Chapter 271: Sleepless Night

Sleep would not come.

Morgana lay on her back in the dark with the covers drawn to her chin and watched the ceiling. A thin bar of moonlight crossed it from the gap in the curtains. Through the half-open door to the little side room, Rowan’s breathing rose and fell in a slow, snuffling rhythm, now and then broken by a murmur that might have been a word.

The palace was quiet. The long hush of deep night had settled over the royal wing, with only the occasional tread of a guard on the far stair and the tick of the cooling hearth to mark the hour.

She turned onto her side.

I am very patient, Morgana. I have had two hundred years of practice.

She turned onto her other side.

It was no use. He was in the room with her, behind her eyes, and every time she closed them he was there. Draeven at the head of the table with his chin in his hand. Draeven laughing, low and rough and surprised, as though he had forgotten how it worked. Draeven in the doorway with his hand on the frame, watching her go, the firelight behind him.

His hand on the back of her chair. It had not touched her. It had stayed.

She pressed her palm to her sternum, where her heart was going faster than it had any right to.

It’s only a dinner, she told herself.

It was not only a dinner.

She sat up, pushed the hair from her face, and drew her knees to her chest. The nightgown was soft and thin against her skin. Beneath it, the bruises had faded to a dull yellow-green, tender when she pressed them. They no longer hurt. They only reminded her.

You are not afraid of him, she thought, slowly, working it out as one works at a knot. You have never been afraid of him. Not once. Not even in the throne room, when you thought he would send you to the cells.

"You are afraid of how much you want to go."

The thought sat in the dark and refused to leave.

She thought of Kaelen, with his hands cupping her face in a candlelit room, saying are you okay as though it were the only question in the world. She thought of Thorne at the fever’s edge, his dark head bent over her, his voice low in her ear. Neither had been cruel. Neither had ever been less than careful, even at their most consuming.

And she had said yes to both of them. She knew that. She had, in her way, opened to them.

But she had not gone to them.

She turned that over carefully. The nights had come to her. Kaelen’s hands had found her in his own chambers. Thorne’s arms had lifted her out of a sickbed and carried her through the dark. Doors had opened, and she had walked through them, willingly, hungrily, but each time the doors had been opened by other hands.

Nobody had ever waited for her to knock.

Not tonight, Draeven had said. "When you are ready. Or I will wait until you say the word, and I will come then."

She drew a long, shaking breath.

Atheris, she thought, because she could not help it. "What would you say?"

She did not expect an answer. She had not been able to reach him since the ridge. There was only the faint ache of a mountain a long way off, and the memory of a vast warm breath on her hair.

But the memory came with something else, rising up from deep in her, the dry gravelled voice of an ancient creature who had never in her hearing used one word more than he needed.

"You are not the first to ask me whether you may be happy," he had said once, years ago, in the dark, with the chain clinking behind him. "And you will not be the last. I have never yet found a good reason to say no."

She laughed, softly, into her knees.

Ma, she thought next, and the laugh went out of her.

"Never show them. Never."

Her mother’s voice lived in the bones of her. It had put her to sleep as a child and woken her in the dark. It had taught her how to stand and how to smile and how to hold her breath when her palms grew warm. And it was a voice of love. She knew that. She had never once doubted it.

But Elara had never met a king who pushed in a chair as though the act were a prayer.

I’m not hiding it, she told the dark. Not from him. Not tonight. I’m only going to walk down a corridor.

She did not examine whether that was true.

She put her feet on the floor.

It was cold.

The flagstones struck through the soles of her feet as she crossed to the wardrobe, and she hissed and hopped and caught the door to keep from knocking it. Rowan’s breathing hitched. Morgana froze.

The breathing resumed its slow ratchet.

She took the long dark robe from its hook, heavy wool the color of midnight, and drew it over her nightgown. She found her slippers by touch. She did not take a candle. The moon was enough.

At the door, she stopped.

Her hand lay on the latch. She could see it clearly, small and pale in the dim blue light, and it was trembling. She watched it with a kind of detached interest.

You could go back to bed, said a small sensible voice. Nobody would know. He said he would wait. He is a man of his word.

Yes, she thought. That’s exactly the problem.

If she went back to bed, he would wait. He would wait a night and a week and a month, with infinite courtesy, and he would never once reach for her. And she would lie here every night in the dark and want to go, and never go, because it was safe and because someone had told her a long time ago that wanting was the beginning of danger.