The guards were gone.
Sera had cleaned and bound his forearm with the quiet efficiency that characterized everything she did, had looked at Gorgina once with an expression that communicated a great deal without words, and had withdrawn to the chair in the corner where she sat with her hands folded and her eyes on the floor, present but deliberately peripheral.
The room had settled into its new arrangement: two unconscious men removed, one window re-latched and now guarded from outside, one lamp replaced with a candle. The ordinary furniture of a sickroom, reclaimed from the brief violent interruption.
Gerffron lay back against the pillow.
The fever was worse. The exertion had fed it, stoked it back up past where it had been that afternoon, and he could feel it now behind his eyes and in his joints and in the cut on his forearm where the binding was already warm.
Gorgina sat in the chair beside the bed.
She had not been asked to stay. She had not offered to stay. She had simply not left, and no one in the room had found a way to suggest that she should.
He turned his head and looked at her.
In the candlelight she looked, for once, tired. Not weak — Gorgina Wadee was constitutionally incapable of looking weak, some stubbornness of bone and bearing refused it — but tired in the specific way of someone who has been holding something very heavy for a very long time and has just, in one unguarded moment, felt the weight of it.
"I'm sorry," he said.
His voice came out rough, scraped thin by fever and the forearm that had been across his throat minutes ago.
Gorgina's eyes moved to his face.
"I never meant harm to this house," he said. The words were not practised — he had no energy left for practised things. They came the way the fever's speech had come for four days: without armour, without architecture, from somewhere below the level where discretion lived. "I know you don't believe that. I know what it looked like. What I did."
She said nothing.
He closed his eyes.
"I have always been like this," he said, and his voice shifted — not in language, not in anything she could have identified, but in register, in the particular grief behind the words. "Too much. Extended too far. Every time I am kind to someone, it costs me something I cannot afford to lose, and I know this, I have always known this, and I do it anyway."
He paused.
The candle moved.
"The last time," he said, very quietly, "it cost me everything. I couldn't prove it. I couldn't tell anyone. I just had to — carry it. And keep going. And pretend that what had been done to me in the dark had not been done."
He was not speaking about the Wadee estate. Gorgina did not know this. She did not realize that the words spoken from Gerffron Wadee's mouth were that of Deepak Sehwal's soul. She assumed what she heard and placed the words in the only context available to her — the years before the marriage, the Cliff family, the rumours she had collected and half-believed about what had happened to Gerffron in his father's house before the wedding day.
Her jaw moved.
"You should have told me," she said. The words came out lower than she intended.
He almost smiled.
"Would you have believed me?" No one would have believed him anyway.What was the point of telling people what happened with him in that computer lab at school? Would any of his parents believed him? Would Birsha and his accomplices be convicted of assault and rape?Deepak wondered.
Gorgina did not answer. Because the honest answer was complicated in a way she was not prepared to be honest about, not tonight, not in this room.
He was fading. She could see it — the intervals between words lengthening, the hand on the blanket going still, the fever pulling him back under with the inevitability of a tide.
"I never wanted to destroy what you built," he said, very faintly. "I only ever wanted—"
He did not finish the sentence.
Gorgina looked at his face — open, undefended in a way it had never been in any ballroom or sitting room or in the courtyard on the day of the sentencing — and felt something move through her that she had no clean name for.
She leaned forward.
She pressed her lips to his — not with force, not with demand, only with a gentleness that surprised even her, a gentleness that had been stored somewhere inside the Duke for a long time and had not had anywhere to go.
He exhaled against her mouth.
And then the last of his strength gave out entirely, and he collapsed into her arms with the boneless completeness of a man who has finally, after fourteen months and one assassination attempt and four days of fever, run entirely out of reserves.
She held him.
Sera did not look up from the floor.
Outside, the second winter's snow had begun again, covering the rose garden and the stone bench and the boarded balcony of the east tower in a clean, indifferent white.
Inside the cedar room, the candle burned.
Gorgina Wadee held her husband in her arms and did not move for a very long time, and the expression on her face in the candlelight was one that no one in the Zenos empire would have recognized as belonging to the Duke.
It belonged to someone older than the Duke.
Someone who had once, in a different world, on a different continent, in a school corridor that smelled of chalk and rain, looked at a quiet, kind-eyed boy and felt — for the first and last time in that life — something that might have become love, if either of them had been given the chance.