Part 5 of the The World Can’t Wait series

UG had reached the wedding chapter of Blood Ties when he found himself thinking about Blondage instead.

It wasn’t a difficult connection to trace, if he’d bothered tracing it. A wedding, even someone else’s, even a fictional one a thousand years deep in someone else’s war, was still a wedding, and UG’s mind had gone where minds tend to go at the mention of one. Blondage had been gone three days by then, and UG finally admitted to himself that he’d been counting.

She’d gone off to Stormwind, this reality’s version, this time, on business of her own, something private, something he suspected had rather more to do with a member of her own family than with anything else, and had been characteristically unspecific about it. UG had pressed, bluntly, the way he pressed at everything, and got nothing more than a look that told him this was hers to handle. He’d let it go. He was, after all, a great believer in letting people handle their own things, mostly because it meant he didn’t have to handle his.

He found himself, boots still resolutely on, sitting on the step outside the graveyard house at Founder’s Point with Blood Ties closed on his knee, thinking instead about a conversation he and Blondage had had months back, one he hadn’t thought about since, and now couldn’t seem to stop thinking about.

She’d told him, in the plain, unhurried way she told most things, about the life she’d had before this one. A marriage, once, to a man she never named and never would, referred to only as him, or that one, or, on one memorable evening after considerably too much mead, he who shall not be named, which had made UG laugh so hard he’d had to sit down. It hadn’t been a good marriage. It had been the kind of marriage built by a world that had already decided what she was allowed to want, and hadn’t thought to ask her, a world with no particular room for a woman who turned out to want rather more than it was offering.

Becoming what she was now, she’d told him, had not felt like a loss. It had felt like the door finally opening. She’d have laughed at the word if he’d used it aloud, called it dramatic, but he’d thought it since. She’d left behind polite company, expectation, a man who had never looked at her and seen what was actually there, and become instead a discipline priest, sharp-tongued, formidable, entirely her own. She’d found in Alonsus Faol something like an elder in the same trade, another undead soul who’d kept hold of the Light despite everything that ought to have made it impossible. It occurred to UG, sitting there, that this was probably the real reason Faol kept surfacing in his thoughts alongside her rather than separately from her — the two threads had never actually been two threads.

“You,” she’d said to UG, that evening, “were never part of any of that.” Not a compliment exactly. More an observation, filed and kept. He hadn’t been part of the world that failed her, hadn’t been in the room for any of it, and so he’d got to be, by simple accident of timing, something other than what she’d left behind.

He thought about that a great deal, sitting there. He thought about it more than he thought about the fungus, which was saying something.

His mind wandered, as it tended to, sideways, toward something considerably sillier. Last time she’d gone off to Stormwind, this same version of it, the two of them had gone together, and ended up, as they somehow always did, in the armoury, drooling over a whole wall of blades neither of them had any real use for. The one worth the trip, a real Frostmourne, whole and gleaming and entirely too large for the room it hung in, had already gone by the time they got there, sold on to some collector a fortnight earlier, and Blondage had taken the disappointment considerably harder than UG had expected. She’d made him stand in front of the empty display case anyway, working out loud exactly how she’d have worn it. He had no real idea what she was actually doing there this time, and he had a fair idea it was rather more personal and rather less to do with weaponry than his daydream allowed, but that hadn’t stopped him deciding, entirely without evidence, that she’d come home with something else like it. Another blade. He’d taken, privately, to calling it Blond Claw, on account of the hair, and because it sounded enough like the sword from the stories that he could enjoy the joke without anyone else having to hear it. He pictured it properly, the way he pictured most things he wanted badly enough, in more detail than was strictly necessary: a long, elegant blade, straight-backed and unfussy, forged out of something pale enough to catch the light without trying to. A pommel worked into a wolf’s head, worn smooth at the snout where a thousand hands had rested a thumb for luck. A blade that had been renamed once, by whoever it was he imagined had renamed it, and had ended up keeping the old name anyway, because it turned out to suit its new owner fine after all.

He liked that part best. Suited her fine after all.

He’d decided, too, that when she came home there would be a very particular sort of evening waiting for her, one he had already started thinking of, with some private delight, as the Blond Claw session.

“She’ll be back with something sharp,” he told Tangkresh. “Wait and see.”

Tangkresh had no view on the matter.

UG thought, too, the way he always thought when Blondage was somewhere he couldn’t see her, of the old joke between them, the one she trotted out whenever he pushed a point too far or got too pleased with himself. You might get a dagger in the back in the night. She always said it lightly, and he always laughed, and neither of them had ever quite explained to the other why it was funny, which was, he supposed, the whole point of it being theirs.

He looked at the book again. He looked at Alonsus Faol’s name, sitting quietly at the edge of everything, patient in the way the dead were patient. He knew he needed to go. He’d known for days. Blondage was off doing the hard, necessary thing that needed doing, and he was sitting on a step working his way through someone else’s love story and hoping his came home with a sword.

“Tomorrow,” he said again, to no one in particular, and picked the book back up.

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More in the The World Can’t Wait series

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