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The world seems red, when Brynden opens his eyes.
He blinks, and it is pink, and he thinks, ah, blood.
“Blood indeed, my lord,” Shiera says, and she too is pink when Bryden turns his heavy head to the sound of her voice. “How terribly irresponsible of you to lose so much.”
He laughs, or tries to, and the rosey world spins with the pain in his head.
“My eye?” he croaks, and Shiera sighs, her long fingers cool on his overwarm face.
“Gone, I’m afraid,” she says, brisk and practical. She has no time for unnecessary gentleness or coddling, one of the things he loves best about her, but she strokes his cheek in comfort all the same. “We’ve saved the other, and saved you, so I think I shall count it a victory.”
Her two-tone necklace is washed over in sickly pink-browns, but her two-tone eyes are purple, through his tinted vision, and he wishes to kiss her, eyes closed, until she looks herself again.
“Am I hideous now?” he asks, hoping she will laugh - and she does, like silver bells, or the sharp silver tools she uses to help women in childbed. “Too hideous to hope for a healing kiss from the fair lady?”
“Silly man,” she says, but she kisses him all the same, and he does feel better for it - there is hardly any pink at all in the world when he opens his eye this time, and she wholly herself to him. “I feared that you were gone from me forever, Brynden,” she adds, serious now. “It has made me realise just how dearly I would miss you, were I to lose you.”
She has never before come so close to returning his assurances of love, and he would laugh, were it not for the throbbing in his head, to hear such words now.
He has waited so, so long.
“I ought put you back to sleep,” she says, “but I do not think a little while awake will do you any harm.”
“Was he caught?” he asks, and immediately regrets it for the loathing that smashes across Shiera’s face. “I must know, love. Was he captured?”
“No,” she says, still raging and hating. “No matter what I wish or how I wish it, he remains free, and poor Calla remains tied to him.”
Calla is their niece as much as Aegor is their brother, but for Shiera it is more than that - in Calla, she sees the life she might have endured, had Aegor been able to force her hand.
“Soon,” he says, “I will kill him, and set her free.”
Set us all free, he thinks, allowing Shiera to spoon dreamwine past his lips only because she kisses him between mouthfuls, and then curls warm and soft against his side as he becomes sleepy.
“I will help you kill him,” she whispers, against his ear, and he has never been surer of his love for her than now, united by their hatred as much as by their love.
Or at least, he hopes that it is their love, and not just his.