The sky came back the way a held breath comes back.
All at once, and with a shudder.
I stood in the garden with four men kneeling in the dirt around me, and the black went out of the evening as though a curtain had been pulled aside. Pink light. A cricket. The smell of cut grass and something scorched. I had meant to do something terrible to Vael. I knew exactly what. I had it ready in my hands, three hundred years of practice folded into a single motion.
Then I heard her breathe.
The power went out of me so quickly that I swayed. Everything I had been a moment ago, the sky, the kneeling men, the ring of cracked earth, simply stopped mattering.
It was a small, wet, uneven sound, and I have heard soldiers die. I know what that sound is.
I turned around.
Elise lay on her back in the grass with one hand pressed under her ribs and her sword beside her, and she was smiling. There was red between her fingers. There was red on her good shirt. She had her head tipped toward me, and her eyes were open, and she was looking at me as if I were the first thing she had ever wanted to see.
Idiot, I thought. Idiot, idiot, you stupid, stupid—
I was across the garden before the thought finished.
"Elise."
"Hi." Her voice was thin. "You stopped."
"Don't talk."
"I think you were about to do something dramatic."
"I said don't talk." I dropped to my knees beside her and put both hands over hers, over the wound, and I poured every healing spell I owned into it.
They went out like candles.
I tried again. The runes on that white blade had eaten something out of the cut, and everything I pushed in, it swallowed. A third time. A fourth. My hands were shaking so badly that the glow flickered, and under my palms I could feel her pulse, quick and thready, working like a small animal trying to get out.
It's nothing. It's a small wound. I have healed worse. I once reattached a general's wing.
"It won't close," I whispered.
"Hm." Elise's eyes had gone a little unfocused. "It's all right."
"It is not all right." My voice broke on it. "You might be the Hero, Elise, but you are still human. You bleed. You break. You do not get to lie there and tell me it's all right."
That was too loud. That was much too loud. Someone could have heard.
"Noctavia," said Elise, gently. "Look at me."
I looked.
"I'm here," she said. It was the gentlest thing she could have said, and it nearly broke me in half.
I put my forehead against hers. I didn't decide to. I didn't care that there were four enemies kneeling ten paces away and a general's worth of soldiers who might have felt the sky go dark. I closed my eyes and said, very quietly, the only true thing I had:
"Stay with me. Please."
"I'm not going anywhere," said my wife.
I dealt with the four of them in a single motion. It took less than a heartbeat. Shadow rose out of the ground like roots and wrapped them, shoulder to ankle, and pressed their faces gently toward the earth.
"You will not move," I said, and my voice sounded very strange. Level. Almost kind. "You will not speak. If one of you gives me a reason to forget that I am trying, I will not be able to promise you what happens."
Nobody moved. Vael was trembling so hard that his teeth clicked.
I didn't look at him again. I gathered Elise up in my arms, and she weighed nothing, which was a lie, because I know exactly how much she weighs. I've carried her through a door. I've pulled her out of a snowdrift. I have never, ever, held her like this.
"You're being very careful," she mumbled against my shoulder.
"Of course I'm careful."
"You're not shaking."
"I am not shaking."
I was shaking so badly that I could barely climb the porch. It was only the length of the garden from the fence to the door. I have crossed battlefields faster, and never felt a distance so long.
The door flew open before I reached it.
Clara stood there, white as milk, with Toby behind her skirts and Dumpling clutched to her chest. She had heard everything. I could see it in her face: every crash, every scream, every moment of the sky going dark above a house she had been told to stay inside.
She took one look at Elise and her hands flew to her mouth.
"Clara." I made myself speak slowly. "I need hot water. Clean cloth. The needle from the sewing box, and the gold thread. All of it. Can you bring them to the table?"
She didn't ask why. She didn't ask whether I could do it. She nodded, once, and was gone, and I heard her feet on the stairs and the clatter of the sewing box, and I thought: she is only a girl. She should not have to be this fast.
"Is Elise dying?" said Toby, very small.
I went down on one knee, with her still in my arms, and looked at him.
"No," I said. "I won't let her."
It was not a promise I had any right to make. I made it anyway. He nodded, believing me, and I felt it settle on my shoulders like a coat I would have to wear for the rest of my life.
By the time Clara returned with her arms full, the light in the doorway had thinned from sunset pink to evening blue. I had not noticed it change.
I laid her on the kitchen table, on the quilt Clara spread beneath her. I cut away the shirt. The wound was small, clean, and neat, and the skin around it was already turning an ugly, silvery gray, spreading outward like frost on a window.
Hero-bane. They made it for her.
I had to breathe through that for a moment.
Magic would not close it. But thread might. The gold thread, the one I had bought, years ago, from a market in a country that no longer exists. It had mended her armor strap. It could mend more than leather, if the one holding it was careful.
"This will hurt," I told her.
"Mm. Okay."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be." Her fingers found my sleeve. "Noctavia."
"Don't talk."
"I'm going to anyway."
I threaded the needle. My hands, which had burned mountains, would not hold still. I tried three times to pass the thread through the eye. On the fourth, Clara's hand closed over mine, steady and warm, and held it until the thread went through.
