Chapter 389: The table 4

"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. A nobleman’s son does not marry a nameless healer from a hut in the pines."

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

"Then one night she told me the truth." His voice dropped. "She sat down across from me, very straight, and said she had something to confess. She said that she was a... witch."

The word hung in the lamplight. Neither of them flinched at it.

"I did not take it well." His eyes had gone distant. "I had been raised to think of them as a stain. A danger. And I had lain in that woman’s bed for weeks, taking her medicine, eating her bread. I felt ashamed. I felt betrayed, because she had known what she was the whole time and had let me love her without telling me. I said things to her that I am not proud of. Then I stood up, took my coat, and walked out."

"But you didn’t tell anyone," Kiara said.

"No. At the door I stopped. I owed her my life, so I made her a promise. I said, ’I will never speak of you to anyone. Not to my father, not to my king. This I swear.’ And I meant it. I walked all the way back to the town without looking behind me."

He let out a long breath.

"I made it two days."

Kiara grinned. "Two days."

"Two days, and I could not eat, and I could not sleep, and I could not stop thinking about the way she hummed over her soup. On the third morning I put on my cleanest coat, bought the first flowers I could find in the village market, and rode back through the rain. The flowers were a mistake. They turned out to be a weed, and one of the stalls had sold them to me as roses."

"Nettles."

"They were nettles. I presented her with a bundle of stinging nettles on her doorstep, soaking wet, with mud up to my knees, and I said, ’Marry me.’"

Kiara pressed a hand over her mouth, shoulders shaking.

"She shut the door in my face," he said gravely.

"She did."

"I knocked. She did not answer. I knocked again. She told me through the wood to go home and stop being ridiculous. So I sat down on her step in the rain, with my nettles, and waited." He spread his hands.

"I came back the next day. And the next. I chopped her firewood. I mended her roof. I carried water until my arms ached, and every morning I asked again, and every morning she said no. Finally, on the ninth day, she opened the door, looked at me for a very long time, and said, ’If I say yes, will you stop standing in my garden looking pitiful?’"

"And you said..."

"I said I could not promise anything." The laugh broke out of him, rich and helpless.

"She said yes. And a year later, there was a small, furious, black-haired baby in my arms who screamed at the midwife, and screamed at me, and screamed at the sky."

"That’s not true."

"It is entirely true." He looked at her, and his eyes were wet. "And she grew up into this."

He studied her for a long moment.

And for a single heartbeat, the lamplight fell across Kiara’s face at just the right angle, and he saw it. The curve of the cheek.

The steady, stormy blue of the eyes.

The same stubborn tilt of the chin that had once glared at him across a sickbed and told him he snored.

Then it passed, and he blinked, and she was only his daughter.

"I never get tired of that story," Kiara whispered.

"Nor do I."

She looked down at her knees. Her voice, when it came, sounded very small.

"She shouldn’t have left us."

Lord Silverward rose from his chair.

He crossed the space between them in two steps, and he folded her into his arms.

It was clumsy at first, tea and silver buttons and elbows, until Kiara let go of her knees and her face went into his shoulder.

He smelled of cedar and old ink and the faint trace of the rose tea. His hand cupped the back of her head, the way it used to when she was small.

"She never left," he murmured against her hair.

"Listen to me. She never left us, Kiara. I see her every day. In the way you walk into a room. In the way you scowl at your breakfast. When you laugh, I hear her. She is not gone. She is in you." His arms tightened.

"And she will always protect us. Always."

Kiara closed her eyes.

She felt a faint warmth stir under the skin of her palm, where it pressed against her father’s back, and she knew, without looking, that a thin pink light was glowing there.

She curled her fingers into a fist and held it against his coat until the warmth faded.

He did not notice. He only held her, and she let him.

They stayed like that for a long time.

The lamp burned lower.

Outside the window, the last of the copper light slid off the garden wall, and the hammering from the academy square slowed, then stopped, as the workers went home.

The silence that followed was a good one.

It was the silence of a house where nobody needed to speak.

When Kiara finally drew back, her father let her go gently.

She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand and gave a small, embarrassed laugh.

He handed her a handkerchief from his sleeve without a word, because he had always carried one, and she took it.

She turned it over in her fingers.

There was one more question.

She had asked herself whether she should say it aloud, and the answer had been no, every time, for years.

But the room was warm and the evening was soft, and she was tired of carrying it alone.

"Father."

"Mm?"

"Was Mother angry?" Her voice was steady, though her fingers were not. "At the people who did that to her. At the ones who threw the stones. At the High Mage. Did she hate them?"