He brings her to the cliffs of Dardania, the long dark wash of the sea below them turned silver in the sunlight, dazzling their eyes until she grips his arm, giddy with the height, with the roar of the waves, the cries of seabirds wheeling overhead. “How it longs for us to fall,” she murmurs, eyes sightless from more than the sun-bright sea, all the world beautiful and hateful, a spiteful, fragile place held in the span of his arms as they come around her.

“Never,” he says, and his lips brush her hair (she knows their weight, their warmth, and tucks it away safe in memory against the end), his words falling into the shell of her ear as he offers, “Must I carry you home, then?” and though her heart trips at the thought, she answers smoothly enough, “There will be time enough for that, my dearest friend.”