Chapter Six: The Trap (2)

And then, just inside the tree line, he did the thing no one had expected.

He went in.

The crypt door was sealed from the inside. He didn't knock. He cut the seal with his own claw, slid through the gap, and closed it behind him, into the dark.

Lila was awake. Of course she was awake. She sat by the fire, the fat cat from the tower somehow having followed her here and draped across her lap, and she looked at him with her head tilted.

"You came back," she said. "You're supposed to be out there being clever."

"They're burning the chapel at dawn."

"Ah." She absorbed this. "So I've got maybe four hours. That's fine. I've had worse notice."

"You're not going to die in a crypt," Kael said. His voice was rough, low, scraped raw. "There's a way out. Under the altar. An old smuggler's tunnel, runs under the wall to the river. You take the tunnel, you cross the river, you go north, and you don't stop until you're a hundred miles from any of us."

Lila looked at him.

"Four hours," she repeated. "You could have sent a message. You didn't have to come yourself. You do know that, right?"

Kael said nothing.

"I mean it." Lila stood up, the cat sliding off her lap. "You coming here, right now, on the night before her trap—that's not a guard checking a door. That's…" She stopped. "That's a man saying goodbye."

The fire cracked between them.

Kael looked at her, and the look in his eyes was the look of a man who has spent ten years building a wall, and has just realized the wall was never going to hold.

"Yes," he said. "It is."

The air between them went thick. Lila took a step toward him. He didn't move back. She took another, and she was close enough to see the crack in his Brand through his shirt, and she reached up, very slowly, and touched the edge of it.

"It's broken," she said. "Your Brand. It's cracked."

"It's been cracked since the first night."

"Because of me."

"No." His voice was barely a breath. "Because of me. Because I couldn't let you die in the mud, and I couldn't stop wanting you to live, and I couldn't—"

She kissed him.

It was a small thing, a soft thing, the brush of her lips against his, like the first touch of rain on a frozen river. And Kael Voss, First Claw of the Border, the man who had not been touched in ten years, made a sound like a man drowning and pulled her into his arms.

It was not a gentle kiss. It was two people who had been holding their breath for a decade, kissing each other like the world was ending—and for them, it was. She tasted like smoke and rain and the faint copper of her own blood. He tasted like iron and cold and something desperately, achingly human underneath.

When they broke apart, her forehead against his, they were both shaking.

"If I survive," she whispered, "I'm coming back for you. I don't care about the Law. I don't care about your precious Brand. I'm coming back, and I'm going to make you smile if it kills me."

"One weakness," he said, and his voice cracked, "a thousand deaths."

"Then let it be a thousand," she said. "At least I'll have made you smile."

She kissed him once more, quick and fierce, and then she was moving—lifting the altar stone, dropping into the tunnel, her red hair vanishing into the dark.

She did not look back. Neither of them could have borne it.

The altar stone settled back into place. Kael stood in the empty crypt for a long time, and then he went up, out into the cold dawn, and walked back across the Border with the sunrise in his eyes and a hole in his chest where she had been.

Behind him, in the tunnel, Lila Moore ran north, and the locket at her throat burned like a small, furious sun.

Neither of them saw the shadow on the east parapet lower its spyglass.

Neither of them heard the Arbiter smile.

Volume Two: The Cage