The chair was too comfortable.

  That was the thought that kept circling through Gale's mind as Fran moved around her chambers, voice sharp with authority, servants appearing and disappearing like spirits summoned by incantation. He was sitting in an armchair by the window—her reading chair, he recognized, the one she curled into most evenings with a book and a cup of tea—and the cushions were soft beneath him, and the fire was warm at his back, and none of it made sense.

  He should not be here. He should not be anywhere.

  "Honey," Fran was saying to someone at the door. "The jar from the stillroom, not the kitchen stores. Wine—the Valdrossian red, not the cooking wine. Rosewater. Clean linen. All of it, now."

  The servant vanished. Another appeared. Gale watched them move with the glazed detachment of a man observing events through water. They were efficient, these people. Quick and silent and precise. The same staff who had witnessed their duchess abandon her dignity to run across a courtyard now scrambled to obey her every word, and he understood—distantly, academically—that they were doing it for him. Because she had asked. Because she needed.

  Because they had seen her face when she saw him, and they understood.

  Fran crossed back to him. She had tied her hair back, he noticed. Sleeves rolled to her elbows. Her movements were brisk, economical, and utterly familiar: this was the woman who had pressed her hands to dying peasants and nobles alike, refusing to let them go. The healer. The one who fixed things.

  He wasn't sure he could be fixed.

  "Can you remove your coat yourself," she asked, "or do you need help?"

  Her voice was steady. Professional. But her eyes kept moving over him—cataloguing damage, he realized. Taking inventory. The way she had once surveyed overcrowded sickrooms in Candlekeep’s clinic.

  "I can manage."

  He couldn't, quite. His right hand wouldn't cooperate, the burns pulling with every movement, and his ribs screamed when he tried to shrug the fabric off his shoulders. Fran watched him struggle for three heartbeats before she stepped forward and took over, her fingers quick and steady on his buttons, easing the ruined coat down his arms with practiced care.

  The shirt beneath was worse. Stained, torn, stiff with salt and old sweat and things he didn't want to think about. She made a soft sound when she saw it. Her fingers stilled on the torn collar, just for a breath. Something in his chest cracked.

  "Fran—"

  “Don’t.” Her voice lowered. “I’ve got you.” She pulled a knife from somewhere—a small blade, the kind healers used—and began cutting the fabric away rather than trying to lift it over his head. "Don't apologize. Don't explain. Just sit there and let me work."

  He sat. He let her work.

  The fire crackled. Servants came and went, depositing supplies on the table beside them: a basin of water, cloths, bottles and jars and rolls of clean linen. Fran sorted through them with automatic efficiency, her hands never pausing, her focus absolute.

  That was when he saw the cane. One of the servants must have brought it along with the rest.

  It was leaning against the wall by the door. Dark wood, simple design, a brass ferrule at the tip worn from use. Not decorative. Functional. The kind of thing a person used when they could not trust their own legs to hold them.

  Be careful, she had said when he left. Months ago, a lifetime ago, standing in this very room while he promised her he would be back before the first snow. I cannot lose you too.

  The first snow had fallen weeks ago in Vartis. He remembered telling Daimon it would snow soon, back when they arrived—back when he still expected a joyful reunion with Fran, not news of Durnhal.

  He had thought about it days ago, drunk and hollow, while Daimon's ghost screamed in his dreams.

  "Fran." His voice came out wrong. Scraped. "The cane—"

  "Later." She didn't look up. Her fingers were unwrapping the bandage from his right eye, working slowly, carefully, her touch so light he barely felt it. "Later. Not now. I need to see what I’m dealing with."

  The bandage fell away. Light stabbed into his eye like a blade, and he flinched, turning his face toward the shadows. Fran made another sound, and this time he heard what was underneath it: fear. Fury. The tightly-leashed rage of a woman who wanted to destroy whoever had done this and couldn't.

  "Keep it closed," she said quietly. "The light sensitivity is normal. It means the eye itself is still functioning."

  She moved to the table, reaching across for the rosewater, and her breath caught—barely a sound, quickly smothered. Her left hand pressed briefly against her side before she turned back with the dampened cloth. Cool and soft against his eyelid, the sting barely noticeable. Her other hand cupped the back of his skull, steadying him, and for a moment they were just two people in a quiet room, and he could almost pretend—

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  "How long has it been since you ate properly?"

  The question broke the spell. He tried to think. "I don't... there was bread. The coachman gave me some."

  "How long ago?"

  "Two days. Perhaps three."

  She exhaled slowly. Controlled. The way she breathed when she was trying not to shout. "And before that?"

  He couldn't remember. His last days in Kentar had blurred together, wine and guilt and the cold ache of the mark on his wrist. He recalled buying food at some point. He wasn't certain he had eaten it.

  "Gale."

  "I don't know." The admission scraped his throat. "I'm sorry. I don't know."

  Her hand was still on the back of his head. Her thumb brushed once against his hair—quick, almost unconscious—and then she pulled away.

  "We'll start with broth," she said. "Your stomach won't tolerate anything heavier. Small amounts, frequently. And water. A great deal of water." She reached for his right hand. "Let me see."

