Ch. 259 The Time We Ask For

Chapter 259: The Time We Ask For

Morning arrived before either of us slept.

Evelyn lay beside me with one hand resting between us.

Not touching.

Close enough that I could have closed the distance.

I waited.

The nursery remained quiet.

Greykeep did not.

A cart crossed the lower yard.

Someone opened a door in the passage.

Far beneath us, the wards shifted around a new contribution.

Ordinary sounds.

They made the silence between us easier to bear.

At last, Evelyn took my hand.

“I am afraid of growing old.”

I did not answer immediately.

The words seemed too small for the fear I had seen in her.

Everyone grew old.

That had once been an ordinary certainty.

Then I had changed.

“What happened at the mine?” I asked.

“It began before that.”

She sat up.

I followed.

The first light of morning found the pale blue-white strands of my hair.

Evelyn watched them.

“That is part of it.”

“My hair?”

“You.”

There was no accusation in the word.

That made it hurt more.

“You are still changing,” she said. “Every time I think your body has settled, something else becomes less mortal.”

I looked at my hands.

They appeared ordinary until I paid attention.

Then frost glimmered beneath my skin.

Pale lightning moved along the edges of my nails.

My heart beat.

Slower than hers.

Stronger.

Not tired after a sleepless night.

Evelyn touched the inside of my wrist.

“You may never grow old.”

“I don’t know.”

“Aurelia believes you won’t. Not in the way I will.”

I looked toward the window.

The glass reflected us faintly.

My wife beside a man whose face no longer changed with exhaustion.

She told me about the morning she had watched me beside the nursery window.

The fear that arrived without warning.

The image of herself decades older while I remained as I was.

The thought of me loving her while already mourning her.

She told me about approaching Aurelia.

About asking Maelin and Thesra to help.

About the old methods they had rejected.

Temple bonds.

Preservation.

Marriage rites that might have stolen years from one person to give them to another.

I felt cold gather around the bed.

Evelyn stopped.

I closed my eyes.

The cold settled.

“Continue.”

She told me about sainthood.

Not the word carved beneath old chapel figures.

Not perfection awarded to the dead.

A mortal life aligned with a divine domain while remaining fully its own.

A person who carried divine power through mortal choice.

Aurelia’s saintess.

The title immediately frightened me.

Not because I doubted Evelyn.

Because I knew what people did with titles.

“What would it require?” I asked.

“They don’t know.”

“What would it do to you?”

“They don’t know.”

“How long would you live?”

“They don’t know.”

My voice sharpened with each answer.

Evelyn did not retreat.

“That is why I did not tell you immediately.”

I stood.

The room cooled.

Ice formed along the washbasin.

“I could give you part of my power.”

“No.”

“I could bind your life to mine.”

“No.”

“Aurelia could—”

“No.”

The third refusal struck harder.

I turned.

Evelyn remained on the bed.

Her hands shook.

Her voice did not.

“I knew you would offer yourself before we understood what I was asking.”

“I am your husband.”

“Yes.”

“I will not stand beside you for sixty years and then—”

The sentence failed.

Winter filled the room.

Not snow.

The silence before it.

Evelyn crossed the space between us.

She placed both hands against my chest.

The ice armor tried to form beneath them.

Instinct.

Protection.

I dismissed it.

“You are doing exactly what Aurelia taught you not to do,” she said.

“What?”

“Reaching past yourself because wanting to help feels like permission.”

The words hurt because they were true.

I looked down at her.

“What do you expect me to do?”

“Listen.”

“I listened.”

“You waited until you heard a problem you could solve by cutting pieces from yourself.”

“That is unfair.”

“Yes.”

Her eyes filled.

“It is also true.”

I stepped away.

Not far.

Enough to breathe without deciding her future through fear.

The frost on the basin began to melt.

Water ran down its side.

“I don’t want to lose you.”

“I don’t want you to.”

“You hid this from me.”

“For days.”

“That does not improve it.”

“I know.”

“Were you ever going to tell me?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“When I could say more than I was frightened.”

I looked at her.

“Why couldn’t you be frightened with me?”

The question changed the room.

Evelyn lowered her hands.

“I thought your fear would become a promise.”

It already had.

Before she finished speaking, I had been prepared to promise power.

Years.

Whatever divine life I possessed.

I would have bound us both without knowing the shape of the bond.

Not because I wanted to control her.

Because terror could make control resemble devotion.

