“Do you buy it?” Kip asked finally.

“That they used the luxin for art?”

“No, the bit about golden joinery.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, it’s one thing when you see the technique used on a bowl or plate. The woodwright could have simply tossed out a piece of faulty wood and made something perfect with another piece, so you know that incorporating the flaw was a choice, right? But on something this massive? There wasn’t a choice. Orholam only knows how many trees they must have gone through to get the perfect tones and patterns already. Maybe the flaws came first and the justifications came later, like this is what they had to work with, so they made the best of it.”

“Regardless, they did a helluva job with it, didn’t they?” Kip asked. “I can imagine the ceiling without those golden stars reflected in the rippling waves, but they add something beautiful, don’t they?”

He saw a wave of gooseflesh go over Tisis’s skin. Perhaps it was merely because the room was cold.

“You bastard,” she said, but she wasn’t angry. She turned and looked at him. “You already knew about golden joinery, didn’t you?”

He was quiet for a moment. “Actually, I was hoping we could learn about it together.”

Her body tensed and she sucked in a breath, and then tears blossomed in her eyes.

He saw her, in that single moment, fall in love with him.

If their brokenness were anything else, they would fall into each other’s arms and let their bodies now speak with wordless urgency the vows they’d made long ago. But where bodies fail, words must stand.

“I will not leave or forsake you,” Kip said. “This is something we need to fix; it does weaken us, but someday, it will be a source of our strength.”

Tisis fixed intent eyes on him. “Kip, I’m going to cry now, and I need you to hold me and not try to fix it. It’s the good kind of crying.”

There’s a good kind?

“And then,” she said. “To the best of my ability, I am going to ravish you.”

And so she did.

After they had pleased each other, and laughed, and held and been held, in the moment where Kip was torn between ramping up the passion again or maybe just admitting it had been a damn long day and maybe they could make love again in the morning, Tisis said, “I need to talk to you about something.”

“You can’t,” Kip said. “I’m asleep.”

Very subtly, he wiggled deeper under the blankets.

“Kip,” she said plaintively.

“Oooh, what have we here?” he asked her chest.

“Kip—oh! Kip, I’m—mm… serious.”

He sighed. If he was learning anything about marriage, it was that talks must come. Putting them off did nothing good.

He poked his head back above the covers.

She looked mildly disappointed—not fair! But then she gathered her wits. “Um…” She blew out a breath. “Kip, I want to make love tonight. I mean, I want to try again.”

Kip dropped his head onto his pillow with a groan. They had fresh bread and fine cheeses, and she was going to complain that they didn’t have wine? “Tonight? When everything is so perfect? You’re doing this now?” Eat the fucking bread and cheese, woman!

“I want—”

“We’ve talked about this! We agreed! Can’t you just leave well enough—”

“I knew you were going to do this,” she said.

“Hold you to your word?!” he said.

“That is not fair!”

Yes, it was. But Kip bit his lip.

A man who’d just been pleasured by a woman so beautiful shouldn’t feel the depths of rage Kip felt now. “I have made my peace with this,” Kip said.

“I haven’t,” she said.

“Well, you’ll save yourself more heartache the sooner you do,” Kip said. “This is how things work in my life. Nothing can be all good; there always has to be birdshit floating in the mead. If I have a friend, I have to know he’s going to die. If I love a girl, she’ll fall for someone else. If—against all odds!—I have something as good as what you and I have, there’s no way it can be whole. This is as good as it gets.” He waved a hand at the rippling, polished grains of the masterpiece above them. “I don’t understand why the hell you’re looking at this marriage and calling it a dead ceiling.”

“Oh, Kip,” she said, but she couldn’t find words.

They lay beside each other, still in the midst of wealth and beauty, but Kip felt as if all the mud and shit at the bottom of Kip Pond had been swirled back up, and he didn’t trust himself to find words that didn’t reek of bitterness. He just needed time for all that shit to settle down again. Just let it be.

“Maybe, maybe you’ve noticed me working with Evie Cairn?” she asked, still lying on her back, speaking as if to the ceiling.

“Yes?” The healer?

She rolled her eyes. “And here my first plan was to wait until you asked me about it.” It was an attempt at levity, but a weak one.

Kip didn’t say, ‘You meet with people all day long, and most of them are your sources for something or other, why would I even—’ Instead he said, “So, honey, why were you meeting with a healer?” It was an attempt at sincerity, but a weak one.

And lo and behold, that question didn’t lead to a fight.

Damn, this controlling-his-tongue thing was seeming like a better and better idea all the time.

“She said she’d seen this before. Especially in girls under incredible pressure or who’d had bad early experiences.”

Kip wasn’t understanding. He propped himself up on an elbow.

Tisis continued, “Or women who have a lot of negative attitudes about lovemaking, but obviously that’s not really my case, ha. But the first two…”

“What? What?”

“So I’ve been talking through some things with her,” Tisis said.

Kip felt like the time when Ramir and Sanson and Isa and he had gone swimming. Ramir’s idea, of course, and when Isa had balked at taking off her tunic by pointing out that Kip was wearing his, Ramir had been furious with him. He’d cornered Kip, and forcibly stripped off his tunic. Then he’d mocked Kip for being fat, as Kip had known he would.