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“No – truly, I didn’t. I only meant to help you understand.”

“You think I don’t?” He sighed, and sounded exhausted afterward; shockingly so. “Do you think I haven’t known, since the moment they placed you in my arms as an infant, that the greatest threat you faced was one I couldn’t keep from you?”

“I–”

“I knew,” Mattias pressed on, “that, as the years wore on, your magic would take a greater and greater toll on you. That you would weaken, and gray, and shrivel, just as your father had done. That I would – lose you.” His voice caught, choked-sounding. He took a shallow, unsteady breath, fist tightening in Náli’s hold. “I could face an army for you – I would. I would slay any man or beast, climb any mountain, ford any river. I have trained my entire life with the sole purpose of protecting you.

“But I can’t save you from your destiny.” When he exhaled, he seemed to deflate; if it weren’t for the iron strength of the clenched fingers against Náli’s palm, he would have looked nearly fragile in that instant. Defeated.

“I have always known,” he said, “that some day far sooner than is tolerable, I will be forced to hang up my sword and shield, don the white of mourning, and go spend the rest of my days in seclusion, grieving. A knowledge that is the surest of my life. And then,” his voice took on a bitter edge, “you call yourself a carcass.”

“Unthinkingly,” Náli said, pushing up the edge of his sleeve so he could pet over the sturdy knobs of his wrist. The hair of Mattias’s forearm bent downy-soft beneath his fingertips. “I’m unpleasant. You know that. I let my anger get the best of me, and I hurl insults – even at myself, yes. Everyone knows I’m a miserable little–”

Mattias’s thumb pressed to his lips, silencing him. He’d moved in a flash, between one blink and the next, so they faced one another. Náli was quick – too quick to fall to a move from someone so much larger and more obvious than him – but Mattias wasn’t a threat, had never been, and so he hadn’t been anticipating that flash. Nor the way Mattias looked down at him, pinning his lips shut with just that one touch.

“Whatever you’re about to call yourself, don’t,” Mattias said, in the steely, unrelenting tone of the sword master he’d so often served as in their relationship. “You wanted me to understand, you said. To know what it felt like to cross the Nágrindr and meet with the dead. And I want you to understand that it cuts like a knife each time you speak of the person I love most in the world with contempt and malice.”

The words landed as a blow and epiphany both. “Oh,” Náli said, and felt the widening of his eyes.

“Yes. Oh,” Mattias repeated.

He reached up to tug the thumb away from his mouth. “To clarify: when you say the person you love most in the world…”

Mattias’s eye twitched.

Náli grinned. “Just checking.”

A knock sounded at the door, and Náli wanted to throttle whoever was on the other side. He stepped around Mattias and tugged the belt of his robe tighter. “Yes? What is it?” he called out in his Court Voice, the one made for decrees and mocking, public-display quips.

The door opened a fraction to reveal Klemens, face very blank in a way that made it impossible to tell how far away he’d been standing at his post, and whether or not he’d overheard their conversation. They hadn’t exactly been whispering for most of it, Náli recalled with an internal wince.

“My lord,” Klemens said, “your lady mother is requesting–”

Náli cut him off with a groan, reaching to massage at the immediate headache that sprouted along his temples. “Supper. Yes, yes. Tell her I’ll be along shortly.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Náli sighed when he was gone.

The fire popped, and boot soles whispered near-silent across the granite floors. He anticipated an approach, strong hands landing on his hips. He hoped for that.

But when none came, and he turned, he found Mattias standing at his upright wardrobe, sorting through his good dinner clothes.

With another sigh, this one soundless, he shed his robe and set about arranging his hair.

~*~

Dinner with his mother was, as ever, a stilted, frigid affair.

She took most of her meals in her favorite salon, alone or with one of her ladies in waiting, few and feckless as they were. She couldn’t tolerate solid, decisive women like Revna Frodesdottr. Even young Tessa Drake might have proven too fiery a companion. She and her whey-faced friends nibbled at Southern-style sandwiches each afternoon in the hazy light let in by the third-floor windows.

But supper she took in the formal dining hall. The one that, in an ordinary household, would have been reserved for formal occasions. The table was a long, single slab of nearly-black granite that seated twenty-six, its legs of heavy cast iron, its chairs high-backed, pale ash wood, seats covered in bristly white bear hide. Iron candelabra interspersed with granite-bottomed candlesticks marched down the table’s center, flames flickering and tallow dripping down to the tabletop, left to dry in little piles the servants would have to scrape, and peel, and scrub away later.

A fire crackled in the hearth, but the room was too vast, with its high, barreled ceiling and its cold, condensation-slick walls for its heat to reach far. Mother sat at the foot, and Náli sat at the head, wrapped in gray wolf fur against the chill.

Náli tried twice to broach the subject of the war, and all that he’d seen and done in his time away from the Fault Lands, but Lady Serafina dismissed the topic with a sharp, “Hardly appropriate discussion over supper.”

He closed his mouth – and kept it that way, as she pivoted the conversation to the ball, and never wavered from the topic for the rest of the meal.