The silence that follows is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.
I lie there, my forehead pressed to his, and feel the awful, obvious truth of it settle into my bones.
Mortality.
The most mundane thing in the world. I’ve buried friends. Buried my brother. Carried the grief, yes, the pain…but never thought of it as anything but a part of life until I drop dead and join them, eventually.
But watching it from where he stands, from the endless, unbroken shore of forever?
“I never thought of it that way,” I admit, my voice cracking at the edges. “Dying is so…ordinary to me. Everyone I’ve ever known has done it or will do it. I never considered what it looks like from the other side. From where you’re standing.”
I press closer, tucking myself beneath his chin, and his arms fold around me like he’s trying to memorize the shape of me through his skin. I feel his lips move against my hair.
“The grief will lessen,” he murmurs, as though testing the truth of it. “Perhaps. In a century. In two. But it will never fully disappear. I know this because I still feel the ache of Eamon’s absence on boats he’ll never ferry.” A pause. “And he was not the woman I adore, respect, and love so dearly.”
His hand drifts down my side and comes to rest against my belly. The touch is feather-light, barely there, but I feel the weight of what it means like a body straining toward the grave.
“And if I put a child in you today,” he says, and his voice is gone, so careful, so brittle, that each word sounds like glass being set down on stone. “If I’m even capable of that. The child…”
“Could be mortal,” I finish the thought, old and familiar, yes, but now blooming slow and terrible in my chest.
“And if it is, then it would…” His fingers spread across my stomach, and I feel them tremble. “Would grow. Would gray. Would die. And I would bury my child, Elara, and stand at the grave with a whole heart and feel every fracture of it.” His thumb moves in a slow arc across my skin. “And then their children. And their children’s children. Generation after generation, each one carrying some small piece of you in their face, their laugh, and each one dying while I remain.”
I close my eyes. The image he’s painting is so vast, so mercilessly lonely, that it makes my lungs feel too small for the breath I’m trying to take.
“Eternal grief.”
“Eternal grief,” he confirms. “Not a single loss to mourn, but an unending succession of them. An infinite lineage of goodbyes.” His hand stills on my belly. “That is why I panicked. Not because I regret what we did. Never that. But because the consequences of loving you do not end when you do. They compound. They multiply. They go on and on, and I?—”
He stops. His chest shudders against me, those two heartstrings vibrating with a low, resonant hum that I feel in the crown on my head.
“I cannot die,” he finishes simply. “And yet, I cannot fathom how I am supposed to survive it.”
I pull back just enough to find his mouth in the dark.
The kiss is slow. Not the desperate, consuming thing from the stable, but something quieter. Something that tastes like salt and sorrow and the stubborn, impossible persistence of two people holding on to each other at the edge of an abyss. I cradle his face in both hands, bone and skin alike, and kiss him until his breathing steadies, until the tremor in his chest softens to a low, steady hum.
When I pull away, my lips brush the corner of his mouth as I speak. “It’s a shame, really.”
“What is?”
“That I’m not the one who has to slit your throat.” I trace the line of his jaw with my fingertip, feeling the hinge where bone meets tendon. “We could end this whole curse tonight.”
The silence that follows is absolute. The embers tick in the hearth. His heartstrings go still beneath my palm—perfectly, breathlessly still—and then they resume with a strong throb.
His hand finds my cheek. His thumb traces beneath my eye, catching moisture I didn’t realize was there. “Could you really?” he asks, and his voice is stripped of everything. No gravel. No command. No ancient authority. Just a raw, naked question from a man who has waited a thousand years to ask it. “Could you really love the one who took your brother from you? Who would one day take your child from its bed?” His thumb stills. “Who will, when the final grain falls, take you?”
I consider the question the way it deserves to be considered. Not with the rushed certainty of passion, but with the slow, deliberate weight of someone who has always felt most at ease between headstones, inside graves, and among death.
“When my sand runs out,” I say, holding his gaze in the dark, those fathomless hollows, “and you come for me… I think I’ll smile. I think it will feel like coming home.” My hand shifts over his heartstrings, feeling their steady pulse. “Like settling into the place where I belonged all along. With Death.”
He stutters out a breath. Then he pulls me into him, burying his face in my hair, his arms wrapping around me so completely that I can’t tell where his bones end and my flesh begins.
Neither of us says anything more.
I lie there in the dark, his arms around me, and I think about the snowball. The cold crust of it under my fingers. The stone at its heart. How I packed it tight and hurled it straight at Death, and how he laughed. How the sound had boomed across the courtyard and bounced off the palace walls and filled up all the places grief had hollowed out.
Just for a moment.
