Chapter 77 Chapter 77

Chapter 77 Chapter 77

Isla's POV
I found her on the east wall a little after midnight.
She wasn't supposed to be out there, not after what the creature had done that afternoon, not with guards stretched thin trying to cover every approach to the city in case it came back. But I knew her well enough by now to know that asking Twilight to stay inside walls after a day like that was asking the impossible. She needed sky. She needed to look at the thing that had almost taken the city apart and decide for herself whether it was still out there.

She was sitting with her back against the parapet, knees pulled up, looking out at the dark hills beyond the city. I climbed up next to her without saying anything and sat close enough that our shoulders touched and for a while neither of us said a word.

"You should be sleeping." I said eventually.

"You should too." She said.

"I am, technically. This counts as sleeping if you don't think about it too hard."

That got the corner of her mouth to move, not quite a smile, but close enough that I counted it as a win.

We sat there a while longer, the city quiet below us, torches burning low along the wall, the sky empty and giving nothing away about whether it would stay that way.

"I keep thinking about today." She said finally. 

"About what it felt like up there."

"Tell me."

She was quiet for a moment, working out how to say it, which was unusual for her. Twilight didn't usually need time to find words. She found them like she found everything else, fast and direct and without much patience for hesitation. This was different.

"It looked at me." She said. "And for a second I wanted to keep looking back. Not because I wanted to die or anything dramatic like that. Just because there was something in it that felt like an answer to a question I didn't know I'd been asking my whole life." She shook her head slightly. "Does that make sense?"

"No." I said honestly. "But I believe you felt it."

"I've spent my whole life not knowing where I came from." She said. "And for one second looking into that thing felt like it might actually tell me. Like the not-knowing could just end if I let it." She looked down at her hands. "That scared me more than the creature itself did."

I reached over and took her hand, careful, the way I always was even now, even here on a wall in the middle of the night with no one around to see. She let me. Her fingers curled into mine like they'd been waiting for the excuse.

"You came back though." I said. "You looked away."

"Ryaknorg pulled me back." She said. "I'm not sure I'd have managed it on my own."

"You would have." I said. "You always do."

She looked at me then, really looked, the way she did sometimes that made me feel like she was reading something in my face I hadn't said out loud yet.

"I don't always feel as certain as you make me sound." She said quietly.

"I know." I said. "That's why I say it. Somebody has to be certain about you when you can't be certain about yourself. I've appointed myself to the position."

That actually got a real laugh out of her, short and surprised, and the sound of it did something warm in my chest that I'd missed without realizing how much I'd missed it. We hadn't laughed together in days. There hadn't been room for it, not with everything that needed handling, not with a kingdom barely holding itself together and a creature in the sky and a king's confession still sitting heavy between us.

"I'm tired, Isla." She said, and the way she said it wasn't about sleep. "Not just tonight. I'm tired of being the answer to everyone's problem. The king needs me to fix his legacy. The kingdom needs me to fix the creature. Alexandro needs me to be the reason his grief makes sense. Everyone needs something from what I am and nobody's asked what I need in a long time."

"What do you need." I said.

She was quiet for a long moment, looking back out at the dark hills.

"I don't know anymore." She said. "I've been so busy being needed I forgot how to want something just for me."

"Try." I said. "Just try, right now, just between us. Nobody else is listening."

She thought about it. Really thought about it, the way she thought about everything that mattered, turning it over carefully before she let it out into the air where it could be wrong or incomplete or messy.

"I want to stop hiding what we are." She said finally. "I want to walk through that courtyard tomorrow holding your hand and not calculate who's watching first. I want one day, just one, where the most complicated thing I'm thinking about is you instead of all of this."

Something in my chest cracked open at that, gentle, not painful, the way ice cracks when spring finally gets to it.

"You told the king the law was changing." I said. "You meant that."

"I meant that." She said. "But meaning it and living inside the part where it hasn't changed yet, where we're still managing every glance, that's a different thing. 

That's the part that's tired."
I shifted so I was facing her more fully, still holding her hand, and reached up with my free hand to brush a strand of hair back from her face, slow, deliberate, not caring for once whether anyone on the wall walkway below might glance up and see two shapes sitting close together in the torchlight.

"Then let's have tonight." I said. "Not the whole world fixed. Not the law changed yet. Just tonight, up here, where it's just us."

She leaned into my hand and closed her eyes for a second and when she opened them again there was something looser in her face, some of the weight finally set down even if only for a little while.
"Tell me something that isn't about any of this." She said. "Something normal. Something that has nothing to do with kings or creatures or laws."
I thought about it. "When I was young, before any of this, before I was a general or anyone's mate or anyone's problem to solve, I wanted to be a healer."

