Could he tell a stranger the full weight of his crimes?
He hadn’t told anyone, he thinks. Not even Kensa with all of the hours that they had spent together and the ways that they had shared so much of themselves. But she had asked and he had skirted around the question entirely. He had been unable to bring himself to peel back the layers for that particular wound and she had not pressed him on it. She had not asked him to be vulnerable in that way.
And neither does Lilian, he thinks.
Although the pressure she applies unknowingly is close.
His face folds at her question, rhetorical though it may be, and feels the way that it slips between his ribs like a blade. What hasn’t he done, he wants to ask. He loved a woman who had not been his to love. He had abandoned a home that had been nothing but kind. He has turned his back on his family because he was too scared to see what had come of them in the war. He had failed to stand up to the dragons.
He was a coward, and he was cruel, and he knew the full depth of the sins he bore.
Would she run if she knew it all?
He chews on the thought as the silence continues and part of him wonders if maybe the silence is not quite as uncomfortable as it had been in the beginning. Perhaps there is even something within it that is close to companionship although he has never been the type to find, let alone keep, friends.
Brigade supposes that he should ask her why she would be different, but he doesn’t want to push.
She has not pushed him, after all.
“Would you like to check out Sylva?” he asks suddenly, his wine red head tipping to the side. “I know that I didn’t do much to sell it, but it actually is better than the meadow. That is, if you want a home.”
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