Page 83 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

“FINALLY,” Sylvie hollered.

“That’s going in the newsletter,” someone said.

“I called it in August,” Flora announced to no one and everyone. “August. Ask anyone. I have witnesses.”

“You have coffee,” Rona said, pressing a paper cup into the old orc’s hand. “Sit down, you’ve been standing since dawn, you’ll fall in the roses and I’m not fishing you out.”

Garrick lifted his head from the kiss just far enough to speak, his forehead against hers. His voice was pitched for her alone, under the rising noise of a party that had decided to happen whether anyone planned it or not. “Was that too many words?”

“It was perfect,” she said. “Do not develop a habit.”

“No danger.” He wrapped his arms around her. And over her shoulder she felt him look at his father, sitting easy now in the open air among Elowen’s roses, where the two of them had once fought every June and made up every July. The living warmth of the town was spread out on the grass around them. A five-year-old in a pair of hinged wings was tugging at his sleeve to ask if they could plant something.

“Later,” he told Toby. “We’ll plant something later. Right now we’re going to let Rona feed everyone before Grondar eats the tray.”

“I heard that,” Grondar said, with his mouth full.

Toby considered it all—the roses, the grandfather in the sun, the mother and the not-a-stranger-anymore wrapped up together on the grass, the entire loud full impossible town that had turned up for a closed door. Then he delivered his verdict with the grave, thorough satisfaction of a boy who had been right about everything all along.

“Good,” he said, and went to find the trowels.

Flora came down the Stonehaven drive and turned towards the square, finally satisfied.

Eight months for that foolish male to realize his mate was on the other side of the wall. Honestly. Still, he’d got there in the end, and Corwin was out in the roses where he belonged. She’d call that a success.

She smoothed the glitter down over her chest and took a look around the square. With any luck her next victim—subject—would prove less obstinate. But who?

Aidan came along the far side of the square at that exact moment, his hands in his pockets, bound for the Moonlight Tavern without a care in the world.

Hmm. A wolf wouldn’t wait eight months. A wolf wouldn’t wait eight days.

As she watched him go, a cold breeze swept down from the mountains bringing the distant scent of snow.

Snow.

Now that would be perfect…

EPILOGUE

Four months later…

“When does it flower?”

The question came from a goblin child of perhaps seven. She was standing under the bare wisteria arbor with her head tipped all the way back. She studied the empty frame the way she’d study a broken toy—like it ought to be doing something and wasn’t.

Garrick looked up at it too. Green oak, mortise-and-tenon, joined the old way and not a screw in it, arching the full length of the south path where the light was best. He’d built it himself over three weekends in February with Toby handing him pegs and Aidan leaning on the wall offering commentary. Right now it held nothing but a single ropey brown vine no thicker than his thumb, trained up the near post, that looked as dead as a stick.

“Two years, maybe three,” he said.

The child frowned at this. “It’s not doing anything.”

“It’s doing a great deal. You just can’t see most of it.” He crouched, which brought his eyes level with hers, then turned back the collar of leaves at the base of the vine to show her the fat green bud swelling at the graft. “There. That’s this year. Next year it’ll reach the crossbeam. The year after, it’ll flower purple all the way down, and you’ll walk under it and it’ll smell like—” He considered. Precision mattered to children. “Like grape candy and honey. And bees.”

“You’ll see it, then.”

“I’ll see it.”

She accepted this and ran off towards the terrace, where Rona had set up something involving lemonade and a great many small cakes. He rose to his full height and did not think anything of what he’d said. Then he caught Eric watching him from the path, arms folded, wearing the expression of a male storing something up.