Movement Two — Trophies

"Little guy," Sorrel said, and there was warmth threaded all through the words, the particular fond, teasing warmth she reserved almost entirely for him, "I see you've been collecting quite a few trophies."

He didn't answer right away. His gaze, which had been resting somewhere past her shoulder, shifted — not toward her, but away, toward the low stone wall near the hearth, toward anywhere that wasn't her face. It was a small movement. Sorrel felt it more than she properly saw it, the particular tension that ran briefly through his chest beneath her palm, there and then smoothed away again almost before she could be certain she'd felt it at all.

"They're not trophies," he said, finally, his voice easy, light, the tone he might have used to comment on the weather. "They're people."

"I know that," Sorrel said. "I was teasing. You know I was teasing."

"I know."

"You're still not looking at me."

He didn't answer that at all. His jaw was relaxed, his mouth still faintly curved in whatever small, easy smile had settled there a moment before, and if she hadn't known him for as long as she had, hadn't spent as many centuries learning the particular grammar of his stillness, she might have believed, entirely, that nothing at all was happening behind that smile beyond simple contentment.

"You've grown quite the collection, regardless of what we call it," Sorrel went on, unhurried, her tone still light, still teasing, though something underneath it had begun, quietly, to sharpen. "Last I properly counted — and I know, I know, you don't count, so someone has to do it on your behalf — there were considerably fewer women waiting their turn for an afternoon like this one. Now half the Between seems to know your name."

"Half the Between doesn't know my name," he said. "You're exaggerating."

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

"I'm allowed to exaggerate. It's one of the very few privileges age actually grants a person." She let her fingers trail once, slow, along his collarbone. "I only mean that you've built something enormous, little guy. Enormous, and warm, and full of people who'd walk through Nothing itself for you. I think that's beautiful. I also think it must be a very particular kind of heavy, being the one thing all of that warmth keeps needing to circle back to."

"It's not heavy," he said, quickly. "I like it. I chose it. Every part of it."

"I believe you chose it," Sorrel said. "I didn't ask whether you chose it. I asked whether it's heavy. Those aren't the same question, and I think you know that, even if you'd rather answer the easier one."

"You always did like asking the harder version of a question."

"I always did," Sorrel agreed, entirely unbothered by the observation. "It's rather how I ended up finding you in the first place, if you'll remember. Asking a question nobody else was brave enough to ask plainly, and getting, from you of all creatures, the only honest answer anyone had ever bothered giving me."

She let him look away. That's a choice worth naming plainly, because I don't think it was an easy one, even for her, even after everything the two of them have weathered together across however many years now separate that first gray afternoon from this one. She could have pressed. She could have turned his face back toward hers with a hand at his jaw, the way she'd done a hundred times before when he needed reminding that he was allowed to be looked at directly. She didn't. She let the silence sit exactly where it had landed, unbothered, patient, and instead of chasing his eyes, she reached for something else.

She drew him closer, unhurried, one hand sliding up along his shoulder to guide him, gently, until his head came to rest against her chest, cheek pillowed there, his breath warm and even against her skin. It wasn't a request. It wasn't, particularly, a comfort offered for his benefit alone, either — Sorrel has never once in her existence done anything purely selflessly, and she'd be the first to tell you so, laughing, if you asked her. But it was, undeniably, an offering. A place to rest that didn't require his eyes to meet anyone's.

"There," she said, quiet, one hand settling into his hair, fingers moving slow and unhurried through it, the particular idle motion of someone with nowhere else she'd rather be. "You don't have to look at me. You just have to stay."