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“Then hold it.” Damian was already moving in his mind, the old reflex of the field, laying out the ride. Night. A horse. The London road. “I will go tonight. Now. I can overtake your man. I can be at the Commons in two days if I kill a horse doing it, and back inside four, and you will marry her before⁠—”

“No.”

The grip on his hand had turned to iron. Damian stopped.

“Look at me,” Edward said softly. “Brother. Look at me and count my days.”

The fire ticked. The rain went on at the glass, soft, indifferent. The sound he had dreamed in a far-off land, when he had believed nothing so gentle existed anywhere.

“I was holding on because there was no one to hold anything after me,” Edward said. “You have come home. A brother is better than a paper. An … heir … is better than a paper.” His thumb moved once across the leather of Damian’s glove. “So now I will tell you the thing that no one else living knows, and then you will do the last thing I ask of you.”

He gathered breath out of nothing and pulled Damian close, down toward the cracked lips. What came was scarcely more than air.

“We anticipated our vows.”

For a moment the words refused to mean anything at all.

“She is increasing,” Edward whispered. “No one knows. Not her mother. Not ours. Not a soul but the two of us, and now you.” His eyes had come open again, fever-bright, fixed on Damian’s, and there was nothing in them now but the naked thing itself. “I did that, and I cannot mend it, and in a little while I am going to leave her alone in the wreck of it. A ruined girl, and my son. My child, Damian. A bastard in the parish book, with no name and no father and the whole world’s boot on its neck before it has drawn breath.”

“Edward.”

“Marry her.” The grip crushed down. “Give her the protection of your name. Give the child a father. You will be Baron Archer by morning. I am sorry for it. I know you never wanted it. But it means the name you give them is a name no one in England dares spit on. Marry her, brother. Promise me.”

The room tilted around the point where their hands were joined.

A wife. A marriage. A child that would look up at him and say Father. Every one of the living things he had crossed off in that cellar while he buttoned an undead man’s coat over the sutures. Not for you. None of that is for you. And here was Edward, who could ask him for anything, asking him to play the part of a living man, not a monstrous horror.

You do not know what you are asking. You are giving her to a monster, Edward. The letter was right. I died at the guns, and something unholy was done that was not Godly.

“Edward.” His voice came out low and not quite level. “There is a thing you must know of me first. What happened on the Continent … What came back … I am not⁠—”

“No.” Flat. Final. The last of a baron’s authority, spent all at once. “Whatever Waterloo did to you, it does not signify. Nothing you could say signifies. You are my brother, and you are here, and that is the whole of what I need to know on this side of the ground.” His breath caught, and still he held on. “I thought you were dead. And tonight you walk through that door. Do you not see it? Your coming is a sign from heaven, and I have not breath enough left to argue with heaven. Neither have you.”

“The license⁠—”

“Damian.” Gently now. Almost amused, that his stubborn brother should be bargaining with him at such an hour. “My time is coming. I feel it coming. Let me go to it with this taken care of.”

Damian pulled the glove from his right hand.

He did it without deciding to. Teeth to the fingertip. The old field habit. The glove cast aside. He took his brother’s hand bare, skin to skin. Edward’s hand was fever-hot in his, and it was the first living skin Damian had touched since he died.

“I love you, brother,” Edward said.

His fingers tightened once around Damian’s, with everything that was left.

“Promise me.”

Damian drew breath.

“I—”

Between that word and the next, Edward let go.

There was no violence in it. There was nothing in it at all. The grip eased, finger by finger, the way a man sets down at the top of a hill the weight he has carried up it. The breath went out of him long and gradual and did not turn around. The fever-bright eyes were on Damian’s face and then they were on nothing. The room was exactly as it had been. The fire crackling. The rain at the glass. The candles standing up straight. Except that his brother was not in it anymore.

Damian knew the moment. That was the unbearable part. The part no other man in England could have claimed. He knew it from the inside. He knew the door Edward had gone through. He had gone through it himself at the guns with the powder-smoke still in his throat. So he knew exactly how far away his brother now was. The knowing was no comfort at all. It sat in him like shot.

He did not move for a long time.