He looked somewhere past the walls of the library for a moment, his eyes distant — either seeing something I couldn't see, or simply living through a particular day again from the inside. Then he exhaled and came back.
"I had the dagger with me when we went north. Not because I knew precisely what it was capable of — I didn't, not fully. I had discovered the tomb roughly a year before, and I was fascinated by it, and I took the dagger out of it and kept it. I knew it had been forged in dragon fire. Given that your bloodline had some connection to dragons, I thought it might be a useful instrument — something to lend to whoever might be inclined to use it against you, so that I could intercept them in the act, catch them before any real harm was done, and in doing so shatter whatever loyalty still bound you to Draga." He grimaced slightly as he said it, as though hearing his own reasoning from the outside made him aware of its texture in a way he hadn't been at the time.
"You might wonder how I knew they would act at all. It was because something had already happened that I kept quiet about. The night after we left Draga, during our journey south, we were attacked. Assassins — a small group, unsuccessful, but real. We took one of them alive and questioned him. He told us there was a secret society within Draga dedicated to eliminating potential dragon seeds — people like you — before the transformation could occur. They had already marked you. They believed you were becoming something dangerous, and they intended to act before you did." He paused. "So I knew they would try again. It was not a question of whether, only of when and how. I arranged for the dagger to find its way to them through channels that couldn't be traced directly back to me. What I underestimated — badly — was how quickly they would move on it."
He turned his hands over slowly, looking at them.
"That woman didn't hesitate. She went straight to you. No delay, no further planning — just acted, immediately and completely. I hadn't predicted that variable. I had intended to intercept her before she reached you, to catch her in the act in a way that was visible and undeniable, so that you would see with your own eyes what your people were willing to do to you. It was a calculated plan, if a cruel one." His voice dropped. "What I had not accounted for was someone who had already decided she would die after she killed you. A person with nothing left to lose moves differently from everyone else. She had no fear. There was nothing to constrain her. She simply came for you, and I wasn't fast enough."
A visible tremor moved through his hands, briefly, before he stilled them.
"When I understood that the wound wouldn't heal — that the dagger's origin was the reason, that dragon-forged metal behaved differently in flesh — I had nothing. No solution. Nothing to offer. All I had was a god I had never believed in and no other direction to turn." He looked at me steadily. "So I prayed. And I meant every word of it. If I had been deceiving even then, do you think a dragon god would not have known? Rulha is not something that can be manipulated. He heard me, and he answered, and I am grateful for that every day since."
He stopped. Rose from the couch and moved to the wooden chair in the corner of the room, putting a small distance between us — not cold, but as though he needed the separation to continue.
"I regret it. Completely and without condition." His voice was quieter now, stripped of everything except the words themselves. "If I could go back to that moment — I wouldn't. I wouldn't begin that plan. I wouldn't touch any of it. Every night you lay there without waking was a lesson in what I had done, and I had nothing to do with those nights except carry them." He looked at me. "I'm sorry, Rhia. For all of it. For choosing that method, for failing to control what I had set in motion, for not being honest with you from the beginning. If you choose to forgive me, I would be grateful. If you don't, I understand that too."
A beat of quiet.
"What else do you want to know? Ask me anything. I'll answer it."
I looked at him in his wooden chair, hands resting loosely on his knees, the composed architecture of him temporarily set aside. He looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.
"The magic crystal," I said. I let the words sit there.
He absorbed them.
"The magic crystal." He exhaled. "That is another long story."
He settled back in the chair with the resignation of someone who has accepted that this conversation is going to require everything, and he may as well give it properly.
"My great-grandmother was an elf. A wood elf — not simply a member of that people, but their queen. So yes, there is elf blood in my lineage, alongside everything else." A faint, wry note entered his voice and dissolved again. "Before she died, she came to see me. She granted me authority over the wood elves — a formal bestowal of her trust and her command. Among all of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, she chose me specifically, and I never fully understood why. When I asked my master Arandial about it, his answer was that I felt more like an elf than any of her other descendants. I still don't know entirely what he meant by that." He paused. "But because of her, I have resources that others don't. A small number of elves who answer to me — not many, but each one formidable. Vicram was one of them. The elf woman, Saira, was another. I gave them the crystal and arranged for it to reach the Dergu woman."
I waited.
"Why?" I asked, when he didn't immediately continue.
He looked up. "To cleanse the army."
The words sat there without enough context to do anything useful, and he seemed to recognise that.
"You remember the soldiers who refused us entry into the military district — who held their position even when they were standing in front of their own emperor?" His voice took on a harder edge, still controlled but with something beneath it. "My cousin had promoted those men. He had corrupted the structure around him carefully and thoroughly, and those soldiers had simply followed the authority they were given — which happened to be the imperial seal, which was in my cousin's hands. Technically, they were following orders. I could not punish them for that without the punishment being unjust on its face, and I had soldiers who had fought their way through genuine danger to reach me who were now living with the knowledge that their emperor could do nothing to reward their loyalty or remove those who had betrayed it." He shook his head. "That was intolerable to me."
"So you manufactured a reason," I said.
"I created a situation in which their conduct would become visible and undeniable, and in which removing them would appear not as an emperor acting arbitrarily, but as a matter of clear necessity. No one could argue with the outcome. The corrupt elements were removed, the loyal soldiers' sacrifice was given meaning, and the army was cleaner afterward than it had been before." He held my gaze without flinching. "I could have simply dismissed those men without explanation — I have the authority. But that is tyranny. It involves families, livelihoods, and ripple effects through communities. I wanted a reason that would hold under scrutiny, one that served the outcome without requiring me to simply assert power. That is what I built."
He paused.
"And if I faced the same situation again, I would handle it the same way."
There was no apology in it. It was simply what it was.
I sat with everything he had just told me and listened to the pieces settle into place — each one finding its position, the picture assembling itself slowly around the spaces I had been staring into for three weeks without being able to name their shape.
And then something else clicked into place.
"You already knew there was an elf in the palace," I said slowly. "When I told you. You already knew because he was yours." A short, humourless sound escaped me. "And then when we were away from Arpa, you arranged his escape — because you needed him out of custody before he could be questioned properly. And Maradi Genasera—" I stopped. "You framed her. You needed her gone, and this was the vehicle."
He said nothing. He didn't need to.
"How did I not see any of this?" The question was directed more at myself than at him. I let out a quiet, dry laugh — the kind that has no warmth in it. "I was looking directly at all of it. I heard you say things, and I watched you do things, and I understood precisely nothing of what was actually happening."
He had played every hand in the room, including mine, and I had sat at the table believing I was a guest rather than a piece.
I looked at the man in the corner chair — tired, stripped back, more honest in the last hour than perhaps he had been in years — and felt the full, complicated weight of what it meant to love someone like this. Not despite the knowledge. With it.