“I’ll have no hope of sleep as long as you’re here.”
Surprise. A swift look of hurt. She moved to stand.
“Wait.” He reached for her sleeve. “I didn’t mean it like that. I only meant…it feels good. You, here. This feels good.” He swallowed. “It’s hard for me to sleep because I don’t want to miss this. Please, don’t go. Tell me what happened. How you won your voice. I want to hear the story.”
She looked unsure.
“I’ll sleep after,” he said. “I promise.”
Softly, careful not to jostle him, she returned to his side. She set her head on the pillow next to his. As she began speaking, he closed his eyes. He hadn’t noticed, at first, the way her voice scratched slightly from disuse, or how she struggled with certain words, the ones far back in her throat likeswordandmourn. A new kind of vulnerability. But courage, too, in her willingness to trust him with it.
He slipped his hand into hers as she told him everything.
???
He didn’t sleep. Even after Ellina finished speaking, and her head came to rest on his shoulder, and day sunk back to night and her body warmed against his and everything went impossibly soft, Venick’s mind wouldn’t stop working. He thought about what Ellina had risked and won. The battle. Artis, and the remorse that gripped Ellina as she recounted his death. Farah. Her escape, and what it might mean for the war.
Venick’s relief mixed with his worry, conspiring to keep him awake until eventually, he couldn’t stand it anymore. He spoke into the dark. “Your sister is alive.”
Ellina lifted her head from his chest. Though they’d been quiet for some time, he’d known by the rhythm of her breathing that she wasn’t asleep.
“The Dark Army will strike again,” Venick went on, drawing his eyes to the ceiling. Though the initial post-battle rush had calmed—inpatients settled into beds, pain tonic distributed, minor wounds tended and discharged—the infirmary’s late-night noises and the slim hang of the curtain provided a measure of privacy. “As long as Farah is leading them, they’ll have a reason to fight. This battle was a victory for us, but it won’t be the end.”
“Farah will be careful from now on,” Ellina said, pushing fully upright. Her hair was undone. A lock snaked over one shoulder, falling forward. “Exposing herself was a mistake. She wanted to establish her position as a leader on the front lines, but she is no warrior, and the fight surely went worse than she anticipated. She will not risk herself again. It will be difficult to target her directly.”
“But not impossible,” Venick said. “As you said, she has made mistakes.”
“And learned from them.”
“Maybe.” Venick scratched his chin. “Have you noticed? The way she looks a bit…”
“Different?”
“I was going to say deranged.”
“If that is true, it will only make her more dangerous. She is determined.”
“Well.” Venick shrugged. “So are we.”
They sank into silence. Ellina, rather than moving back down next to him, stayed upright. She inhaled a breath, flexed her jaw. Then: “I have been angry with you.”
Venick’s surprise almost made him laugh. “Oh?”
“You knew that I was—” she faltered, swallowing the syllables. “That I was shadow-bound.”
He’d thought she might bring this up. In his imaginings of this conversation, they were both stone-faced, serious. He would apologize and try to explain. Ellina would motion, nonverbally, that he was or was not forgiven.
But Venick didn’t feelserious. He still couldn’t quite believe that Ellina no longer had to struggle with hand symbols and scribbled notes. She could accuse him directly, tell him what an idiot he’d been, how angry she was. He wanted her to.
He said, “I told you of my suspicions.”
“Your suspicions, yes, but nothing direct. You have known about my binding for weeks.”
“I knew nothing for certain.”
“Fool.”
His smile pulled free. “Gods, I missed hearing you say that.”
