"And now you've restored them."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because I was wrong." Simple as that. Complicated as that. "About the tea, about hiding your pregnancy, about the texts—I thought I was protecting you and I was just controlling you. Making decisions that weren't mine to make." I take a breath. "You left because I didn't trust you with the truth about your own body. I'm not making that mistake again."
Something shifts in her expression. Not forgiveness—we're a long way from that, if we ever get there at all. But something thatmight be acknowledgment. Recognition that I'm at least trying to be different.
"The ritual," she says. "If we find the complete version, I'll be the one to do it."
"We explore every other option first."
"Rhystan—"
"I'm not forbidding you." I take a step toward her, close enough to see the way her pupils dilate despite her anger. "I'm asking for time to search for alternatives. Partial transfers, staged rituals, ways to weaken the curse before moving it. The priests destroyed most of the texts but not all of them—there might be another way that doesn't end with you dead."
The bond thrums between us, heavy with anger and fear and underneath it all, buried deep but impossible to ignore, the pull that's never stopped. She feels it too. I see it in the way she sways almost imperceptibly toward me before catching herself.
"How long do we have?"
"I don't know exactly. Twelve weeks, maybe less." I hold her gaze. "We work together—separate spaces if that's what you need, but two people searching covers more ground than one. I've already identified promising texts. Give me a chance to find another way before you volunteer to die."
She's quiet for a long moment, and I let the silence stretch without trying to fill it. This has to be her choice. All of it has to be her choice from now on.
"Fine," she says finally. "We search together. But you stay out of my way, and you don't make any more decisions about what I can handle."
"Agreed."
"And Rhystan—" She steps closer, and the proximity floods the bond with heat neither of us is acknowledging. Her belly brushes against me as she gets in my face, close enough that I could count her eyelashes, close enough that her scent fills mylungs and makes my head spin. "If I decide the ritual is the only option, you don't get to stop me. No more hiding texts, no more drugging my tea, no more making choices about my body. I decide what happens to me. Understood?"
"Understood."
She holds my gaze for another long moment, searching for something—sincerity, maybe, or the limits of my commitment. Whatever she finds must satisfy her, because she steps back with a sharp nod that puts distance between us again.
"I'm going to see the mystic. Then I'm going to sleep. We start in the library tomorrow."
"I'll have everything ready."
She moves toward the door, and I think that's it—conversation over, boundaries established, nothing left to say. Then she stops with her hand on the frame and looks back over her shoulder.
"The bed smells like you."
It's not a question. Not an accusation either, exactly. Just a statement of fact delivered in a tone I can't quite read.
"I know."
Her expression flickers—something complicated moving behind her eyes that I can't interpret. Then she's gone, the door closing behind her with a soft click, and I'm standing alone in chambers that smell like both of us.
I don't go back to her bed that night.
She's there now, wrapped in sheets that carry traces of my desperate weeks without her, and whatever comfort I found in sleeping surrounded by her scent feels like an intrusion now that she's actually here. Instead I return to the library, to the restricted archives, to the piles of fragmented texts that might hold the key to saving our children.
The work helps. Focusing on translations and cross-references and the careful reconstruction of knowledge someone tried very hard to destroy—it's better than lying awake replaying every word she said, every flash of heat through the bond she was trying to suppress, every moment where I wanted to reach for her and knew I couldn't.
She came back. Against all odds, despite everything I did, she walked through a mountain pass while pregnant because our children needed more than she could provide on her own.
Not for me. I'm under no illusions about that.
