“It shouldn’t be me holding us together.”

Jude smiled through a pang of sadness. “Maybe not. But it is you.”

Penrose held his gaze for a moment and then looked away. “Your … friends,” she said at last. “They can stay in the barracks for the night. Keric knows, we have the room.”

Jude nodded, grateful. “Thank you, I’ll tell them.” He turned to go.

“And Jude—” Penrose said, and then stopped herself. “You’re all welcome to come to dinner in the great hall.”

It was not, he saw, what she had intended to say, but Jude just nodded and left the room without another word.

When he stepped back out to the veranda, Anton was hovering a few feet from the door. The Wanderer, true to her name, seemed to have wandered off.

“What did she say?” Anton asked with an edge of nervousness.

Jude shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“That bad, huh?”

“We should go find the others.”

“Jude…” Anton began, making an aborted movement, as if he wanted to take Jude’s hand.

Jude looked off toward the crumbled outer wall of the fort. “It was my choice to leave the Order. I’d make the same one again.”

“I know you would,” Anton said. “But I also know that coming back here can’t be easy. And you can talk to me about this. I want—I want you to tell me how you feel. Even if you don’t think I’ll like it.”

Jude just stared at him, momentarily speechless. “You want—Why?”

“Why?” Anton echoed. He touched a thumb to Jude’s temple, fingers combing through Jude’s hair soothingly. “Because I want to know everything about you. Always.”

He said it like it was obvious, like Jude should take it for granted that Anton should want to know these things, every hidden truth and private shame. Jude was so used to Anton being able to see through him, further than even Jude himself saw sometimes. It had always been that way between them, right from the first night they’d met.

But it was one thing for Anton to steal past Jude’s defenses and slip beyond the walls of his heart like a thief in the night. It was quite another for Jude to fling open the gates and invite him inside. To forfeit even the pretense of protection.

He wasn’t sure he could bear it. Not now, still bruised from the past two and a half months and the knowledge that Anton had kept them apart. Not now that he knew exactly what pain it might bring because he had already lived through it once.