“And that is the door back to your time. To the future.”
“Yes.”
He looked past her to the woman kneeling in the ruin. His jaw tightened with a pain so sharp it nearly drove him to his knees.
“They love you.”
The words nearly finished her.
“Yes.”
The portal pulsed, and the future sharpened. Rain glittered on broken stone. The little false stars trembled. Amelia’s mother stood suddenly, her head turning as if somewhere in her bones she had heard her daughter’s voice.
Amelia took another half step.
Thomas’s hand closed around hers.
“Nay,” he said.
She turned, startled.
His face felt carved from iron, but his heart was anything but. His heart had become a battlefield, and every army upon it bore her name.
“Nay?” she echoed.
“I will not shove you through that door to soothe my honor.”
Her mouth parted.
“I would not keep you from your mother.” His voice roughened. “I would cut off my own hand before I held you here by force. But I am no saint carved in stone, Amelia. I am yours, if you’ll have me, I love you past all reason, with all of my heart and soul.”
The portal roared. Rain lashed through the broken tower beyond, turning the little false stars into blurred smears of light.Her mother’s voice came again, thin and broken and impossibly near.
“Amelia!”
Thomas flinched as if the call had struck him.
Then he stepped closer, his boots grinding against the rushes, his face pale beneath the blue fire and his eyes fierce enough to hold back armies.
“So hear me well, because I’m done speaking in pieces and expecting you to gather them like dropped grain. I love you. I love your sharp tongue and your lists and the way you look at my accounts as if they’ve personally offended you. I love that you made a home here. I love that you taught my people to hope before I remembered how.”
His hand closed around hers, rough and warm and trembling.
“I love you when you argue,” he said. “I love you when you laugh. I love you when you look at me as if I am more than a sword with a man wrapped round it. I love you in my hall and in my yard and in every cursed breath I take when you are not beside me.”
Hob made a sound behind them that might have been a cough but was not.
Huck whispered, “Saints preserve us.”
Thomas did not look away from her.
“I have no clever words of wooing. I have a rundown castle, a questionable temper, a horse who likes you better than he likes me, and a household that has already decided you belong to them. I cannot give you your mother. I cannot give you the future world beyond that door. But I can give you all that I am and all that I have, and I will spend the rest of my life making certain you never regret choosing me.”
A tear slid down her cheek.
“Thomas.”
“I am asking.” His voice broke on the word, and he did not care at all that Hob and Huck heard it.
