The pale wash of morning brought sea-light through the curtains and washed the walls the color of sand. The bedclothes were tangled, ruined by bodies that refused to behave.

  Lain woke on her side with Morgan pressed along her front, his arm draped over her waist, his face tucked into the space beneath her chin. The last of sleep clung to her in thick strands, but the memory of the night sat close. Her muscles ached with exertion, and under it lived the stranger ache, relief braided with grief, because she’d taken something back and she didn’t know what it would cost her.

  Still half asleep, Morgan shifted, tightening his hold in a way that made her breath catch. His mouth brushed the underside of her jaw, searching for her in the dark of his own comfort.

  “Lain,” he murmured. The sound of her name in his morning voice made her scalp prickle.

  She should pull away, or stand. This was too intimate, too close. Instead, she stayed where she was, and let him have the first few seconds of waking with her.

  Morgan’s eyes opened. The expression that crossed his face belonged to a man stunned by his own luck. His gaze moved over her as if he couldn’t stop verifying she was real, that she hadn’t been a dream the night invented to mock him.

  “You’re here,” he said, as if he’d been afraid of waking to an empty bed.

  Lain smiled despite herself. “I’m here.”

  He kissed her shoulder, then her collarbone, then the corner of her mouth, each one quick and almost boyish. He had the reckless joy of someone who had survived a storm and stepped out into the sun.

  Lain tried to roll her eyes at him but failed. The warmth in her chest wouldn’t let her.

  “How are you feeling this morning, my darling?” Morgan asked.

  “Surprisingly… good,” Lain admitted.

  Morgan slid his hand down her side, then paused and drew back as if he’d remembered rules. The movement made her chest tighten with old instinct. He noticed at once and softened his grip on her waist.

  “May I?” he asked, voice rough with sleep still.

  The question landed in her body and settled there like a stone returned to a riverbed. She could have said no, and he would have moved away. She knew that now. The knowledge didn’t erase the past, yet it changed the shape of the present.

  “Yes,” Lain said, and knew it came out steady.

  Morgan exhaled with relief. His hand returned to her hip, holding her in place with care. He nuzzled into her hair.

  “You’re warm,” he said.

  “That’s what people are.”

  His laugh came out soft and unguarded. He shifted her to her other side so her back was to him, scooting closer. His knee nudged the back of her pastern under the blankets, a playful insistence.

  “You’re prickly,” he said.

  “I’m civilized,” Lain answered.

  “You were feral last night.”

  Lain’s cheeks heated. “You’re insufferable.”

  Morgan’s hand slid up her ribs with the kind of familiarity that threatened to undo her. He stopped near her underarm, fingers poised.

  “Don’t,” Lain warned, already smiling.

  Morgan’s eyes gleamed. “Don’t what?”

  “You know.”

  He moved his fingers anyway, a light, quick touch at her side. Lain jerked and made a sound that was half laugh and half outrage, twisting to escape him. Morgan followed without letting her go, trapping her between his chest and the mattress with nothing but warmth and insistence.

  “Stop,” she laughed, breathless.

  “I can’t,” Morgan replied, his voice carrying pure delight. “You look like you might kill me if I don’t.”

  Lain tried to glare at him and ended up laughing again. The sound felt wrong in her mouth at first, like she’d stolen it from someone. Then it turned real, because he kept making it real.

  Morgan kissed her cheek, then the corner of her eye, as if he could taste her laughter.

  “There,” he said. “That one. Keep that one.”

  Lain’s laughter faded into breath. The closeness of him, the ease of him, joy that kept spilling over the edges of his usual control, all of it tugged at her heart. It frightened her.

  She rolled onto her back to face him. Morgan followed at once, crowding her with his body without weight. Hovering just above her as if he didn’t want to pin her unless she asked. His hair hung messy around his face. A bruise colored his cheek where she’d struck him, and the bite marks at his neck looked raw against his skin.

  Lain’s hand lifted to his face, stopping short a breath, checking herself. Then she touched him, gentle at the bruise, her thumb tracing the edge as if she could smooth it away.

