Ronan looks at me, his eyes clouded with desire, and I know he had the same vision I had. His feelings are urging him to grab me and put me onto Kira, and that desire echoes between us, compounding and strengthening with each reverberation.
“Blessed Mother Kerensa, your hands,” says the priestess.
I lift our hands, and they’re covered in blood.
The wounds I gave us in the dream. They’re real.
The priestess reaches for us, reciting a prayer and preparing to heal us with her magic, but Ronan beats her to it, the sight of my blood snapping him out of his lust.
“Here,” says Taran, handing us a damp handkerchief. “Please let me take this torch away from here. You have to see that whatever this is, it’s hurting you. Physically, now.”
The priestess mutters something in Orsan. We’ve learned a little now from living here, but she speaks too quickly for me to understand her.
Taran speaks to her, his voice rising as the exchange continues.
“What is she saying?” asks Ronan, climbing to his feet and pulling me up with them.
I pick up a few words here and there—please, speak, help—and our names. The priestess shakes her head and turns and leaves abruptly.
“Taran,” says Ronan, a question and warning in his tone.
“She’s no danger to you. The sight of the blood at the altar of Kerensa reminded her of some ancient Orsan superstition. She refused to explain, but she asked if she could do a ritual of protection over you. I declined on your behalf. It would have involved the sacrifice of a lamb.”
I shudder. He was right to decline.
“What are you thinking, darling?” asks Ronan.
“Just wondering if the Orsa might know something about the Shadowbound Prophecy. Maybe the apocrypha were preserved in their myths and superstitions.”
“I can follow after Priestess Greta and find out,” says Taran, already heading in that direction.
“Tomorrow,” says Ronan. “Tonight, we owe my wife a celebration.”
My wife.My heart skips a beat when he says it.
We head from the clearing into the meadow where Kira and now Bitey have made their nests. The others have brought the dining tables out from the cottage, setting them with arrangements of bluebells, white hyacinths, and pale daffodils and a spread made of dishes from four cultures: roast chicken and rabbit prepared in the Selaran style, stewed carrots and parsnips from Nithyria, and an Enezian vanilla cake served with Orsan blackberry jam for dessert.
And the drinks span our cultures as well. Nithyrian red wine, casks of beer and rum from Selara and Enez that Larus and the others obtained during their travels, and a bottle of a fermented honey mead that the Orsa serve on special occasions.
Which is to say that after just an hour or two, everyone is pleasantly drunk and unpleasantly full.
Ronan and I are sitting together at the end of the table nearest to the woods, my legs draped over his as the others talk and dance and sing, when Larus comes over.
“May I speak with you?” he asks Ronan.
“Him?”
“Just a quick word, man to man,” he says.
A word and a warning, most likely, but I won’t refuse him the honor of being the man to put my new husband in his place. It’s a time-honored tradition: the warnings given by each spouse’s parents to protect their child.
And Larus is like a father to me. In many ways, he’s more like my father than my actual father was.
“Go on,” I say, kissing Ronan’s cheek.
Quinn leaves Octavia with Typhon and comes to join me once Ronan is gone.
“Take a walk with me,” she says.
