She fits here. In my space. In my life. A woman who speaks for the dead, resting in the quarters of a man who burns them. The universe has a cruel sense of poetry, but this time I’m not complaining.
I fetch water from the basin in the corner. Tear a strip from a clean cloth. Sit on the edge of the cot and begin cleaning the blood from her face.
She’s beautiful beneath the damage. Not in the way court ladies are beautiful—soft and perfumed and untouchedby anything harder than disappointment. Aradya’s beauty is quieter. The kind that comes from compassion weathered by loss. From gentleness that refuses to break no matter how much grief tries to crush it.
I never expected to want anyone. Now I can’t imagine letting her go.
The possessiveness doesn’t surprise me anymore. The mating mark claimed her before I knew what was happening, but I’ve had time to catch up. She’s mine the way the pyres are mine, the way the dead are mine. Part of my purpose. The piece that was missing without my knowing it.
Her eyes flutter open as I wipe the last of the blood from her cheek.
Dark. Expressive. Finding me immediately, like the mark on her collarbone has been tracking me even while she slept. Her lips curve into the ghost of a smile.
“Still here.”
I set aside the cloth. “Where else would I be?”
She doesn’t answer. Her hand rises, trembling, and presses against the mark beneath my armor. The touch registers through layers of leather and iron—not physically, but in the way the claiming brand responds to her proximity. Heat blooms across my sternum. Spreads down my ribs. Makes me want things I’ve spent decades pretending I didn’t need.
“The Council will have questions.” My voice comes out rougher than I intended. “They’ll want to know what happened. They’ll probably try to take credit for defeating the King.”
“Let them.” Her eyes are drifting closed again, but her fingers stay pressed against my armor. “I don’t care about credit.”
“What do you care about?”
Her eyes open. Fix on mine with an intensity that makes my throat tight.
“Right now?” She tugs weakly at the collar of my armor. “This. Only this.”
Afterward, we lie tangled in my narrow cot. Her head rests against my shoulder. My hand traces patterns on her bare back—the knobs of her spine, the curve of her ribs, the places where bone gives way to softness.
The silence is comfortable. I didn’t know silence could be comfortable. All those years alone, and I never realized what I was missing until a mourning witch fell asleep in my arms.
FORTY-SEVEN
ARADYA
“What happens now?”
The question emerges from nowhere. Or maybe it emerges from everywhere—from the bones of the city shifting above us, from the graves that have finally gone quiet, from the future that stretches uncertain and terrifying before me.
Drokhar is quiet for a long moment. His hand pauses on my back, then resumes its gentle motion. The calluses on his palm are rough from handling torch handles and corpse-iron, softened only slightly by the hours we’ve spent touching each other.
“The Council will try to reassert control.” His voice rumbles through the ribs I’m resting against. “They’ll probably blame both of us for the crisis—the witch who woke the dead and the death warden who let her live. They’ll want us punished. Exiled. Executed.”
I trace the edge of the claiming mark on his sternum. The skin there is smoother than the rest of him—scar tissue from the brand that burned into his flesh when he claimed me. My mark. My claim on this impossible man.
“And you?”
“I’ll tell them to try.” The certainty in his voice is the same certainty that once terrified condemned prisoners. The flat assurance that the alternative to compliance is worse than whatever punishment they’re contemplating. “I’m done following orders that don’t serve the dead. I’m done burning without rites. I’m done pretending that silence is the same as peace.”
“That’s very noble.”
“It’s very stupid.” He pulls me closer, tucking my body against his like he’s afraid I’ll disappear if he loosens his grip. “But you’ve made me stupid. You and your whispers and your ridiculous bravery.”
I laugh against his shoulder. The sound surprises me—I don’t remember the last time I laughed like this. Before the rite went wrong. Before Ira Genn died screaming. Before I learned what it means to speak for the dead and survive the consequences.
This is what it feels like. Being happy. Being safe. Being held by someone who has no intention of letting go.