But Lorkin just shook his head, his horns casting shadows on the mud underfoot, and we turned towards Zarcal with whatever he was thinking hanging between us.
12
LORKIN
Infidelity.
The word followed me the whole way across town.
Theeodus hadn't even had the spine to say it to my face. He'd said it to Chloe, in that cold box with his pink neck and his hornless pale face, and by the time she got it out to me in the wind behind the cider house, it had already done its work on her. It sat in my chest now and burned and would not bank.
I knew what the word was supposed to mean. It did not touch her. It did not touch the two of us.
A male doesn't break faith with acontractby going home to hismate.
There was no faith there to break that wasn't already mine to keep, and I would have torn the Agency office off its clean little footings brick by brick for putting that word in the same room as her.
I could feel the bond between us, low and steady, the same as always, a pull I'd stopped fighting days ago. She was my mate. That was not a thing a clerk got to call a crime.
She walked half a step ahead with her chin down and her hands bunched up in her sleeves, scared and not letting it show. I wanted to put a hand to the back of her neck and tell her I had it. Tell her there was a path through this and I'd already found the front half of it in Remmen's hall not an hour past.
Because there was. Remmen had a folio with my name on it and hers both, marriage and citizenship, a way to put her past the Agency's reach with a stamp if it came down to it. A way around the contracts and the clauses and the rest of the paper horseshit.
I'd tell her about it after.
Once we had Zarcal's release in hand. Once we were back at the forge, at home, because I couldn't make it mean anything smaller than that anymore, not since she'd left her little knife on my bench and her coat on my door. We'd sit down there and I’d lay the whole of it out.
But first Zarcal. Everything else after. That was the plan. I held it down and kept my hands to myself.
His place sat just off the main street, low and broad-doored like the rest. The door stood open.
Inside, he'd pulled the pantry door clean off its hinges and laid it across two stools, and he was driving a nail flush with the flat of a hammer, his back half to us.
Beside me, Chloe went stiff. I felt it more than saw it: the small hitch in her, the breath she caught and held. My hand started toward the small of her back before I'd decided to send it. Then I stopped it halfway.
After the office, I didn't know if I was allowed. I didn't know if a hand on her in daylight, where a neighbor could see, was the exact thing that put her on the next ship out. My hand hung there for a second, doing nothing. Then I pulled it back. Having to ask the question at all stoked my anger hotter.
Zarcal heard us. He set the hammer down on the stool slowly and turned, and for a moment none of us knew how to stand in the room.
It was Chloe who found her feet first.
"You look better," she said. "Less pale."
"Chloe." He said her name like he was setting something down he was afraid to drop. "I'm sorry. For what I — for that night. I don't have words enough for it."
"Then don't spend them." She made it gentle. "I know it wasn't you. That was just a bad night."
His tail dropped against the floorboards. He believed her about as much as I'd have believed it in his place, which was not at all, but he let it stand.
"But since you're up and steady." She rolled on, light, already working the angle. "There's a thing you could do. For me. And for Lorkin."
I let her have it. If Zarcal was going to feel the whole weight of that night every time he looked at her, then better that the asking came from her hand than mine. A male will say no to his brother easier than he'll say it to the female he nearly put through a wall.
"Anything," Zarcal said. "Name it."
"Let me go." She kept her voice even. "Tell the Agency you release me, free and glad, and that you'd see me matched to Lorkin for the days that are left. That's all. You wouldn't even have to come to the office, we can just take a note."
For a breath, I thought he'd do it. His face had gone soft, something that might have been relief starting up under the guilt, and I let myself believe the worst of this was about to be over and we could go home.
