One Night

======================================================================

Later, he would not remember the exact moment the commander left him.

There was a kiss, and it was nothing like the cold small formalities he had permitted himself in the barracks years ago. It was slow and deep and hungry, and Kaelen kissed the way he fought: with complete attention, as though the whole world were narrowed to the width of one mouth. Lucian's hands, which he had meant to use as weapons, found their way into the black curls instead, and stayed.

Then the dragon drew back an inch, and Lucian made a noise of protest before he could stop it.

"Look at me," Kaelen said.

He did. In the gold light the prince's face was unguarded for the first time, stripped of the smile and the swagger. There was a long, thin scratch across his cheekbone. His lashes were wet.

"I thought I would rather hate you than lose you," Kaelen said. "For fifteen years I told myself you were a dream. A fever. A story the snow told me. And then I came to the Frostline, and you put your hand on my throat, and I thought, *he is real, and he will kill me, and I do not care.*" His thumb traced Lucian's lower lip. "But just now, in that tunnel, I realized something. You were afraid of me. Not of the dragon. Of *me*."

Lucian's throat worked. "I have a position," he said. "I have responsibilities to uphold. I cannot just be Lucian. You know what I mean. I am the Commander."

"The Commander is not going anywhere." The corner of Kaelen's mouth lifted. "But I can hear Lucian, too. He is right there. He has been telling me for six weeks that he wants me."

"He has no such..."

"He has told me all night."

The breath left Lucian in a long, helpless exhale.

It was true, and the truth was a door. He stood on the threshold and for one more moment held the whole weight of what he was, the uniform, the oath, nine generations of stone-faced Winters lords looking down from their portraits. Then he thought of the cell, and the needle, and the voice on the speaker saying *kill Lucian on sight*, and he found that the weight, when he set it down, did not crush him.

"For one night," he said. "Go to hell with being the Commander. Just one night."

"Lucian."

"Do not make me say it twice."

"I would not dream of it." Kaelen's smile was devastating. He lowered his head, and his lips brushed the corner of Lucian's mouth, the line of his jaw, the pulse in his throat. "We are mortal, you and I. Either of us could die tomorrow. Neither of us will ever be forgotten by the other, though. This I promise."

---

It was not hurried.

That surprised Lucian most. After everything, the chains and the rut and the fire, he had expected something like war. Instead the dragon was patient. He undid buttons as though each one were a sentence he wanted to finish. His mouth traveled over the places where Lucian's body held old scars, a bullet graze, a burn, a knife line across the ribs, and he kissed each of them as though apologizing to the years. Lucian's hands wanted something to do, and Kaelen guided them: to his shoulders, to the smooth hot plane of his back, to the places where the skin ran gold under his fingers.

"That's it," Kaelen murmured. "Good boy. Just like that."

"I will kill you for that," Lucian breathed.

"You will not."

"No." He pulled the dragon's mouth back to his own. "I will not."

The tower seemed to hold its breath around them. Outside, past the open window, the lanterns of the Ashfall Reach burned like a field of stars. Inside, the gold dunes shifted and whispered. Somewhere in the long dark, the mark on Lucian's neck flared, and an answering light rose in Kaelen's chest, and where the two lights touched, the air itself seemed to sing.

It was more dangerous than the strongest psychic suppressant: that was what Lucian thought, dimly, when the thought came at all. A drug that left a man's mind perfectly clear and his defenses utterly gone. Every wall he had ever built was lying in ruins at his feet. Every thought was open, and every one of them was a name.

"Look at me, Lucian," Kaelen whispered. "Open your eyes. Look at me."

He looked.

"You are mine." The words were hoarse, half prayer, half oath. "No one will take you from my domain. Not Thorne. Not the Conclave. Not death itself."

*Not even you*, Lucian wanted to say, and found he had no breath for it.

Behind his eyes the mountain opened. Gold and white and endless. And at the center of it, small and bright and impossible, a boy in the snow, holding out a bleeding hand.

The world went white.

---

He woke very late, or very early, in the grey part of the night. The lanterns had burned low. Beside him, Kaelen slept the way a cat sleeps, sprawled and trusting and entirely unembarrassed, one arm thrown across Lucian's waist and his face half buried in the furs. In sleep he looked younger. He looked, Lucian thought with a lurch, like the boy in the snow.

*I should hate this*, he thought. *I should be ashamed.*

He waited for the shame. It did not come.

"Why were you at the border?" he said into the dark.

The arm tightened. Kaelen did not open his eyes. "You are awake."

"Why were you there the night my father died? You said, *I came too late.*"

For a long time there was no answer. Then the prince sighed and rolled onto his back and stared up at the vanished ceiling.

"Because he sent for me."

Lucian went still.

"Your father." Kaelen's voice was very quiet. "Lord Aldric Winters. He wrote to me through a smuggler's channel, seven months before. He said there was a war coming that neither of our peoples had chosen, and that there was a man in his own house who wanted it. He asked me to meet him on the Frostline, alone, on the night of the new moon. He wanted a treaty." A pause. "He asked me to tell no one. Not even you. Especially you, until the Nexus Trial. He said you were too much like him; you would march straight to Thorne with your sword out."

"He knew," Lucian whispered.

"He suspected. He did not have proof." Kaelen turned his head. "I arrived an hour late. There was a storm. When I found him, he was already dying. He said one word to me."

"What word?"

"Your name."

Lucian's eyes closed. The grief rose like water, and for the first time in six weeks he did not fight it. A hand found his in the dark and held on.

"I should have told you in the cell," Kaelen said. "I did not trust you."

"You were right not to."

"No." The dragon's thumb stroked his knuckles. "I was wrong. And I am sorry."

Somewhere on the bedside table, a small green light began to blink.

Lucian looked at it for a long moment. Then he got up.

======================================================================