Kell would be here for only one day. Whatever solace others had found wouldn’t belong to him. They had a job to do, and at least it was to restore something lost to this place. Setting something quietly right.
Kell drew near enough to hear the women speak of when they knew they loved the other. The dark-skinned elf told her beloved satyr about a celebration the satyr had insisted she attend, and how they had held hands the whole time, as if they couldn’t let go, and then, eventually, she realized she didn’t want to.
Beside him, Saeldian ran their fingers along the back of Kell’s hand, from one edge to the other—and drew two short slashes to make it an arrow.Look.
The arrow on his hand lingered, warm where Saeldian’s fingers were cool. Just a signal. Only that.
Kell shrugged that shoulder.At what?
Saeldian drew a rectangle across his knuckles, and then Kell saw it—nestled at the foot of the flawless crystal lid was a cut, faceted oval rose-green-lavender-silver gem identical to the one they’d stolen from Lady Elezia Tarm.
Return the Kiss of Enduring Love back to its proper place without anyone realizing it had been missing. Simple! Once Kell fashioned a raft that wouldn’t leave a wake as it sailed to an island in the middle of a lake, this would be absolutely trivial. Like trading candy to a boggle.
The noble armored eladrin holding the oath woven from words was staring at him. She was tall, wearing the armor of a heavy fighter, but she was also veiled in autumn leaves like their silent guide had worn. She was beautiful and serene and a little bit sad—at his inattention? Kell gave the tiniest apologetic smile and then attendedthe ceremony with full seriousness as the eladrin took the magic of every word the couple had spoken and bound it around them.
“You are one,” the tall, long-haired knight declared. “Bound by an oath no one may break, spoken over the reminder of what one of you will face when even death does not part you. Your love is everlasting.”
The women stepped backward over the casket, refusing to unclasp their hands even for this. They kissed, and Kell used their need for privacy to count how many cottages stared at this little island all the time before he joined the soft applause of the witnesses.
The couple boarded one of the rafts and sailed toward a cottage on the shore. Others boarded rafts to set off to other destinations. The archfey who had presided over the marriage stood where she was, expecting them.
Lorzok took the hint and moved forward. At the proper distance, he bowed.
“I am Ilondrel,” the eladrin said. “You have come close to the starless quiet of Hearthaven’s Repose, visitors. I feel your heart-sore weariness. You will find rest, but what else do you seek? What is your hurt?”
That was a request for an introduction if Kell ever heard one, and it was his job to go first.
He bowed. Low enough to show respect for one who ruled this domain absolutely. “I am Kell Redsong, raised in Essanderon’s Rest by Terandis Redsong.”
Ilondrel nodded for him to continue.
“I was lost when I was a child,” Kell said. “My father saved me the only way he could, by opening a way to the Material Plane and shoving me through it. I’ve tried to come home ever since.”
“You found your way back, then? If not to your home, then to your people.”
“I found them. I had thought about what it would be like to reunite. They live in one of the domains connected to Eightbridge, with the Brewmistress—”
“I remember her,” Ilondrel said. “She made a keg for the regiment that flowed for five hundred years.”
“You lived in Eightbridge before, my lady?” Jubilee asked.
“Not Eightbridge,” Saeldian said, their voice tinged with sudden insight. “Menoriath.”
“Indeed. I was there when it fell.”
She was old, then. Or, better to say, endless.
“Do you know the story of how the Brewmistress came to be the archfey? She’d made a new brew on the Last Day, and she wouldn’t leave until she could move it. But when she felt Menoriath shaking apart and the shard she brewed on fell, the Brewmistress cried, ‘Oh no, you don’t! Have a care for the last brew of Menoriath!’ and she was so fearsome, her broken shard floated light as a feather and touched ground so softly the kettle didn’t spill a drop.”
“No one told me that story.”
“She won’t hear it repeated,” Ilondrel said. “So you come from the Village That Chooses Its Own, but you needed Hearthaven’s Repose. Why?”
Because it hadn’t solved anything. “I’m afraid that it will happen again.”
“What did happen?”
“The Hungry War.”
