“Find any new wrinkles?” she whispers.
“Several.” I lift my bony finger to her face, tracing the deep lines that bracket her mouth, the creases at her eyes, the papery softness of her cheek. “They’re magnificent.”
“Liar.”
“Never. Not about this.” I trace the crease at the corner of her eye. “This one is from the day Edmund put a frog in Maren’s bed. You laughed so hard you couldn’t breathe.” My finger moves to the line between her brows. “This one is from the trade negotiations with the southern provinces. Three weeks of frowning.” Down to the bracket beside her mouth. “And this one…this one is mine. Decades of sharing in joy and laughter with me.”
Her eyes glisten. “You deserved most of them.”
“Debatable.”
We’re quiet for a while. The sun sinks lower, turning the gold to amber. Her breaths are coming slower now, with longer pauses between them, each one a deliberate act.
Each pause quiets my strings, a suspension, the terrible anticipation of a silence that will eventually hold. “Oh, Elara…”
She trundles up an exhausted smile, hair that has gone completely white framing her age-speckled face. “I’m not afraid.”
My eye sockets burn. “I know.”
“It feels like it did before… In the throne room.” Her eyes close for a moment. “Like coming home.”
My jaw clenches so hard the bone creaks. “I will forever be your home.”
“Then stop being sad.”
“Impossible request.” My voice fractures. I bring her hand to my mouth—to the side that’s still lips—and press it there. “Denied.”
A breath of laughter, so thin it’s barely air. “Worst husband.”
“Best wife.” I lower my forehead to hers. Bone to skin. One last time. “The best thing that ever happened to the worst thing in existence.”
Her hand rises slowly, with effort that costs her too much, and lays flat against my open chest. Three heartstrings hum against her palm. The same palm that first reached into my ribcage in a moonlit clearing and told me my heart was healing.
“Take care of them,” she whispers. “All of them.”
“With everything I am.”
“And yourself.”
A sound leaves me that isn’t quite a laugh. “That, I cannot promise.”
“Live.” Her fingers curl weakly against my ribs. “For them…and for me.”
I nod. A single dip of my skull that she feels against her forehead rather than sees, because her eyes are closing now, the gold around us dimming in a way that has nothing to do with the sun.
“Elara.” I say her name the way I said it in the throne room. Like a prayer. Like the first and last word in a language only we speak. “Say it. One more time.”
“I love you.” The words come as easily as they did the first time. Easier, maybe, shaped by years of practice. “I’ll love you even after this.”
My voice is a ruin. “And I’ll love you until the day I die.”
Her aura dims.
Dims more.
The candle finds the bottom of its wick, and the flame doesn’t dance or fight. It simply softens, glowing warm and amber and perfectly still, before it eases itself out with the quiet dignity of a woman who spent her whole life among the dead and was never once afraid of joining them.
Her soul passes through me.
