Page 123

I found it warm, and quiet, and mine in a way very little in my life had ever belonged to me before.

I liked this.

I liked them, all of them, in ways I still didn't have proper words for and wasn't drunk enough tonight to figure out, though I was certainly drunk enough to stop pretending I didn't feel any of it at all. Liora's voice sat somewhere behind my thoughts, warm and certain. Nothing is stopping you. I didn't know yet what I'd do with that, only that it had settled into me the way good advice sometimes did, quiet and permanent, waiting for me to be ready to use it.

The fire crackled low. Somewhere across the yard Kellan lost the stone game loudly enough that Taren started laughing, and Nykos said something dry enough that even Corian laughed. Ashter shifted against the chair leg and settled again, fully at ease, the ember cracks along his back banked low the way they only went when nothing in the yard needed watching. Halver's fingers kept moving through my hair, unhurried, and Alex's thumb traced an idle line along the arch of my foot like he'd forgotten he was doing it at all.

I closed my eyes.

The noise didn't fade so much as soften, wrapping around me the way the blanket had, warm and close and entirely too comfortable to fight, and somewhere between one breath and the next I stopped trying to hold on to any of it and let myself go under.

Chapter Fourteen: The Things We Wear

Nykos

I had started taking my morning tea beside Jade without deciding to.

The kitchen held other chairs. For the fourth morning running I found her already at the table and took the one to her right anyway. I told myself the reason was practical. The rest of the house reached me even when my shields held, not as words but as familiar minds moving through familiar moods, while Jade sat quiet in a way nobody else in this house managed.

She gave me nothing.

Her mind stayed a blank space beside mine, closed so completely that sitting near her felt like stepping out of a crowded hall into an empty room. I didn't have to brace against her thoughts, sort my irritation from hers, or reinforce the wall I'd built up long ago. The absence should have unsettled me. Instead it had become the easiest part of my morning.

It had nothing to do with the loose black braid over her shoulder, or the line between her brows whenever she was solving a problem without admitting she had one.

That morning the line between her brows had nothing to do with a problem at all.

Jade sat hunched over her tea with both hands wrapped around the cup, dark shadows pressed deep beneath her eyes, her whole face pulled tight against a headache she hadn't mentioned and didn't need to. Whatever Argentite had poured down her the night before clearly hadn't finished with her yet. When Alex's chair scraped back behind her she flinched hard enough to slop tea over her knuckles.

"Inside voice," she said, to nobody in particular.

"That was a chair."

"The chair should learn better manners."

I studied her over the rim of my own cup, careful to keep my amusement hidden. "You could fix that, you know."

"Fix what."

"You healed a broken leg in under a minute. I assume a hangover isn't beyond you."

She gave me a look that would have withered someone less used to being on the receiving end of her looks. "It's not an injury. It's poor decisions metabolizing themselves."

"That's an unnecessarily principled stance for this early."

She set the cup down with more force than it deserved. "It was not intentional. I simply forgot I could—" She stopped, pressed the heel of her hand against one eye, and gave up on the sentence entirely.

That was the part I couldn't hold in the laugh anymore. It came out low at first and then didn't stay that way, and the look she turned on me only made it worse.

"Laugh it up."

"I intend to."

"I hate all of you," she said, without any heat behind it at all, "and I am never accepting a drink from any of you again."

Halver set a glass of water in front of her without being asked.

"This doesn't count."