She was saying something about the root structure of the tree — she'd been reading about it, the Old Drakonian text was getting easier for her nanite translator — when he interrupted her.
"November."
She stopped. The way he said her name made her go still.
He reached into his pocket.
His hand was steady, which was an achievement.
The chain was simple gold. Aeltharian gold, darker than Earth's, with a reddish undertone. Hanging from it: a single scale. His. Shed from the line along his forearm two weeks ago when he'd known — when he had stopped lying to himself — that she would need something of his when he was not there.
He had cleaned it and set it and spent two evenings in his room working the mounting and he had not told Davn about it at first, though Davn had noticed the metalworking tools missing from the workshop and said nothing, which was the same as knowing everything.
She turned to face him. Looked at the chain in his hand.
"I need you to have something of mine when you—" He stopped. That was the rehearsed version. The security-measure line. He had practiced it in his head for three days and it came out first because he was a man who defaulted to logistics when his chest was full of something he had no blueprint for.
He stopped himself. Started again.
"The scale carries warmth. To you. To anyone else it carries fire." He swallowed. "It's — mine. From the line along my forearm. If you breathe on it, the heat activates. It will feel warm against your skin, but to anyone else — if someone grabs it, ifsomeone tries to take it from you — it burns. Not metaphorically. It actually—" He was babbling again. He could not seem to stop. "You should be careful with it. You should keep it under your shirt. You should?—"
She put her hand over his. Both of them holding the chain now.
"You gave me a piece of yourself."
He stared at her. He had not expected her to name it that accurately. He had not expected her to cut through every tactical justification and logistical framework and land on the exact center of what he had done. He had given her a piece of his body. He had pulled it from his own skin and set it in gold, and he was sitting here holding it out to her like an offering, and she saw it for what it was immediately and completely.
"It is a practical?—"
"Thank you."
She lifted her hair.
The gesture was simple. She gathered the dark weight of it in one hand and swept it forward over her shoulder, baring the nape of her neck to him.
His hands stopped working.
The curve of her neck in the gold light. The exact territory his biology had been pulling toward since the moment her body had joined with his, offered to him now.
He breathed out. Brought the chain around her. His knuckles brushed her collarbone and she made a small sound — not quite a sigh. The clasp was small in his large fingers and he managed it on the first try, which felt like its own quiet victory.
The scale settled between her collarbones, the tip of it hovering between the cleft of her breasts.
He leaned down and pressed his lips to the back of her neck.
The bond roared. He held there. Breathed through his teeth. Endured.
Then he kissed her once more and pulled back.
She lifted it in her hand and breathed on it. It glowed with a brief pulse of gold. She touched it with her fingertips.
"It's warm."
"Yes."
She looked up at him with an expression he could not name and did not try to. He kissed her instead. He pulled her against him and the Old Drakonian book slid off her lap into the grass and neither of them retrieved it.
They madelove under the old tree with both stars overhead.
