Chương 66: The Thing She Wanted to Say Properly

She found me three days later, once the worst of the academy's gossip about a courtyard shockwave had finally started settling into something closer to ordinary background noise, and asked if I'd walk with her toward the same fountain where I'd once told her, months ago now, that I was leaving without her. The walk there passed in a comfortable, charged quiet, the kind that settles between two people who both sense something important waiting at the end of a path neither of them wants to rush toward too quickly.

Ember stayed behind this time, perched contentedly on Dororo's windowsill, and I found myself grateful for the small mercy of not having an audience even one this loyal for whatever conversation Ellia had clearly been rehearsing since long before I'd actually returned.

"You picked this spot on purpose," I said quietly, once we'd reached it.

"I did." She sat on the low stone rim, close enough that our shoulders touched, and studied the water a long, quiet moment before she trusted herself to actually start.

"I wanted to say this somewhere that already knew how hard it was for me to watch you walk away the last time. It felt wrong to say it somewhere easy instead."

"Say what?" I asked, though some part of me had already begun to guess. Ellia took a slow breath, the kind I recognized from every difficult truth I'd ever forced myself to speak plainly across the past two years.

"I've been in love with you for considerably longer than I let either of us admit," she said.

"Since before the duel, if I'm being honest with myself instead of just careful. I told myself, for a long time, that it was easier to simply be your friend, your ally, the girl who happened to keep ending up on the same dangerous roads as you because friendship didn't require me to risk anything, and loving you clearly meant risking everything." I didn't trust my voice yet, so I simply let her continue.

"Four months taught me something I didn't expect it to," she said.

"I thought the distance would make it easier to keep pretending I hadn't already decided how I felt. It did the opposite. Every letter I wrote you, I kept trying to sound composed, and every single one came out considerably more honest than I meant it to, because apparently I've simply stopped being capable of performing indifference where you're concerned." She turned to face me fully, something steady and unguarded in her expression that I'd only glimpsed in pieces before now.

"I don't want to be careful about this anymore, Len Fan. I don't want to keep calling it complicated as though that word actually excuses either of us from being honest about what it already is."

"Ellia—""Let me finish," she said, gentle but firm.

"Because if I stop now, I'll talk myself back into careful, and I promised myself I wouldn't do that again." She took my hand, the same way she had on every road that had actually mattered this past year, and held it like she meant to keep it there considerably longer than any previous moment had allowed.

"I love you. Not as a friend who happens to worry about you. Not as an ally who happens to enjoy your company. I love you the way people mean it when they choose to build an actual life around someone, and I've known that for months now, and I am done pretending four months of missing you desperately was simply concern for a friend."

The courtyard held its breath around us, water spilling steady and endless over stone that had already witnessed considerably more of my life's turning points than any single fountain reasonably should have been asked to carry.

"I love you too," I said, finally, the words arriving considerably easier than I expected once I actually let myself say them plainly, out loud, without any of the careful hedging I'd wrapped around every other hard truth this past year.

"I think I have for a long time now. I told myself it was complicated too that there wasn't room in everything I was carrying for something this important, that it wasn't fair to ask you to love someone with a Choir's countdown hanging over his head and a bloodline two Courts of Creation once wanted erased." I held her gaze, steady despite how much the honesty cost.

"I was wrong. It was never about there not being room. It was about being afraid of exactly what you just said that loving you back meant risking losing you, the same way I've lost almost everyone else I've ever let myself love properly." Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

"You haven't lost me," Ellia said, quiet and certain.

"You're not going to, either, not over something as small and foolish as being afraid to say it first." I leaned in, and she met me halfway, and the kiss that followed felt less like a beginning and more like something that had simply been waiting, patiently, for both of us to finally stop pretending it hadn't already started months ago, somewhere between a courtyard and a battlefield and every road in between the two.

We sat by the fountain a long while afterward, her head resting against my shoulder the way it had on countless roads before this one, except considerably lighter now, unburdened by everything we'd both spent so long carefully not saying out loud to anyone, least of all each other.

"My father's going to be insufferable about this," she said eventually, something warm and rueful in her voice.

"He's been not-so-subtly hoping for this since the day he first threatened to bring up marriage in front of half the kingdom."

"I remember that particular humiliation."

"You survived worse humiliations since then," she said, laughing properly now.

"Losing a limb-count duel to Kalio's face, apparently. This is considerably gentler by comparison."

"Considerably," I agreed simply, and found myself laughing too, the sound easier and less guarded than it had been in longer than I wanted to admit.

"Alfredo Van will pretend not to care," she added, "and then quietly tell everyone in the Greyhold anyway, the way he's told them about every other piece of good news since he finally started letting himself care about things again. Serel will never let either of us live it down, either she still brings up the way you looked the day you first arrived asking after your grandfather, apparently as though it's the single funniest thing she's witnessed in decades."

I thought of a grandfather still slowly rebuilding trust in a valley full of unclaimed things, of a great-grandfather learning, four centuries too late, how to actually be present for his own family.

"Good," I said.

"They've earned a piece of good news, after everything the rest of us have put them through this year. I intend to write both of them properly, once we've had a chance to simply sit with this ourselves a while longer." Ellia grew quieter after that, some of the earlier lightness settling into something more thoughtful.

"Whatever's coming next," she said, "Vashe, the Nightsky Sect, whatever's actually standing above both of them I want to face it as this. Not as two people who happen to care about each other while pretending otherwise. As exactly what we actually are now."

"Together," I said.

"The way we've done everything else since that first road."

"Together," she agreed, and settled back against my shoulder, and we sat there a long while longer, watching dusk finally settle gold and violet over Trigatia's spires.

"There's one more thing," she said eventually, quieter now.

"I've been thinking about it since your third month away, and I didn't want to say it until I was certain it wasn't simply loneliness talking."

"Tell me."

"When this is finished — Vashe, whatever's above him, all of it I don't want to go back to simply being the girl who happens to accompany you on dangerous roads." She turned to face me, something steady and a little nervous in her expression despite everything we'd already said tonight.

"I want to actually build something with you. Not immediately. Not before either of us is ready for it properly. But eventually. A life that isn't only measured in countdowns and thresholds and whatever the next crisis happens to demand of us."

"I'd like that," I said, and meant it more completely than almost anything I'd said all year.

"I spent four months learning what whole actually means, Ellia. I don't think I fully understood, until just now, that it was always supposed to include this too." She smiled, something bright and unguarded breaking through the last of her earlier nervousness, and leaned back into my shoulder properly this time, unburdened, for one quiet evening, by anything except the simple, hard-won relief of finally having said the truth out loud.