  Morgan’s eyes closed for a moment. He leaned into her hand like he wanted to be forgiven.

  “You’re inspecting that like you regret it,” he said.

  “I regret nothing,” Lain answered, and meant it in the way that mattered. She touched the bruise again, then let her fingers drift to his throat where she’d bitten him. “You’re going to be sore.”

  Morgan opened his eyes. “You were magnificent.”

  Lain huffed a laugh. “You’re still insufferable.”

  “I’m hopelessly in love with you.”

  The words landed so casually it startled her. He said them like a fact he’d accepted and was now building his day around.

  Lain’s chest tightened, and she hated herself for how quickly her mind went to danger. What did it mean to have the love of a man like this?

  Morgan saw the shift. He didn’t retreat. He softened, his face turning more serious without losing the warmth.

  “I know,” he said quietly. Then he caught himself, as if he were still learning which words could hurt her. “I know that scares you.”

  “It should scare you,” Lain said. “It’s like… you’re loving a person you’ve hurt, and calling it a miracle.”

  Morgan’s gaze held hers. “I don’t call it a miracle,” he said. “I just… want to be a man who doesn’t destroy what he wants.”

  Lain swallowed. A part of her wanted to believe him so badly it felt like hunger.

  Morgan kissed her, slow and careful, then drew back and smiled again, as if he couldn’t hold seriousness for long this morning.

  “Do you know what I want?” he said, and the question carried mischief again.

  Lain’s suspicion rose. “That’s never a safe question.”

  Morgan’s hand slid to her waist beneath the blanket, steadying his palm on her belly, waiting for her to decide whether to let it stay.

  “I want breakfast,” he said.

  Lain blinked. “Breakfast?”

  Morgan nodded solemnly, then ruined it with a grin. “I want to go downstairs and eat whatever terrible bread this place pretends is edible. I want you to drink something sweet without making a face. I want to walk with you in the sun like ordinary people.”

  Lain stared at him, caught between relief and a cold thread winding up her spine.

  Morgan kept talking as if he’d found a line of thought he loved too much to stop.

  “And then,” he said, “we leave.”

  The word cut through the room and changed the air. It took the bed, the warmth, the soft domestic shape of the morning, and set it on a knife’s edge. Lain held still, her hand still on his throat, fingers spread against skin that rose and fell with his breath.

  Morgan looked at her, still smiling, still full of joy, and missed the moment the world cracked inside her.

  “We leave today,” he said, brighter, as if he were giving her good news. “We find the Dothain, and we bind the Underveins to me. To us. We finish what we started. We can do it properly this time, with everything we need.”

  Lain heard her own pulse in her ears and hated how her body tried to flee even while she lay beneath him.

  Morgan kept going, carried by certainty. “And then,” he said, “we’ll have time. You, me, the child. We’ll live forever, Lain. No more running. No more begging safe houses for soup. No more fear that the world will take you from me.”

  Lain’s fingers curled on his throat without meaning to. Morgan’s eyes flicked down to her hand and back up, and he finally saw the way her face had gone blank, the way her gaze had pulled far away.

  “Lain,” he said, and the joy faltered. “What is it?”

  Her voice came out thin. “No.”

  Morgan blinked, as if he’d misheard her. “No what?”

  “No,” she said again, and sat up so fast the blankets fell away. She dragged them back around her body, a reflexive shield, and slid toward the edge of the bed until her hooves found the floor. Morgan sat up too, reaching toward her, but she opened her feelings up to him and it hissed across the bond like boiling water. He stopped himself mid-motion as if he’d hit a wall.

  “Lain,” he said, and now the bond carried confusion and fear, the beginnings of panic. “We agreed we would finish it.”

  “I never agreed to that,” she said. She stood, stepping away from him.

  Morgan’s brows drew together. He followed her, placing himself between her and the door, as if she meant to run out into the hallway with only the bedsheet around her. “You know what it means,” he said. “You know what we can have.”

  “I know what it costs,” Lain snapped, and the heat of her anger was a rope she clung to. Morgan looked too human in the morning light, which made the words he was saying feel more monstrous.

