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“Is that why you dosed me with a relaxant before my conversation with Rheya?”

Stian startled. Clearly, he’d assumed exhaustion had wiped my memory.

He cleared his throat before he said, apologetic, “It was necessary to keep your heart rate even and your facial muscles loose. If Arun had detected a lie—either in your pulse or your physical tells—he would have resorted to other means of extracting the truth. And our immunity,” he added, nodding to the completed Gallery brooch on my vanity, “does not protect us from Ansoran authority itself.”

I nodded slowly, having already deduced Stian’s motives. Because I had lied to Arun that day—and even with his specter around my wrist like a measuring gauge, he hadn’t sensed anything amiss.

“What made you think I would lie?”

Stian gave me a wry look. “I made an educated guess.”

After that, a silent alliance formed between us. Stian grew increasingly proud of my progress, in a deeply paternal way. He started celebrating my successes with lemon muffins, and we would eat them together, stories from Vereen slipping into the cracks of conversation until our province was all we talked about. Until his eye-creasing smiles began reminding me of my father’s, which should’ve produced that usual gut-wrenching sensation inside me.

Instead, I found myself wanting to think about Father. And the more I did, the more I understood why I’d been making such swift progress with my Wielding. Grief had been my companion these last weeks, oozing into my power because I’d refused to acknowledge it. And when I’d surrendered to the memory of Father that day in the Neyamay waters, I’d taken the first step toward dealing with my loss.

But as I began the slow process of healing one internal wound, another began opening up inside me.

After that first day of being bedridden, I told Keil everything that had occurred at Neyamay. But each time he returned—with a meal, with concern, with an unspoken desire to exist in my vicinity—I would tell the nurses I was too weary for company.

It hurt beyond reason, fighting the magnetic pull toward him. My deal with Rheya was complete, and my failure to destroy the compass meant that home was now further from my reach than ever; I would be, willingly or not, bound to Ansora for the foreseeable future. So there was nothing stopping us from being together for as long as we could be.

Nothing except me.

Because I couldn’t stop thinking about Erik’s soldiers, trying to capture Keil on Banarrat. Couldn’t stop hearing Erik’s voice, dark with anticipation. I would have taken great pleasure in cutting him open in front of you.

And a fearful realization implanted itself in me: I’d been trying to maintain a boundary between us for all these weeks not just because of my deal with Rheya, or the inevitability of our separation, or the fact that Keil could make me vulnerable.

But because I could make him vulnerable.

Somewhere along the way, I’d let myself forget. I’d gotten swept up in him once again, believing it didn’t have to mean more than desire and simple heat. Yet there was no heat attached to the little pieces of him I’d been unwittingly hoarding like jewels these past few weeks. How his fingers traced absent patterns over surfaces whenever he was deep in thought. How he added cinnamon to his tea on nights he felt restless. How he gravitated toward the sunny side of every room, leaving his skin forever warm.

Being with Keil had always meant more, and I’d been fooling myself in thinking otherwise. But Erik had done well to remind me of a grim, painful reality: The compass was not the most precious thing he could have stolen from me that day on Banarrat.

So I couldn’t let myself be selfish anymore. As long as I continued to hold on to Keil, I was only putting him in danger. And while I couldn’t undo all that had happened between us—all that Erik had already witnessed—I could stop it from going any further.

I could stop him from becoming the next victim of the fire that kept destroying everything around me.

I didn’t know if I was more anguished or relieved when Keil finally stopped knocking. I only knew that if it ached this much to hear him walk away now, I wouldn’t be able to bear the agony of losing him for good.

A few days later, another visitor marched in on Stian’s heels.

“I don’t care if she’s refusing visitors,” Lye was saying, uncharacteristically anxious. “If you’d seen her on that riverbank, you would need proof of life, too—”

He broke off as I crashed against his torso, wrapping my arms around him. My reaction shocked him enough that he froze for a moment before he chuckled, breathy and full of relief.

“Great gods, Lockpicker,” he said, returning the embrace. “If this is the treatment I get for breaking your ribs, I should throw you under a moving carriage sometime.”

I elbowed him in the gut as I pulled back, which only made him laugh again. My heart swelled at the sound, and not just because he’d saved my life, but because I’d spent the battle at Banarrat believing him dead.

“Thank you,” I said, serious now. “I wouldn’t be here without you.”

His smile lines creased through a new scar on his temple. “What are friends for if not to give the occasional mouth-to-mouth?”

“You gave me mouth-to-mouth?”

“Hmm.” He nodded. “Admittedly, not how I imagined our first kiss would be.”

I rolled my eyes, then leaned up to kiss his cheek. “Better?”