She raised an eyebrow. "You. A healer."

"I was eight. I hadn't met any of the people I'd eventually have to fight yet." I said, and she laughed again, and I kept going because the laugh was worth chasing. "I used to patch up every animal I found in the woods near my father's estate. Birds with broken wings, a fox with a torn ear once that bit me for my trouble. My father said I had the patience for it. Then I got older and patience turned into something he could point at the sword instead, and that was that."

"Do you regret it?" She asked. "Not becoming a healer."

"Some days." I said honestly. "Most days I think I'd have found my way to a sword eventually no matter what. Some things in you are just built a certain way. But there are nights like tonight where I think about that little girl with the fox bite and wonder what she'd think of where I ended up."

"I think she'd be proud." Twilight said quietly. 

"Even with all of it. Even with the law and the hiding and everything that's hard about it."

"Maybe." I said. "I think she'd mostly just be glad I found someone worth all of it."

Twilight went still beside me, and I felt her hand tighten slightly around mine, and for a moment neither of us said anything because some things didn't need more words layered onto them, they just needed to be allowed to exist in the quiet.

"I love you." She said eventually, soft.

"I love you too." I said, just as plainly, and felt something settle in my chest that had been unsettled for longer than I could properly trace. 

"And I'm done managing how loud I say it either."

We sat with that for a while, the words still hanging in the air between us like something fragile we were both being careful not to disturb. Then Twilight shifted, turning her head to look at me properly.

"Can I ask you something." She said. "And you don't have to answer if it's too much."
"Ask."

"Were you ever afraid of this." She said. "Of us. Before any of it started, before the mate pull even hit, were you afraid of what it would mean if it ever happened to you."

I thought about that honestly, because she deserved honesty even when it was complicated.

"Yes." I said. "I grew up watching what happened to people the law caught. Quietly, mostly. No public spectacle, just people who disappeared from court, who lost positions, who stopped being invited anywhere that mattered. I told myself it would never be me because I was careful, because I followed every rule perfectly, because I made general younger than almost anyone and that kind of success was supposed to make me untouchable." I looked out at the dark hills. "Then I met you and every rule I'd built my life around stopped mattering the second that burn hit my neck."

"Do you regret that." She asked quietly. "The rules stopping mattering."

"Not for one second." I said, and meant it completely. "I regret the years we spent managing it instead of just being in it. I regret every room we walked into separately because walking in together would have raised questions. But I don't regret you. I never could."

She was quiet for a moment, processing that, and I watched her face in the torchlight, the way it had softened over the course of the night from the tight controlled thing it usually was into something I rarely got to see.

"I used to think love was something that happened to other people." She said. "Growing up the way I did, nobody loved me first, so I never really learned what it was supposed to feel like. I had to figure it out from nothing, from just you, from the way you looked at me in that camp like I wasn't a problem to be managed."

"You were never a problem." I said.

"I know that now." She said. "I didn't always."

I pulled her closer, careful of the wound on her side that was still healing, and she let me, resting against me fully now instead of just leaning, and we stayed like that for a long while, just breathing together in the quiet.

She leaned her head against my shoulder and we sat there together on the wall with the city quiet below us and the sky empty above us, and for that small stretch of night, with everything still unresolved and the creature still out there somewhere and the law still technically unchanged, it didn't matter. None of it reached us up there. It was just the two of us and the dark hills and the torches burning low, and for once neither of us was managing anything at all.

Before we climbed down she stopped me at the top of the steps, just for a second, and pressed her forehead against mine, eyes closed, breathing slow.

"Thank you." She said quietly. "For tonight. For the fox bite story. For not needing me to be anything other than tired."

"Always." I said. "Whatever you need to be, on any given night, I'm not going anywhere."

She pulled back enough to look at me, and there was something in her eyes I wanted to hold onto, something unguarded and entirely hers, given to me without her usual careful rationing.

"When this is over." She said. "When the creature's dealt with and the king's fate is settled and Alexandro's found somewhere to put his grief that isn't me. When the law actually changes instead of just gets promised. I want us to have more nights like this. Not stolen. Not managed. Just ours."
"We will." I said. "I promise you that."

We stayed until the cold finally drove us down sometime before dawn, and even then we walked back through the empty corridors with our hands still loosely linked, not letting go just because the wall was behind us now, both of us deciding without saying it out loud that tonight the calculation didn't apply.

Tomorrow there would be a kingdom to run and a creature to find and a law to actually change instead of just promise. Tomorrow Alexandro would still be angry and Nixon would still be trying to earn something back and the king would still be sitting under guard waiting to learn his fate in full.

But tonight had been ours. And I was going to hold onto that for as long as it lasted.