Uneasy, I search his gaze. “You didn’t owe me then, either,” I say softly. “Don’t chain yourself to me out of guilt.”
I’ve had more than enough of invisibleandtangible shackles.
Zan’s eyes narrow. “It’s not a chain. It’s an opportunity.”
“To get yourself killed?” I demand.
“To see if I can live a life I can be happy with,” he snaps. “Can you imagine what that would look like, for you?”
I blink a few times.
I’m worried he’s not being honest with me, or with himself—that he’s actually expecting to gain from this in the sense of doing one final act to make him feel reconciled with his life so he can feel comfortable dying at last. Which makes me angry, but in more of a muddying way than a clarifying way, so I’ll let that simmer.
And truthfully answer, “No.”
What does happiness look like for a sage? For me?
I don’t know the shape of freedom.
But maybe it looks like a cottage on a mountainside.
As if following my thoughts, Zan says quietly, “I can’t either.”
A look passes between us.
“But this—” he gestures at the cottage “—can be where you start to think about it. That’s why it’s here.”
“And what about you?” I ask. “Maybe you don’t know because you’ve never had a space that felt like yours, and if anything, by rights this cottage belongs to you. I can live in the temple, the gods know I’m used to it—”
“No,” Zan snaps.
The vise that had only begun to constrict my chest with my own words eases.
At his refusal of that possibility?
Or because this man who has held himself apart forfive hundred yearsis willing to let me see what lies beneath?
Still, I step even closer to him, our noses practically touching, and echo dangerously, “No?”
Zan scowls. “You deserve to have ahousefor once in your life that feels like a home.”
I poke him in the chest; that rush again, though smaller. “Well then so do you!”
We glare at each other for a minute.
Zan’s sapphire eyes glitter, and my breath catches.
His eyes swoop down—to my lips or my pulse, I’m not sure.
And then he turns. Not stepping back, exactly, or away from me, but so we’re side by side.
My heart is thundering. I clear my throat. “We could share?”
His eyes glance at me, back at the cottage. “That could work,” he says, like we’re talking about the academics of a spell structure and not that we will be living together.
“Great.”
“That’s settled then.”