She didn't say anything. She only nodded.
Thank you, I thought, as hard as I could. I hoped some of it showed.
I began to sew.
I have never sewn anything on a living person.
It is slow, fine work, and it is nothing like fighting. You can't be clever. You can't be fast. You can only put the needle in, and draw it through, and put it in again, and trust the thread to do what it was made for. Each stitch glowed faintly as it set, and where it set, the silver faded to pink.
I kept my eyes on my hands. I did not look at her face.
I am not crying. It is the smoke. There is smoke in this kitchen.
"You were beautiful," said Elise.
My hands stopped.
"What?"
"Out there." Her voice was slow and dreamy and utterly sincere. "The whole sky. I've never seen anything like that. I was lying there and I thought, that's my wife. She's incredible." She smiled at the ceiling. "I wasn't scared. I need you to know that. Not for a second."
Do not say that while bleeding. That is cheating. That is a completely unfair tactical advantage.
"I frightened you," I said.
"No."
"I lost it, Elise. I could have burned the house. The tomato. You." My voice cracked in the middle. "I came so close."
"But you didn't."
"Noctavia." She turned her head on the quilt. Her eyes were hazy and gold-brown and absolutely certain. "You put a shield over the cabin. In the middle of all that. I saw it. You were the end of the world, and you were still looking after the tomato."
I made a sound I'm not proud of.
"That's who you are," Elise said, very softly. "That's who you've always been. I don't think you know that."
I pulled the next stitch through. I could not have spoken if the world had ended.
I love you, I thought. I love you, I love you, I love you.
It got as far as my teeth.
"I'm staying," I said instead, and my voice shook. "Right here. If anyone comes through that door tonight, I will deal with it gently. I promise." I swallowed. "Sleep, my love. I've got you."
Her hand tightened on my sleeve once.
Then it went slack, and her breathing slowed and deepened.
I do not know how long it took. When I tied off the last stitch, the window had gone fully dark and the water in the basin had gone cold. I bit the thread with my own teeth, because I could not find the scissors.
I sat there with my hands in my lap, looking at a neat gold line under her ribs.
My love, I thought, with a kind of horror. I said that out loud.
I did not leave the table.
Clara brought a blanket and put it around my shoulders without a word. Toby fell asleep in the chair beside us, with Dumpling in his arms, and the little plant lay against his chest with its mouth gently shut. Someone, I think Clara, put out the lamp except for one.
Somewhere past midnight, she spoke.
"You didn't hurt the house."
I didn't turn my head. "I tried not to."
"You were scary."
"Yes."
"I wasn't scared of you," said Clara, and then, in a smaller voice: "I mean, I was. A little. But I thought, she's out there so we're in here. And I wasn't scared of that." She sat down on the floor with her back against the table leg, in the gray coat, knees pulled up. "I want you to know I'm not going anywhere. I decided."
I stared at the lamp for a while.
"Thank you," I said. It came out much steadier than the last one. "For the thread. For holding my hand. For all of it."
"You said that already."
"I'll say it again."
She leaned her head back against the table. After a moment, very carefully, as though testing whether she was allowed, she rested it against my knee.
I did not move.
I am not going to cry on a child's head. I have standards.
I put my hand on her hair.
By dawn, Elise had a fever.
It wasn't a bad one, but the skin around the gold stitches had not quite lost its silver edge. I checked three times, and then I checked again, and then I stopped pretending that I was not holding her wrist the whole time. I wet a cloth. I wrung it out. I laid it on her forehead and did the same thing, over and over, until the sky outside turned from black to gray to a thin, clear gold.
She woke slowly.
Her eyes went to the ceiling, then to the lamp, then to me, and something in her face went soft.
"Hi," she whispered.
"Hello."
"Did the tomato make it?"
I could have laughed. I could have wept. I did a little of both, and tried to disguise it as a cough.
"It's fine," I said. "It's leaning on its stake. It has a third flower." I took her hand in both of mine. "I've closed the wound. You are going to stay in this bed for a very long time. I've decided."
"A long time?"
"Weeks. You're the Hero, not a stone wall. Humans heal slowly."
"I'll go crazy."
"I'll read to you."
"You hate reading aloud."
"I'll make an exception." I kissed her knuckles, once, quickly, before I lost my nerve. "Don't argue."
"Wouldn't dream of it," said Elise, and fell asleep with a smile.
I sat very still, with her hand against my cheek.
Then I looked out the window.
It was a clear, ordinary morning. The grass was wet. The tomato leaned against its stake, small and green and absurdly alive. The fence post had a long black scorch mark on it. And beside the fence, in the dirt, lay a ring of dark shadow-roots, a little frayed at the edges, wrapped around three kneeling figures.
I counted them twice.
Three.
The fourth rope lay empty on the ground, quite neatly coiled, as though someone had slipped out of it politely. There was a single line of prints leading away, up the path toward the northern ridge, and the left heel of every one of them was worn flat.
I looked at that for a long, cold moment.
Then I looked down at the sleeping woman in my hands, and at the gold line under her ribs, and I thought, very calmly:
Not this time.
I will keep trying to be gentle. I will. But I will keep her first.