"Maisie." I nudged her foot with mine.
"Kazan says he knew before he saw my face." She said it to the porch rail, not to me. "Off the transport. One breath of me across the whole bay and that was it, done, decided. He's described it about forty times and it always comes out like I'm a pie he smelled cooling on a sill."
"Deeply romantic." I snorted.
"Right? Every girl's dream, to be the pie." But she was smiling at her knees. "It's a real thing, Chloe. Not an arrangement. Not the contract. There's a... I don't have a good word. A pull. He says it sits in his chest and pulls toward wherever I am. When he gets that look like he's listening to something nobody else can hear, that's it. That'sme, apparently. Ringing in him like a struck bell."
The cider had gone warm in my hands. I made myself keep my voice light. "And you? Do you get the pull?"
She took her time. "Not like he does. Quieter. I didn't know what it was at first." She turned her cup slowly in her hands. "The whole time. I just didn't have a word for it, so I called it everything else. Nerves. Bad cider. The fact that I'd crossed the galaxy to marry a stranger the size of a barn." She finally looked at me. "It got louder the more I stopped fighting it. And then one night it wasn't quiet at all. Everything, all at once, this thing rooting down through the middle of me and grabbing hold and not letting go. He says I'm his mate. It means something."
Something in the center of me went very still.
Rooting down through the middle. Grabbing hold. Not letting go.
I knew that. I'd been carrying since the first day in that little agency office and had blamed on heartburn, of all the stupid things.
And the loud one, three days into the best and most doomed week of my life, on a cleared workbench with my hands locked around his horns, and him buried so deep I felt it in my teeth, when something reached out of me and took hold of something in him and set, fast and final and impossible to take back. I'd been so scared of how badly I wanted it to be real that I'd talked myself out of it before I came down off the bench.
"Chloe." Maisie was watching my face. "Where'd you go?"
"Nowhere." I cleared my throat. Performed. It's what I do. "So. The horns."
She blinked. "The?—"
I leaned in, elbows on my knees. "You grab the horns, right? At the, the bloom-y moment. Tell me you grab the horns."
A slow grin spread across her face. "Oh, you absolute menace. You've been gripping the blacksmith's horns."
I pointed at her. "I asked you a question."
"The bases," she said, and took a serene sip, "are extremely sensitive. It's not my fault Earth men were built like discount furniture."
I sat back, fully restored. "I want it on the record that I have, on multiple occasions, reduced seven feet of war criminal to a whimper using only my hands and a good attitude."
I laughed, and then it cracked in the middle and came out wet, and Maisie's face went soft, and she reached over and took my hand and didn't say anything about it.
She'd just given me a name for the thing in my chest, and I had no idea what to do with it.
I didn't sleep.
The orchard bed was soft, and the quilt smelled of fig sap, and somebody had left a light going low. I lay in it and turned the whole horrible day over and over until it wore smooth.
He'd brawled in the street like an animal. True. He'd let the worst of himself off its leash where I could see it. Also true.I'd looked at him in that mud and felt something drop straight through the floor of me, scared down to the bone, and I still hadn't been able to tell whether I was scared of him or scaredforhim.
Somewhere around the third turn of it I worked out the answer, and it was so stupid and so simple that I laughed at the ceiling.
For him. Duh.
I'd been scared for him the whole time. The fear of him I'd been so sure I ought to feel had never once shown up, not that first night, the forge, or the street with another male's blood on his knuckles. I kept waiting for the trap to spring, and it just never did.
By the time the window went gray, I'd stopped arguing with myself.
He was an idiot, the biggest idiot on the planet, and he was mine. I was as sure of that as I'd ever been of anything. Surer, even. The pull in the middle of me pointed east toward a man in a cell, and I was done. Done running. I'd run my whole life, off Earth, across two failed husbands, right up to the edge of this.
I wasn't going to climb onto a ship now and leave the one thing I'd ever felt root down and hold.
Maisie drove us into town. She took her buggy fast and easy over the ridge road's bad spots without slowing, and she didn't ask me once if I was sure, which I appreciated, because I'd have had to lie.
