What happened next was something I couldn't have fully described afterward. Not because it was confusing, it was very clear, just hard to describe. I moved, and I fought. I used my sword and my staff in the narrow street with the economy of someone who had been doing this since her brother taught her, someone who had never once been allowed to be bad at it because in Crystallese, being bad at it meant death. Or worse.
Nicco was beside me, then ahead of me, and then somewhere I couldn't track without losing focus on my own situation.
It was loud for a while, then it wasn't.
The two men were down. Not dead, or mine wasn't. The other I didn't examine too closely.
But the noise had been enough. Bloomreach was a town with guards looking for two people, and the backstreets of any town carried sound in ways the main roads didn't. I could hear boots on cobblestones coming from two different directions.
"Nicco—"
He grabbed my hand. “Move.”
We ran away from the fallen, and he led me around a corner, then another, and I remembered Bloomreach wasn’t large, and we were running out of streets.
I heard the sound of boots.
Nicco was beside me, closer than I expected, close enough that I stepped back instinctively and hit the building wall behind me. Nicco came with me.
I looked up at him in confusion and saw him looking down at me, his expression one that I recognized. That calculation, that momentary frown, the arrival at a conclusion before I had processed what the question was.
The boots were getting louder.
He moved. His hands came up to my face — both of them, warm and certain — and he tilted my chin and kissed me.
It wasn’t to be misinterpreted. He kissed me the way he did everything, with complete certainty.
His mouth was warm. Warmer than I expected, warmer than anything had a right to be, and for one suspended moment, my entire world narrowed to that warmth and the slight pressure of it and the way his thumb moved once against my jaw — barely,barely— as if checking that I was real.
I didn't know what to do. I'd had nothing to measure this against.
My hands found the front of his shirt without my permission, my fingers curling into the fabric, holding him close.
He kissed me like he had time for it, which was a lie, and I knew it was a lie even as I stopped thinking about anything else. His lips were unhurried. It was present, deliberate, a thing being done properly in the time available. His tongue licked my bottom lip, and I jerked at the unexpectedness of it. I felt his smile as I leaned back in, wanting more, and with his mouth still moving over mine, I tentatively tasted his bottom lip. Nicco made a sound, a low rumble in his chest, and he pressed me harder against the wall, his hand leaving my jaw and tangling in my hair.
His lips were soft. So strange for a man who was so difficult.
Warmth moved through my chest that had nothing to do with magic. I felt the slow exhale of months ofalmostandnot yetandnot thisandI don't knowresolve into a single moment that was already ending.
It lasted the length of a breath, or longer, or no time at all.
My first kiss.
And it felt like a goodbye.
I knew that even as it was happening. I knew it the way I knew the lodestone found north without deciding to, without meaning to, just as a fact my body had accumulated somewhere in the weeks of knowing him.
Two people pressed against a wall who were not running from guards. That was the risk he took, the calculated risk.
The sound of boots moved past us, not stopping to consider us, and I heard them rounding the corner.
Nicco stepped back.
His hands left me.
I looked at him. At those warm brown eyes in the lamplight, steady on mine, and something in them I'd never seen before, and then it was gone.
“I—”
