He leans his shoulder to mine.
“We make it kinder by refusing to call cowardice love.”
I love him for that. For the way he never lets my fury pretend to be virtue, even when it would be easy. I tip my head to his and let us sit like that for a while, crowns heavy, hands light, two feral creatures learning domesticity on a balcony that once taught me how to be alone.
Below, a patrol shifts at the outer ward. The war does what war always does—collects its debts in the dark and writes receipts in ash. Somewhere a messenger hound bays, somewhere a gate coughs another spy through. The palace breathes. Our people sleep. The night keeps its secrets and tells them anyway.
Where I come from is the place between. Half-angel discipline. Half-demon hunger. Guild corridors that smelled like tea and steel. A mother who measured love in lessons you could survive. A throne built by people who never thought I’d touch it.
Where Yuna comes from is a garden that named her and a court that will try to claim her back when it suits them. A boy whobecame a man by leaving first and is finally, finally tired of the taste of it.
“Will she forgive him?” Rheon asks, soft.
“She shouldn’t.” The answer is easy. It tastes wrong. “She might.”
“Will you let her?”
“I will stand beside her while she decides and slit any throat that treats her choice like permission to hurt her again.”
He laughs into my hair, low and proud.
“My queen.”
I turn my face and kiss his jaw because we have earned this softness in blood.
“Yours.”
We stand. Duty waits, patient and insistent as tide. Before I go, I pull a thin strip of black ribbon from my sleeve and tie the night-bloom’s stem to the rail so it won’t snap if the wind lies. It’s a small, stupid act. It feels like faith.
“Send a runner,” I tell Rheon, already seeing the path the message must take. “No banners. No seals. Find Taeyang before the court does. Tell him… tell him the next door she opens will be the last. If he means to walk through, he must come with his hands empty and his mouth full of truth. If he means to leave again, he should do it now, and far from her.”
Rheon nods, eyes gone very old, very gentle. “It will be done.”
“And Minji?” I ask, throat tightening around the name. “Keep her busy. She thinks mending the world is her job. Tonight I need her to mend Yuna’s hair and make her tea she won’t drink.”
“She’s already at it,” he says, smile crooked. “She said the lilies told her to.”
Of course they did. Flowers gossip. They always have.
We start back down the black glass hall together, our reflections walking with us—two sets of crowns, four shadows where there used to be one, the kind of symmetry I never believed I’d get to keep. Halfway to the throne room, I stop and look back. The night-bloom holds fast to its ribbon, stubborn thing. Below, the gardens cradle their small flames and pale ghosts. Somewhere out there, under wisteria, a girl I love is learning how to breathe while her heart insists on singing.
“Where I come from,” I say to no one, to the runes, to my younger self, “we do not let our own go quiet.”
Rheon squeezes my hand once, a vow without words. I squeeze back.
Maybe the war will ask for everything again. Maybe the court will try to make Yuna small so it can hold her. Maybe Taeyang will arrive with his chest cracked open and the truth hot in his mouth. Maybe he won’t.
Either way, morning will find us moving.
Either way, I will sit beside Yuna when the sun is cruel and when it is kind and remind her of the girl who braided flowers into Minji’s hair and dared a prince of wrath to confess.
Either way, he will learn what the rest of the worlds already know:
We do not wait to be saved. We save each other, or we burn everything that tries to keep us from it.
The throne hums in answer as we pass—the living magic recognizing its own—and somewhere far off, like a knuckleagainst a door, I feel the faintest echo through the bonds that tangle all of us together:
A mark warming. A step turning home.
