I have a great deal to make certain I do differently this time. Whatever it was. Whatever I failed to do, or did too carelessly, or didn't do soon enough." His gray eyes came back to mine, steady despite everything. "I would like the chance to prove that to you, Liora. Not with words. I don't imagine you'd believe words, not from me, not yet. With time, if you'll allow it."

It was not an apology. He had nothing yet to apologize for, not in this life, not in any way he could name or understand or take responsibility for. But it was, I thought, watching him standing there among my mother's flowers with the last of the day's light behind him, something almost as valuable: a promise made in advance, by a man who did not yet know the full shape of what he was promising, and meant it regardless of the not-knowing.

I did not tell him it might not be enough.

I was no longer entirely certain, standing there with his gray eyes steady on mine and the moon-lilies breathing their pale scent into the cooling air between us, that I believed that myself.

He did not press further that night. He seemed to understand, without needing to be told, that I had already given him more than I had planned to, and that anything more would have to come at its own pace, on its own terms, not dragged out of me in a moment of fear and gratitude I might regret by morning. Instead he crossed the small distance between us, slow enough that I could have stepped back if I'd wanted to, and reached for my hand — not to hold it, only to turn it gently palm-up in the dying light, studying the fading marks the practice blade had left there weeks ago.

"These are healing well," he said, and there was something almost absurdly ordinary in the observation, after everything else we had said to each other in this room.

"Maren says I'm still holding the grip wrong."

"Maren is usually right about such things." The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile, but close enough to it that something in my chest loosened slightly. "I fought beside her once, years ago, before she left Vale service. She broke my wrist in a training bout and apologized for it exactly once, out of what I understood to be pure formality, and then told me I should have blocked better."

"That sounds like her."

"It does." He let my hand go, carefully, and stepped back, and the ordinary warmth of the moment cooled into something more careful again, though not unkindly. "Get some rest, Liora. Whatever tomorrow brings, I imagine you'll need it."

He left before I could find an answer to that, and I stood alone among my mother's moon-lilies for a long while after, listening to his footsteps fade toward the gate, and understood — with a clarity that frightened me more than the arrows in the wood had — that I had just handed a piece of my second life to the very man who had ended my first one, and that some quiet, traitorous part of me did not regret it at all.