They put Kellan back together in a cot in the Undercity, which he would have found unbearable a month ago and now accepted with the flat exhaustion of a man who has run out of places to be proud. He would live. He'd carry a scar the length of his ribs, and he would not let anyone but Silas near it, and when I made myself go and stand at the foot of the cot he looked at me and I looked at him and neither of us said any of the enormous things, because there weren't words the right size yet.
"You still don't forgive me," he said. Not a question.
"No."
"Good." He closed his eyes. "I'd have known you were lying."
I left him a book from my mother's shelf — the histories the Temple burned, the ones about the line — and I did not explain why, and he did not ask, and that was as close as either of us could get, for now, to the thing that might one day, a very long way off, become something other than a wound.
He'd started doing the work, at least. That was new. Before I even asked, he'd given Silas everything — every Temple protocol, every private channel, every weakness in Morrigan's order he'd learned in a lifetime of being an Heir. Not to be forgiven. He'd stopped asking for that. Just to be, for the first time in his life, useful to something that wasn't his own advantage.
It was Mara who found Della for me. I should have known it would be.
She turned up at the edge of the Undercity three days after the plaza, thinner and harder than the girl who'd wrapped her coat around me in an alley, with a network of her own already half-built through the Ashwood territories — because while I'd been becoming a symbol under the city, Mara had been quietly doing the unglamorous work of keeping the people I'd left behind alive.
"Della's safe," she said, before I could even ask, because she knew me. "I moved her the day the Council named you. The Ashwood elders were going to hand her to the Temple to prove their loyalty — a bond-keeper who raised the Blood Moon, she's worth a great deal to the right buyer." Mara's jaw set. "So I took her north, past the Houses, to people who owe me. She's frightened and she's furious and she's alive, and she made me swear to tell you two things." A breath. "One: stop trying to save the whole world before you've saved the three people in it who love you. And two—" Mara's voice caught, just slightly. "Two: she says it's time you knew who your father was. And that she'll only tell you to your face."
The floor of the world tilted, the way it did when a locked door I'd forgotten about swung open a crack.
But that — that was a road for later. A Book's worth of later. I made myself set it down, gently, where I'd know to find it.
"Bring her to me," I said. "When it's safe. And Mara—" I caught her hand. "You're not doing the unglamorous work alone anymore. You're not a coat you gave me and then vanished. You're one of the three."
She looked at me for a moment, and then she almost smiled, and it was the first entirely uncomplicated good thing that had happened in weeks.
Alaric found me that night on the surface — the actual surface, under the actual sky, on a rooftop above the sleeping tunnels, because I'd needed to see the moon without a grate across it.
For a while we just stood there. We'd won a war three days ago and neither of us had said a single word yet about the night before it, the dark hours, the door I'd kept closed in the telling. There'd been no time. Now there was time, and the time sat between us, enormous.
"I need to ask you something," I said, "and I need you to not give me the kind answer."
"I don't give you those anymore."
"No. You don't." I made myself look at him. "I have her eyes. Her voice, you said. Her spine. You told me the night we met I stopped your heart because you looked across a room and saw her, looking out of my face." The thing I'd been carrying since a burning car finally came out. "So I need to know, and I need it to be true, even if it's ugly. When you look at me — is it me? Or am I just the closest you'll ever get again to the woman you couldn't save?"
He was quiet for a long time. Long enough that I braced for it.
"When you walked into that Council hall in a borrowed dress," he said slowly, "yes. It was her. For one second I saw a ghost, and it nearly put me on the floor, and I have to tell you that because you'd feel the lie if I didn't." He turned to face me fully. "But Liora, I loved the way you love a door someone opens for you when you've been locked in the dark your whole life. She showed me the truth and then she died for it, and I have spent twenty years grateful to her and destroyed by her and I will carry her until I die. That's real. I won't pretend it isn't."
"That's not an answer."
"I'm getting to the answer." And there was something almost like a smile, tired and true. "The answer is that your mother would have taken one look at how you handled that plaza and been jealous. Because she opened one man's eyes, once, and it cost her everything. And you stood on an altar built to kill you and opened a hundred thousand at once, and lived, and asked them a question instead of giving them an order — which is the one thing she never quite learned to do." He reached up, and touched my face, not the way you touch a memory, the way you touch a person. "I don't love a ghost, Sera. I loved a woman who showed me a door. I'm in love with the one who walked through it and then held it open behind her for everyone else. Those aren't the same, and I know the difference, because the ghost never once frightened me, and you frighten me all the time." His thumb moved along my cheekbone. "You are not the closest I'll get to her. You're the farthest I've ever been from the man I was when she died. That's what it is. That's the whole of it."
I kissed him, on a rooftop under a moon with no bars across it, and it had nothing to do with strategy, or duty, or a bond, or a war — nothing to do with anything but wanting, for once in my life, the simple human wanting of a person for a person — and he kissed me back the same way, and for one night the tunnels and the Temple and the whisper I never heard and the father I'd just learned I could finally have a name for all waited, patiently, in the dark, for us to be ready for them.
They would not wait long. They never do.
But they waited that night.
