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He did not let himself finish that last thought most nights. It did no good. He could not act on it if he had it, and a thing you cannot act on is better not held too tightly. So he watched the sky and told himself it was strategy.

Three nights after the witch sat in his chair, the crow came back to the palace at the grey edge of dawn, and he was on a high gallery to see it. It came in from the west, over the lower city, flying that hard unnatural line, and it dropped down into a part of the palace he had marked but never entered, the deep quarter behind the old east wall where the passages ran down toward her door. He marked the window it went to. He marked the hour. He did not follow it, because following it there, that night, would have told her everything. But he had a thread now, thin as a hair, and he held it.

She was sending the crow west. Over the lower city. Again and again, always west and always low, as you quarter ground when you are searching it. She had not found what she was looking for yet, or she would not still be searching. That was the one scrap of comfort he could draw, and he drew it hard: the crow still flew, which meant the hunt was not finished, which meant, perhaps, that whatever she had sent out into the night had not yet closed its hand.

He did not know what she had sent. He had held its twin in his own palm in her cold chamber, an amber bottle got up to look like an apothecary’s mercy, and he had set it back in the ring of dust it left and walked away, because he had nothing to do with it and no way to find the one that mattered. That was the part that woke him at the third hour and would not let him sleep, not the fear of the witch, but the plain arithmetic of his own helplessness. Somewhere in his city there was a woman who had been his whole heart before he handed her to the fire. Somewhere near her, closing, was a poison wearing the face of the medicine keeping her alive. And he, the master of the southern empire, before whom every knee in the world was meant to bend, could not lift one finger toward her without pulling his own house down on both their heads.

By now he had run the possibilities until they wore smooth. He could send guards into the lower city, quartering it as the crow did, and find nothing, because a silver fox does not answer to a search-party and a hidden woman goes to ground the moment armed men appear. He could go himself, in a plain cloak, and walk the lower wards, and he had done it once, three nights running, learning nothing but the size of the city and the smallness of one man in it. He could confront Morrigwen, and lose, because she held every thread of his house in her old hands and would simply cut the one that was him if he became inconvenient, as she had surely cut inconvenient emperors before. Or he could do what he was doing, which was to watch, and map, and wait, and hate every patient minute of it.

The choice sat wrong in him no matter how he turned it. He was not a man built for waiting while someone he loved was hunted. Everything in his blood and his training said to act, to command, to bring the weight of the empire down on the problem until it broke. And he could not. The very thing that made him powerful, the throne, the line, the three hundred years, was the thing that pinned his hands. To reach for her was to confess her, and to confess her was to lose the empire his forefathers had bled for, the peace his marriage would seal, the whole edifice he had been raised to believe mattered more than any one man’s heart, more than his own, more than hers.

He had believed that once. He had stood under a plum tree and said it to a northern envoy and meant it, every cold word, the line is more than any one man’s heart. He had let the most precious thing he would ever hold go out of his hands because he believed it. He was no longer sure he believed it. That was the change three nights of sleepless mapping had worked in him, and it frightened him more than the witch did. A man who no longer believed the thing his whole life was built on was a man standing on nothing.

He thought about her more than was wise. In the cold hours he let himself remember the grove, the pool, the silver of her hair and the look she had given him, as though he were a man and not a crown. He remembered the mark he had found over her heart, the sigil out of the old gallery, the thing that had told him what she was and set the whole ruin in motion. If he had not seen it. If he had simply not known her for a Vespera. He would have married a peasant girl in secret and damned the north and been happy, and the empire would have survived it, because empires survive a great many things, and he had thrown away the one thing his would not give back for a law he was no longer certain deserved him.

Too late. That was the shape of it, and he made himself hold the whole shape, because a man should look at what he has done. Too late for the grove, too late for the gate she had surely come to and been turned from, too late for the weeks she had spent hunted through his streets while he mourned her as gone. All he had left was the thin thread of a crow flying west, and the chance, growing smaller each night, that patience and stealth might let him do one single thing right before the end: get between her and the poison, once, even if it cost him everything the law was meant to protect.

He would take that trade now. That was the measure of how far he had come from the man under the plum tree. Three nights ago he had chosen the empire. Tonight, on a cold gallery, watching a witch’s crow carry something terrible west over his sleeping city, he knew that if the choice came again, and came clear, he would choose her, and let the rest of it fall.

The knowledge did him no good at all. The choice did not come clear. It did not come at all. There was only the crow, and the dark, and the west, and the long, helpless patience of a powerful man who had finally learned what his power was worth, which was nothing, against the one thing he wanted, on the one night it might have mattered.

He stayed on the gallery until the sky went from grey to gold and the crow did not come again. Then he went down to be the emperor for another day, and to wait for the dark, and to watch the sky, and to hate, with a completeness that surprised him, the crown he had chosen over her.

Chapter 29

I crossed the floor and I did not wait for him to reach for me, because I had spent every day since that night being reached for, taken, decided about, and I had learned at the monastery that the thing I most needed was to be the one who chose, so I chose.

I had only ever done this once before, and that time I had been led. A man had taught me what my body could do, had been the one who knew and the one who showed me, and I had followed where I was taken and called the following love, because I had not known there was another way to do it. There was another way. I found it that night in the shrine, in the low gold of the hearth, and the way was this, that I led, and he let me.

