Delia Prance's Arc

Chapter 25 of 59

Arden's horse was gone from the field, but his shadow stayed. Nick watched the empty road long after the dust settled. Delia saw the doubt still sitting in him. Words at the porch had not been enough. So she took his hand and led him away from the finished house, back to the small stone cottage by the river where they first began. The cottage smelled of dried herbs and river water. Delia lit the lamp. Nick stood by the door, stiff, his jaw hard the way it got when something cut deep. "You're wondering," she said. "About your brother." "He wants you." Nick did not soften it. "He built you a house to stay near you." "He wanted a house. I wanted the beds for the sick." Delia crossed the room. "That's all it ever was to me." "He picked flowers for you. Every morning." "And I named them for him and sent him back to work." She stopped close to Nick. She put her hand flat on his chest, over his heart. "Listen to me. I turned him away when he was still weak from the cure. I turned him away at the porch. I chose you three years ago by the river, before any land or crown. I choose you now." Nick looked at her hand. "You never say a thing you don't mean." "Then hear this and hold it." Delia lifted his chin the way she lifted a frightened patient's. "You are the one I want. Not your brother. Not any other man. You. There is no doubt in me. Let there be none in you." Something broke loose in Nick's shoulders. The hardness left his jaw. He let out a long breath, as if he had held it since the day Arden first lingered too long in the meadow. He raised his hand and covered hers where it rested on his chest. "All right," he said. "All right." He kissed her then, slow at first, then not slow. Delia untied her apron and let it fall over a chair. The lamp burned low. Outside, the river ran on past the flowers at the door, the way it always had. Inside, there was no palace, no nobles, no ledger, no brother. There was only the two of them in the little house where it started. Afterward they lay quiet under the blankets. Nick's arm was heavy across her. The doubt had gone out of him. Delia felt it leave, the way fever leaves a body once the medicine takes. "The house is done," she said into the dark. "Forty beds. I can fill them now." "You will." Nick's voice was warm and sure. "Tomorrow we tell my father it's finished. He'll want to see it." Delia lay still. The house was built and her marriage was whole. But the king would come to her field. And the nobles would come with him, hungry as ever for what she had made.