Not hers. He was Kazi’s, more than he’d ever been hers.
There it was, the x-equals-y, the final sharp shard lodged behind her heart after she’d chipped the rest away. It still waited for her.
Keifon touched her arm through her cloak. “I won’t let him bother you.”
“That’s not it.” Her sigh puffed out in a cloud. She was so close. She had to stop being a child about it. “We can talk inside.”
She took a minute to stall, stamping the snow off her shoes. The doorknob was icy cold, but inside, a lamp burned on the hook at the foot of the stairs. Her winter coat hung on its peg — she’d have killed for a good winter coat, a couple of those days in stables. Keifon closed the door behind them and slid the bolt home. Realizing that he had come out without a key, Agna turned her own in the lock before putting it away for good.
She felt the weight of her backpack shift as Keifon gently tugged at it. Agna tried to turn, as ungainly as a flipped turtle. “Oh. Just a second.” She fumbled at the backpack’s straps with numb fingers, and when the straps came loose, he helped to pull the unwieldy pack from her back. Without its weight, out of the wind, Agna felt light and dizzy. Her skin burned where the wind had scoured her wet cheeks, and feeling returned to her extremities in hot prickles. Grateful for a minute of wordless practicalities, Agna hung up her cloak and slipped her wet feet out of her summer shoes.
“I’ll get a fire going.” Setting her pack aside, Keifon hung his coat next to her cloak and pulled off his boots. His feet were bare under them, blast him. The legs of his pajamas were soaked with snow melt.
“Thanks.” A fire sounded like the loveliest thing in the world. Her legs shook as she climbed the stairs, and she elaborated on the scene. A fire, and the couch with its deep cushions, and all of the blankets in the house, and the cats curled up and purring next to her. And one more thing.
Keifon had taken the lamp as he climbed the stairs, and so the light bobbed across the walls, casting her shadow before her. She could reach the doorknob at the top by touch, by habit. The kitchen folded her in warmth so suddenly that she half-expected cold mist to roll off her body. It was quiet except for muffled voices downstairs and the soft hiss of a fire in the stove.
“Gods damn it, Kazi,” Keifon muttered behind her.
Agna bit back a hysterical giggle. “Language.”
He set the lamp on the table and unshouldered her backpack on the floor. The stove cast stripes of orange light across the floorboards and heated the teakettle and a small cooking pot on its surface. Across the rear burners lay two rectangular slabs of metal that she half-recognized as bed warmers, to slip under one’s covers at night.
Keifon cast about for a potholder and lifted the pot lid. “It’s the broth. I’d set it aside for dinner tomorrow. Had it in the larder in the yard.” He swore again in Yanweian and replaced the lid. Gingerly, he touched the pot bare-handed. “Still cold. It’s only been a few minutes, huh. Well…” Crumpling the potholder on his hip, he ran his other hand through his hair. “I guess this is his peace offering.”
Peace offering? Agna felt too jumbled to work out the connotations. Kazi was still here; that was all she could conclude.
“Doesn’t matter,” Keifon said, and tossed the potholder on the table as he turned away from the stove. “You’re here. We’re here. Welcome home.”
She heard the tension in his voice, the strain of trying to sound calm. After everything that had happened, she still knew this exhausted, disheveled man in snow-soaked flannel pajamas. She knew him more deeply than she’d ever known her supposed spouse.
It wasn’t right to equate them. It wasn’t right to feel relief like this. But, as he’d said, that didn’t matter. She closed the distance between them, threw her arms around him, and stood in the heat radiating from the stove. “Now I’m home.”
Keifon nodded against her shoulder. That was his only answer. He stood with her, idly winding the ends of her hair around his fingertips, seemingly content to stay there forever.
He misses you so much it’s painful to see.
She silenced Nelle’s words in her head. Not now. A spike of panic marked the fragile boundary between hugging and holding. She wouldn’t let herself ruin this. Cupping his cheek — cold pressing cold, both beginning to warm — she eased back. “Do you mind if I sit by the fire for a while? Though tea and broth sounds wonderful, when it’s ready.”
