Chapter 8: Transgression
Seventeen days.
Seventeen days of correct distance and observed interactions and the Elder's satisfied surveillance. Seventeen days of Ava learning her sacred duties and Lex learning his political obligations and the two of them existing in the same building with approximately the precision of a man trying not to look at the sun.
It was the dreams that broke it.
She'd been warned about the Moonheart Bond—or rather, she hadn't been warned, because apparently no one in living memory had experienced one, and the texts on the subject were unhelpfully mystical. What she knew from personal experience was this: when she slept, she was somewhere else. A space that felt like the forest and the sanctuary simultaneously, a place that had no rules, where Lex was not controlled and distant and she was not the Holy Maiden.
In the dreams, he laughed. She hadn't known his face could do that.
In the dreams, she took his hand without thinking and he held on.
On the seventeenth night she woke from one of these to find her hands shaking and something in her chest that felt like a rope pulled to snapping point, and she thought: I cannot do this for five hundred years.
She got up. She walked.
She didn't intend to find him in the east corridor at two in the morning. She believed that completely. She was simply awake and walking and the cord in her chest had been pulling her east all evening.
He stopped walking when he saw her. She stopped walking when she saw him.
Neither of them said anything.
She could feel everything across the distance between them—the same rope, pulling from his end, the way it had been pulling all seventeen days. She could feel his exhaustion and the terrible specific loneliness of knowing exactly who you wanted and having the wanting turned into a law.
"The dreams," she said finally.
"Yes."
"You have them too."
"Yes."
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she said: "I'm afraid of losing you."
He crossed the distance between them.
He held her face in both hands the way you hold something you've been told you can't have and have decided to hold anyway, and she felt him shaking—this man who had chained himself to a cave wall rather than risk touching her—and she felt the fear in him, identical to hers, the terror of a person standing at an edge.
"I keep thinking," he said, "about a world where I never walked into that clearing."
"Don't."
"It would have been easier."
"I don't want easier."
And then he kissed her, and it was not the tentative first kiss of people who don't know each other. It was the desperate, honest kiss of two people who have spent seventeen days pretending they didn't know exactly who the other one was. She felt the bond flare between them like light through a cracked door—sudden and total and, she understood in that moment, completely irrevocable.
When they broke apart, his forehead was against hers and neither of them moved.
"This is going to cost us something," he said.
"I know."
"Ava—"
"I know," she said again. "I still choose this."
He closed his eyes. She felt him making the same choice, felt it settle in him with the particular weight of something decided once and never revisited.
Down the corridor, a door opened.
They separated.
The night continued as though it had witnessed nothing.
