“Of course,” Malric said immediately.
“We want you to,” Thane said.
Neither of them moved to leave, which was fine, since we were in a bath. But they were not pushing, giving me space even though they were physically present. I appreciated that they understood the difference.
I also noticed that they were both very still in a way that had nothing restful about it.
I’d spent a long time in a tower learning to read small things. The set of a jaw. The quality of a silence. The way my father’s hands would settle at his sides when he’d already decided what would happen and was waiting for the performance of the discussion to conclude. I had developed, out of necessity, a very accurate sense of what people wanted when they were not saying what they wanted.
“What do you want?” I asked.
The stillness changed quality.
“That’s not the relevant—” Malric started.
“I didn’t ask what was relevant. I asked what you want.” I looked at him steadily.
Thane’s answer came without hesitation.
“You,” he said. “I want you. I want the bond, if you want it. I want to be whatever this is.” His voice was straightforward in the way that was particular to him—no performance, no management of my response. “That’s what I want.”
I looked at Malric.
He held my gaze. His jaw worked once.
He didn’t answer.
The silence stretched long enough to have a shape. I watched something move behind his eyes—calculation, or conflict, or something I didn’t have enough information to name—and I waited, and he said nothing, and the warmth in my chest began to contract.
He was still working out whether he wanted to want this.
I stood up.
Water sluiced off me. I stepped out of the basin without looking at either of them and took the linen from the rail and wrapped it around myself before I walked out of the bathing chamber into the nest.
I heard Thane say something behind me, low and sharp. I didn’t catch the words.
I gathered a dry shift from the shelf and pulled it on before I sat on the edge of the nest. With my hands pressed flat on my knees, I looked at the window. The sky grew dark.
They came to the doorway together.
I didn’t turn around. “I think we all need time to think.”
“Aveline—” Thane said.
“I’m not angry.” It was mostly true. “I just—” I stopped. Found the correct words. “I have spent my entire life being a decision someone else made. I would like, just once, to be a decision someone makes clearly. On purpose.” I turned then and looked at Malric, because he was the one this was for. “When you know what you want, you can tell me.”
His face was blank, perfectly controlled and might have been something else entirely.
“I’d like you both to go. Please.”
Thane looked at Malric. Malric looked at me for one long moment with an expression that almost cracked into something legible, and then he turned and walked down the stairs. Thane crossed to me first, kissed my forehead, and didn’t say anything, which was the right choice.
Then he followed.
I sat in the quiet of my nest and listened to their footsteps descend and let the warmth of the bath and the food and the careful tenderness of the last hour settle into me alongside the ache of that silence. I could hold both. I’d been holding harder things than that my entire life.
The two threads in my chest were still there.
