Page 124 of The Second Death of Locke
Grey scoffed. If she had to worry about Sela on top of everything else, she might actually combust. She frowned, annoyed at herself for a moment, for finally understanding Torrin’s healthy fear for her own safety.
I know this gift is small, and possibly insignificant. I cannot give you my sword or the promise of a nation I haven’t yet inherited. I can barely help you. But you are the strongest person I know, and the strongest well. You will be okay. You have to be okay.
Thank you for your ruthlessness, Grey. It is its own kind of safety.
Yours,
W. N.
PS You can’t die, because I’ve already started planning Locke’s resurrection party, and the plans I have are in no way appropriate for a funeral.
She laughed, pushing away tears that threatened to overflow. She rifled through the fabrics, and was halfway through when she felt the press of cold metal. She frowned, pushing aside the top layer of clothes to reveal a set of cleverly made armor. It was dark silver, glimmering in the stormy light through the windows, overlaid with patterns of birds and ivy. It was, she realized with some awe, a twin to the armor Kitalma wore in the icons.
She clutched the metal, feeling the cold bite of it under her fingers. Ruthlessness was, she agreed, its own kind of safety.
That evening, while Kier and Dainridge and Reggin continued their planning, Grey took a candle and made her way through the dark halls to the administrative wing of the fortress. Cleoc and Scaelas and their various clerks and advisers had taken up most of the rooms, but, probably at Scaelas’s instruction, Grey’s mother’s office was left free for her.
She hesitated at the door. It was warded—perhaps that was the true reason. Perhaps she was assigning kindnesses to Torrin that didn’t belong.
The door opened easily beneath her touch, only creaking a little. She carried a leather satchel of documents over her shoulder, passed from the other sovereigns for her review. She set the documents on the carved wood desk and took the room in: the walls were covered with bookshelves, bearing old treatises and folklore alike. It was small, but far more nicely appointed than any commander’s office she’d been in before. She could not say if it rivaled the luxury of Torrin’s private office; she had never been there.
She lit the fire in the grate, then sat behind the desk. There was a stack of letters in the middle, seals broken, all bearing correspondence that was now worthless. She ran her fingers over the parchment to the other side, where her mother had been halfway through writing a response to Maerin’s harbormaster. She read it over, but it was irrelevant: preparing for renovations to the port that had never happened.
She sighed and pulled out the documents from the satchel. Grey read the proposed articles of the treaty with Scaela and Cleoc Strata until her eyes were heavy with strain, until the door opened and Kier slipped through, his coat as dark and shadowed as the night itself.
He perched on the edge of the desk. “It’s late,” he said, his gaze careful. “Tomorrow is our last day of peace before it all goes to shit, and you need to rest. You should come to bed.”
Grey glanced at the timepiece on his wrist. “It’s not that late,” she said. Not even midnight. “And you can’t order me around anymore.”
That got a smile out of him. “Oh, I can try.”
She sat back, folding her hands over her lap. Her fingers were cold—she was not yet skilled at keeping fires going in the hearth. Kier must’ve noted the whiteness of her knuckles—he took her hands in his and rubbed the warmth back into them.
“Is it odd?” she asked. “That no one thinks you have power over me anymore? That they no longer see me as just your well?”
Kier snorted. “I never saw you as just my well.”
“Maybe not, but no one else asked my opinion.”
He thought for a moment, bringing one of her hands to his lips, then the other. “It never mattered, what they thought,” he said after a moment. “I always saw you as my equal. Every decision I made, it was with your counsel.”
Grey looked away. Kier misinterpreted her guilt—he took her chin in his hand, turned her face back to him. “Nothing has changed, Grey. Not for me.”
She regarded him, studied his features. She nodded, and he nodded back.
“You should sleep when you can,” he said.
“I will, after I finish this. Half an hour more.”
He sighed, but leaned in to kiss her forehead. “I’m timing you, Locke.”
An hour later, the door opened again. Grey didn’t glance up. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” she murmured.
“Unfortunately, I don’t think we can enjoy that kind of relationship anymore.”
She looked up, the pen falling from her hand, dripping ink across the note on tributes she was halfway through making. Leonie stood in the doorway, leaning on a cane. Grey frowned—she doubted the Isle’s stormy weather was good for Leonie’s bones.
“Please, sit,” she said, nodding to one of the chairs on the other side of the desk. Leonie crossed the carpet, leaving the door cracked behind her. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
