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She gave me room. She saw that I was healing in some direction she could not follow and she did not follow it. She did not ask. She let me go out into the dark and come back changed, saying nothing. Her silence was its own kindness and its own quiet accusation, because she trusted me, and I was keeping a secret from her. A secret kept from the person who took you in out of nothing becomes a debt, even when it harms no one. I knew it, yet I went anyway. The pull was stronger than the shame.

* * *

When the third bad night came, I went again.

The shrine was empty.

I knew it the moment I came through the gate, feeling the profound stillness of a place with no one in it, the single lantern burning over a bare floor. He was not on his bench, nor at the sanctuary. The poor shrine kept its quiet and its goddess and nothing else. Something in my chest dropped further than the moment deserved, a disappointment far too large for what it was. I stood in the gateway and felt the night turn colder around the absence of a man I had no right to miss.

Then I saw what he had left.

On the bench where he slept, folded square and deliberate, lay a blanket. His blanket, the one I had seen tucked under his head. Beside it sat an altar candle, a good one, far better than the stubs the poor shrine could afford. It was clean wax that would burn long and steady through a bad night. Under the candle lay a scrap of paper, featuring a few words in a plain, steady hand.

I am called up the hill and cannot come. The cold is worst near morning. These are yours for as long as you have need of them.

No name. No claim. Nothing that asked anything of me. Only a man who had not been sure I would ever return, leaving warmth and light in the dark on the chance that I might. On the chance that I would arrive on a hard night, find him gone, and not have to face the dark without something of his against the cold. He had thought of me when I was not there. He had stood in this shrine knowing he was being taken from it, and his first thought had been that I might come and find it empty. He had left me his own blanket to soften that hour.

I stood over the folded square of wool and felt the careful walls I had built go thin in a way that frightened me past any threat. I understood two things at once.

The first was that he had been pulled up to the palace, the place that would not let him sleep, the place he could not call home.

The second was that if I wanted to see him, I would have to go to him there.

It should not have been a hard choice. Everything in me that had kept me alive said to let it be. He was gone, the shrine was safe again, the dangerous warm thing could cool in his absence, and I could go back to being only the mission, only Lady Liora, only a woman doing what she must to survive. To follow him up the hill was to want something. Wanting had cost me everything I had.

I took his blanket home in my arms anyway, held it through the day, and made my choice.

The next night I went to him. Not because the mission needed it, though I told myself for one cowardly moment that it did. I went because I wanted to, as a parched throat turns toward water. Some healing part of me that betrayal had failed to kill had decided, without consulting the rest of me, that it would rather move toward a good thing once than spend the short remainder of its life flinching from every shadow. It was the first step I had taken toward another person on purpose, knowing it for a step, since the night above the secret grove taught me never to take one again. It terrified me. I took it anyway.

I wrapped myself in my heavy grey shawl against the cold and the curse, and Tsuki found me on the rooftops before I had gone three streets. He asked nothing, simply leading me up into the heights.

* * *

The emperor’s own temple sat high in the palace, and it was everything the poor shrine was not.

It was vast. The ceilings climbed into the gold-leafed dark, the lamps burned bright on scented oil, and Tateharas, the god of wealth who dwelt in that high place, had none of the worn, child-sized humility of the stone goddess at the bottom of the city. He towered in lacquer and precious metal, serene, enormous, and empty of any soul. Everything in it was the finest that could be made, yet all of it together held less warmth than the single lantern over the broken roof down the hill. It was a temple built to impress the powerful. It impressed, but it comforted no one. I understood the moment I stepped into it why a man who could not sleep would lie awake in a palace full of rooms like this and find no rest in any of them.

Tsuki brought me to a high gallery and went still. I looked down into the vast main hall, and there he was.

He sat alone before the great, cold god in the empty evening temple. Even from above, the days spent up here showed on him. He was worn through. He held himself upright by will alone, in the manner of a man too tired to sit any other way. A greyness had settled into his face, the distinct mark of someone kept too long from true sleep. I knew that mark. I had worn it myself. He had fled here looking for the refuge the shrine gave him, but the grand, cold temple had none to spare.

He was reaching for my chant.

The line I had given him in the dark, that small dead blessing over a fallen offering, had only ever been a fragment of an older and larger thing. It was a whole chant of the deep practice, the long, low devotional song the temple maids of my girlhood carried in their mouths because the books had let it die. It opened plainly, as the oldest prayers do.

To the exalted gods, I offer what little I am.

Teach me to live with a pure and sincere heart.

He had the opening. He had caught that much from somewhere, the worn, common cadence the city temples still kept, but when he reached past it for the old turns, the rise where my line belonged, it would not come. The sound drifted up to the gallery, halting and broken. He lost it, stopped, and began again from further back, only to lose it once more. He was trying to summon home out of a song he half remembered. The half he had lost was the living half, the part that survives only in a voice that learned it as a child. He sat in the gold-leafed cold reaching after a melody that would not close, a worn, gentle man failing, over and over, to find the one comfort he had climbed up here to seek.

I could not bear it.

There was no decision in it, no weighing of consequences, no strategy. I had spent these last bitter days teaching myself to watch from the shadows and never approach, yet all of it came to nothing against the plain, unbearable sight of him suffering for lack of a line I carried whole in my mouth. The thing the shrine had been quietly giving back to me, the thing betrayal had buried, the old pull toward another person’s pain rose through me and moved my feet before my caution could catch them.

I came down from the gallery, crossed the cold, bright floor toward him, and when he reached for the old turn and faltered, I gave it to him.

Grant that my heart stay genuine, childlike, and true.