Something cracks in my chest. Not the heartstrings. Something deeper. Something…structural.
“And if there’s a child.” My voice comes out hoarse. “Ourchild. I will love it. I will hold it. I will watch it grow and stumble and become something extraordinary, and then one day—one day, Elara—I will watch it die. And then their children. And?—”
“Stop.”
The word is firm but not cruel. Elara reaches up and presses her dirt-caked hand against my chest, directly over the place where the heartstrings ache.
“Every headstone marks someone who would cherish what you’re afraid of.” Her fingers curl into the fabric of my cloak. “Somewhere in a graveyard, there’s a woman who never met her grandson. A father who died the winter before his daughter’s wedding.”
A tremor runs through my sternum, sharp enough to make me wince. “Elara…”
“They would give everything just to see one wobbly first step. One wiggly milk tooth pressed into their palm. To watch their child fall madly, stupidly in love.” Rough and calloused, her palm strokes up along the tendon on my neck, only to cup my jawbone. “You looked so happy yesterday during the snowball fight. Were you? Happy?”
My jaw works. I don't even recall when I was last this happy, if ever. “Yes.”
“None of it would’ve happened had you turned down the joy over the sadness that the snow will melt, eventually.” Tears streak through the dirt on her cheeks, but her voice holds. “You can’t have love without embracing grief. Pain is the price we pay for participating in life. And if you’re not willing to pay that, then maybe…” Her other hand finds the exposed curve of my sternum, fingers slipping around the bone to rest against the heat. “Then maybe you’re a corpse after all. Existing somehow, yes. But not living.”
The words don’t just land. They excavate. They dig past tendons and sinew, past ancient bone and godly power, and find the soft, trembling heart that falters in my chest.
Shovel pulled from the ground, she turns her back on me and drives the iron into the dirt. “I have to finish this.”
I stand there, as unmoving as the dead, the shovel biting into the earth with ahrrkthat reverberates through the soles of my feet, up through my anklebones, my shins, settling into the marrow like a burial hymn.
I’m standing in my own grave.
Chapter
Twenty-One
Elara
Something tickles my hair. A faint, rhythmic stroke. Featherlight. Barely there.
It pulls me from sleep the way dawn pulls mist from a lake. Slow. Gradual. One sense at a time. First touch. Then the quiet exhale of a breath that isn’t mine. The scent of carnations follows, drifting into my nose with hints of soil and snow.
I open my eyes.
Vale sits on the floor beside my bed, his back against the frame, his long legs folded at impractical angles. One hand restson his knee, while the other gently combs through the loose strands of my hair splayed across the pillow.
I clear the roughness of sleep from my voice. “How long have you been here?”
He continues the slow, absent drag through tangles, watching me with those green eyes that hold too much for one morning. “A while.”
I search his face. Pale. Shadows pooled beneath his lashes. The stubborn set of his jaw softer than usual, as though the night chewed on him and spat out what was left.
“I want it noted,” he says, his voice low, the gravel of it catching on something fragile, “that I am not fully convinced.”
“Convinced of what?”
He shifts, rising to his knees beside the bed. His hand leaves my hair and finds my cheek instead, cradling it with a careful, trembling pressure that turns my face toward his until the green of his eyes is all I see.
“You were right. In the grave. About all of it.” His jaw works, a muscle feathering beneath the skin. “I have to choose before life chooses for me. And there are only two paths.”
He’s quiet for a long moment. When he speaks again, his voice is lower. Rougher. “I break the curse. Mend the third string. Feel everything—every death, every loss, the full, annihilating weight of your eventual absence—with a whole and unprotected heart.” A pause, heavy as wet soil. “Or I refuse. Watch resentment curdle between us. Watch you walk away. Watch another man gain your heart. Lose you not to mortality…” His throat works once, hard. “But to a life I was too afraid to choose.”
The air leaves my lungs in a rush that has no part in breathing. I stare at him, my pulse suddenly loud enough to hear in my skull, my fingers twisting the edge of the blanket into a knot. “You mean…?”
His forehead drops against mine. “Both paths end in pain; I understand that now.” Something shifts in those green eyes. A deepening, as if the man himself is looking at me harder. “Between the two, I choose the one that allows me to do life with you until then.”
