I bit my lip, the pain chasing away the sting behind my eyes.
“There will be a bed,” Irian continued, his voice solemn. “A lovely feather mattress. Not too large, for the man could not bear sleeping too far away from the woman. He would climb into her dreams, if only he knew how. But he will content himself with resting his arm around her waist and drawing her close when she murmurs in her sleep.”
“With pillows?” I asked softly.
“So many pillows.” He dropped his eyes, the vanes of his eyelashes painting black ink along the sweep of his cheekbones. “And someday there may be a child. With dark hair and curious eyes and a sharp, stubborn chin.”
My pulse vaulted, a sudden bloom of pale, secretive cereus—beautiful and thrilling, yet burdened by trepidation. I managed, “Not in the bed, I hope.”
“Gods alive, no.” Irian’s smile was like a daydream I kept returning to. “Although I have been told parents have less choice in that matter than they are led to believe.”
I held Cathair’s awful prophecy like a thorned rose—wishing to share it yet dreading its sting. I had to tell him. I could not bear to tell him.
“I am not certain I can have children,” I said, instead. “The way I was born, the way I was raised—” I trailed off. “Even beyond my unusual biology, I am not certain Iwishto have children. Motherhood hasn’t always been the most comforting notion in my life. Where it has not been absence, it has been manipulation and cruelty. What kind of mother would I be?”
“What kind of father would I be?” Irian was as serious as I had ever seen him. Yet his expression bore a lightness, like a man in a dark room gazing at shadows upon a distant wall. “We are not bound by our pasts, colleen. Neither are we bound to any future. This is but a dream. You are my reality. And I have sworn never to let you go.”
I reached out, grazing my bare fingertips over his heavygloves—close enough that I could imagine his heat, far enough that I could taste his longing, sweet and bitter as blackberry wine.
“That night in the tavern, Irian, you said—”
“Oh,” he interrupted, rueful. “Do not taunt me with the nonsense I spewed while in my cups.”
“You said that without me, you werenothing.” I lifted my eyes to his, even as I maintained the tenuous touch of our hands. The half-memorized lines of Cathair’s prophecy throbbed in time to the beat of my heart, a bane I could not shake. “What did you mean by that?”
Irian’s gaze scathed over mine before lifting toward the horizon, jeweled in a cacophony of colors. When he spoke, the wind nearly snatched the words from his mouth.
“All I have loved, I have lost. My mother, my dearest friend, my brother. The life that was promised me, the death I had earned. All that is left to me now are my oaths. My promises.” He lifted his hand from mine, grazed his thumb over the hilt of the Sky-Sword. “This is all I am. You are all I have. It is not melodrama to say that without you, I am nothing.”
His words were a blade to my gut, twisting as it cut. I had not always appreciated how much my sacrifice beneath the Ember Moon had devastated Irian—in time, I had learned the depths of his desolation, and how far he would go to prevent such a thing ever happening again. How could I tell him that yet again, the prospect of my death clattered like a feeble pawn upon a game board stacked by destiny? An oath made not by him or by me, but by the stars wheeling in the careless dark?
I couldn’t. The vow I had wrenched from my husband on the Longest Night had been made in fear and love in equal measure. It had saved my life. I feared it had scarred his. And it might break us both to sever that bond.
But I began to see how an oath could be a chain. And how love, held too tightly, could bruise the thing it was meant to protect.
“Let us make a bargain, Sky-Sword.” I pruned back my regret and tilted my head to look Irian in the eye.
“Colleen.” His smile was a pale scythe. “Surely you have been warned not to make bargains with the Folk.”
“You have already kept me long beyond my welcome.” I could not quite muster a grin. “I am not sure what more you can threaten me with.”
“Peace and quiet, apparently.”
“My bargain is this.” I barreled through the ache of my disquiet. “If we survive the next month of war and chaos, then you shall have all the peace and quiet your heart desires. We shall have our sturdy house and our regular meals and our overgrown garden. And perhaps in time—after a few late-nightdiscussionsover a bottle of wine—perhapswe shall have our child.”
Irian’s gloved hand grazed over my hips. I rocked forward; his lips hovered a bare inch from mine. A spark passed between us, sharp but not unpleasant. “And in return?”
“Remember him,” I whispered. “The boy who climbed cliffs and picked cockles on the beach and listened to Deirdre’s stories. Before he traded winkles for war and songs for steel. RememberIrian, before he learned to kill.”
“For you?” he murmured in return. “Anything.”
“Not for me. Foryou.”
Irian’s stark eyebrows winged together in something that was not quite a frown. Beyond the canopy of the looming forest, the sun had sunk, casting the world in shades of vermilion and taupe. The space between us tautened, a string pulled too tight.
“I will,” he promised.
Chapter Forty-Three
