“I do not!”
“Yes, you do. In fact, sometimes I call you Knight Crusty Cheeks. So ha. Take that to your Foxy Lady Brigade and shove it. Which, by the way, you can sure as shit bet we’re going to have a long talk about, especially given how you apparently trust Lady Tina, of all people. My sworn enemy is now your second? What the fuck is wrong with all of you?” I had a thought then. “Is she holding you all hostage? Is she listening in right now? Blink once for yes and twice for probably, and I’ll go outside and make her die horribly. Like, all that would be left would be a pile of blood and gristle. It would be awesome.”
He didn’t blink.
“Okay, I’m not quite sure what that meant. Tell you what, I’ll just assume you’re being held hostage. Let me go make her die and we can continue this conversation sometime next decade—”
“Do you still love me?”
Godsdamn him.
I closed my eyes and took in a shuddering breath. That was a question I hadn’t expected. Out of everything that could have happened, I thought if those words were spoken aloud, I would have been the one saying them. And definitely not in a small voice like I’d never heard from him before.
“You’re my cornerstone,” I said clumsily.
“That’s not what I asked.”
I opened my eyes and looked at him. Now that we were close, I could see the dark bags under his eyes, the worry etched across his brow like it’d been there a long time. He was thinner, as if the stress of the last year had weighed heavily upon him. I wondered at the scar that would be on his torso, how pronounced it would be. If I would ever get to trace it with my tongue, silently thanking the gods that he still drew breath. And there was the other scar, the one on his face, partially hidden by his thick beard.
I didn’t think I looked any better. I hadn’t yet found the strength to look in a mirror, but from what everyone else was saying, I probably didn’t look too great. When I slept in the Dark Woods, it was the sleep of the exhausted, from having been assaulted by magic day in and day out, the Great White forcing me into something I hadn’t thought I was quite capable of. It worked—eventually—but it’d taken its toll on me. The voices of dragons and Morgan and Randall and Myrin had been whispering around me, telling me I needed to be stronger, better, that I was going to fail, that everyone I loved would die.
But one thing kept me coming back to myself. One person kept me pushing forward so that one day, I could stand before him again and tell him how sorry I was.
And how much I loved him.
“It wasn’t—” I shook my head. “He told me I didn’t need you.”
Ryan took a step back, clenching his fists at his sides.
I pushed on. “He told me that cornerstones were weaknesses. That they would lead to nothing but ruin. That Randall had put his faith in his and was then betrayed. After… Myrin, after all that he did, and after they banished him to the realm of shadows, Randall brought back the King of Sorrows from the brink of madness, only to succumb to his own. He… went Dark, Ryan. He locked himself up in Castle Freesias and went Dark. He tried to fight it for so long, but…. He went Dark, and it took ages for him to come back from that. To put his own mind back together and return to the right side of magic.”
I looked down at my hands. “The Great White was… concerned. He thought I was too young to have found my cornerstone already, that you were an obstacle to what the gods had planned for me.”
“Your destiny.”
I sighed. “I really fucking hate that word.”
“And yet you seem to have accepted it just fine.”
“Okay, I deserved that.”
“Damn right you did. The Great White?”
Might as well get it all out now. “He tried to convince me that a cornerstone was an illogical fallacy, that putting faith and trust and magic into one person was a mistake. Because people could be cruel. Or corrupted. They could follow a path of magic that leads to shadows. Or they could die. Because no matter what happens, a cornerstone will die. You don’t have the magic I do. Either you will fall in battle or your body will be ravaged by sickness. And even if none of that happens, eventually time will catch up with you. It was better, he said, to only trust myself.”
“That… sounds really stupid.”
I snorted. “Right? I go to the woods to accept my Destiny of Dragons, and the Great White—the oldest living creature in the known world—tells me the secret to defeating the most evil wizard of all time is to believe in myself. I almost punched him in the eye.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“He’s super big. I couldn’t reach.”
“Like that’s stopped you before.”
“What can I say. I’ve grown as a person.”
He sounded nervous when he asked, “And what did you choose?”
“What?”
“Did you believe in yourself? Or did you keep your faith in me? Or can you do both? Like, believe in yourself and in me?”
I groaned. “This is such a dumb conversation.”
“How else am I supposed to ask that? This whole thing is fu—mothercracking stupid.”
“It’s like one of those after-school special plays they used to put on in the square. Remember those? They were all about learning life lessons like not to eat mushrooms you find in the forest because you’ll turn into a prostitute or not getting pregnant while young because you’ll have a baby and then turn into a prostitute.” I frowned. “Wow, now that I think about it, most of those ended with people turning into prostitutes.”
“Would you just—”
“I love you,” I told him, and he slumped against the door as if his knees had given out. “More than anything. You’re my cornerstone. And I don’t care what an ancient dragon says about that. Or what the gods say. Or anyone. I can believe in myself and still have faith in you. In what you are to me. That you’ll pull me back when I need you to. I gave you my heart, Ryan. And the only way I’ll take it back is if you don’t want it anymore. Which I hope you won’t, because I kind of want you for always.” My voice broke a little as I continued. “I promise you, when I was in the woods, looking up at the stars, there is nothing I wished for more than you.”
He bowed his head, taking in deep, raspy breaths. “Why did you come back?” he managed to say. “Why now?”
I was walking on dangerous ground here. “It was time. There was nothing more that GW could do for me, even though he thinks otherwise. And Zero only has a few weeks left before he goes back into hibernation. Either we do this now or we don’t do it at all.”
His head snapped up, and though he still looked angry, his eyes were wet. I had made Knight Delicious Face cry. I was the worst person in the world. “You came back because Zero’s time is almost up.”
“Yeah.” Oh shit. “And because of the whole love stuff. Remember that part? Hopefully you do, seeing as how it was just a minute ago and all hella romantic. Like, I said I love you, dude, because of wishes, and you were all like, oh no, I’m crying a little because I may be a knight, but I’m not afraid to show my feelings.”
“I’m not crying,” he said, a tear tracking down his cheek.
“Yeah, okay. Whatever you need to tell yourself, you big ball of sap.”
“You’re an idiot.”