Chapter 11: The Argument

She laid the long spread four times that night, and each time it showed her the same thing.

Snow, a bridge, a bolt, a kneeling man, and the woman beside him, still turned away.

If Marguerite had never touched the goblet, then who had?

Liora sat on the window seat of her little round room with the cards fanned across her knees and her forehead against the cold glass.

Outside, the snow came down in the dark.

At midnight someone knocked on the wall between their rooms.

It was a quiet knock, three taps, the kind a man gives who has never knocked on a wall before.

She opened her door, and he was standing in the corridor in his shirt with his hair every which way.

"I said a stupid thing," said Bastien.

"You said three."

"I said three." He looked at the floor.

"I called it a drawing. It is a drawing. It's also the only reason I'm alive."

"You were frightened."

"I'm frightened every day since you came." He lifted his eyes.

"I have never been afraid for anyone before."

Her anger came loose from her chest all at once.

She took his hand and drew him into the room.

"Sit," she said.

"Where?"

"There."

She pointed to the window seat, a deep padded bench under the cold glass with the snow swirling outside.

He sat, and she gathered up her cards and set them in a neat stack beside him.

Then she climbed into his lap and put her arms around his neck.

"I believe you," said Bastien into her hair. "I do not believe it is Marguerite. But I believe you."

"That's most of a sentence."

"It's the best I have."

"It's enough," she said, and kissed him.

He kissed her.

The warmth of him went straight through her thin nightgown, and the cold glass at her back made her shiver and press closer.

His hand slid up her spine.

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