Chapter 281: Until Morning.
The forest air was cool.
Birds moved through the branches overhead, chirping across each other in overlapping, careless threads, and everything in that place carried the same signal. Life. Ordinary, uninterrupted, unafraid. The light came down green through the canopy, soft and filtered, nothing like the white hammer of the plain. Leaves shifted in a slow breeze. Shadows of wings crossed the mossy ground in brief, flickering patterns.
A blue butterfly came off one of the trees and landed on my arm.
It passed straight through it and settled on the grass below, wings opening and closing once, unbothered.
Nothing here suggested outside the walls. Not the light, not the sound, not the temperature. And this was outside. It had to be. There were no walls yet, not the way I understood them. The ground under my feet felt solid in a way the libra never quite managed.
My father appeared.
He came in hurrying, breathing hard, the sound of a man who had been running on more than just distance. He stopped a few steps from the door. Straightened. Ran the back of his hand across his mouth, carefully, checking.
Removing what my mother had left there.
Whoever was inside that house wasn’t supposed to know about the other woman in his life. The gesture was small, private, and completely damning.
I followed him in.
A woman came through from the far room as he entered and I knew her face immediately.
Eleanor.
Dark hair pulled back. She stood in the doorway like she belonged there, like the house had always been waiting for this exact moment. The light from the corridor caught the edge of her cheekbone.
"We’ve been waiting for you," she said.
"Is she done?"
They both went into another room and I followed a few steps behind them. The corridor was narrow, the walls close, the air carrying the particular quiet of a house that had been holding its breath. Floorboards creaked under their steps. Mine made no sound at all.
What is this. What am I looking at.
Then a cry came through the wall.
A newborn. High, thin, absolute. The sound of something that had only just arrived and already demanded the world answer it.
I moved down the corridor and turned into the room they’d gone into, and the voices were already coming through the doorway.
"It’s a girl," Eleanor said.
My father laughed. Not a small laugh. The sound of a man who had been holding his breath for hours and had finally been allowed to let it go. Another woman was laughing too, exhausted, somewhere underneath it—the kind of laugh that comes after pain and survives it.
I stepped into the doorway.
He had the baby up in both hands, the child crying, his whole face open with it—eyes bright, mouth split wide in a grin that looked almost painful. Past him I could see the legs of a woman who had just given birth, a sheet drawn over her, the fabric damp and wrinkled. Eleanor sat on the bed beside her, one hand resting lightly on the mother’s arm, the other smoothing damp hair back from a face I couldn’t quite see.
The baby turned in his hands and faced me.
Blue eyes.
Blue hair.
No.
I opened my eyes.
***
Venna was asleep on top of me, both of us with nothing on. Her hands rested on my shoulders and her hair was across my face—blue, soft, smelling faintly of the night—and my hand was still on her waist where I’d left it. The weight of her was warm and complete and suddenly too much. Skin against skin. The slow rise and fall of her breathing.
Crows were cawing outside.
That sound. The one I woke to every morning for twenty years on the plain, the first thing that ever told me I’d survived another night. It landed in my chest like a memory that had teeth.
Sunlight was coming through the window. Morning had arrived while we weren’t watching. The light was pale, ordinary, completely indifferent to what the night had done. It cut across the floor in a clean rectangle, dust floating in the beam, and touched the edge of the bed where her bare leg was tangled in the sheet.
She was still asleep. I had held her until dawn, exactly as she’d asked. The promise kept. The cost of it still settling.
And two things sat in me, and I could only look at one of them.
How did I go back without her. She isn’t holding my hands. She isn’t even awake.
The other one I refused to touch.
"Venna."
She shifted higher on my chest, her hands moving up to plant themselves on the bed either side of my head, and stayed asleep. She pulled in a breath, louder than the rest, and went straight back under. The movement pressed her closer for a second—breasts against my chest, the soft heat of her still lingering between her thighs where I had been.
"Ven."
My arm had stopped existing somewhere around hour three. The pins-and-needles were secondary. The face of the baby turning toward me was not.
"Bram." Lazy, half in a dream. She shifted again. "Is it morning already?"
"It is."
I wanted her off me. Not because of anything she’d done. Because I could still see a baby’s face turning toward me in a room full of laughing people, and I needed her further away from me while I decided whether it meant what it looked like.
She rolled off and lay down beside me, face up at the ceiling. The mattress shifted. Cool air moved into the space she’d left, sliding across the sweat still drying on my skin.
"Good morning."
"Morning."
"You don’t sound fine." She sat up. The sheet fell away from her. Morning light spilled across her bare shoulders, the curve of one breast, the soft plane of her stomach. "Is everything okay?"
"Yeah." I sat up too. The morning light made everything look too clean. "I think we should get dressed. Start the day."
"Dressing is genuinely the last thing I want to do in a room with you." She stretched her arms above her head. The movement was easy, unguarded, completely without the weight of what I’d just seen.
"I’m serious, Ven."
She smiled at that.
"Ven works, actually." She let her arms drop. "And I’m serious too."
I got up and found my boxers on the floor. The fabric was cold. I pulled them on without looking at her.
"Is everything okay between us?"
"Yeah."
I pulled them on.
The two of us alone in a house, and no plan at all for how we were getting through it. The crows kept calling. The sunlight kept arriving. And the face of a newborn with blue eyes and blue hair sat behind my ribs and refused to leave.