He was moving again before he’d finished saying it, over the ruined hedge line, toward the patch of grass where he’d shoved her clear.
She was still there. Upright, more or less — pushed back against what remained of the garden wall, one hand braced flat against the stone like she’d been using it to stay sitting rather than let herself fold sideways. Her legs were tucked beneath her at an angle her body couldn’t have arranged on its own, the way a person moves when their upper body still answers and the rest of them simply doesn’t, and for a moment, seeing her sitting on the bare ground like that — no chair, no rails, nothing between her and the dirt — he understood something about what her life had actually been like since the collapse that he hadn’t let himself understand before.
She looked up when she heard him, and whatever composure she’d been holding onto broke at the sight of him standing there, in one piece, walking.
"You’re—" Her voice caught. She didn’t finish it. She didn’t need to.
He crossed the last few feet and went down on his knees in front of her, and she reached for him before he’d fully settled, both arms coming up around his neck with a grip that had nothing careful or guarded left in it. He felt her shaking against him — not sobbing, not quite, but close to it, the kind of shaking that came after fear had been held too tightly for too long and finally had somewhere to go.
"I thought the wall—" she started, and stopped again.
"I know." He kept a hand flat against her back, steady, the way you’d steady something that had been thrown too hard. "I’m still here."
She didn’t let go right away. He didn’t ask her to. For a few seconds neither of them said anything at all, and it was the first time since the wedding parchment that the silence between them hadn’t felt like distance.
When she finally eased back, she wiped at her face with the back of one hand, quick and almost angry about it, like she resented needing to.
"You went into a collapsing wall for me," she said. Not quite a question.
"Wasn’t really thinking about the wall part." He managed something close to a wry smile. "In hindsight, maybe I should have."
She didn’t smile back, but something in her face loosened, just slightly. "Don’t do it again."
"No promises."
Behind them, another tremor rolled through the ground, distant but not distant enough, and the reminder was enough to pull them both back to the fact that they were still sitting in the open a few hundred feet from wherever the rift had actually torn itself open.
"We need to move," he said. "The chair’s gone, and I’m not leaving you here to find out what else comes through that thing."
"Then carry me." She said it flatly, already resigned to it, already past the version of herself that would have fought him over it a few hours ago. "You clearly have the strength to spare now."
He didn’t waste time on the irony of that. He got her settled against his back instead, her arms looped over his shoulders, and stood with a steadiness that still felt like it belonged to someone else.
The street beyond the garden told him everything he needed to know about how bad it actually was — collapsed roofs, a fire two houses down that no one had come to fight yet, people running in directions that didn’t look like they’d decided on them so much as fled into them. There was nowhere close that would take them in tonight, not with a rift still open somewhere behind them and half the district burning.
There was exactly one place in the city with walls thick enough, guards enough, and resources enough to actually be safe tonight.
He hated the thought of it before he’d even finished having it.
"Hold on," he said. "We’re going to my father’s house."
She went very still against his back. "Emeric—"
"I know." He started walking, fast, before either of them could talk him out of it. "Believe me. I know exactly how bad an idea this is. It’s still the best one I’ve got."
***
The house the two families had settled on them sat two streets back from the noble quarter. It was smaller than the one that had come down.
He’d heard that the Royal family was rebuilding the entire district but he had yet to see any changes. Neither the Haldens nor the Rowans had discussed it with either of them directly. It had simply appeared, arranged through lawyers and stewards, the way everything about this marriage had been arranged from the start.
Emeric suspected it had less to do with concern for either of their wellbeing and more to do with the inconvenient fact that a dead or homeless daughter-in-law made for worse gossip than a living one, however discreetly housed.
He didn’t argue about it. He was learning, slowly, which battles were worth the energy.
It was three nights after the collapse before he let himself sit still long enough to actually think about what had happened under that rubble.
Isolde had gone to bed early, worn thin by a day spent fielding letters from her family that ranged from performative concern to thinly veiled interrogation about they had been seen. Emeric sat alone in the new house’s small study, an actual fire burning in an actual hearth for the first time in days, and let himself replay it.
The wall coming down. The stone that should have crushed him instead giving way like it had changed its mind. The voice that wasn’t quite a voice, telling him plainly what he’d have to keep doing if he wanted to keep what he’d been given.
Every real risk you take for your wife. Every genuine act of care. He turned the words over again, testing them for a catch he might have missed the first time. It sounded simple when stated like that. He doubted very much that it would stay simple.
"Alright," he said quietly, to no one, to the empty room. "What exactly am I working with."
The system answered like it had been waiting for him to ask.