  The bandages Alkisa had wrapped around his fingers were stained and stiff, the work of someone competent but rushed. Fran cut them away with the same methodical precision, peeling back layers of linen to expose the damage beneath.

  The burns were healing. Badly. The skin was tight and red, ridged in places where it had begun to scar wrong, and his fingers didn't want to straighten all the way. Fran examined each one in turn, manipulating the joints gently, testing range of motion. Her face revealed nothing, but he saw the way her jaw tightened.

  "What did this?"

  "Caustic compound." The technical answer came automatically. "Alchemical enhancement. It burned through fabric before it reached skin."

  She looked at him. Waiting.

  He couldn't tell her about Gerolf. Couldn't explain the pier, or the vials, or the way he had stood there and let it happen because he hadn't cared enough to fight back. Couldn't describe Ezaryon pulling him out of the harbor or Alkisa swearing at him while she cleaned his wounds.

  "I was careless," he said instead. "It won't happen again."

  For a moment, something flickered across her face. He had seen that expression before—the one that meant she knew he was lying and was deciding whether to call him on it. But she only nodded once and turned back to his hand.

  "The fingers need to be wrapped separately," she said, reaching for fresh linen. "If they heal bound together, you'll lose mobility permanently. I want you moving them every few hours, even when it hurts. Small movements. Keep the joints from stiffening."

  She worked as she talked, cleaning each finger with wine-soaked cloth, applying honey in careful layers, wrapping linen around each digit individually. Her hands were sure and unhurried, and he found himself watching them—the familiar competence, the healer's grace—and remembering.

  He had imagined this differently. When he was still on the barge heading for Kentar, thinking already about his homecoming, he had pictured… not this. He had imagined riding through the gates on a fine autumn morning, mystery solved, danger passed. He had imagined Fran meeting him in the courtyard with that crooked smile she saved just for him—calling him Portashaft like it was the most natural thing in the world, and he’d call her Dove back, laughing about whatever stupid mishap had happened on the road. He had imagined their first night back together, her body warm against his, the relief of being home.

  Instead he was sitting in her chair with burns on his hand and darkness eating at his eye and a mark on his wrist that screamed what he had done to anyone with the senses to hear it.

  Fran reached for his right arm, turning it to check for additional injuries, and her fingers brushed across the mark.

  She went still.

  The Severance scar was impossible to miss up close—that jagged line of silver-blue, raised slightly against his skin, cold to the touch even now. It looked like frost. It looked like a crack in ice. It looked like exactly what it was: a permanent record of the worst thing he had ever done.

  "Gale." Her voice had changed. Softer. More careful. "What is this?"

  His throat closed.

  "It's nothing." The lie tasted like ash. "A scar. It looks worse than it is."

  "This isn't a scar." Her fingers traced the edges, and he felt the cold pulse in response—felt it recognize her touch and recoil from it, because even his own corruption knew she deserved better. "I've seen scars. I've made scars. This is..."

  She trailed off. Her eyes met his, and in them he saw the question she wasn't asking. The fear she was trying to hide.

  What did you do?

  "Please." The word cracked in his mouth. "Not now. I can't—" His chest was tightening, the familiar pressure building behind his ribs, and he couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't be here in this room with her looking at him like that. "Please, Fran. I'll explain. I will. Just... not now."

  For a long moment, she didn't move. He could see the war playing out behind her eyes—the healer's need to understand against the lover's instinct to protect.

  The lover won.

  "All right," she said quietly. She released his wrist, returning to the basin to wet a fresh cloth. "Not now."

  Relief flooded through him, bitter and sharp. He had bought himself time. A few hours, perhaps a day. Eventually she would ask again, and he would have to find words for something that had no words, and she would look at him differently forever.

  But not yet. Not tonight.

  "You need a bath," Fran said, her voice carefully neutral. "And sleep. Real sleep, in an actual bed." She paused, something almost like humor flickering at the corner of her mouth. "Tomorrow I'm calling for a barber. You look like a man who's been living in a harbor tavern."

  "I have been living in a harbor tavern."

  "That explains the smell."

  It surprised a sound out of him—not quite a laugh, too broken for that, but something close. Fran glanced up at him, and for just a moment, her professional mask slipped. He saw the exhaustion underneath. The worry. The fierce, desperate love that had sent her running across a courtyard without her cane.

  But she was here. She was alive. Not a pale shape propped up against pillows in a blood-scented room in Durnhal, gray with pain and barely able to sit. And despite everything—despite the mark on his wrist and the blood on his hands and the ruin he had made of every promise he had ever given her—she was still willing to touch him.

  It was more than he deserved. It was more than he would ever deserve.

  "Come on," Fran said. She braced one hand against the chair arm as she rose, the movement slow and careful. Then she was standing, offering him her hand as though nothing had happened. "Bath first. Then food. Then sleep." Her fingers closed around his. "We'll figure out the rest tomorrow."

  He let her pull him to his feet. His ribs protested, his hand throbbed, and the mark on his wrist pulsed cold against the warmth of her grip.

  Tomorrow. They would figure it out tomorrow.

  He followed her toward the bathing room, and tried not to think about how many tomorrows he had left before she learned the truth.