Chapter 388: The table 3

"I thought that was it. I thought I’d ruined it." Her fingers tightened on the porcelain. "But then I went to him, and I said I was sorry, and I meant it. And he listened. And then he forgave me, even though he didn’t have to. He was so... understanding. I still can’t believe it."

She laughed, a short, shaky sound.

"We aren’t the way we were before. Maybe we never will be. Something broke and it doesn’t fit back the same. But it feels like we’re building it again, slowly, from the beginning. And I think this time I want to build it properly."

The room was silent.

Somewhere beneath them a clock ticked, and a door closed on the ground floor.

Kiara glanced up, half afraid of what she would see, and found her father smiling at her.

"What?" she asked.

"Nothing." He shook his head. "It is only that people say a great many things about my daughter. They say she is rude. They say she is proud, and cocky, and a little cruel with her tongue." His voice was warm.

"I have always known it was only armor. But I never once thought I would hear you say I want to build it properly about anyone."

Kiara dropped her gaze. Her eyes stung, and she blamed the steam.

"So when do I meet this remarkable young man?" he asked.

"Father."

"I am only asking. A father has a right to see the person who has turned his daughter into a scholar." He leaned forward, eyes bright with mischief. "And do not worry. I promise I will not have him killed for taking you away from me. I will merely glare at him over dinner a few times."

Kiara snorted despite herself, and then they were both laughing, the quiet, helpless laugh of two people who had needed to for a long time.

"When the time comes," she said, wiping her eye with her wrist. "I’ll introduce him. When the time comes."

"I will hold you to that."

The laughter faded, and the silence that came after was gentle. The tea had cooled, and neither of them had touched it for a while.

Then Kiara asked the question she had been carrying all evening.

"Father... how did you and Mother meet?"

He did not answer at once.

The smile on his face changed, becoming softer, and his gaze drifted past her to the window as if the evening outside held something older than a garden.

"You know that story," he said. "I have told it to you a hundred times."

"I know. Tell it again."

"You will only correct me where I get it wrong."

"Yes," Kiara said. "That’s the point."

He huffed a laugh and settled back in the chair, lacing his fingers across his chest.

"Very well. It is a little like yours, in its way. It started with something going badly wrong."

He was quiet for a moment, gathering it.

"I was young, then. Younger than I looked, and far more foolish than I knew. My father had given me a command, a small one, and I led a party of twelve into the eastern pine forests to survey the old border road. We were a day from the nearest village when the ambush came. It was bandits, or what I took for bandits, hiding in the trees on both sides of the road. They struck without warning, and within a quarter of an hour, every man in my party was dead. All but me."

"And you were nearly dead too," Kiara said softly.

"I was. A spear caught me under the ribs, here." He tapped his chest, a hand’s width left of his breastbone.

"A finger’s breadth more to the right and it would have gone through my heart. I remember the road tilting. I remember crawling toward the sound of water. After that I remember nothing."

He paused for effect.

"When I opened my eyes, I was lying on a narrow bed in a small, warm room that smelled of herbs. The ceiling was low, and a fire was burning. There was a woman sitting by the bed with a bowl in her lap, and she was glaring at me."

Kiara smiled. This was the part she liked.

"She had the longest black hair I had ever seen. It was tied back with a piece of green cord, and half of it had come loose and hung over her shoulder, and she did not appear to care. Her eyes were blue, a deep blue, the colour of the sky just before a storm, and she was looking at me as if I were a stray dog that had dragged itself onto her porch and bled on her floor." His voice cracked with fondness.

"The first thing she said to me was, ’You are very heavy, and you snore.’"

Kiara laughed out loud.

"I could barely move," he said, "and I had apparently been unconscious for six days. And that was her opening remark. I told her that was no way to speak to a wounded nobleman, and she said that a wounded nobleman who snored that loudly deserved no better, and then she poured something foul into my mouth and told me to swallow."

"You said it tasted like old boots."

"It tasted like old boots and socks." He grinned.

"But the wound closed. Within a week, I could sit. Within two, I could stand. And all the while she was there, in that tiny house, humming under her breath as she ground her herbs and cooked her soup. She made me laugh when it hurt to laugh. She called me ’Lord Stubborn,’ because I would not stay in bed. She made me carry water when I should have been resting, and told me that a man who could argue could certainly lift a bucket."

His smile deepened.

"I do not know when it happened. Somewhere between the soup and the bucket, I suppose. One evening I looked across the room and thought, I do not want to leave. And then I thought, I am in trouble."

Kiara pulled her knees up onto the chair, hugging them, her tea forgotten.