Pasul is blurred and running with mud, as dark as twilight under the billowing clouds. Veran pulls his horse out of its canter at the town signpost, but he doesn’t pass under yet. He turns in the saddle and stares back across the flats, looking for Lark. I can feel his heart pounding against my back.
“She’ll . . . she’ll be okay,” he says, his voice shaky. “I mean . . . she’ll be okay.”
I free one of my hands from inside the cloak and pat his knee. It’s the closest thing I can approximate to reassurance—even aside from my mouth, I’m too exhausted to summon more energy.
He shakes himself and turns his horse back under the signpost. Pasul is situated on a slight slope, so the town rises gradually before us, twinkling with lanterns in the downpour. We slosh up the main street. The posthouse for the stage line is the dominating feature of the lower town, surrounded by corrals of droopy workhorses, all pressed together in the rain, their coats slick and gleaming. A line of coaches are parked under a long shed. Nobody would think of setting out in this weather.
Nobody, it seems, except one small mud-coach on the end. The doors are open, and the driver is readying it for travel, prepping the iron wheels for rough roads. They’re going out into the desert.
We plod nearer. All the lights in the posthouse are blazing, and shadows hurry in front of the windows, as if people are rushing to and fro inside. But one person is stationary, standing on the porch and looking out into the rain. My head hurts, and Veran is distracted, and so it takes us both until we’re nearly even with the front door to recognize who it is.
To be fair, his hair is down, and he’s in a dark traveling cloak made colorless by the rain. I can’t remember when I’ve ever seen Iano without colors or hairpins, so I can’t be blamed for passing over his silhouette. But the mistake doesn’t last long, and I snatch at the reins in Veran’s hands, causing his horse to snort and jerk to a stop. Veran shakes himself behind me.
“Iano?” he says.
Iano is staring hard at us through the rain—he leaves the glare of lantern light and steps out into the muddy street.
“Oh . . . eta, Iano!” Veran comes to himself and slithers to the ground, landing with a splash in the road. “Ista . . . I found her! Look . . . look! Tamsin is here!”
Veran reaches up wildly and starts to pull me from the saddle like I’m a parcel. I wobble when I hit the ground, sinking up to my ankles in muck. Iano has drifted nearer, now a few arm’s lengths away. Close enough, I expect, to see the damage that’s been done.
Though, perhaps not. He takes a few splashing steps, close enough that I can see his expression but can’t interpret it, just lines of agony, probably shock. Perhaps dismay. Any moment now, he’ll stop again and simply stare. He may even argue that Veran brought back the wrong person.
But he doesn’t. The nameless expression on his face only intensifies, and now he’s running, and it’s only as he reaches me that I realize he’s crying.
I’ve never seen him cry.
He clamps his hands on my shoulders, and then on my face, holding me close enough so that I can see which rivulets are rain and which are tears.
“Tamsin . . .” His voice is cracked. “Oh, Tamsin . . .”
“Uh!” Veran says suddenly. “Uh, Iano . . . I should mention . . . probably wait on the kissing. They, um, . . . they cut her tongue.”
Now, then. Now it’s over. Iano’s face ripples with shock, and his cold fingers tighten on my cheeks. Numbly, I lean back, out of that intimate space only for whispers and kisses, and open my mouth. I take one of his hands and move it up to the fuzz above my ear, trying to make him realize, to see. To come to his senses. Hair gone. Words gone. Skin and swells and self gone. I’m not anything for you anymore, my dear. Let’s hurry this thing along, I’m tired.
His fingers brush along my scalp to cradle the back of my neck. And his gaze, instead of fixing on my mangled tongue and cracked lips, locks back on mine again, creased and still spilling tears.
“Oh, Tamsin,” he whispers. “Bless the Light you’re alive.”
I sag, catching both of us by surprise. Be it hunger or exhaustion or the sudden realization that he hasn’t stepped away, that he really is here in the mud and excreta of the street . . . we sink to our knees. He folds around me, arms warm, pressing his face into my neck, and I simply lean my aching head on his shoulder.
“Oh, Tamsin,” he whispers, and I realize that he, like me, has no other words. His breath hitches in his chest, and he tightens his grip. “Oh, Tamsin.”
I hear Veran shift awkwardly, his feet squelching in the mud. His horse blows wetly, champing its bit.
“Were you coming out to find us?” Veran finally asks.
Iano lifts his head from my neck but doesn’t look at him, still gazing down at me. “What?”
“That coach—were you riding out to find us?”
“Oh—no. It’s not for me.” He blanches suddenly and looks up. “No . . . sorry. It’s for your ambassador. And the princess. They’re inside.”
“They are? Eloise, is she—”
“Very sick,” Iano replies. “She’s very sick. But—Veran, wait!”
But Veran has taken off running toward the posthouse, dragging his horse behind him. Iano calls after him again, but whether it’s lost to the rain or Veran’s simply ignoring him, it does no good. Iano turns back to me.
“They got here this morning,” he says. “They were escorted out—deported. The ambassador is furious. But, Tamsin—the guards are here, in Pasul. They ransacked my room. If I hadn’t been out by the crossroads, they’d have taken me in. They’ve found out about you. Someone . . . someone knows. Someone is against us, someone close. And I don’t . . .” His face is slowly paling, as if he’s coming to all these realizations now. “I don’t think we can go back.”
He waits, as usual, expecting me to reply, to carry his thoughts forward. But I don’t.
I can’t.
He lifts his cold fingers again and brushes my cheek, my lips. He leans forward, but at the last moment aims just to the side, pressing a kiss to the corner of my lips.
He leans back. “But you’re here. You’re back. And we’re together again.”
He fishes in his pocket and comes up with my si-oque, the amber one I commissioned the day I got my right to title from the king. I turn it over and rub my thumb along the three glass beads—green for my mother, pale blue for my father. Yellow for me. Ochre isn’t a popular color among the titled—difficult to match, tricky to flaunt. Too pale and it becomes sickly, too dark and it becomes muddy. But when it hits just the right shade, just the right notes, it soars.
I thought that was poetic when I first decided to keep it.
Now it feels impossibly narrow. A too-small box I built for myself. A mold I don’t fit anymore.
I slip it onto my wrist, where it settles, loose, against my skin. Iano folds his fingers around mine.
“Things are . . . they’re going to be all right,” he says.
I want to make him think rationally, to parse through this step by step. I want to tell him about the Hires, and Poia, and the unanswered questions still casting their shadows on us.
But I can’t. So I say the only thing I can.
“Uah.”