  “I’m not doing it,” she said.

  Morgan’s voice rose, then steadied itself with effort. “Why?” he demanded, and the demand carried a plea inside it. “After last night – after what you said to me – after the beach and the child and the life – Don’t you want that? ”

  An ugly, helpless laugh escaped her. “Don’t do that. The things I want – they don’t have anything to do with your grand plan. I don’t need eternity, Morgan. Neither do you.”

  Morgan stared at her, face tightening. He tried again. “Lain, listen to me.”

  Lain shook her head. “Don’t.”

  “I can feel you,” Morgan said, voice breaking. “I can feel you pulling away, and you don’t even know what you’re doing.”

  “I know exactly what I’m doing,” Lain replied. “I’m choosing myself.”

  Morgan’s hands clenched at his sides, then opened again. He took a step toward her. Lain backed up until her pasterns hit the bedframe. Her breath came fast. She lifted her chin anyway, refusing to shrink.

  Morgan stopped when he saw it. He stood there for a beat, eyes shining, as if the reality of forcing her finally rose in front of him like a mirror.

  “I don’t want to do this with you fighting me,” he said.

  “I won’t stop fighting you,” Lain answered.

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  Morgan swallowed hard. He looked like a man trying to keep himself from becoming the worst version of himself. “Come with me,” he pleaded. “Let me show you. Let me make it right. Let me give you a life where no one can touch you again. Let me give you a safe place forever.”

  “And what about the people you have hurt to do it?” Lain asked. “What about the Dothain? What about the world you drain to feed your forever?”

  Morgan’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t understand.”

  “I understand enough,” Lain said. “I understand the Dothain was born from cruelty, and you want to finish it by adding more.”

  “And in a handful of centuries no one will remember any of it – The Dothain, the Serpent, Ivath, Ren, Eamon, Grainne – none of it will matter. We will have made peace with it. Anything can be made right, Lain, with enough time.”

  “I don’t want more time,” she said. “I don’t need it.”

  Morgan’s breath shuddered. His voice turned cold for a heartbeat. “If you won’t come willingly, I can take you.”

  The air left the room.

  Lain’s stomach dropped. The old terror rose and tried to take her body over. She gripped the sheet about her and refused to back away.

  “I will bite your throat out,” she said.

  Morgan stared at her, and his face cracked. Grief washed through the bond so heavily it made her heart ache for him.

  “You’d rather live destitute than live with me,” he said.

  “I’d rather live with my soul intact,” Lain replied.

  Morgan’s eyes went wet again. He scrubbed a hand over his face and paced one step, then another, then stopped, as if the small room couldn’t contain what he wanted.

  “You’re going to ruin yourself,” he said. “You can’t go back to Ivath. You can’t go to the Dagorlind. They will keep you in a cell and sing you into compliance. You'll end up in someone’s house as a curiosity, an obedient tool with a bell around your neck.”

  She hated that he knew where to press. But Morgan did not know about Vaelun. And she would never tell him now. She clung to that secret like a beam of wood floating on the sea.

  “Maybe,” Lain said. “And maybe your friends will take me in. Maybe I’ll work in a kitchen and scrub floors and sleep in a loft. I will still be mine. My child will be mine.”

  Morgan’s mouth twisted. “You’ll both starve. You’ll both die.”

  “I’ve been hungry before. I’ve survived.”

  Morgan’s gaze found her again, sharp with desperation. “You can’t leave me,” he whispered. It was the rawest truth he’d offered all morning.

  Lain’s throat burned. She wanted to reach for him. She wanted to cradle his face and kiss him and comfort that sorrow out of him. She would not.

  “I’m not leaving you,” Lain said, realizing it as she spoke. “You’re leaving me.”

  Morgan’s shoulders rose as he drew in air, then fell as if the breath had nothing to hold onto. He turned away from her and took one step toward the window, as if he meant to put distance between his face and her eyes. His shoulders rose, then fell, and he stood there with his hand braced on the sill, staring at the sea-light leaking through the curtain like it could explain how the morning had gone wrong so fast.

