Movement Four — The Thing She Wasn't Saying

Eremos understood it before she said it. I don't think that should surprise you, reading this — he has spent centuries now learning to read the particular shape of an unspoken grief before its owner finds the nerve to hand it over in words, and Elowen's had been sitting close enough to the surface, for long enough now, that even someone far less attentive than he is would have started to notice the outline of it.

He knew it wasn't about the man who'd left her. He knew, with equal certainty, that it wasn't about being one woman among a great many — she had made her peace with that particular arithmetic a long time ago, in her own theatrical, self-deprecating way, the same week he'd gently corrected her attempt to impose her old court's rigid hierarchy onto a household that had never once operated by rank. She'd absorbed that lesson completely, and had spent every day since then joking about her own earlier mistake rather than resenting the correction. Whatever this was, it lived somewhere else.

He knew, too, though he didn't yet have the words for it either, that it had something to do with the particular ache of a woman who had once ruled an entire continent's worth of people and had never, in all that ruling, managed the one thing every ordinary soul under her care had managed without needing to try: a child of her own to carry the weight of it forward.

He didn't push. That has never been his way, not with her, not with any of them. He simply held the silence open a little longer, one hand moving slowly, absently, through her hair, and let her decide, in her own time, whether tonight was the night she finally said it.

It wasn't. Not fully.

"I'm not ready to tell you the real thing," she admitted, finally, quiet enough that the wind almost carried it away before he caught it. "I know you'd understand it. I think that's actually the whole problem — I know exactly how kindly you'd take it, and somehow that makes it harder to say, not easier. Isn't that absurd."

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"It isn't absurd," he said again, the same words as before, because sometimes the truest thing you can offer someone is simply repeating what's true until they start to believe you mean it. "You don't owe me the whole of it tonight. You don't owe me the whole of it ever, if it comes to that — I'd rather you tell me on the day it's actually yours to tell, than have me pull it out of you before you're ready, just because I already suspect the shape of it."

She looked up at him then, properly, the dramatic edge finally gone from her expression entirely, replaced by something rawer and much more careful.

"You already suspect the shape of it," she repeated, not quite a question.

"I think so," he said. "I won't say it for you. That part's yours."

Something in her face shifted at that — relief, maybe, or something closer to gratitude too complicated to wear cleanly. She didn't answer him in words. I told you, near the start of this, that I don't know what a kiss feels like, and I meant it, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise now just because this is the part of the story where it happens. But I can tell you what it looked like, from where I stood telling it to you: she closed the last small distance between them in the grass, and kissed him — not desperately, not as an escape from the conversation so much as a continuation of it, the exact thing I tried to describe to you at the start of this chapter, the moment where the words finally run out and something quieter has to finish the sentence they left unfinished.

She didn't want to think, just then. It was a problem with no solution she could see her way to yet, and she knew, better than almost anyone in that household, exactly how impossible it was to swim toward an answer that didn't currently exist. Whatever the Between allowed or didn't allow her, whatever door remained permanently closed to a soul in her particular position no matter how much love surrounded her, she was going to go through the motion of this moment anyway, and see, for just a little while, if she could manage to set the impossible thing down and simply be here instead.