The tavern Sela had threatened to drain dry turned out to be a small, warm, half-empty place with exactly one fiddler and considerably more ale than a town this size had any right to keep in stock, and by the time the second round turned into the fourth, the whole company had settled into the specific, loose-limbed relief of people who’d genuinely, recently, almost lost someone and were now allowed to simply be grateful instead.
“To Borin,” Sela said, for what was probably the sixth toast of the night, “who is going to be so annoyed tomorrow that he missed this entire celebration in favor of sleeping like a sensible person.”
“To Borin,” the table agreed, loud and warm, and I drank to it too, feeling the ale loosen something in my chest that two months of grim, careful training had kept wound tight without me fully noticing.
Tamsin had long since drifted into an animated, half-coherent lecture about resonant Aether decay that nobody at the table was following, which suited everyone fine, since nobody was trying to.
Sela eventually wandered off to flirt, with great enthusiasm and questionable success, with the fiddler.
And somewhere in the slow drift of the evening, I found myself at the tavern’s far end with Draus, both of us several drinks past careful, the noise of the room gone soft and distant around the small, warm space we’d settled into without quite meaning to.
“You scared me today,” Draus said, no preamble, voice rougher than the ale alone explained.
“Properly. The kind of scared I haven’t let myself feel in eleven years, because feeling it usually means someone’s already dead by the time you notice.”
“I’m not dead,” I said, softer than I meant to.
“No,” he agreed.
“You’re sitting right here, somehow, after doing something I genuinely don’t have words for yet.” He turned his mug slowly between his hands, not quite looking at me.
“I keep doing the math on it. The Revenant. The light. The way you just — gave everything you had, all at once, like the cost of it wasn’t even a question worth asking yourself first.”
“It wasn’t,” I said.
“Not when it was you standing there.”
That landed between us heavier than the noise of the tavern could absorb.
Draus looked up, finally, and whatever careful distance either of us had been maintaining for two months of charged silences and almost-moments simply wasn’t there anymore — burned away, maybe, in the same fight that had burned away an Epic-rarity Revenant, leaving nothing behind but the plain, unguarded truth of it.
“Corwin,” he said, and the use of my actual first name, instead of the easy Rose he’d called me since the sparring ring, landed like its own small confession.
“Draus,” I said back, and didn’t look away.
Neither of us quite remembered, afterward, who closed the last of the distance first.
It didn’t matter.
What mattered was the warmth of it, finally, after months of nearly — his hand at my jaw, careful despite the ale humming through both of us, my fingers curling into the front of his shirt like I’d been waiting to do exactly that since a sparring ring full of strangers had first looked me over and decided I was worth a chance.
“We should—” Draus started, breathless, somewhere between my name and the next kiss.
“Upstairs,” I agreed, against his mouth, and neither of us needed to say more than that.
The walk up the tavern’s narrow stairs was a blur of laughing, stumbling warmth — too much ale and too much relief and months of careful restraint finally given somewhere to go — and the door to the small rented room closed behind us on a night neither of us would remember clearly enough, by morning, to reconstruct in any order beyond the simple, overwhelming fact of finally, finally choosing each other after so long spent only almost.
I woke to a headache, a stranger’s ceiling, and the specific, dawning weight of a night I remembered in fragments — warm, urgent, real — pressing in on me faster than my body was ready to process.
I sat up.
The room spun gently.
Beside me, Draus was already awake, sitting up against the headboard with his head in both hands, very deliberately not looking at me, which told me everything about where his thoughts had landed before mine had even caught up.
“Okay,” I said, voice rough, throat dry.
“Okay. That happened.”
“That happened,” Draus agreed, to his own hands rather than to me.
“You’re not saying anything else, which is somehow worse than if you said something terrible.”
He looked over then, and whatever I’d braced for — regret, awkward retreat, the careful captain’s distance he used to manage everything else in his life — wasn’t quite what was sitting on his face.
It was closer to something disoriented, almost startled by itself, the look of a man who’d built a fairly settled idea of who he was and what he wanted and had just discovered, somewhere in the warm blur of last night, that the idea had been smaller than the truth.
“I’ve never—” he started, and stopped, and tried again.
“I’ve been with women. Plenty. I’ve never once, before last night, wanted someone the way I wanted you, in this exact body, no asterisk on it, no part of me quietly filing it as an exception. That’s not confusion about you. That’s confusion about every assumption I’ve apparently been carrying about myself that turned out to be smaller than what I actually feel.” He exhaled, rough.
“I don’t regret it. I want that said plainly, before either of us starts spiraling. I just wasn’t prepared for how much it would rearrange, this fast, this hungover.”
I felt something in my chest unclench that I hadn’t realized was braced at all.
“I wasn’t prepared for any of this five minutes ago either,” I admitted.
“Not the — ” I gestured, helpless, encompassing the room, the night, the whole unplanned weight of it — “any of it. I’ve spent two months telling myself slow was smart. Safe. And then Borin nearly died and I just — stopped being careful about anything, including this.”
“Do you regret it?” he asked, quiet, the question costing him something visible to ask.
“No,” I said, and meant it, even through the headache, even through the shaking new uncertainty of it.
“I just don’t know what we do with it now, in daylight, sober, with an Empire still hunting me and a company downstairs that’s going to have opinions.”
“Sela already has opinions,” Draus said, dry despite everything, some of the easy warmth finally creeping back into his voice.
“Sela’s had opinions since the wagon ride out of Caldris. I think the actual question is smaller than either of us is making it. Do you want this — whatever this is — to be a thing we try, on purpose, sober, in daylight? Or last night being last night, full stop, and we go back to being careful?”
I looked at him — the scar through his eyebrow, the careful, unguarded honesty he’d just handed me at considerable cost to his own composure, the same steady patience that had pulled me out of a melon cart’s wreckage and never once stopped showing up for me since — and found the answer arriving with far less hesitation than the question’s weight should have allowed.
“I don’t want to go back to careful,” I said.
Something in his shoulders eased, visibly, like a held breath finally let go.
“Good,” he said.
“Because I’m fairly sure I forgot how to do careful somewhere around the third toast last night, and I wasn’t looking forward to relearning it.”
[The Ledger has nothing to file regarding the events of last night, on principle, and would like that restraint noted as a courtesy. The Ledger would, however, like to mark this morning for the record as the point at which two considerably stubborn people stopped pretending otherwise.]
“It’s still doing the thing,” I said, half-laughing despite the headache, despite everything.
“Let it,” Draus said, and reached for my hand again, steadier this time than the drunk, urgent warmth of the night before — certain, instead, in the plain daylight way that actually meant something.
“I think, for once, it’s earned an opinion.”