His bastard heart swells painfully in his chest, and he wonders if she can hear the way that it pounds against his ribs. She has to hear the ocean of it as it swirls and as it churns—louder than the ocean that is now at her back. But he still says nothing, because he is not sure that there is anything to say. There are no words that come, no words that find their way to his lips, and he stands silently, just watching her.
She says that she never says things she doesn’t mean, and he can only think of the last time that they were together. He can only think of the way she had said that she had loved him; of how desperately he had wanted to say it back—how desperately he had wanted to whisper it back to her.
But he didn’t then and he doesn’t know.
Something shifts on his face though, something almost imperceivable. It is a quiet shifting of tectonic plates beneath the red-wine of the skin stretched taut over the cliffs and valleys of his face. It is something that opens it up just slightly, pulling back the curtain to the emotions that always storm within him.
Brigade angles his antlered head for a second, tension throughout his body.
She is beautiful—he has told her that before. He is sure that he is not the first and he will not be the last to say such a thing to the lady of Hyaline. But her beauty has never interested him in anything more than a surface attraction. It was always her spirit. Her fierceness. That wildness trapped beneath the filagree.
It is this that catches him on tenterhooks.
It is this that finally makes him say, “Come here, Kensa.”
BRIGADE
when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache
but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake