On his Knees for a Ghost

The fact that he didn't tell her he knew was the first move, and that was the mistake which cost him more than any of the others.

They and Cassius discussed it for half the night, sitting in the study although the fire had long ago died down to just embers, going on with the same arguments but looking at them from different points of view until they had worn a groove into them. If I told her directly, I'd see three years of careful restraint all come apart at once and perhaps watch her run away, or even worse, watch her turn on a man who had deserved every bit of it. Alternatively, I could do nothing, let her retain the name which she had spent so much effort in obtaining, and then, in silence and without asking for anything in return, try to become a person worthy of being told the truth to when she eventually decided she was ready.

"If you say it to her at this time," Cassius remarked somewhere about halfway through the night, "you are taking the decision out of her hands a second time. She didn't choose the fire, nor did she choose what happened to her afterwards. If you go into there tomorrow and call her name, you'll be making a choice for her once more by deciding in advance what she is ready to hear before she has herself worked out what she wants to hear."

"If I remain silent," Kaelan said, "then I will be having to lie in her face every single day for as long as this takes."

You'd be lying in order to protect a decision that is hers and not to cover up one that is yours. Even if it doesn't seem like a very great difference from your point of view, there is a difference.

Kaelan gave it a great deal of thought, looking steadily into the embers, and finally chose the second one not since it seemed to him to be a clean option but because it was the only type of penance that a man in his position could still carry out. All the others would have been measures for his own comfort, and having decided at some point during the past few hours that his comfort no longer had any place near the top of the list, he had come to that conclusion.

It started small.

He ceased assigning her a guard for the corridors, even though according to protocol an envoy of her rank should have had one, and just told the steward that he had changed his mind without giving any further reason. He would, in a manner that caught him at awkward times, recall how much Wren had disliked being followed and had resented being looked after as if she might stray and bring disgrace upon the house; he preferred to take on myself the small risk involved in that decision rather than ask her to suffer the indignity of it once more without knowing the reason for having spared her.

During the second week he observed that she drank her tea without any honey. Yet the steward's entry regarding the Halloway delegation had supposed that she liked it sweet. As a gesture of courtesy, every tray delivered to her was always served with honey, assuming she had no particular preference. He recalled a night two years prior to the fire when she had told him, in a half-joking manner, that tea with honey had the taste of something prepared for a visitor rather than of a drink that a person truly wanted, and that it was a beverage for guests rather than one meant for someone who intended to stay. He altered the standard order without saying a word to anyone except the kitchen staff, and she became aware of it. He saw her become aware of it, and watched as a brief look of confusion crossed her face before she dismissed it as a coincidence, just as she now does with almost everything.

He started to go to the trade sessions with greater patience than he had in any of the negotiations over the previous three years, giving up points which he wasn't absolutely obliged to give up, not since Halloway's position merited it but because he had seen the way she had argued for it—with the same stubborn, exacting care that she had previously brought to the pack ledgers when the figures had been hers to keep. She had hated sloppy mathematics more than she had hated almost anything. Some part of him just wanted to see her be right about something in a room which had once punished her for being wrong about nothing at all. If that meant offering Halloway a slightly better deal than the pack had strictly needed to provide, then he was able to accept the expense.

Delphine was the first to notice, since Delphine noticed all the things that might be useful later on.

"You act differently when you're with that Halloway woman," she said one evening, spotting him all by himself in the corridor outside the study, in a light and carefree manner, using the tone she reserved for things she intended as sharp remarks. "Be careful, cousin, or people will begin to talk. It would be a most unpleasant situation, wouldn't it, for an Alpha to show favour to a foreign envoy so soon after..." She left it there. She had never needed to finish it; after three years she had mastered the art of a sentence which could do its harm simply by not completing itself.

"Finish it," Kaelan said in a quiet voice, and that particular tone in his voice caused Delphine to go still, since he had never used it with her before, not in all three years, not even during the most difficult times. "If you're going to call upon her, Delphine, then say her name. I saw your face when she was burning, and even though I've spent three years avoiding thinking too much about why I remember that so clearly, I'm now beginning to recall a great many things that I had stopped looking at three years ago. You'd be wise, if you were me, to be careful about which of those things you'd like me to look at next."

Without answering, she left the room, and for the first time since the fire Kaelan had felt in his chest a sensation that wasn't just guilt, something sharper, more useful and nearer to purpose.

Three nights later he saw Selene in the garden again, though this time she was not humming simply sitting on the low stone wall with her face turned towards the moon which was two days away from being full. He stayed at the gate and did not approach because he had told himself repeatedly, going over Cassius's advice until it became second nature, that he would let her determine all the distances between them from now on, having already made up his mind about her before without asking and refusing to do so in any way, however small it might be.

"Come in, Alpha," she said without turning round, "since I can hear you changing your mind not to."

He went over and took the seat at the far end of the wall, sitting close enough to be able to talk but far enough to leave her alone. For some time they said nothing, and the silence extended between them, not in the least uncomfortable, merely complete.