“Mmn.” He leaned past her to look through the door to the living room. “Yeah. He lit the fireplace too.”
He sounded so grumpy about it that she couldn’t help but laugh. “If this is some kind of mind game, it’s the coziest mind game I’ve ever seen.”
“No, it isn’t a mind game, it’s…” He shook his head. “It’s trying. It’s all he can do. Five minutes of thinking of somebody other than himself. …I don’t want to talk about him.”
“He’s… still here, isn’t he?”
“Yeah. Nowhere else to go, yet. I gave him a deadline of the end of the week.” Keifon prowled through the door to survey the living room. “He’s been staying on the couch, but it looks like he cleared out. He’s probably in one of the spare rooms. Just a second.”
As he disappeared down the hall, Agna collected the lamp and her backpack and lugged them to the couch. An unfamiliar quilt lay folded along the back of the couch, a field of triangles and squares in scattered colors. A new woven rug had been laid out under the table and chairs in her writing nook. On the mantel, Keifon had added small ceramic statues of two of the gods. Agna peered at them as she peeled off her soaked stockings. Darano, with the sword and shield, and the other one — a woman with outstretched hands — had to be Lundra. If he felt comfortable adding his own touches to their common rooms, then she’d take it as a sign that he felt at home.
She carried her stockings to the bathroom to hang them up to dry. There wasn’t much to be done for the damp hems of her dress and underskirts. She’d have to change entirely, and that would mean venturing into her room. Part of her wasn’t ready to be surrounded by the things she’d left behind, and part of her suspected that if she closed that door behind her, she wouldn’t want to come out for days.
Quiet voices murmured down the hall as she returned to the living room. Agna pulled the quilt off the couch and swaddled herself in it. She tucked her feet up and rested her head against the back of the couch. The fire was still growing, but its heat lured her closer to sleep.
It wasn’t perfect. Her old enemy was sleeping in her spare room, and her gallery had turned into a hostel. But she was home. They could work out everything else.
At the sound of footsteps, she opened her eyes. Keifon carried a blanket, folded over his arms. He took in the quilt around her shoulders. “Ah. Switch?”
“This is fine.” To swap she’d have to move.
“All right. Here, though.” He dumped the blanket on the couch next to her and held out a pair of socks.
Agna freed an arm to accept them; they were heavy, soft wool. Her cold toes flexed under the quilt in anticipation. “Are these yours?”
“Yeah. I wouldn’t go through your things.”
“I know you wouldn’t, not in a bad way. Thanks.” She grudgingly uncurled to pull on the dry socks, and stretched her feet toward the fire’s warmth. The socks were baggy on her, leaving far too much room at the toes. As Keifon gathered up the extra blanket and sat next to her, she noted that he’d changed out of his wet clothes, too — that was the same shirt he’d worn on the street, but he’d changed into worn blue sleeping pants and thick socks. He sat hunched forward, propping his elbows on his knees.
“He’s staying in the spare room on my side,” he said, steepling his fingers as if in prayer. “The camping cots were in there, so it’s comfortable enough. He’ll leave us be.”
Agna decided to take this information in the spirit in which it was intended. It was a point in Keifon’s favor that he wasn’t being spiteful toward Kazi. She could endeavor to rise to the occasion,
too. “All right. We’ll talk tomorrow,” she said. “I won’t make him hide from me.” It would eat at her more to skulk through her own house day after day. One good night’s sleep, and she could face — this. Some of this. Maybe if she met Kazi in person, this swirling, falling feeling would dissipate.
As Keifon draped the blanket over his lap, she caught him favoring his right hand, grasping the fabric with his fingertips. Agna struggled free of her cocoon to reach out. “Hey. Let me look at that. Have you washed it out yet?”
“Yeah, just now, in my room.” He shifted in his seat to face her and let her take his scraped hand.
“Fair warning, I don’t know if I have enough in me left to do anything right now. I hardly slept on the carriage.” She tilted his palm toward the firelight and inspected the wound. It was a deep scrape on the heel of his hand, as though he’d broken a fall on a rocky surface, but no worse than that. Purely superficial. Agna placed her fingertips at the edges of his unbroken skin and called up what energy she had left.