He understood it without my saying a word, which was the thing about him, that he could read a hurt off a person and answer it before they had to ask. When I put my hands to him he went still under them and let me, as he had held still and let me tend his arm in the wood, except that this was no wound to be tended and there was no fear in it, only the slow warm country of him laid open for me to learn. He did not take the lead from me. He did not reach to show me what I should want or how I should want it. He held himself still and attentive and gave me the whole of himself to explore at whatever pace I found, and I understood that his stillness was not passivity but the truest care he knew how to give, the same care that had made him look away in the snow, turned now to letting me be the one who moved.

So I began, and I began by undressing him.

I worked the fastenings of his tunic loose one at a time and pushed the coarse wool back off his shoulders, and I watched his ribs lift and fall with each breath while I did it. He let me. He raised his arms when I needed them raised and went motionless when I needed him to, and when the last of his clothing was gone and he lay bare in the low gold of the hearth I sat back on my heels and looked at him, all of him, and I took my time about it. The broad plane of his chest. The old silver lines of forgotten battles scattered across his ribs. The fresh linen bound tight over the new wound. The dense heat coming off his skin, and under it the smell of woodsmoke and incense, the shrine worked into him. Looking was a thing I was allowed now, slowly, for no reason but that it pleased me, and I did it until I had looked my fill.

Then I undressed myself, and I did it while he watched.

That was the first thing I learned that night about the power I had never been given leave to hold. I drew the shift over my head and let it fall, and I did not cover myself, and I watched what the sight of me did to him. His breath went shallow. His gaze moved down me and went darker as it travelled, until his eyes were near black in the firelight, and then it came back to my face and stayed there. His hands closed in the blanket at his sides and fisted, the knuckles gone pale, because I had not yet given them leave to move. He held all that strength still by his own will, waiting on a word from me, and that sent a heat through me I felt to the soles of my feet. In the wood he had turned his eyes away. Here he could not, and would not, and how he wanted me was plain on him, held in check only because he had made a gift of it to me.

I knelt back over him, the warmth of the hearth against my bare thighs, and set my mouth to the hollow beneath his ear, and a low breath shuddered out of him and travelled from his collarbone into mine.

With my palms and then with my lips, I mapped him. I had touched a man before. I had been shown, once, what to do and how, and I had done what I was shown. This was not that. This was mine to discover, and I discovered him a little at a time, the rough stubble of his jaw and the thick column of his throat and the hard ridge of a collarbone, down into the muscle of his chest, past the old scars to the linen at his side. When my lips brushed the skin just above the wrap a sound scraped out of him, low and past his choosing, and his whole body drew tight as a bent bow. I paused with my palm flat over his heart and felt it going hard and fast beneath my hand, and I looked up to find his eyes half shut and burning. Each place I set my mouth taught me something, and each sound he made told me where to go next, and reading him was its own sharp pleasure, mine to take.

His control began to fray, and I felt the first give of it, and I was glad.

It showed first in his hands. They came up off the blanket without his meaning them to, reaching, and stopped in the air, and I lifted my head and looked at him, and he understood and put them back. But I had seen the strain of it, seen what it cost him to stay still, and I understood that his stillness was no small ease but the hardest kind of holding, all that strength turned inward and spent on giving me room. So I took mercy. I lifted his hands from the blanket and set them on my hips, and I let him touch me at last.

His fingers were broad and hot against my skin. He did not pull me down or press. He held me as though I were something that might crack under any real pressure, his thumbs moving in slow circles at my hipbones, and he let me set every pace and every depth. When my breath began to come short he did not rush me. When I guided his hand lower he went where I moved it and no further, watching my face the whole time, reading what he found there and answering it. The pleasure built in me steady and certain and wholly under my own hand, a heat no one had put in me or drawn out of me against my will, that I had found in myself and was choosing, breath by breath, to let rise. I did not yet know what I liked. That was the gift of it, that I had it to find out, that each thing I tried I tried because I chose it, and each choice taught me more of the body I was only now coming to own.

And when the need in me had built past the slow pleasure of learning him, I rose over him and took him into me, and the breath left us both at once.

I set the pace of it, slow at first, learning the rhythm my own body reached for. He gripped my hips then, an instinctive, grounding hold, but he let me have the depth and the cadence and made none of it for me. I watched the control go out of his face in the firelight. The guard he wore every hour of every day dissolved off him, his brow smoothing, his mouth parting, his eyes staying fixed on mine, dark and open and full of a wonder he made no effort to hide. And still I felt the strain in him, the banked hunger held hard on its leash, the tremble in the hands at my hips, and it moved me past anything I had felt before, that all that strength lay under me and answered to me and waited on my choosing.

There was a moment, near the end of it, where the old fear reached up out of habit, the bracing, the flinch, the voice that said this is where it is taken from you. And it found nothing to take hold of, because nothing was being done to me. I was doing it. I was the one moving, the one choosing, the one taking my own pleasure in my own time from a man who had given me the reins, and the fear had no purchase on a thing I was doing to myself, for myself, and the cold of it fell away like ash off a wind.

I found the rhythm again, and he began at last to move with me, his hips lifting to meet mine, the sweat gleaming on his shoulders in the flickering light, a low sound breaking out of him. The heat wound tight inside me, made by my own hands and my own choosing, and when it broke it came like light through glass. I arched into the dark with my head thrown back and his name tearing out of my throat, and he followed me a breath later, pulling me down hard against his chest, his hips rising into mine, my name spilling low into the hollow of my neck. And it was mine, all of it, every touch and every breath and every spark of the heat, the first thing in weeks that had been wholly and only mine.

And the fox did not stir.