"Let me offer you an apology," he said at last. "Not for tonight, but for something that goes back further and has nothing at all to do with trade routes and everything to do with the sort of person I allowed myself to become a few years ago. I don't think you'll be able to grasp what I mean by that, nor do I entirely understand it myself." He folded his hands in his lap, a habit he had always had, one which he adopted whenever he was trying to find the right words but wasn't quite succeeding. "I once did something terrible to someone who had trusted me. I've been telling myself for three years that it was over. It hasn't been finished. I don't believe it ever will be, not really, not until I've done all that I can to win back even a small part of what I took. I intend to carry on with that, no matter how long it takes and no matter how small a part it turns out to be. I wanted you to know this about me. It has nothing to do with you. Recently, I've come to the conclusion that it's better to say true things badly than to keep saying careful things well, and you are the only person in this house to whom I seem able to say this particular true thing."

For a long time Selene said nothing, looking at the moon with her hands very still in her lap, although in the dark he could not see that they were shaking.

To tell a stranger something so strange is odd, she said at last, and her voice was not quite as steady as she had wanted it to be.

Perhaps," he said, "I've begun to believe that the only people left who might listen are strangers, since everyone else already has an opinion as to what took place. You don't, and that in some way makes it easier to state things plainly rather than at the same time putting forward my own argument."

She asked what had happened, but felt a bit bad about it since she already knew and because asking seemed a slight cruelty to him and an even smaller one to herself.

For a moment he remained quiet and then said, "I allowed someone whom I loved to die as a result of a crime she hadn't committed. I was there and saw it happen, and I told myself it was justice because it was simpler than having to admit that I was too overcome with grief and fear to put a single difficult question to her at the one time when it could have made a difference." His voice had become rough. "I've had three years to realise precisely what that cost me, and I don't believe I've finished learning that lesson yet."

She wasn't sure if she could answer that question directly. "Would she forgive you? If she could."

I don't know," he said, "I've given up the idea that I am entitled to an answer to that question. The only thing I actually get to do is make an effort without asking her whether it's working."

They stayed together for a little while longer in the cold garden, saying very little. The silence between them was completely unlike any other silence that either of them had come to endure since the fire; it had a heavy quality and seemed, in an unbearable way, as if a debt were being settled simultaneously by both of them, whether or not they had agreed to it.

On her way back to her rooms afterwards, Selene pressed her arms firmly against her body in order to prevent her hands from shaking any more than they already were.

He doesn't know,' she told herself, 'because a man is admitting it to a ghost whom he doesn't consider to be real.'

She nearly believed it; in three years she had become very good at nearly believing anything she needed to.

But a new and unfamiliar aspect of her—the part which had gone silent when I had allowed someone she loved to die as a result of a crime she hadn't committed—had already started keeping a second list, quietly and without her consent. Not a list of what he owed her.

Even though everything else had happened—despite the fire, despite the fury, and despite three years of carefully intended hatred—some traitorous part of her still wanted to give it to him.

Neither did she sleep that night; she stayed lying on the covers, still in her clothes, and kept going over the conversation until it ceased to make sense as words and had become merely a shape, a pressure behind her ribs which wouldn't stay still.

In the morning she was at the stables where she was looking over the horses as she usually did, a habit from her life prior to this one which she had never fully explained and about which Selene had never fully asked.

"I don't think you've slept," Ivy said, still not looking up from the horse's foreleg she was examining.

"I didn't."

"Kaelan again."

"It was Kaelan once more," Selene said as she leaned her back against the door of the stall, arms folded, and watched Ivy at work. "He apologised to me last night, not for anything in particular, but simply apologised generally for being the sort of man who would have someone he loved die because of something she hadn't done."

For a moment Ivy held her hands still on the horse's leg before resuming her action. "It's rather strange for a man to confide that sort of thing in a woman whom he thinks is a stranger."

"That's what I said."

What did you reply?

"That's nothing useful," Selene remarked as she watched a stable boy lead a second horse past them and waited until he was out of hearing before continuing. "I asked him whether he thought she'd forgive him. If she could."

"And?"

He stated that he no longer supposed he was entitled to an answer regarding that question; the only thing he regarded as his duty was to make the attempt, without asking whether it was having any effect.

Ivy sat up straighter in the horse and looked properly at her for the first time since arriving, her expression being careful and searching. "That's a good answer—rather suspiciously so, considering that he's supposed to be grieving over a stranger."

"I know."

"Selene," Ivy put down the brush she had been holding and joined beside her at the stall door, coming closer than normal and speaking in a low voice even though there was no one nearby to hear. "You really have to think about this, not just go through it on a feeling. If he does know, or even merely suspects it, and yet is choosing to remain silent and is instead quietly transforming himself into someone deserving of being forgiven without asking you for anything in return, that's no small matter. That's not the same man who stood in that clearing three years before."

"I know that too."

Sure you do? From my point of view it seems as if you're allowing yourself to be persuaded into believing that a man could undo something like that with just tea and an apology in a garden.

Selene said that she wasn't going to allow herself to believe anything, speaking more sharply than she intended; all she was doing was listening, and that was all. She could listen to a man without forgiving him.

Ivy looked at her for a long time and, whatever it was that she noticed, decided to put it aside at least for the present, even though her concerned expression didn't vanish. "Just make sure you're actually carrying out the right one," she said in the end, "since from this point on it becomes harder to tell."