“This is horribly awkward,” Nes complained, her elbow swinging in the space between them each time he lifted his hand.
“It’ll be much easier when we’re lying down,” he replied with a chuckle, handing her a beer, a gift from a villager.
Kas found an upturned barrel and set her atop it to give her arm a break while she enjoyed her drink. In that quiet moment away from the crowd, she heard a few words from a passing conversation: A charming older woman claimed the new Lady of Stormhill finally managed to make the duke smileand put some meat on those bones. Nes grinned, and Kas leaned in for another kiss, which she happily obliged.
In the early evening, as Kas led her in a dance on a cobbled street surrounded by their people, she knew with absolute certainty she’d made the right choice in answering that summons from the king.
Epilogue
Rasdekina.
Afterayearofco-authoring together, Talik Thanin and Thila Taryan, also known as the Lord and Lady of Stormhill, decided it was time to make well-earned changes to their home. They knocked out the north wall of the estate to extend their ever-growing library and add on to their small private study, making room enough for two.
Construction was timed to coincide with their annual trip to Summer Cottage, the one they’d had to cancel the year before. Nesrina found his family’s—their family’s—vacation home wasn’t a cottage at all. The manor was built from smooth hewn tan stone, was larger than Stormhill, and was honestly, comparable to a small castle.
“What an insane name,”she scoffed when they first pulled up.
Kas laughed and kissed his beautiful, perfect wife. She wasn’t wrong.
At the end of their weeklong stay, when the royals had returned to Serkath, and Summer Cottage was quiet, Nes coaxed him onto a large patio off the library, and fed him a healthy serving of mushrooms, taking twice as many herself.
“Do you feel it yet?” she whispered, over an hour after he’d eaten them.
“No, I don’t think so.” Kas had his eyes closed, legs propped up on an otherwise empty chair across from him.
“Open your eyes, you won’t know unless you look,” she scolded, the rustle of fabric letting him know she was on the move.
He cracked a lid and found her close, one arm extended as she reached for him. Snatching her wrist from the air, Kas tugged her toward him as his other eye flew open in time to catch a fantastic glimpse of her lusciousbreasts.
She pulled back, freeing her hand to prop it on her hip. “Look,” she commanded, like the tutor she’d always be.
He peered out at the garden, and at first, the world was no different. But then, he saw something new, something more.
Reality shimmered. It was as if everything had been curtained. Common objects were wearing draperies of themselves that floated on a breeze. The formerly straight grout lines on the patio wavered atop an ocean of terra cotta. Reality flickered. Shadows he’d never noticed pulsated from the dips and divots in the stones of the walls. His eyes landed on the vines wrapping the terrace. The heartbeat of the earth itself pulsed through the greenery. He could practically hear it as each of the thousands of tiny leaves writhed at him.Thump thump. Thump thump.
“I don’t know,” he murmured.
She laughed, and it was the most ethereal noise he’d ever heard, like ten-thousand windchimes dancing in the air around him.
“Come here,” Nes commanded, and he did, rising from his wicker chair before resting one palm atop his duchess’s head to ground himself in the reality that warbled around him.
“You’re very tiny, you know that?” He chuckled.
She tipped her head back, forcing his hand off of her hair. “I’ve been told, thank you.” Her voice was dry, and when he looked down to apologize, he couldn’t help but notice the way she glowed, literally.
Nesrina bade him follow her to the edge of the terrace where they gazed at the garden. Lost in thought, they stood like that in happy silence for another hour or more, both enjoying the journey the gods were taking them on that sunny afternoon.
Eventually, she asked him something that drew him from his reverie. With several slow blinks and a rather delayed turn of the head, Kas laid eyes on Nes, then followed her line of sight to the clouds billowing through the summer sky. He waited to learn what he was supposed to do next. He hadn’t heard the question.
“Do you see it?” she asked—again, he assumed.
“See what, exactly? Everything looks... weird.” He held a hand up in front of his face, studying the tangle of lines pulsing across his palm,begging to be read, although he knew there were no words there.
“Look at the clouds.”
He did.
“Now watch them.”
