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"Because I'd like to remember it." He hadn't meant to say that. It came out anyway, the way true things had started coming out of him around her, without asking his leave first. "I've had a great many nights I'd give anything to forget. I'd like one I don't."

She became quiet at that. Then she took his face in both her hands and looked at him, and there was no calculation in it anywhere, none of the careful reading she gave the rest of the world.

"All right," she said. "Then we'll go slow, and you'll remember every bit of it. I'll see to that myself."

His tail wrapped around her thigh, the ridges turned carefully inward, the same instinct that had once folded a blade away from a baby's reaching hand now wrapped in nothing but care around her leg. She made a sound at that, low and surprised, and he caught it and kept it, the way he'd once kept the sounds that meant a wall was about to fall. This one meant the opposite of danger. He wanted to learn every one she had.

His wing opened around them both, a roof against the cold and the stone and the waiting weight of the world above. She said his name. He said hers, low, over and over, the one word he'd been forbidden to want and had decided tonight to keep.

And somewhere in the middle of it, under the double beat of his heart, he felt the hum begin.

It started low in his chest and had no source he could name. It wasn't a sound. It was a rightness. A fitting-together, as though some part of him that had stood at a post all his life had finally been told it could stand down. He had no word for it and no drill that had ever covered it. He only knew it had started the moment she looked at him and didn't look away, and that it grew with every breath they took together.

He didn't know what it was. He would learn. For now, he held her and let it hum. For the first time in his life, he was not afraid of a thing he couldn't name.

*** Diana ***

Afterward they lay in the curve of his wing. She listened to the strange twin beat of his heart, and under it, low, steady and warm, that third sound she'd never heard before.

"What is that?" she asked. She had her ear flat against his chest. "That hum. That's not your pulse. I know your pulse now, it turns out."

"I don't know."

"You don't know. It's your own chest, Kavren. Take a guess."

"I've never felt it before in my life." He said it plainly, and she believed him, because she'd never once caught him in a comfortable lie, only the kind a man tells to stay alive. "I'd tell you if I knew. I've stopped keeping things from you. It seems to be a habit I lost all at once, without deciding to."

That made her laugh. She hadn't expected to, not tonight, not down here in the dark with the court asleep two levels up. It came out of her warm and startled, and she felt him go still underneath her, listening to it like it was a cousin of the hum.

"What," she said.

"You laughed. I wasn't sure you did that."

"I do it. I ration it." She put her head back down over the sound. "Consider that one a gift, and don't you dare put it in a report. The Dowager would want to know exactly what it cost me."

"It's not going in any report. None of this is. I told you. I stopped."

"I believe you." And she found, lying there, that she did, completely, which was a something she could count on one hand having felt about another living soul. She let herself have it. She almost never let herself have anything.

They lay quiet a while. The seams pulsed slow and blue above them, and the deep cave held its silence the way it held everything, without judgment.

"So, what do we do now?" she asked at last. She was being practical, because practical was the one language she never lost, even here. "In the daylight, tomorrow, I go back to being the consort. You go back to being the blade she planted at my spine. And this thing hums in your chest where anyone with ears could theoretically hear it. That's not a plan. That's a problem waiting for a witness."

"We do exactly what we did today. Nothing." He said it the way he handed her assessments, level and sure. "Two feet of distance. The correct face. You've held harder covers than this. You told me so yourself, and I've watched you hold them."

"I've never held one with a heartbeat before." She sighed. "A job I can hide. A job doesn't look at me across the council chamber. You are going to look at me across the council chamber, Kavren. I'm going to feel this ridiculous hum start up. And I'm going to have to say something withering about grain tariffs while it happens."

"Then say it well," he said. "You always do."

"That," she said, "was very nearly a third joke. In one night. I've ruined you completely."

* * *

This changes everything, she thought, and then, because it was true and because she'd stopped keeping the truth from herself down here, she said it out loud.

"This changes everything."

Not a question, and not a regret either. Just the fact, laid down once between them.