Page 82 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

And here was the answer. Nobody had stood up and defended Fairhaven Falls to Cornelia Pinckney, because nobody in Fairhaven Falls had the faintest idea Cornelia Pinckney existed—or would have cared if they did. The answer was Trogar and Grondar arguing about oak. Houston carrying timber. Rona in the kitchen feeding everyone whether they were hungry or not, and Flora in a glitter shirt taking credit for everything.

The answer was that Garrick had picked up the phone yesterday and said I need a favor to one person, and this morning there were nine trucks in the drive. Nobody had voted on it. Nobody had been persuaded. There was no committee, no favor-bank, no ledger. Garrick had picked up the phone and the town had come. Toby was growing up inside that.

She had to put the coffee down on the windowsill because her hands weren’t steady.

“Well, now.” Flora watched her do it, and something ancient and satisfied moved behind the old orc’s face. It was the look of a female watching a plant she’d staked finally reach where she’d meant it to. “Took you long enough.”

“Don’t,” Maris said thickly.

“I’ll take that under advisement.” Flora patted her arm again and raised her voice to a volume Maris would not have believed a woman that small could produce. “TROGAR. If you crack that plinth I’ll tell everyone what you were doing behind the feed store in nineteen and eighty-four.”

“I wasn’t born in eighty-four,” Trogar said, and his ears went dark.

“Eighty-five, then. LIFT.”

They lifted.

It took five of them and the better part of an hour, and a great deal of low, tense, careful instruction from Trogar, who would not be hurried by anybody. Houston took the base. Grondar took the middle, and Garrick took his father’s shoulders. Nobody argued about that and nobody offered to spare him, and she understood why. This was the part he needed, taking the weight himself.

Eric and Aidan set the pads and swung the widened door and steadied the timbers. Robin walked backwards down the hall calling the turns like she’d done it a hundred times, which, according to Flora, she had.

Maris watched Corwin Stonehaven come out of the dark, and in the light it was even more obvious. Corwin was Garrick, thirty years on. The same enormous frame, the same folded wings, the same angular face, but weathered somehow even in the stone, gone grey and quiet and permanent. Toby had gotten it exactly right, sitting on the floor in front of this figure a week ago, entirely unafraid. Is this your dad? He looked like a grandfather. He looked like a male who had built half the walls in a valley and lost the wife he’d fought with every June, and had simply, one evening, decided to stop.

They carried him down the corridor inch by inch, and out through the doors Garrick had propped wide, and out onto the terrace. Then, very carefully, up the wide steps and into the rose garden. Elowen’s garden. The garden Maris had spent all autumn bringing back from the dead, one stubborn vine at a time.

They set him down where Garrick pointed, in the center of the garden, surrounded by roses and facing towards the fallen wall she’d refused to let him fix and the river beyond. The low morning light illuminated a face that hadn’t seen open air in fifteen years.

Nobody clapped. It wasn’t that kind of moment. But there was a general shifting, the town rearranging itself onto the terrace steps and the low walls and the grass. Rona appeared from the house with a tray and a bottomless supply of paper cups. Toby wedged himself against Garrick’s leg with his wings on.

Robin bounced Birdie on her hip, laughing at something Eric was saying. Sylvie was there, examining the latest beds. Sara and Ben. Gladys. Nichola from Bridge Mechanics. People Maris had sold plants to, and people whose gardens she’d built, and people she only knew to nod to on Main Street. Every one of them had given up a Saturday to help a gargoyle carry his father into the roses and celebrate his presence.

Garrick straightened. He looked at the statue and said something to it that only the two of them heard, his mouth barely moving. Then he turned around and faced all of them, and she watched him do the hardest thing she had ever seen him do, which was speak to more than three people at once about a feeling.

He was quiet for a long moment. Long enough that anyone who didn’t know him would have thought he’d changed his mind. Then his grey eyes flared to gold.

“Thank you,” he said, “for coming.”

That was nearly it. She could see him deciding it was enough, and then deciding, right after, that it wasn’t. His gaze found her at the edge of the terrace and stayed there.

“I sleep the way my people sleep.” His voice didn’t rise, but it carried, low and even, the way stone carries sound. “Last winter I went under meaning to come up at the end of January. I came up two weeks early instead. And for eight months I couldn’t have told you why.”

The whole garden was silent. Even Birdie had stopped fussing.

“I can now,” Garrick said. “It was her.”

He didn’t point. He didn’t have to. Fifty faces turned towards her on the terrace steps. She felt her face go hot, and did not care.

“Maris Calder is my mate,” Garrick said, in the flat tone he used to state an undeniable fact. “And her son Toby is mine now too, by his own request, which is the only permission I’ve ever cared about.” His hand came to rest on the top of Toby’s hard hat. “They’re moving into this house. I wanted my father out of that room before they did, because⁠—”

He stopped. And this was the part she hadn’t known was coming, the part he’d never said even to her.

“—because a grave isn’t a door you shut,” he said. “I forgot that for fifteen years. I’m not going to forget it again.”

Flora made a sound that in a lesser woman would have been a sob and in Flora was clearly a suppressed I told you so.

That was all. He’d used maybe sixty words, which for Garrick was practically an epic. And he stood there in his mother’s garden with his father in the light and his hand on his son’s head, and looked at her as though the entire town weren’t watching. She crossed the terrace and the grass and went straight to him, rose up on her toes, and kissed her mate in front of half of Fairhaven Falls.

The town, being the town, did not fall respectfully silent.