“You’re exhausted, too,” she says softly. “I can see it.”
I scoff. I’m not sure if exhaustion is the right word for the particular weariness of an immortal arguing with his mortal wife about whether love is worth the pain it guarantees.
I lean on the shovel. Say nothing.
Elara is quiet for a long moment. When she speaks again, her voice is shifted—no longer sharp, no longer snapping, but careful. Deliberate. The voice of a woman choosing her words the way she chooses where to place a headstone: with precision, because once it’s set, it doesn’t move.
“What did you think was going to happen?” she asks. “After last night. After everything we said to each other.” She searches my face. “Did you think I would just…accept this? Wake up beside you and agree to watch the rot spread and the realm die?”
My jawbone gives a tight, weary pop. “I…did not think that far in the moment.”
“Neither of us did.” She leans back against the grave wall again, tilting her head to look up at the stars above us. “But themoment is over, and the rot is still here, and people are still dying, and I’m standing in a grave I dug alone because there’s no one left who is well enough to help me.”
She looks back at me.
“I understand, Vale.” Her voice cracks on my name. The name I bestowed upon myself, but the way she says it…as though it has become something more personal than any name she’s ever spoken. “I have compassion for your fear. I understand the weight of grief. But understanding why you refuse doesn’t mean I support it. Not when the cost is…” She gestures above us, at the graveyard, at the palace beyond, at all of it. “This. All of this.”
Something behind my ribs lurches—a visceral, ugly thing, like a hand closing around my heartstrings andtwisting.“What are you saying?”
Her arms squeeze across her chest, a silent conflict playing out across her face. How she drops her gaze to the dirt between us, then lifts to a headstone nearby, then finally, reluctantly, settles on me.
“Maybe you were right,” she whispers. “Maybe we should divorce.”
Another twist, stopping the blood in my heart until it cools into the familiar numbness of years passed. “I beg your pardon.”
“If I can’t break the curse,” she continues, each word sounding like it’s being pulled from her by force, “then I have to feed it. And to feed it, I need a husband.” She swallows. “A real one. Like you said.”
Like I said…
The memory surfaces with sickening clarity: me telling her to find a husband she could love. A mortal man. Someone with a lifespan and the biological capacity to die with her. It had beenmysuggestion. My strategic, reasonable, perfectly logical suggestion, delivered with the cold efficiency of a god who’d not yet remembered how to long.
I remember now. Painfully.
Jealousy hits with a blinding flare behind my sternum, followed by rage at the faceless man who would dare to hold her in my stead. “I refuse.”
Elara scoffs. A short, sharp breath through her nose that clouds white in the frozen air. “Do you love me yet?”
I only stare at her, the words awfully familiar, yet making no sense. “What?”
“You refuse to let me go.” She steps forward, and the grave narrows to nothing between us. “Trapping me in a marriage that forces me to watch the world die. How is that love?”
The pressure builds behind my sternum like a clenching fist, wrenching a shout from my chest. “You are trying to force my hand!”
“I’m not forcing you to do anything!” Her voice rises to match mine, then catches, trembles, steadies. “But neither will I force myself to indulge in a love—however real, howeverwanted—when it’s costing me my conscience.”
“And what will it costme?” The word tears out of me raw and ragged, ricocheting off the earthen walls, startling a crow from a nearby tree. “I would die for you!” The words come out low and wrecked and shaking. “If I could, I would die for you.”
The silence stretches between us like the night itself holds its breath.
Then Elara exhales. Slow. Measured. “Dying for someone is easy.”
The words are quiet, almost gentle. Which makes them worse.
“You know that better than anyone.” She gestures at me, all of me, every tendon and bone. “You’ve gathered their souls. The mothers who threw themselves over cradles. The soldiers who stepped in front of swords. The old men who gave their last scrapof bread and called it enough.” She pauses. “And I know it, too, because I’m the one who buried what you left behind.”
Her eyes hold mine, steady and unblinking.
“We both know dying is easy. It’s a single moment. One decision, and then…it’s done. And you never have to feel the weight of what comes after.” She tilts her head. “Butlivingfor someone? Waking up every morning, even when it hurts, even when you can’t fathom to keep going?” The corner of her mouth twitches. “Try that. If you want to impress me.”
