“I do.” I tighten my arm around her. “I decide what I want. And I want you.”
She presses her face harder against my chest. Her breathing changes. Not crying. Something else. Something letting go.
“The comb,” I say. “You left it on my chair.”
“I couldn't take it.”
“Why?”
“Because it was the kindest thing anyone’s ever given me. And I didn't think I was allowed to keep it.”
I reach for my pack. It’s within arm’s reach because I set it beside the bed when we came in. I've been carrying it since the hall.
I pull out the comb. Bone handle. Carved birds. I take her hand, open her fingers, and set it in her palm. Close her fingers around it.
“Keep it.”
She holds it against her chest. Her eyes closed. Her breathing steady. The bone handle warm from my pack, warming more from her skin.
Hers.
I pull her closer. She settles into the space under my arm, small and warm, filling the hollow that nothing else has filled since Vortek.
The room cools around us. The window clears. The stone walls releasing what we put into them.
I do not let go.
ESELD
We walk back through the Wastes, my hand in his.
His hand swallows mine completely. My fingers fit between two of his knuckles. The heat of his palm is constant and steady, and I have stopped noticing it the way I stopped noticing the cold weeks ago. It’s just there. The temperature of being near him.
“Why aren't we taking the portal road?” I ask on the first morning. The trading road is south. He’s leading us northeast.
“Longer this way.” He doesn't look at me. “I want to show you something.”
I don't push. I let him lead.
The route follows ridgelines where the wind has packed the snow hard, and the footing is solid. He knows this terrain the way I know buildings: every weak point, every stable path, every place where the ground will hold and where it won't. I watch him read the landscape. I recognize the instinct. We're the same kind of brain in different bodies. He reads terrain. I read structures.
The walking is easy. My legs remember how to cover distance. I'm different. I feel it in the way I move, the way I hold my body, the way the walking doesn't pull me forward into blank space the way it did when I was heading south. The runningenergy is gone. Not disappeared. Redirected. I am walking toward something. Toward the hall, toward the routine, toward the furs and the fire and the shelves I organized three times and will organize again. Toward a life I chose out loud in front of strangers.
The comb is in my coat pocket. I feel it against my hip with every step.
We camp the first night in the lee of a rock formation, out of the wind. He builds a fire, wraps furs around us both, and I sleep against his chest with the stars overhead instead of stone. Different from the hall. Colder air, warmer skin. His arm around me, his pulse drumming through my cheek and the vast silence of the Wastes pressing in from every direction. His heat turns our shelter into something the cold can't reach. I learn that he says my name differently in the open air. Rougher. Like the Wastes strip something away from him and what’s left is the raw sound.
We have three days, and we use them. Not just for walking. For talking, for silence, for the slow luxury of learning each other outside the walls of his hall.
On the second day, the path curves between two ridges. A hollow opens up to the east, sheltered from the wind, with a stand of scrub brush at the base and a pile of stones at the center. Stones stacked in a deliberate pattern. Too neat for a natural formation. Too careful.
Thyran stops.
His hand tightens around mine. Not hard. Just a change in pressure. His body shifts, turning toward the hollow, and the warmth of his palm drops a fraction.
“Vortek,” he says.
This is what he wanted to show me.
