The tears came as though they had been waiting for a very long time for permission, and once they had it, they did not hold back. My breathing grew unsteady, broken by the kind of sobs that are undignified and entirely involuntary, and my chest ached with the particular physical pain of grief that has been compressed for too long and is finally releasing.
Arvid crossed the space between us.
"Please don't cry," he said quietly. His hands came to my face, thumbs moving carefully across my cheeks, clearing the tears as they fell — though they fell faster than he could keep up with.
I could not pull away from his touch. More than that — I leaned into it, the way a wounded thing leans toward the only warmth available, without strategy, without dignity, without anything except the need. I knew it was the bond doing what the bond always did, making it impossible to choose distance when proximity was offered. Knowing that changed nothing. I was completely powerless against it, and I had stopped pretending otherwise.
"Please," he said again, softer. "Don't cry."
He pressed a kiss to my forehead. Then another, feather-light, barely landing before moving on — across my forehead, to my temple, to the top of my head, a series of small careful touches that moved through my hair and woke something in my chest that was adjacent to pain. His arms came around me, drawing me in, and I let them. I turned my face into his chest and held on, breathing in the familiar sandalwood warmth of him, and he held me with one arm while the other moved in slow circles against my back, patient and steady, not trying to rush any of it.
"I'm sorry," he said into my hair. "I'm so sorry. I never meant to hurt you. Please — let me explain. I'm sorry."
He said it again. And again. The repetition had the quality of something that had been waiting to be said for a long time, something that had accumulated pressure and was now simply coming out, without calculation, without the usual architecture of his careful speech.
After a long while, when the worst of the sobbing had eased into something quieter, I pulled back enough to look up at him.
"Why did you do it?" I asked. My voice was rough from crying, and small, and very honest.
He went still. Every movement stopped at once.
I held his gaze through my tear-blurred vision, my dark eyes against his ash-grey ones, and I said what I needed him to hear.
"Don't lie to me. Not this time. Even if the reason is foolish — even if it makes you look terrible — I don't care. Just tell me the truth. Please."
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he looked away.
"It is a rather foolish reason," he said, half to himself.
He guided me to the nearby couch without another word, his hand at my back, and we sat together in the deep quiet of the library. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands loosely linked, looking at nothing in particular for long enough that I thought he might not know where to begin.
Then he began.
"I have always been manipulative. Shrewd in a way that goes past learned behaviour — it comes from somewhere deeper than that. Much of it is shaped by what I experienced as a child. The world was not kind to me early on, and I adapted accordingly. But a great deal of it is simply in my blood." He paused. "From my mother's side."
He looked at his hands.
"My mother herself is a good woman. Honest, straightforward, no particular taste for games. But the same cannot be said for her parents, or their parents before them, or for her siblings. They are a carefully cunning family — manipulative in the way of people who have practised it across generations until it became simply the way they move through the world. Ambitious, opportunistic, always reading the room several steps ahead of everyone else in it." A quiet, dry exhale. "It makes sense, given what they are. You saw the mural in the dragon tomb — the red dragon king killed by his mate. He had three children. The eldest son and the queen were killed in the rebellion that followed. But the other son and the daughter were sent away — exiled west. My mother's family descends from that daughter. The blood of that red dragon's mate runs in them, and with it the nature that has always defined that bloodline. Power-hungry. Cunning. Driven. None of it skipped me, whatever grace spared my mother." A humourless breath of laughter. "I was the full inheritance."
He sat back.
"I met them when I was seven — my mother took me to visit. And I felt, for the first time in my life, that I was somewhere I actually belonged. More at home among them than I had ever felt in Selon. That was when I understood what I was. And I decided, standing in their halls at seven years old, that I would never be satisfied with anything less than the highest I could reach. I set my course and I held it." He said it without pride and without apology, simply as a statement of fact. "By seventeen I was Emperor. I killed for it. I planned and I deceived and I did what was required. That is not something I can revise or reframe into something more palatable."
His gaze settled on the rows of books across from us.
"I kept that nature hidden, for the most part. People don't respond well to being told they are being managed, and I had learned very early that the facade was the more effective instrument. It came naturally after a while — too naturally, perhaps. It stopped feeling like a performance and became simply how I moved through the world."
He turned slightly toward me.
"When the question of an heir arose, I thought carefully about what I needed. A double royal bloodline, to make the child's claim to the throne unassailable — Selon has complicated views on legitimacy, and I wanted no opening for opposition. My first thought was the west. But most western kingdoms are either ruled by my mother's relatives or closely connected to them, and introducing another person of that nature into Selon's court would have been inviting a war from inside my own walls. Marriage between relatives was not a possibility I was willing to consider — my father's elder brother was proof enough of what that produces." He shook his head. "So the west was abandoned."
"What remained was Draga. The northern kingdom — untouched, isolated, harsh enough that Selon had largely disregarded it. And I remembered the princess who had saved me, briefly, in the north years ago. I thought — why not? I would go north. If you agreed, I would have what I came for. If you refused, we would win the resulting conflict regardless, by sheer weight of numbers, and gain something else instead: territory, and a direct overland trade route to the Chang'an empire that we currently reach only by sea. Either way, it was a favourable outcome." He looked at me. "It was a clean calculation. That was all it was, when I began."
A pause.
"And then I saw you."
He said it differently from everything that had preceded it — quieter, without the analytical distance he had maintained throughout.
"Every calculation I had in my head simply vanished. You were — I could not look at anything else. My only thought, which I am aware says nothing flattering about my self-possession, was that I needed to have you near me. I am not an impulsive person. I have never been. But at that moment I wanted to take you and leave with you and not concern myself with any of the rest of it." A ghost of something crossed his face. "So I found a way to do something very close to that."
He was quiet for a moment.
"What I felt for you grew deeper every day after that. I had not planned on love — it was not a variable I had included in any version of my calculations, because I had not considered it a realistic possibility. But it happened regardless of what I had planned for, and when I recognised what it was, I was frightened by it. Frightened of how much I felt, frightened of what it would mean to lose you. I became possessive in a way I had no precedent for. I wanted you entirely to myself. I had no intention of ever returning you to Draga."
He broke eye contact and looked away.
"And then the messenger came. Your friend, with news that your people were ill. When you asked to go back—" He stopped. Pressed his mouth together briefly. "I wanted to say no. I wanted to refuse absolutely, tell you that you were not going, that you would never go back. But you loved them. You loved them with the kind of love that puts everything else second, and at that point I knew — I knew I was second. Your people came before me. I felt it, and I felt it like an injury." His voice dropped. "Inferior. A secondary consideration."
He exhaled slowly.
"So when we went north, I was already working in my head. Planning how to break the tether that bound you to Draga — to make it impossible for you to stay, to give you a reason to choose me, to choose Selon, definitively and finally. And I devised something."
The library was very quiet. Outside, the afternoon continued as though nothing of consequence was occurring within these walls.
I sat beside him and waited, and did not rush what was coming.