“You?” Ronan says, his fingers still busy.
“Fuck off.” The teasing brings a flush to his face, and the warm glow of that makes it easier to talk about the rest. “My magic started really coming in. My friends and my parents were impressed when I could do little tricks, so they would be really impressed when I did big tricks, right? And I was really certain by then that nobody else I knew had a helpful, all-knowing voice in their head. I’d figured out I was special.” His laugh is bitter. “Like I said, I was a brat, and decided since I was so special, I didn’t need to listen to Vara. I told my parents that I had a secret friend in my head.”
Ronan stops peeling grapes. “I’m guessing that went poorly.”
“Just a bit.” Karis puts three grapes in his mouth at once, and chews them slowly, gaze dancing everywhere except Ronan. This is easier to talk about than he’d expected, but still not easy. “Napkin?” He dips the napkin in the glass of water to clean off his fingertips, before reaching for more bread. “I don’t remember how many doctors I saw over the next few years. Healers, alchemists, hedgewitches. They even brought in a necromancer once, to check that I wasn’t possessed by a ghost or something. Mother made sure he came after dark, so the neighbors wouldn’t see.” He looks up at Ronan. “I regretted telling them almost immediately, and tried to tell them I’d made it up. It wasn’t real. I guess I just scared them so bad, they kept the doctors coming until I was fourteen anyway.”
He waits for Ronan to say something. Anything. But he doesn’t, so Karis has to continue.
“I never told my parents that my friend was Radiant Vara, but I guess word of a boy with an imaginary friend reached the Bright Cathedral anyway. Neradt rode out to Andell personally to recruit me last year. I didn’t really want to enlist, but I didn’t want to stay with my parents either, so I decided to make the best of it.” He waves a hand around the room. “And here we are.”
Ronan sits back in his chair, silent for a while. Eventually he says, “So that’s why you wanted in the Locksmiths so badly, once you found out?”
Karis nods. “You explained everything, even things I’d never thought to wonder about. Like why Vara couldn’t help me scry for the Crown, or all the weird silences over the years. And when I was little, I was so worried my parents would have me locked away somewhere forever.” His next breath shakes. “I didn’t like Vara being locked away.” He blinks away the worst of his emotions, unwilling to cry again so soon. “How did you figure it out, anyway? You knew to bring me the Crown somehow.”
“Leth found evidence of the orders killing Voices in his great-whatever grandfather’s journal,” Ronan says. “When I realized the binding hadn’t blocked out Voices, I realized you’d…”
“Shamelessly lied to you?” Karis grins.
Ronan doesn’t smile back. “You had your reasons.” He looks away. “When I realized you were a Voice, I panicked and moved up the infiltration. You know the rest.”
Karis doesn’t actually know all the rest. But he knows the important parts, thanks to Evain’s welcome meddling. “Yeah, then you jumped out a window for me.”
“It was on the ground floor,” Ronan protests.
But when Karis stands up, wobbling only slightly, Ronan moves his chair back from the table. And when Karis swings a leg over his thighs and lowers onto Ronan’s lap, his hands come up to Karis’s hips. Karis is still exhausted, but a languid heat rises through his veins. He doesn’t have energy for much, but he’d like a taste of more than grapes before he succumbs to sleep again.
“What if it had been the second floor?” He touches Ronan’s lips. “Or the third?”
Ronan’s hands tighten around his hips. “You got me,” he says, low and breathless. “I would have jumped from the top of the fucking cathedral if I had to.”
“That’s very thrilling,” Karis says, equally breathless. “But please don’t. I love you too, you asshole.”
And even under truth spell, Karis wouldn’t be able to say who leaned in first for the exhausted, desperate kiss.
?
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
RONAN
Ronan sweeps Dansa into one last hug at the city gate. “If you run into bandits, don’t hurt them too bad.”
She hugs him back, then pats his shoulders. “I’ll hurt them just enough,” she says with a sparkling grin. Behind her waits a merchant caravan, bound for the Praian border. The atmosphere is lively. Great wagons of cloth and ore, a trio of traveling bard-priests, and four Riverswords mercenaries for protection. The caravan leader is speaking at length to the soldiers at the gate. Dansa has her own carriage compartment to share with Alice; as an acolyte of Kan Halla, she’s never had to pay travel fees in her life.
She waves at the open chaos. “Nothing like how we came into Ostaris, huh?”
Ronan scrubs a hand over his chin and admits, “I still feel uncomfortable parading around without a disguise.”
One of the gate soldiers makes eye contact with him, but he looks away too quickly for Ronan to tell if he recognizes him from the wanted posters or not.
The caravan leader yells out, and drivers and passengers begin returning to the wagons. Dansa takes a deep breath and flashes one last smile at Ronan. “Take care of yourself. And bring your little hostage to Praia for a visit at some point.”
“I’ll try,” Ronan says with a laugh. “Goodbye, and good luck.”
She retreats into her carriage, and Ronan turns back along the wide streets of Ostaris. A brisk breeze dances through the city, promising winter from the shell-blue sky.
Two weeks after the unbinding of Charain, Dansa is the first of the Locksmiths to leave Ostaris. Her destination is her family’s temple clinic in Praia, and she claims she intends to sleep for a year. Ronan’s pretty sure that instead of resting, she’ll be stealing her father’s patients to cure within a week.
