He said it with the same matter-of-fact stoicism as he spoke of getting a new king. To Terran, they were more than merely words. He said very little, if anything, he did not mean.
“I found it difficult, when you left,” I admitted, Galfrid’s advice fresh in my mind.
“I found it intolerable.”
Terran pulled me into him, his arm wrapping around me. Laying my head on his chest, I stared out the window, watching the night sky and marveling at how easy it was to sit in silence with him. Thoughts of our future swirled in my head, but for a time, I left them unasked.
The Gate was open. Our world was about to change once again.
Yet, for the first time since my parents left Aetheria, a calm—a safety—enveloped me. I could stay this way forever. As to that…
I sat up. “Can a Gyorian king partner with an Aetherian so soon after?—”
“You ask the wrong question,” he said, cutting me off.
“What is the right question, pray tell?”
“Questions. Many of them. When should we partner? Do you wish to reside in my quarters or would you prefer a new palace be built? What will your role with Galfrid be, as I assume you will still have one? How many times a day can I take you and still fulfill my duties?”
I was still focused on the first one.
“You wish to partner?” I asked, the answer in front of me. The way he touched me, looked at me, held me… I had no doubt. Yet I asked because the turn of events seemed even more unlikely than Kael partnering with Mev.
“I do. I love you, Lyra. Surely you know that.”
I didn’t mean to laugh. “Only you could make an admission of love sound as if it may be a declaration of battle, if the words were different.”
“Oh, there will be one, for certain. If I tell you to get on your hands and knees for me, and you fail to do it quick enough.”
Oh dear.
I’d stirred the other side of him, and wasn’t sorry for it.
“The sweetest battle I could have ever anticipated,” he said, his eyes dipping down to the front of my gown.
“Outside the bedchamber,” I warned him, “if you order me?—”
He grasped my chin, forcing my eyes to him.
“I would not dare. You are equal to me in every way, Lyra. Those are games we play, but not who we are as partners. I will be your king as much as you will be my queen. If you can accept living in a land very different”—he swept his hands out to the growing darkness, but I knew what lay beyond—“than this.”
I lay my hand over his fingers.
“I can accept anything except being separated again from the stubborn Gyorian prince turned king with whom I’ve fallen in love.”
His eyes softened, hinting of the Terran I’d come to know. That he showed so few another side of him made it all the more to relish. As he kissed me, Terran’s lips covering mine in a caress that was equal parts sweet and promising, I scooted closer to him. Soon, I’d be sitting on his lap, but did not care. So much would change after this day. Everything, really.
But not this.
Not our love for each other.
But then I remembered.
Pulling back, I looked into the eyes of one who had lost his father and now, potentially, his brother.
“How long will you wait?”
Sighing, Terran looked out into the night, only the stars, and not the mountains below them, now visible.
