~ 15 ~
Neither of us stayed to oversee the work. Graves persuaded us that he could follow the plans as well as anyone, and that it would be an insult to hover. He also really wanted his queen out of the lower tunnels as fast as he could move her along without giving offense. While I sympathized with the man’s difficulties, I figured he could handle her himself.
I’d proven I had no ability to do so.
Just as well, as I passed out while Ami was still cleaning my leg wound. I hadn’t lost that much blood, but—as she informed me—I’d lost plenty to begin with and hadn’t had the opportunity to make more.
At least it saved the argument about sleeping arrangements. Or rather, my losing consciousness so precipitously had resolved the argument in Ami’s favor. I awoke in her bed, feeling as if a sound had brought me alert. High above, a clear blue winter sky showed searingly bright through the clerestory windows. The storm had finally abated. No more howling wind. Even the sea had quieted to a muted, regular crashing of waves.
And somewhere beneath it all, the dragon slept.
So did Ami, curled up against my side, her back to me like a cat, only her bright hair showing on the pillow. I put a hand on her waist, finding her warm and naked. So was I, and my morning erection ached in a counterpoint with my healing arm and leg, all somehow equally painful. Along with my heart—or whatever facsimile remained of the shriveled, scarred thing.
Somehow revisiting those nightmares, making myself walk away from Ami over and over, all had conspired to rip the scar tissue off the oozing, pus-filled well of my psyche. I thought I’d healed. In those silent days of manual tasks and fervent prayer, I’d immersed myself in the routine of the White Monks. Glorianna’s light and love had filled me, chasing away the shadows.
But that had been no more than a bandage. Underneath the white robes, I’d been a mess of broken bones too scattered to mend, the ichor of the prison left to fester and turn me into one of them. A monster.
I’d been a fool to love Ami, to let myself have her—not because she was so far above me, but because I wasn’t whole enough to love anyone. Didn’t trust myself, I supposed.
“Ash?” Ami whispered. I pulled my gaze from the intense blue of the sky out the windows to find the same clarity in her eyes, watching me with caution and concern.
“I didn’t remember these windows, from before,” I told her, in lieu of asking what she’d seen to make her worry. “Or this bed, for that matter.”
“I had them put in. So you could see the sky even with the shutters closed. And I thought you’d like this bed better, because it kind of looks like the forest.”
I studied her, impossibly moved. “You planned for me to come back here all along?”
“Of course,” she said simply. “I always wanted you here with me, if I could be enough for you. I know you’d be giving up other things. Maybe more important things.”
“Nothing is more important to me than you are. I’m sorry if I made it seem otherwise.” I reached up and smoothed the hair out of her face. “My sun.”
A line formed between her brows. “I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”
“My love,” I amended, and pressed a kiss to that line, smoothing it away. “But you should know—it was never you. You never blinded or burned me. It was always me, too afraid of what I wanted. I wanted you more than anything, and that wanting terrified me.”
She pulled back a little, laying a hand on my stubbled cheek. “Are you talking to me?”
“I’m trying. I’m not good at it. Silence is… easier.” And it always had been, I realized. The White Monks, the vow of silence, that had been the tourniquet. It stopped the life-threatening loss of blood, but keeping it tight for too long had nearly made me lose what mattered most in my life.
“I think I understand that,” she answered. “I try to, anyway. But sometimes… sometimes your silence hurts me. I feel like you don’t trust me.”
A sound came out of me, involuntary, pain to match hers. And maybe an acknowledgment of that truth. “I don’t want you to think less of me,” I admitted.
“Oh, Ash,” she breathed. “You are the strongest, bravest, most amazing person I’ve ever met. You lived through horrible things that would break most people.”
“I think they did break me.” My voice, always hoarse, choked up, and wetness touched my lashes. I tried to turn my face away, so she wouldn’t see, but Ami’s hand tightened, holding me while she levered up to kiss my eyelids.
“You’re not broken,” she whispered against me. “You’re loving and kind. You embody patience, with me and the bratlings. You love me even when I’m being impossible and emotional.”
“I like that you rage and weep. It’s who you are—a vivid and passionate person who’s fully alive. Your way is better. You so freely express what I can’t. Sometimes…” I took a breath, focused on the sky. “Sometimes I think I’m like the volcano, with a cork in it. All this feeling inside me, it’s the lava that will explode out and burn everything around me to ash.”
“That’s not you.” Ami kissed me, heating it, stirring the passion between us until I groaned. “You do express it—during sex.”
“I… what?”
“During sex. You show me everything then. It’s the one time you’re not all guarded. That’s part of why I like everything you do to me, no matter what. Because it’s really you, showing me what’s really inside.”
I didn’t know what to think of that. Those seemed to be the times I lost control, when I lost sight of the man I’d tried so hard to craft from the shards left of that imprisoned boy. “I don’t like that idea, that who I truly am is someone who hurts you.”
“You never hurt me, not really. That’s the thing. Not during sex, anyway. You only hurt me when you pull away.”
“I pull away because I think I’m not good for you.”