I sat beside her.

“I’m sorry.”

She wiped one cheek.

“So am I.”

“Do you want sainthood?”

“I want time.”

“That was not what I asked.”

“No.”

She looked toward the nursery door.

“I don’t know what sainthood means yet.”

The twins began moving in the adjoining room.

Not crying.

Whispering.

That was less reassuring.

A small flash passed beneath the door.

Then a fold of darkness.

Something wooden struck the floor.

Evelyn glanced toward it.

“We have perhaps three minutes.”

“That seems generous.”

She took my hand again.

“I want time with you. With them. I want to see who they become.”

“So do I.”

“I want to finish building the chapel. I want to train healers who do not ask whether a patient worships the correct god. I want to help Aurelia shape a church that cannot become another high court.”

Her fingers tightened.

“I want more life because I have more living to do. Not only because I am your wife.”

Relief and shame arrived together.

Relief because I was part of what she wanted.

Shame because some frightened part of me had needed to hear it.

“That matters,” I said.

“It does.”

“If there is a safe path—”

“We study it.”

“Together.”

“Yes.”

“No working without both of us understanding how it affects our bond.”

“Yes.”

“And if sainthood asks you to become less yourself—”

“I refuse it.”

The answer came immediately.

I breathed.

That helped.

The nursery door opened.

Garrick stood in the passage.

He had acquired one of my boots.

Carol stood behind him holding the other.

Neither had put them on.

That would have been ordinary.

The boots floated between them.

My son looked at my bare feet.

“Cold.”

“Apparently.”

Carol released her boot.

It dropped.

Garrick did not.

He moved it toward me.

“Thank you.”

He smiled.

Then the boot struck me in the chest.

Our serious conversation ended for several minutes.

Aurelia, Maelin, and Thesra met us after breakfast.

The Castellan joined only after Evelyn invited him.

Mary did not.

This felt unusual.

I looked toward the door twice.

“She is reviewing yesterday’s emergency orders,” Evelyn said.

“That has never prevented her from appearing.”

“She does not know yet.”

I looked at my wife.

“Do you want her to?”

“Eventually.”

Aurelia closed the chamber door.

“Today, we keep the circle small.”

I remembered Evelyn asking them for confidentiality.

Part of me still resented it.

I kept that part from answering for me.

The green book lay on the table.

Maelin opened it to a marked page.

The writing had faded.

A picture remained.

A woman stood beneath a carved tree with one hand lifted toward a sick child.

The other held a lantern.

The symbol beneath her feet matched the one on the cover.

“Her name was Elianor,” Maelin said. “She served a god of mercy whose name has been removed from the record.”

“By Othellos?” I asked.

“Possibly. The removal is older than many of his known revisions.”

“How long did she live?”

“Three hundred and twelve years.”

The number settled heavily.

Not forever.

Far beyond an ordinary mortal life.

“What happened to her?” Evelyn asked.

“The record does not say.”

“That seems important.”

“It is.”

Maelin turned several pages.

“The last surviving entry describes her leaving the temple after the god she served demanded that she refuse healing to an enemy city.”

Evelyn leaned closer.

“She disobeyed.”

“Yes.”

“Did she lose her power?”

“No.”

Aurelia touched the drawing.

“That may be why the god’s name was removed and hers survived.”

I looked at the woman in the picture.

“She carried the domain without obeying its god.”

“That appears to be the point,” Thesra said.

The next account concerned a saint who had lived one hundred and eighty years.

Another lived four hundred.

One had stopped aging entirely for a century, then resumed after leaving the order he served.

None provided instructions.

Every story contradicted another.

Some saints healed.

Some witnessed oaths.

One protected a bridge.

Another kept the memories of children who died before receiving names.

“What do they share?” I asked.

Maelin moved the books aside.

“They were recognized by people before they were recognized by divine power.”

“Worshipped?”

“No,” Aurelia said. “Trusted.”

That distinction sounded familiar.

“Yesterday at the mine,” she continued, “people throughout Havenreach heard the chapel bell.”

“No one rang it,” I said.

“No mortal hand rang it.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

Evelyn looked at her.

“Then who did?”

“The domain.”

The answer made me uneasy.

Domains were not supposed to possess intentions.

Then I remembered storms choosing paths.

Winter settling around seeds.

My sword appearing because some part of the world recognized what I had become.

Perhaps intention was the wrong word.

Recognition did not require a mind shaped like ours.