It wasn’t much, just a thin trickle like a drought-choked stream. But it connected easily with his energy, which flowed in fits and waves, pulled in all directions at once. Agna closed her eyes and held onto her concentration. “Relax.”
“I’m trying. It’s—it’s been a rough night. Good, bad, everything.”
And she’d caused most of it. The least she could do was to heal him. Focusing on the task before her, she gently guided her energy and directed his body to mend itself. Slow, she reminded herself, in and out with every breath. Easy. Start from the inside out. No hurry.
It was almost relaxing to take her time. On the road, and even in the hospital, she tied up her workings as swiftly as she could safely manage. She told herself it was efficiency, but that wasn’t all of it. She had to make it look effortless. She had the robes and the heatless light; she had to be the master of the art. To wait for her energy to flow at its own pace meant that she had to risk her patient’s impatience and doubt.
But not this time. Keifon didn’t fidget or rush her, allowing her to spin her fine thread and weave it into her working. Of course he trusted her to do it right. He trusted her implicitly. That was what made everything so hard.
Eventually she looked up to check her work, taking the last of her strength to test the integrity of the new skin. She curled his fingers up and gave his hand one more squeeze. Keifon pressed the healed spot with a strange, thoughtful expression. “That felt…different.”
“I had to take it slow, to keep from overtaxing myself.” She wrapped herself in the quilt again, belatedly realizing that he hadn’t answered. In fact, his look was rather pointed, despite his growing smirk. “What?”
“Hmm, just something you ought to apply to life every once in a while.”
“Tch.” She pulled her knees up and rested her chin on her folded arms.
Before she could concoct a comeback, Keifon stood, leaving the blanket aside. “I’m going to check the broth.”
When he’d passed into the kitchen, a pointed ear and one eye peeked around the corner from the hallway. Agna patted the couch cushions. “Lulu! C’mon, come here where it’s warm.”
The calico cat bounded into the hallway, followed at a more cautious pace by her gray brother. Lulu leaped onto the couch next to her, while Shadow curled up on the opposite arm. Agna scratched Lulu’s neck and was rewarded with a rattling purr. They had grown; they were full-sized now, with thick winter fur. “Kei’s taking good care of you, isn’t he,” Agna murmured in Nessinian, and pushed back a sudden lump in her throat. “He’s good at that.”
One of Shadow’s ears flicked toward the kitchen. Agna turned as Keifon entered with a cup and saucer in one hand and a bowl in the other. She raised her eyebrows at the cats. “See?”
“Hm?”
“Nothing. Just reminding them that they’re lucky to have you.”
“Are they, now.” He set the cup and bowl on the side table next to her. The bowl nestled in a folded kitchen towel, and steam rose from the surface of the broth inside it. “There’s plenty left,” Keifon said. “Have as much as you want. It’s root vegetable and pheasant broth. Made it this afternoon.”
“Thank you.” Despite their mutual exhaustion, Keifon seemed eager to make her feel comfortable, and she couldn’t resist the offer. She picked up the towel-padded bowl and blew across the broth. So the hunters could still find pheasant in the woods around the city. When she’d left, every butcher in town had lined them up for sale by the dozen every day. She wondered how much they charged now. “Hey. Go get some for yourself.” She sipped from the edge of the bowl.
“I already ate. I don’t know what time it is now, but a few hours ago. When I got off shift.”
“Humor me. It’s awkward to eat alone.”
With a stroke down Shadow’s back, he pushed off and returned to the kitchen. On the way back in, he waved pointedly at the mugful of broth he carried.
“Better,” Agna said. She shooed Lulu out of his seat. The calico clambered across Agna’s lap and hopped up on the arm of the couch, so that the cats bookended the humans. Keifon sat, pulled the spare blanket over his lap, and cupped his hands around his mug. It wasn’t purely the idyllic scene she’d held in her mind. It couldn’t last. But for these few minutes, it was all she needed.