  Lain felt the fracture as the bond carried it in a dizzying rush. The surge of love that had been buoyant a moment ago, and the certainty he’d been building his day on, dropped into sudden panic, anger, and grief. It hit her in layers, weaving through each other, each one trying to take control, each one failing.

  He kept his back to her. His hand slid along the sill, fingers searching for purchase that did not exist. He bowed his head and made a sound that tore from him before he could snare it.

  Lain moved without thinking. She crossed the room and put her arms around him from behind, pressing her cheek to the feathers at his shoulder. The contact anchored them to each other, though he fought it at first, his body rigid with the instinct to stand alone in his ruin.

  “Don’t,” Morgan said, and the word carried effort, not anger.

  “I’m here,” Lain answered.

  He tried to pull away, his hands leaving the sill and hovering, caught between the need to hold her and the fear of himself. Then his body betrayed him in the oldest way. He leaned back into her as if he had no strength left to keep himself upright.

  Lain tightened her arms around him.

  Morgan’s breath shuddered. He turned in her hold. Folding down into her chest, forehead pressed to her collarbone, his hands finally catching at her sides with child-like desperation.

  “I can’t,” he whispered. He didn’t say what he couldn’t do. He let the bond carry the rest. The bond didn’t require him to choose words that would make him look weak.

  Instead, the bond opened like a door.

  He sent her an image so clear it stole the air from her lungs.

  Ivath, high above the river, the Dawn Spire rebuilt in glittering stone. The council hall’s arched windows thrown open to the sun. Morgan on a dais with his hand on the bell’s chain, his face composed in the way men learned to be composed when they ruled. Lain stood beside him in silks that draped over her and left her legs exposed the way the free Kelthi wore their clothes, her hooves capped in gold leaf and her antlers crowned in metal. A child stood beside her, with pale curls and eyes like stormlight, small fingers gripping Lain’s wool, Lain’s tail coiled protectively about them. The city below arranged itself into order, streets and roofs laid out like a map he could fold and keep.

  Home claimed, power sealed. Safety built out of stone and obedience.

  The image hit Lain with a sick complicated longing. It carried everything he wanted to give her, everything he wanted to take for himself. It also carried a hook in it, the cage disguised as a sanctuary. Morgan’s hope was braced behind it, and his terror of losing her. She felt the way he needed the vision to be true because he didn’t know how to survive any other ending.

  Morgan’s arms tightened around her as if he could pull the future into his body and keep it there.

  Lain closed her eyes. She held him through the surge that went through him when he realized she’d seen it fully. He waited for her to accept it, waited for her to say yes, so he could stop falling apart.

  She didn’t.

  Lain opened the bond wider and sent him her own image in return, vibrant and clear, built out of the simplest materials.

  It was the stretch of shore where the dolphins had broken the surface. Two children ran ahead of them, hair streaming, laughs carried on wind. Morgan wearing a knitted sweater, like the one she’d seen Eamon wearing, to protect him from the chill. He had a pack slung over his shoulder, bread wrapped in cloth inside it, fruit tucked into a pocket, a small blanket rolled tight. His hair was streaked gray in places, his eyes warm and soft with crow’s feet. There was Grainne, and Finn and Orla, and Eamon too, the older children teasing her younger ones. Lain walked beside Morgan with her hand in his, their steps matched effortlessly, the comforting chatter of the group tumbling down the beach and meeting the waves.

  There was no crown. No dais. No city that required other people to kneel so they could stand taller. Just the morning light, the salt in the air, and the pleasure of something simple, and ordinary.

  She pushed the image toward him the way she might push a cup of warm tea into his hands.

  Stay, she asked him through it. Stay here. Stay with me. Stay in the life we can hold without hurting anyone to keep it.

  Morgan went still in her arms.

  For a breath, the bond filled with his yearning so fiercely that it made Lain’s eyes sting. He wanted it. He wanted her vision. He wanted that child running ahead of them so badly it hurt. He wanted the ease of it, the innocence, the way it asked no blood price.

  Then the old machinery inside him caught.

