Page 112 of Veil of Night & Flames

I nod. “Yeah. I get that. It was very kingly.” I walk toward him, then reach for his hands and hold them tight. “Aren’t I yours to care for? And if you ever truly wish to hang your crown over the Real, aren’t its people yours to care for, too?”

His expression hardens. “Cora, it is not the same.”

“You’re right. It really isn’t. You’ll empty your stores to a pen of goats for a family you’ve already forgotten, but when I tell you that millions of my people—including everyone I know and love—are going to die when the barriers come down, you quote bullshit about acceptable losses. Do you maybe have a clue now about why I am really, really pissed at you?”

“Dammit, Cora, I could help the man with the grain. I could take stores from the castle, put them in baskets, and have the baskets delivered to his homestead. You, my love, are talking about the barriers. You are asking me why I will save the canoe but not the cruise ship, and the answer is only that I can reach the canoe.”

“Then reach further, dammit. A lot further.”

“Cora.”

“No. Say it to my face first. I know all the bullshit versions. The acceptable loss of people I don’t know, while you keep my friends safe in their rooms, and the rest of the world ends outside the door. I don’t want the soft version tonight.” I make myself hold his eyes. “Look at me and say the real thing. You’ve decided to let my world fall. Say it, dammit.”

For a long moment, he doesn’t answer, and in the silence, the moons throw their bars of light between us.

“It’s true the barriers are failing,” he says at last. “They have been coming apart longer than your kind has had words for it, and nothing I do now will stop it. They are going to fall. That part is already decided—and not by me.”

“No? You were the Guardian. You and Chase. One being charged with keeping the barriers whole. But that ended when you—you—decided to split the Guardian in two.”

“And that, my love, is history.” Something flickers across his face, there and gone. “The barriers created prisons of whole peoples. They are a foolish division the emperor erected to badly solve a problem he barely understood. Prison and estrangement are not the answer.”

“And chaos is?”

“There may be some chaos, yes. But chaos is always inevitable. And in this case, the barriers are falling whether I wish it or not. The only question left is how they fall and that is a choice I made long ago.”

“What choice?” I ask.

“Whether it comes down all at once, in a single night, with nothing on the other side ready for it, and everyone dies. Or whether I monitor the fall and intervene so as to bring them down slowly, piece by piece, so that some of your world has the time and the warning to live through it.” His eyes hold mine, steady and terrible. “I chose the second. And yes, Cora, even the second costs more lives than you can stand to imagine. I know that. I have always known it. And I am doing it anyway, because the only other path is all of you instead of some of you.”

“And you can live with that.”

“I have lived with worse.” He doesn’t look away when he says it, and that’s the part that guts me, that he won’t even pretend to struggle, won’t hand me the comfort of a man torn down the middle. “I am older than your whole world, Cora. I have watched the sea take cities. I have watched nations end that thought themselves eternal. What is coming does not look to me the way it looks to you, and I will not lie and tell you it does. I have never lied to you. I won’t start now just to be easier to love.”

“Then you can’t have me.”

It leaves me before I’ve decided to say it, and when it lands cold in the room, I hear his sharp intake of breath.

“Cora.”

“You heard me.” My voice cracks, and I let it. “I can’t be with a man who’d do this. I can’t stand next to a king who looks at the people I love and files them under acceptable losses.” I lift my chin and meet his eyes. “Find another way. Or find another woman.”

His eyes never leave mine. “You don’t mean that.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I do.”

“You’re asking me to choose.”

“I’m telling you to. The war-riddled world you want, or the woman you say you love. You don’t get both. Not the way you’ve drawn it.”

He’s quiet for a long time. Somewhere, a bell sounds its low double note and goes silent.

I shiver.

“The barriers are coming down whether I will it or not. Surely my brother has told you as much. The only choice I have ever had is how.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.” I close some of the space between us. “You’ve decided the only question is fast or slow. But that’s not the only question. It’s just the only one you’ve let yourself ask.”

I hold his eyes. “I’m not asking you to bring it down gentler, Adric. I’m asking you to find a way to keep the barriers up.”