“Because you think loving someone means destroying them.”
I nearly protested, but… “Maybe,” I finally said.
“But we already love each other, and we’re not destroyed. We’re better. I love you. Astar and Stella love you. You’d only destroy us by taking that away. We’d be lost without you.”
“You asked me to go.”
“No. And you claim I don’t listen.” She shook her head and sat up a little, making me look at her. “I never wanted you to go. I was trying not to be selfish and keep you with me against your wanting to go.”
I searched her face, bemused. “I never wanted to go. I thought you wanted me to.”
She sighed, raking back her hair. “What a pair we are. Flinging words back and forth and never getting the right message across. Will you explain to me why you think I wanted you to leave me, when you are the one person who keeps me whole in my heart?”
“Do I do that?”
“Yes. You alone have never been dazzled by my face, my body. You tell me the truth—when you talk to me.”
“Ami.” Reverently, I reached up and touched her face, then slid my fingers through the enticing silk of her hair. “I’m eternally dazzled by you. I can’t think straight when you smile at me. You know this.”
“Maybe—but I don’t agree on the thinking straight. You don’t let me sway you, even when I try my best.”
I laughed, a scrape of sound. “You sway me all the time.”
“Do I? Then let me sway you now.” She kissed me. “Stay with me. Don’t ever leave me. Be with me always.”
“Ami…” I tried, but she drank in the sound, making a hmm of pleasure. Reinforcing my grip on her shoulder, I set her away from me and sat up. “I can’t do that.”
“Aha.” She sat up, too, folding her arms over her naked bosom. “So much for my power over you. Why not? You said you don’t want to leave me.”
“I don’t want to.” I scrubbed a hand over my face. “But we can’t be together forever. You know this.”
“I don’t know it. By Glorianna, you’re going to explain this to me.”
“You are the Queen of Avonlidgh.”
“I’m well aware.”
I shook my head in frustration. “You have obligations! To the throne of Avonlidgh, and to the High Throne, should it come to that. You have to marry a man of equal—or better—rank.”
“I don’t care about that.”
“You have to care—you’re a queen, not some dairy maid.”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m empty-headed.” She said it quietly, warning in her tone.
“I know perfectly well you’re not empty-headed,” I snapped. “You’re the smartest woman I’ve ever met, you’re just foolish when it comes to me.”
“You were doing well until that last bit. Ash—I am not a fool about you. I’m smart enough to know that I’m my best self with you. Glorianna laid Her hand on you and sent you to me. Now that I know you don’t really want to leave me, I’m not letting you go. Ever. Chew on that.”
Her decisive nod was mitigated somewhat by the luscious bounce of her breasts, but I managed not to smile. Or reach for her. No turning to sex to blunt the raw edges. Talk. Talk this out. “If you marry, your husband will not want me around.”
“Easily solved: I won’t marry anyone but you.”
“You can’t marry me!”
She shrugged a little. “Only because you haven’t asked.”
“What are you talking about?”
“At Ordnung, we discussed this. I said then I wouldn’t marry anyone but you and you said that you hadn’t asked me.” Now she looked away, blinking rapidly.
I felt as if I’d been kicked by a horse: stunned, momentarily dizzy. We hadn’t discussed it. She’d been in a strategy meeting with her sisters and I’d only attended because Ami insisted. At least that way I could keep an eye on her. “That wasn’t about us.” I felt my way through the words. “You were just saying that, to support Her Majesty, and I returned the joke in kind.”
“No,” she replied with exaggerated patience. “I said that because I want you to be my husband. Then I waited for you to ask me, like you seemed to want to. And then you never did. You wouldn’t even dance with me—not at the coronation ball, not at Castle Avonlidgh.”
“Ami…” I felt wrecked. So much I’d done wrong. “I wouldn’t dance with you because I can’t dance.”
Her mouth fell open slightly. “Oh, Ash… This is your answer?”
“And I can’t ask you to marry me,” I continued doggedly. “You’re a queen and I’m an ex-convict.”
“Is that the only reason?”
“It’s a pretty fucking big reason.”
She glared, no longer so watery. “If I’m queen, I make the law. I can marry who I like.”
“You’re still subject to the High Queen’s law.”
“You think Essla wouldn’t back me on this? Harlan is her consort and maybe there are good political reasons for him to stay that way, but she won’t marry anyone else, either. I’ll get her to make you into a duke or something, if that’s what you need.”
I shook my head, trying to clear it. “The Duchess of Lianore offered to dub me Lord Sousbois.”
Ami smiled. “It’s a pretty place. You’d like it.”
“It’s not so easy as that.”
“It is that easy, Ash.” She framed my face with her hands. “Just let me love you. Let yourself love me and everything else will fall into place.”
“Love doesn’t solve everything.”
“No.” She kissed me. “But it makes everything worthwhile.”
I sank into her, into the kiss and into the silken sweetness of her embrace. In the soft light of morning, I let myself love her as she’d asked, showing her with caresses and all the rawness in me, how very worthwhile that could be.