I pressed my face against his chest. His arms came around me, warm against the cold water.
“Good.” The words between us meant more than the quiet. “Me too.”
We ateat the pool’s edge as the sun went down.
Guruk had produced, from what I had privately begun thinking of as theBag of Infinite Provisions, a small wheel of the same cheese from the village, travel bread, the last of the honeyed almonds, and a tin of something that turned out to be a soft,herb spread I had never seen before and was immediately devoted to.
“What is this?” I demanded, holding up the tin.
“Chive paste. From the valley market.”
I sniffed the delectable contents. “You bought this at the market and didn’t tell me?”
“I was saving it.”
“For what occasion?”
He gestured at the falls, the pool, the last gold light. “This occasion.”
I looked at the tin. At him. At the falls. I considered several responses and settled on spreading a large quantity of the paste onto a piece of bread and eating it in two bites.
Guruk watched me with quiet satisfaction.
“I would like you to know,” I said, while reaching for more bread, “that I find your planning extremely irritating.”
“I know.”
“And also extremely good."
“I know that too.”
Berry accepted a small piece of bread and ate it with composure on their rock. We watched the light leave the falls in slow degrees, the color going out of the water, the mist turning silver, the stone of the basin darkening from amber to gray. The first star appeared. Then several more.
It was, I thought, exactly what he had planned it to be. What I had needed without knowing I needed it.
I was composing this thought, turning it over, deciding whether to say it aloud, when Guruk said, “I have something for you.”
He reached into his pocket and brought out something small, setting it on the blanket between us.
I picked it up.
It was a carving. Small enough to fit in my palm, warm from being in his pocket, smooth where his knife had worked the wood. An alicorn, miniature with details that came from time and attention and care. The wings were suggested rather than fully rendered, each feather a matter of angle more than line. The horn was tapered to a fine point.
I turned it in my fingers. The wood was the same warm grain as the nightstand in our bedroom. The one where a larger version of this carving had sat on its stone top, the first thing I had seen when I woke up in Havenlore. The first thing I had picked up, considered, and called beautiful, not knowing yet what world I was in.
My throat tightened. “When did you make this?”
“In the forest,” he said, a solemn expression on his face, “while you slept.”
I turned it over once more. The night of the fire and the stars and the deputy and the constellations burning steadily overhead. He had stayed awake and finished this.
“Guruk,” I breathed his name like a prayer. I didn’t have the words. Not the right ones. Not ones that were equal to the weight of the small carved figurine in my hand and everything itmeant. So I kissed him instead. Not quick, not brief. A real kiss, unhurried as the falls.
He made a sound low in his chest and pulled me closer. The blanket shifted, and Berry made a pointed sound from their rock that we both ignored.
When I pulled back, I was still holding the carving.
“Thank you,” I said, motioning not only to the alicorn figurine but to the food, the blanket, the bags. “For this. For all of it.”