  He pulled his face back from her collarbone and lifted his head. His expression arranged itself into something smoother, a mask he could wear in front of soldiers and councils. He didn’t push her away. He didn’t let her feel how hard he fought to keep his grief from spilling out in front of her. But lain could still feel it anyway. The bond gave her the tremor beneath the surface, the deep ache he refused to show.

  “You want me to stay,” he said, voice controlled.

  “Yes,” Lain replied, and she held his gaze so he couldn’t pretend he’d misread her. “I want you to stay.”

  Morgan almost smiled. He looked down for a moment, then back up, and the look in his eyes carried love and apology together.

  He swallowed again. His hands slid to her waist with care, and he held her like he could memorize her shape and carry it into whatever darkness he planned to walk into. His gaze drifted to the bed, to the ordinary room that had held their borrowed domestic dream for a handful of hours. When he looked back, his face closed around itself again.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  Lain’s chest tightened. She didn’t let herself step back, or soften into pleading, because she knew how easily pleading could become surrender.

  “You can,” she said. “Yes, you can.”

  Morgan exhaled through his nose, steadying himself. The bond carried the deeper truth behind his control: he did not know who he was without hunger and purpose and power. He did not know how to live inside an ordinary life without turning it into a cage to keep his fear from touching him.

  He leaned in and pressed his forehead to hers.

  “I can’t live in a world where they can take you,” he whispered.

  “They can take anyone,” Lain said, and the honesty of it made her voice go quiet with grief she refused to dramatize. “But we carry on anyway. Don’t we?”

  “You’re asking me to die with you,” he said.

  “I’m asking you to live with me,” Lain replied.

  Morgan closed his eyes. “There was a time…” he trailed off for a moment. “A time I said yes.”

  And the memory came.

  Morgan had married an angel.

  Her wings were orange and blue. She leapt from the cliff face and cried with delight. The ones who had mixed families – the ones where not all of the members were winged – lived near the top, so they would not have far to climb. He watched her go, watched her fall, watched her wings snap open and carry her over the sea.

  That afternoon, they’d fought.

  She found him at his worktable, a knifeblade to his arm, another creature manifesting in the hollow smoke that spewed from the thing he had killed there. It was a bloodwyrm the size of a polecat, hissing furiously, eyes red and wet as blood.

  They’d had this fight before. He’d promised to stop these experiments, that his work with their leader would end.

  She left the room and he chased after her, forgetting the knife was still in his hand, and when the boys saw the blade and the fretful eyes of their father and the blood oozing down his arm they shrunk back from him in fear. They were meant to visit their grandmother that evening. Siobhan had been preparing them to leave.

  Siobhan brought herself and the boys into the bedroom in the back of their roost and slammed the door on his face.

  The young Morgan was no less self-righteous. He slammed his fist on the door. He turned, and left.

  It was as he was climbing from their roost that the quake arrived. He stumbled against the rocks, felt the stairs slip out from under him, and clambered up the cliff face. He watched his people flee their homes, take to their wings. But not enough. Not many. It was late in the day, and the updrafts were weakening, and they would be home having supper with their families.

  The next few images came in flashes – Siobhan fluttering free, the boys tucked under her arms, a rock from above clipping her wing, and all three of them tumbling –

  That wasn’t the story Morgan had told her, that wasn’t how he’d described it, and she clung to him as she saw it play out, as she watched through his eyes as his wife and children fell to the beach, and rolled, and he heard the cry of his youngest and the wail of Siobhan and then the roar of the rocks that fell upon them –

  And when the earth had finally stilled and he picked his way down the side of the cliff in a desperate pleading momentum the wave came, and no Siobhan had carried him to safety, and those that were left were bashed against the rocks in the angry sea and Morgan remembered only the way his head rolled against stone and he thought with wonder at how easily the body could be broken –

  She pulled away from him, gasping, and they both wept, and Lain understood. They had come to that place of dew-laden grass, of a stone with a name carved upon it. This place in Morgan’s mind was its own sort of lasting beauty, a sorrow reminding.

  She had finally brought him to the graveyard of his grief.

  She pulled him gently to his knees.

  She asked him to pray.

