Page 251 of Mother of Death and Dawn

Max sat up, and I handed him the scorched piece of canvas.

He stared down at it in silence for a long moment. When he finally spoke, his voice was rough. “How— how did you get this?”

“It was not easy. No one should have to work so hard to get something so ugly.”

He let out a strangled laugh.

The painting was, indeed, truly awful. It depicted a very rotund, very naked woman with fair hair, reclining awkwardly on a stone bench in a garden of pink and red roses. The artist had not been particularly talented, the figure flat and oddly proportioned, the colors garishly bright.

But Max had been right—ugly as it was, this picture had been rendered with deep, reverent love. I could see it dripping off the paint just as Max could when he wept in that cafe all those years ago.

The night I let myself fall into my feelings for him, Max had sat with me under the moonlight over the Threllian plains and told me of these paintings. How he had been in a dark place when he saw them, and how they had reminded him that even in the most terrible moments, someone, somewhere, was happy. They had reminded him of the existence of hope. Now, in another dark time, I could feel it here, too.

I had only been able to locate this single small painting, and I had only the canvas, not the frame it was once stretched on. It was now somewhat damaged, one side of it burned from the explosion. Still, Max cradled it like a thing of great, precious value.

I sat beside him, close enough that our shoulders touched. “That night in the cottage, the night when we were… before the hands were sent to us. You asked me if I ever thought about what a future together might be like. I— I couldn’t answer you then. But every second that you were locked in that horrible place, I thought about that night and what I did not say to you. I regretted it more than I have ever regretted anything.”

“Tisaanah, I never thought—”

I took his hand, squeezed tight. “The truth that I couldn’t give you then was that I had never wanted anything so much. It was true then, when you asked me. It is true now. It will be true tomorrow.”

Max looked at me like nothing else existed. Despite everything that we had been through together, despite all the weaknesses I had let him—and only him—see in me, I had to fight the urge to look away. Nothing had ever terrified me so much as such raw vulnerability.

“You are my home, Max. I never allowed myself to believe I would ever have one. I never allowed myself to think that I could keep one, if I did. But I have realized that there is bravery in hope for the future. And I—”

Max’s kiss, sudden and passionate, swallowed the rest of my words. The taste of him, the scent of him, made them seem so much less important—made them seem utterly inconsequential.

When we parted, our foreheads pressed together, he murmured, “You cannot possibly understand how much I love you.”

I absolutely do, actually,I wanted to say, but instead I said, “Marry me.”

A stunned pause.

“Say that again,” he whispered.

“Marry me, mysterious snake man.”

His arms wound around me, pulling me onto his lap, and he kissed me again, and again, and again, until finally we untangled ourselves from each other long enough for him to look into my eyes and say, “Well, Iguessso.”

CHAPTERONE HUNDRED TWO

MAX

Iya agreed to perform the ceremony, even though we’d dragged him away from the scant rest he could steal while he still could. We had no time to go anywhere, no time for any fanciful celebration. So we simply went downstairs to the Palace’s courtyard gardens.

We did, however, take the time to grab Sammerin on our way out. I pounded on his door and cut off his irritated greeting with, “I know you’re exhausted. But, we’re going to go get married before the world goes to shit. Do you want to… come watch, or something?”

I honestly wouldn’t have blamed him if he told me to fuck off. Alas, he did not.

Tisaanah and I took no time to prepare—having the ceremony before our attackers arrived was more important to us than looking the part, so we had settled for scrubbing the dirt off our faces and throwing on clean cloaks that we had found in the Palace. As we walked to the gardens, I picked a few red blossoms from the bushes that lined the path and tucked them into Tisaanah’s hair. When she grinned at me in response, there were no gowns or makeup or magic in the world that would have made her more beautiful than she was in that moment.

Iya stood before us, a book perched in his hands. Despite our circumstances, he was in remarkably good spirits. Aran weddings were notoriously long and convoluted affairs, so as he opened the book, I was expecting a long, dry reading.

“You can skip all of that,” I said. “No one actually listens to any of it anyway, least of all in times like this.”

Iya gave me a knowing smirk. “I agree. I thought perhaps you might appreciate something different.”

He tipped the book forward to show us its pages—pages written not in Aran, but in Thereni.

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