She took a sip and held the bowl, letting the steam rise against her skin. “You can tell him thank you for the broth and everything. I won’t be petty.”
“Mmn.” He watched the fire through the grate. Reading the set of his mouth felt like an old reflex returning, like speaking Nessinian after years abroad. “You have every right to hate me for that. I feel like a hypocrite every hour he’s here. But even then, I don’t think I would have chosen any differently. It was an impossible situation.”
She knew about impossible situations. They smelled like ink and sealing wax. They tasted like sheep’s milk cheese and sugared coffee. “I understand. I mean — not exactly. I never had what you and Kazi had together. But impossible choices. Yeah.”
Cupping his mug in one hand, Keifon rubbed the back of his neck. “So your family put the pressure on, I take it?”
She took another sip of broth to stall for time. Where to start, where to end. “The trip was nice, at the beginning. Got to catch up with my sister and my cousin. Got to meet Marco in person.”
“Hm. How was that?” By the cautious tone in his voice, he had picked up on her ambivalence.
Agna pushed away the urge to simply shrug, as though she were eluding her parents’ questions during a visit home from the Academy. Instead she set aside the bowl of broth and tasted the tea he’d brought. Chamomile with honey. She held onto the cup and saucer, focused on keeping them still, denying the shake in her hands. “He’s about what I’d expected. Mostly. Intelligent, good taste, in touch with the art scene. Kind of reserved. Not shy, though. Aloof, I guess. He’s noble, or — was, technically — so I figure it comes with the territory.”
“Was noble? Did something happen?”
She told herself that the misgiving she heard was rooted in Yanweian expectations, or in secondhand concern for a friend of a friend. In his country, one was only demoted from noble to commoner for murder or embezzlement or any number of crimes and slights. Being born into a family near the end of its arc was not a crime. It wasn’t precisely fair, but that was how life worked. “His family has been losing influence over the last few generations. There are fewer of them these days, and they don’t have the holdings they used to. And now that the crown is expected to shift to a new dynasty, whoever comes in will push out a weaker Family or two, to show their strength, reward their allies, all of that. Any Pirci who hasn’t married out or gone underground is taking a big risk. Usually a collapsing Family goes into exile.”
“That’s… huh. It seems excessive. No offense.” He rolled his shoulders uncomfortably. “I’ve heard of that sort of thing happening in Nessiny, but… I’m sorry it’s happening to your friend. What is he going
to do? Will he be safe if he marries your cousin?”
Agna’s stomach dropped, and she felt as cold as the blowing snow outside. He’d understand. Wouldn’t he? “Well. It gets complicated.” She set the teacup on the side table and laced her fingers together so tightly that the knuckles went white. “My father called me back to discuss his company, like we talked about. Apparently my aunt — his sister — had a health scare this spring. She’s fine now, but it rattled them. He needed to decide who would step up if anything happened to him.”
“I see.”
“So… that’s the first part.” It got thicker the further she waded in, and she didn’t know what she would find at the bottom: understanding or censure. “I spent most of the visit trying to convince my father that this gallery was worthwhile, and trying to find a way to secure their chain of inheritance without locking myself down in Murio. And we could only find one solution that got everyone what they wanted.” She loosened her grip and pulled the chain over her head. The plain gold rings spun and stilled, exposed to the open air for the first time since she’d boarded the ship.
Frowning, Keifon set his cup aside and reached out to touch the rings. She let go of the chain to let them land in his palm. He traced the circle of gold with his thumb. “These are… I don’t understand. Marriage rings?”
“…Yeah.”
“Are they your parents’? I’m sorry, I don’t know what it means to wear them around your neck.” He dangled the rings by their chain, and Agna collected them.
“It doesn’t mean anything, necessarily. It isn’t a common thing in Nessiny that you’re missing. I didn’t want them. Don’t. That’s all. But I had to do something to get everyone what we needed.” She slipped the rings over her middle fingers, trapping the chain against her skin. “They’re mine, Kei. We gave Marco the Despana name so he could inherit my father’s company instead of me.”
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