Chapter 273: She Is Coming Here

He knew, she thought, with a quick fierce throb of her heart. Or he hoped. Either way, he left the way clear.

She stopped in front of the door.

***

On the other side of the door, Draeven had stopped reading an hour ago.

He had not stopped pretending to. The book lay open on the desk, and he had turned a page every few minutes for the sake of discipline, but the words had long since dissolved. He had read the same line about grain levies in the southern provinces eleven times and could not have said what it was.

INFERNUS wouldn’t lie down.

The dragon paced the dark of him, restless and vast, and every circuit ended in the same place. A thread, thin as a hair, drawn from his sternum to somewhere in the west wing. He could feel it pulling. Not hard. Not the greedy wrenching of the first day. A gentle, steady, patient tug, like a hand at a sleeve.

He had sent the night guard away at ten.

He had told himself it was a courtesy. The east wing was quiet, the palace secure, no reason for a man to stand all night at a door. He had told himself it had nothing to do with a girl who had said good night at a threshold in a voice that did not sound as though she meant it.

He had told himself a good many things.

***

At midnight, the thread changed.

It tightened. A small, sudden shift, like a rope drawn up by a single turn of a winch. His head came up. INFERNUS stopped dead in the middle of him.

"She is awake," the dragon said.

Go back to your passing INFERNUS.

"She is moving."

He put down the book.

"Draeven."

I hear you.

"She is coming."

He sat very still. His heart was going so hard that he could feel it in his teeth. He listened to the palace, the great still bulk of it, the groan of old timber and the drip of water in a gutter and the tread of a guard three floors down. And under it all, so faint he might have invented it, the soft pat of slippered feet on stone.

"Do not," he told himself, with the grim discipline of two hundred years. "Do not hope. If she is walking, she is walking. She may be going to the kitchens. She may be sleepless and wandering. You will not be a fool."

"She is coming here," said INFERNUS.

You do not know that.

The dragon only looked at him.

The steps came on. He tracked them down the long gallery, up the narrow stair, into the passage where the torches burned. He felt her pass Kaelen’s door and Thorne’s, and the twin brief flickers of GLACIUS and NOCTYS rising to greet her and subsiding, courteous and restrained, like two old soldiers saluting a banner. He felt her slow at the last turning.

He stood.

He did not remember deciding to. He found himself on his feet by the desk with his hands flat on the wood, breathing as though he had run. The silence outside the door was perfect.

She had stopped.

He knew it as surely as he knew the shape of his own hand. She was standing on the other side of the oak, six inches of wood between them, and she was afraid. He could feel that, too, a fine bright shiver along the thread. She was afraid, and she was there.

"Open the door", said the dragon.

She has not knocked.

"Open it."

"She must knock," INFERNUS. He closed his eyes. "It must be hers. Every part of it. The step, the door, the word. If I take that from her, I have taken everything."

A long quiet pause. Then the great head lowered.

"Then we wait."

Yes.

He stood with his palms pressed to the desk and counted his own heartbeats. Ten. Twenty. Forty. He thought of every war he had fought, every siege he had endured, the long cold winters on the northern wall with his brothers’ lives balanced on a single order. He had never in his life waited so hard for anything.

***

For a long moment, she only stood.

Her hand rose and hung in the air. She was aware of her pulse in her throat and her fingertips and the soles of her feet. She was aware of the smell of woodsmoke and cedar and hot metal, faint and rich and familiar. She was aware of a thread, so fine she might have imagined it, that ran from somewhere under her ribs to the far side of the door.

Knock.

She didn’t move.

Knock, Morgana.

It was absurd. She had walked the length of the palace. She had come this far. She stood with her knuckles an inch from the wood and her whole body locked like a rabbit’s at the sight of a hawk.

What if I’m wrong?

What if he doesn’t want.....

He said he would wait. He said it twice.

What if I’m not ready, and I only think I am?

Then you’ll say so. And he’ll let you go. He will not stop you. You know that.

She did know it. It was the strangest thing. She knew it with a certainty she could not have explained, as she knew the sun rose in the east and her mother’s hands had been cold in winter. Whatever else he was, whatever else the dragon in him wanted, Draeven would never take a thing that was not freely given.

She took a breath and knocked.

It was three soft raps, no more than the beat of a moth against glass. They echoed in the quiet.

The torch at her left shoulder flared.

It leapt higher than it had any right to, and bowed, its tall gold flame leaning toward her like a flower to the sun. Warm light washed over her hands. The shadows jumped. The second torch, on the far side of the door, did the same, bending its flame toward the place where she stood.

She did not see it. She was staring at the wood, her breath held, her heart going like a bird in a trap.

The door opened.

Draeven stood on the threshold.