*COMPLETE* Allayria promised to do what it takes to stop the Jarles, to make the ugly decision. She thinks, at last, she understands what the dynast meant. The lesson earned from the top of that lonely cliff and given the dark murky water below.
It...
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His surroundings are a blur of dark grayness and flickering yellow, a mess of inconsequential things as Caj thunders down the Tower hall. Metal clinks and groans around him but he doesn't hear it as he takes the steps at a lunge, as he barrels for the door and the man standing in front of it.
"I— Ah—" Lord Toulounne splutters and Caj wonders that it is not the spymaster guarding it, or even Hin, as he pushes past him, as he throws open the quarter's doors.
He smells blood before he sees her, and his own seizes in his head, clouding his vision, pounding alongside the overwhelming pulse of his heart. He had thought the fires had taken all the water out of him, but here, now, he can feel himself begin to sweat. Not with the sweltering perspiration of heat, but with a cold, a clammy chill sticking to goosebumps and flushed flesh. He feels it now, beneath all this armor, how the hair stands up on it, how his lungs seize beneath it.
His thoughts go white when he sees the dark burgundy trail of ruin on her face and the mangled mess at her shoulder.
But Fae Urilong is not reposed, not lying down with ice or a cloth or anything held to the wounds on her. She sits upright, good elbow on knee, knife in hand, and when she glances up at the Protector there is no alarm, no shock, no fear.
She looks at him and says: "Take that thing off."
"I—" he sputters, echoing Toulounne.
"Caj," she says, and the lost name is like cold water on fever, a jolt in the reverie. "Enough. Take that thing off."
Caj looks down at one of his hands, watching as it moves—gloved and stained—slowly up, toward the metal case than hangs on the crown of his head.
The air tastes different with it off; cooler, crisper, cleaner. It's like a breath amongst mountains, alone in the quiet birdsong of a deep forest, and Caj suddenly feels the sickly warm stagnation everywhere else, trapping him in, sweltering him.
"You're—" he croaks.
"I'm fine."
"But you're—"
"Enough," Fae says for a second time and there's steel in it now. "Take it off."
A pause, a held breath, and then:
"Caj," Fae commands, the low gentleness of her voice belying her face, carved granite starlight and framed in ruin, a thing of terrible greatness, harsh beauty. "Take it all off."
So he sheds the armor, piece by piece, as she watches, letting that smoking shell clatter on the cold floor around him while he looks at the wounds on her face, shoulder, thigh.
"We have slept a long time in tombs in our own minds, the places we buried ourselves after... everything," she tells him. "Seeing nothing, feeling nothing but the heavy weight we placed on ourselves. Too long have I stayed tucked away in this tower, doing nothing, feeling nothing; too long have you walked those streets, doing everything, enduring everything."
She stands, knife left on the settee, head framed by the moonlight filtering through the bay window behind her.
"No more hiding. No more lying."
When Fae reaches out, seizes his hand, her fingers are vise-like on his, even as they shake. And the touch of skin, of a warm, beating pulse pressing alongside his, reminding him that he is alive, that she is alive, overwhelms him.
"I don't want to be this anymore, this painted figurine we've made me," she tells him. "I don't want to be gentle and serene, calm and mild." Her face, her striking, marred face, twists in the moonlight, crinkling, fracturing, but never breaking, and Caj thinks she's never been so beautiful as this.
"I want to be sharp and brittle, tempestuous and biting, something fierce and something rancorous, something human and alive, all the way down to my nerve endings."
"We said—" he tries, voice cracking. "I can't—"
"I want this pain, Caj," she tells him, holding harder, and he feels the strain of her voice in his bones, feels it in his lungs like the first breath of air after breaking through water. "I want this pain because it's part of the choice, the risk, the jump into the vast unknown. I want it, even if it breaks me, because it's part of what it means to be alive. We can't live in these tombs anymore, Caj, we have to climb out, we have to try."
No, a part of him says, recoils in the fragment memory of a bloody mirror, lying cold and naked on tiled floor. No, no, no...
Careful, Nan whispers too, and the monster thinks, the monster says—
"No more hiding, Caj," Fae interrupts, and her grip on him stronger, warmer, holding tight. Her eyes are bright flecks of green in the moonlight, like grass, trees, and all the quiet places safe from men.
"It's time to step out of the darkness."
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A/N: Caj!
Sorry, meant to get this out Saturday, but it was my friend's birthday and I was basically floored for the rest of the weekend. Ah, the joys of getting older... Next chapter is a bite-sized epilogue (!) for this part, so I'm going to reconfigure the timing somehow so you aren't waiting too long for something more substantial.....