  “You can’t fix it,” she said.

  “Lain –”

  “You have to let them go,” Lain said.

  “I just need time. There’s so much to learn. We freed the Underserpent. I made the bloodwyrms – the blade – the Dothain – I could–”

  “All those things were made from death,” Lain said, and held his head against her chest as her hips curled under her, and she felt the cool grass beneath them. “And they were new things. You can’t bring them back, Morgan.”

  “Then I can protect you,” he cried. “I can save you. And together, no one else will ever do this – not to your people, not to mine –”

  “People die,” Lain whispered. “You lost them. Death can take anyone. It wasn’t your fault. And you can’t fix it.”

  And then she remembered her final night with Mallow, after they had reconnected with so much tenderness under the shrine of Saint Fillian, and she remembered precisely the words that had brought her to herself, with undeniable grace.

  “You have to forgive yourself,” she said.

  She could sense him thinking, could sense his confusion. He closed his eyes again. He calmed, breathing deeply, his chest rising and falling as he let her hold him.

  When he opened his eyes again, his gaze held the same shimmer of loss, and his face still refused to break.

  “It’s too late for that,” Morgan said. “I am not that man anymore. He isn’t here. He can’t be forgiven.”

  “You said anything could be made right, with enough time.”

  Morgan gave her a smile that was so broken it made the part of Lain that loved him yowl inside her chest, wishing it could cross the bond to him, clawing at the space where a path for his grief should have been.

  The bond stayed open between them, crowded with two futures neither of them could force into the other’s hands.

  Lain kept her arms around him anyway.

  Morgan stayed held and still managed to hide the worst of his grief, as if the act of being seen would kill him faster than any enemy ever could. He kissed her once, slow, a kiss that carried everything he wouldn’t say out loud.

  Then he pulled back and looked at her, as if he meant to etch her into his memory.

  “I love you, Lain.”

  She put her hand on his chest. “I love this man. The one here with me, now.”

  He nodded. Breathed deep. Let that breath go. “When I leave here. If you come to me. If you try to stop me. We won’t be what we were last night.”

  “I know,” she said.

  He nodded again. In that fragile moment, she saw the part of him from his youth, the part of him who had loved Siobhan, the part of him that was still running, as if he could catch his family in his arms and carry them away from the sea.

  She kissed him.

  He kissed her back. He followed her kiss, traced the tenderness of her wanting, and gave her what she asked for, lifting her in one smooth motion, then easing her to the bed, to kiss her over and over again, gentle, the love he’d carried through all his many lifetimes finding Lain as the only true receiver he would ever choose again, the final resting place for the part of him that was willing to die.

  She took it. She took him inside herself. He rocked into her, and pressed his nose to her temple, then his mouth.

  “Remember me like this,” he said.

  She gasped with heartbreak and pleasure all blooming inside her. She wept in his arms, and nodded.

  He brushed the tears from her face, and kissed them from her eyelashes.

  “Please, my love.” In that plea there was every request he had ever made of her, everything he’d ever wanted. “Please. Remember that I tried to be kind.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, Morgan.”

  “Lain. Lain.”

  They were together for a long time. He ran his fingers across her glimmering scales and she buried her hands in his soft feathers and he caressed her velvety ears and she bit his arm, but only lightly. They might have laughed, and she might have loved him, and he might have stayed.

  But they both knew when it ended that he would leave, and she would not.

  They finally released themselves into each other’s arms, damp with sweat. The hot sheets carried the light as the sun arched toward midmorning.

  They dozed in a mortal coil of limbs, sharing the ache that rose to each of their throats.

  When he stood to leave, he tried not to wake her, and she pretended to sleep. She knew that if she’d asked it of him that he would stay one more day, and maybe one more after that. But she’d already prolonged his departure by several days too many. So when she heard his boots cross the floor, and heard his hand meet the latch, she did not open her eyes. She sensed him pausing there. Sensed the plea that rose up in the bond, before it fell back. He sent his love instead, and went through the door, and closed it behind him.

  He loved her, as well as such a broken man could let himself.

  It was not enough.

  But it was all he had.