Cruel Beauty

Then I thought, I do not have time for such things.

“We’ll both be foolish,” I said, “and vicious and cruel. We will never be safe with each other.”

“Don’t try too hard to be cheerful.” His fingers threaded through mine.

“But we’ll pretend we know how to love.” I smiled at him. “And someday we’ll learn.”

And we walked out through the gateway together.

But when we were almost at the threshold, he paused again, and this time there was naked fear on his face.

“You do realize,” he said. “I don’t remember how to be anything but a demon lord and his shadow.”

“I’m still not very good at being anything but a wicked sister.” I took his other hand.

A handful of kindness, the sparrow had said, and now we each had two.

Aren’t you tired of being in this house?”

I meant the words lightly, but he looked around the sunlit ruins with solemn eyes. “It’s strange,” he said softly. “I think I’ll miss it.”

And I realized that in every life he had lived, this was his only home and he had never left.

I had just created the kind of scandal I’d spent all week scheming to avoid. But with the sky an impossible blue overhead and my impossible, blue-eyed husband sitting beside me, I couldn’t much care.

“Come on.” I took his hand and stood, pulling him up with me. “Let’s go home.

But then he went on, “So, you were running after another man? I can’t leave you alone for a minute.”

“Then don’t,” I said. “Never leave me again.”

“Well, we should tell somebody I’m alive, since I ran out into the night. And we’d better prepare to get shouted at, since I jilted Tom-a-Lone.” I remembered that the world he’d known hadn’t had that tradition. “At the festival, they—”

“I’ve seen the festivals.” His soft voice stopped the breath in my throat.

“Well, you were at least both handsome, too.” I took his hand again; our thumbs rubbed together, and then suddenly we were kissing.

When we finally stopped, Lux said, “What happens now?” He looked around at the ruins as if seeing them for the first time.

I pushed hair out of my face and tried to think past the warmth of his arm around my waist.

Neither one of them would ever have apologized so desperately. It was a new person staring back at me with blue eyes—but I was a new person too. And if he, so long divided, could gather himself together and remember how to love me, then I could do the same for him.

“You saved me,” he said quietly. The cadences of his voice were uncanny: entirely familiar, but not exactly like either Ignifex or Shade. “You saved me, and I think that covers almost half your sins.”

I snorted. “I was more than a little late.”

“Better than never,” he said. “Besides, I did deserve it. I wronged you. Both of me.” His mouth tightened, and then he said, whisper-soft, “I’m sorry too. Please forgive me.”