going to marry her, aren’t you?”
The flush spreads. Not because he’s embarrassed. My brother could almost be described as giddy. “Springtime, I think,” he says, toying with one of his rings. “When the snows melt. She’ll like that.”
“She would.” Well, now we certainly have something to look forward to.
His smile ebbs a bit, softening with his voice. “And you?” he asks. “You can do that here.”
My heart skips in my chest, and I have to clear my throat. “Yes, I can,” I say simply, and to my great relief, Ptolemus doesn’t push the subject. No matter how much I think about Elane, how much I would enjoy marrying her one day, this is hardly the time. We’re too young, in a new country, our lives barely formed. Our paths far from chosen. Refuse Davidson’s offer, Elane, I plead in my head. Tell him no.
“What’s that look for?” Tolly says sharply, reading my face.
I exhale slowly. It isn’t the job that bothers me, not really. “Elane says I’m hiding.”
“Well, she’s not wrong, is she?”
“I wear metal spikes most of the time; I’m a bit difficult to miss,” I snap. For emphasis, I gesture to the still-bleeding cut over his eye. My brother is far from deterred, fixing me with a weary stare that makes me fumble for words. “It isn’t—I shouldn’t have to stand there and tell the world what I am. I should just be.”
Because Ptolemus has no skill in hiding emotion, or even in expressing it, sometimes he can be too simple. Too blunt. He makes too much sense. “Maybe in a century that will be true. People like you will just be. But now?” he says, shaking his head. “I don’t know.”
“I do, I think.” This is Montfort, an impossible country. A place I could have never dreamed of a few years ago, so different from Norta, the Rift, and any other reality I believed in before. Reds stand up with the rest of us. The premier has no reason to hide who he loves. “I’m different, but I’m not wrong.”
Tolly tips his head. “You sound like you’re talking about blood.”
“Maybe it’s the same,” I murmur. Once again, there’s that familiar curl of shame. For my cowardice now, for my stupidity before. When I refused to see how wrong the old world was. “Does it still bother you?”
“You?” my brother scoffs. “Eve, if anything about you bothered me, I would have said something by now.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I mutter, swatting him on the shoulder.
He dodges the blow with ease. “No, Montfort doesn’t bother me so much anymore. It isn’t easy, to relearn how things just are,” he says. “And I’m trying. I check my words. I keep quiet in mixed company so I don’t say the wrong thing. But sometimes I do. Without even knowing it.”
I nod, understanding what he means. We’re all doing the same, fighting against old habits and old prejudices as much as we can. “Well, keep trying.”
“You too, Eve.”
“I am.”
“Try to be happy, I mean,” he says, his voice sharp. “Try to believe this is all real.”
It would be easy to agree, to nod along and let the conversation end. Instead I hesitate, a thousand words caught on my lips. A thousand scenarios playing out in my head.
“For how long?” I whisper. “How long will this be real?”
He knows what I’m saying. How long before the Scarlet Guard loses ground and the Nortan States implode? How long until the Lakelanders decide to stop licking their wounds and return to fight? How long can these days last?
Patrol service is adjacent to joining the Montfort military. You get a uniform, a rank, a unit. You drill; you march; you make your rounds. And when the time comes, when the call goes out, you fight to defend the Republic. You risk dying to keep this country safe.
And Elane never asked me to consider anything else when I thought about joining patrol. She won’t push me away from it.
Slowly, I turn the re-formed bracelet on my wrist, shifting the metal to catch the light. I could make a dozen bullets from it easily. “Would you fight for this place, Ptolemus?” For Montfort, and for our new place in the world.
“I’d fight for you. I always have and I always will.” His reply is quick, without thought.
So is mine.
“I need to give you my letter.”
FOUR
Elane
The bath takes longer to fill here. Either because the water has to be piped up from the lake below in the city,