Chapter 12: The Taste of Wine

Alaric woke before the light, and for a moment he thought he was still dead.

The room was grey and cold, and the fire had burned to red ash.

Then a warm weight shifted against his side, and he turned his head.

She was asleep with her face against his shoulder and her copper hair across his arm.

Her mouth was slightly open.

He lay without moving and looked at her.

He had looked at the first Lysandra across tables for eleven months, in the first life, and never once seen her asleep.

That woman had locked her door.

This one had thrown a robe over his burning body at two in the morning and packed his ribs in snow.

In the first life he had been at the border fort when the news reached him.

A rider had come up the road at noon the day after the Banquet, with a sealed letter and a face that wouldn't look at him.

The letter had a date on it, and the date was a morning that had already ended.

He remembered the road down.

He remembered the town square, and the empty beam, and the grey rope the hangman had already coiled and put away.

He remembered that no one in the whole crowd would say her name.

Alaric closed his eyes.

He did not let himself see more.

He had spent eight days learning not to.

Beside him, Lysandra stirred and mumbled something, and her hand closed on his wrist in her sleep.

He covered it with his own.

The black book lay on the table where she had left it.

He had written it in his first eight days of this life, sitting up in the study with the door locked.

Every entry in it was a place where he'd changed something.

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