The storm worsens as time goes on. Wind comes through the gap upstairs in a sustained pitch that makes sleep difficult and conversation worse. Two of the escorts manage it anyway. Theren doesn't bother trying, and Leoric hasn't moved from his position, and how he holds himself tells me he stopped waiting for sleep a long time ago. I add wood to the fire and settle back, and he speaks before I've decided whether I wanted him to.
"You've been in my life since Blackwater." Not to the room—to me, in the tone of someone finishing a thought they started long ago. "Every scar that pulls wrong in the cold. Every time someone uses your name in my presence to watch my face. Everyquestion I couldn't close because the person who could answer it was—" He stops. "Gone."
My eyes stay on the fire. "I didn't know you survived."
The words sour around us. I have thought about them before. In pieces. In the private corners of nights when sleep wouldn't come and the past decided to be at the front of my mind. I didn't know. It never sounds like innocence. Not even inside my own head.
Leoric watches the flames. "Would it have changed anything?"
My answer should be quick. Yes, because that is the answer a decent person gives. Yes, because no one wants to admit there are moments in their life where knowledge might not have stopped them from becoming exactly what grief had already made them. But he is not asking for that. He is asking for truth.
"I'm not sure," I admit.
His gaze moves to me then.
I hate that I can't give him something cleaner. "I was twenty-four. Angry. Stupid enough to think anger was the same thing as courage. If someone had told me there were prisoners, I would have believed it. If someone said monsters were inside, I would have believed that too."
"And if someone had told you men like me were inside?"
"I already believed that."
The words leave ash behind. He gives a small nod, like the answer confirmed something he had already put a blade through years ago.
"Then we were both useful," he claims. "You to the rebellion. Me to the council. Different hands. Same purpose."
Part of me wants to argue, and the old me reaches for it fast, hungry for the familiarity of blame. But the words don't come cleanly. Not here. Not with the storm pressing against us.
"That doesn't absolve either of us," I state.
"No."
The quiet after that is worse than arguing.
"I know." A pause that has weight to it. "That's the part I kept returning to. You didn't know. You lit it and you left and for years after you were a name and a face in an inked likeness and a reason I couldn't sleep a full night. And you didn't know."
There's no accusation in it. That's what makes it harder to sit with than anger would be. It's just the shape of what happened, delivered plainly, and I don't have anything to put across the space of the plainness of it.
"I left the cell the morning after." I look to the floor. "The rebellion. I walked out and I didn't go back."
"Why."
"Because victory did not feel the way they promised it would." I turn the wood in the fire with my boot. "They were singing about Blackwater in the streets, and I realized I could not stand beside them anymore."
"The smuggling," he starts.
"Refugees. Medicine. It didn't fix anything, of course. But it was something I could do with my hands that wasn't—" I don't finish it. "The victory songs made me sick. Still do."
"That's not an apology."
"No," I agree. "It's not."
Another silence. Theren shifts at the door and goes still again.
"I'm not asking for one." Quieter now. "I don't know what I'm asking for."
I don't answer, offering something I don't mean would be worse than saying nothing. We sit with it—not with any sense that the distance has closed, but in the way two people sit when the shared weight is too heavy to keep carrying separately and neither has figured it out.
The ceiling goes before I hear it coming. The northeast corner—already compromised, already carrying more snow than the remaining building can hold—comes down with a sound like the storm deciding it's finished waiting. Stone, timber and packed ice, and I'm on my feet before I've processed any of it, and then something massive hits me from the left and drives me into the south wall instead.
