The Bone Palace - Amanda Downum [137]
She frowned and raised her head; her hair slid across his chest and tangled both their arms. “But how can she know? Can even a saint see the end of your life, to know where to snip it short?”
“I don’t know. It may have been a hollow threat, merely meant to make me miserable. Shadows know it would have been easier if she’d snipped the thread three years ago, instead of leaving me like this.”
Isyllt bit his shoulder in response, hard enough to elicit a hiss of pain. “Don’t be stupid. She’s had her time, then. The rest is yours.”
“Mine.” He laughed, his chest jerking sharply against her. “Five years I gave to Nikolaos Alexios. Thirty years to Mathiros. Three to Erishal. I can scarcely remember what I did when my time was my own.”
“Give it to me, then. I’ll make use of it.”
He laughed, until she smothered it with a kiss and her hair fell around them like a veil.
“Come away with me,” he said later, so softly she barely heard it. Sleep lapped slowly over her, but that drew her awake again. No bells rang on the dead days, but she guessed from the light that it was near the second terce—the hour of virtue.
“Where?”
“Anywhere but here. What’s left for us in Erisín?”
What was there for her? Twenty-four years of history. Ciaran and Khelséa and Dahlia, and a handful of other friends she saw less often. A lot of ghosts. The Arcanost and her classes. Her favorite shops and taverns and all the streets she knew as well as her own hands. Her home.
But what kind of home would it be without Kiril?
“It would break my oath.” How that oath was still intact she didn’t understand. But there had been no clause in her vow to serve and uphold about not keeping secrets from the king. The crafters of the oath had obviously understood the latitude her job often called for.
“You’ll suffer for it, true. But you’re strong enough to overcome it.”
“And let Phaedra and Spider throw the city into chaos?”
“Is it really our concern anymore? Erisín has endured worse than a coup.”
She couldn’t argue that. If it were only Mathiros she wouldn’t lift a hand to save him. Nikos had his own people. But no matter what Spider claimed, it was the city that would suffer for a revolution.
She didn’t realize she’d made a decision till she pulled away, dragging a sheet closer around her.
“I can’t leave. Not like this. I’ll resign my position and go with you when it’s over, but I won’t let Phaedra and Spider drag the city into their madness.”
Kiril sat up, the covers pooling around the sharp angles of his hips. The winter chill rushed to fill the space between them. “Phaedra won’t be easy to oppose.”
“I promised Forsythia justice. There will never be justice for all, but for this one I can do something.” She had never set great store on honor—it was transitory and subjective, and often directly opposed to practicality—but she needed some scrap of self-respect, and knew she wouldn’t keep it if her word meant nothing at all.
“Justice at the cost of your own life?”
But that wasn’t the true cost. The importance of her own life had always been a fluid thing, to be guarded or gambled on a whim. The price of pursuing justice now would be another chance at spending that life with Kiril.
“Could you do it so easily?” she asked. “Leave everything you’ve lived for? Or would you only be miserable?” He had said it himself: he didn’t know what to do with his own life. She might start over, if she had him. She had always known, in those lonely hours when she dwelled on such things, how easily Kiril had defined her. How easily he could become her world. And she also knew that his love for her was real, but nowhere as broad or as deep as hers.
“I don’t know. But I’m willing to try.”
“We both make ourselves miserable all too well. I’m not willing to help you.”
The silence stretched taut. Finally Kiril rose to collect his scattered clothes. Isyllt watched him dress, and her stomach felt too small.
A knock at the door snapped the strained stillness. Isyllt hadn’t realized she was holding her breath till it left in an aching rush.