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i.
WHEN HILJD IVERgot divorced, there was a tacit understanding between herself and her ex-husband Valdemar that they’d divide everything up. They didn’t talk about this, and they didn’t write it down or sign things, but it was understood.
They’d had a shared history, and to make it easier on them both, there were places that belonged to Valdemar and places that belonged to her. She got all the fun restaurants and brewpubs they used to go out to in Frederick and Hagerstown. He got the bars in Shepherdstown.
At the time, it had seemed reasonable.
After all, he was the one who deemed getting drunk the proper way to grieve the death of their infant. Not that she didn’t drink, too, in the aftermath of that. But she’d been pregnant and nursing for nearly a year at that point, and she had gotten out of the habit. So, letting him have the bars seemed like the thing to do. She didn’t even think she’d miss them.
Hiljd had never been one for bars. She and Valdi had gotten married young, and they’d gone out together sometimes in their twenties, but she’d never had the experience of some other women her age at the time—getting dressed up, going out dancing, having strange men buy her shots, drunkenly hanging on her equally drunken girlfriends as they evaluated the relative safety of said strange men. She’d observed it, but she hadn’t needed to go through that, because she had a mating bond.
Fat lot of good that had done.
It had been three years now since she and Valdemar had gotten divorced, and he was engaged to be married. To a nymph. Who was about as big around as a toothpick, tall and lithe and graceful, nothing like Hiljd herself, an orc woman. He’d met this nymph at one of the bars in Shepherdstown, the Mecklenberg Inn, as far as Hiljd knew.
All of these things were good reasons to say no when her friend Mariana texted her and told her she was running late for their dinner plans.I’m at the Meck. It’s still early. Come have a drink. See everyone.
Hiljd typed it out, in fact.No. I don’t go there. Valdi goes there.
And then she deleted it, because seriously. It had been three years at this point. Sure, he was her fated mate, and she was never going to get over him, and she was jealous as all hell of his stupid new fiancée.
But.
She didn’t want to be married to him anymore either. Truthfully, the only thing they’d ever had in common was the mating bond. Everything had gone wrong with them, everything. Why would the ancestors have mated them, anyway, if it was actually impossible for them to, well, mate? If they could not have healthy children together?
Of course, Hiljd’s belief in the ancestors was more symbolic than anything. She was a medical doctor, and she was a woman of science. Even so, things like mating bonds demanded a mystical explanation, even if she had read all the science on them—oxytocin and vasopressin, triggered by something in the genes, some random adaptation of natural selection that tended to work to make sure couples had a vested interest in each other and their offspring. Nothing mystical at all. Just chemicals.
But if a person had everexperienceda bond, she wouldn’t believe that. She’d know what it was, that it was powerful, and there were some things science wasn’t equipped to explain.
At any rate, she didn’t want that man, no matter what the mystical, chemical connection had tried to make her want. She was in control of her own destiny.
So, she typed out,Be there in ten minutes.
And when she arrived, it was Lucy tending bar, an old friend from years ago. Lucy was a kelpie, which wasn’t a thing you could really see about her at first glance. If you talked to her a while, you might notice the faint webbing at her fingers or the way her nails were a little hoof-like, the way her laugh sometimes sounded like horse braying. Presumably, she could shapeshift into a watery horse sprite, but Lucy definitely didn’t do that in the bar.
The last time that Hiljd and Lucy had interacted, it had been in the grocery store, where they’d somehow started gossiping about Niles Chaudhary, the naga, Valdi’s best friend.
Yes, everyone around Hiljd was coupling up into relationships, and she was still here, still single, still childless.
But it was fine, actually.
One day, she’d decided to just give up on it all. Not that she wasn’t open to something happening, but that she was just done with the constant disappointment. She was working on being happy with her life the way it was. She actually had a pretty good life.
“Hey,” said Lucy, “you’re an orc.”
Hiljd laughed. “Um, last I checked.”
“What do you know about Winternights gatherings?”
Hiljd tilted her head to one side. “It’s the analog to Halloween for our people. Celebrated around the same time, but no costumes, just bonfires and a feast and saying goodbye to the light and welcoming the dark and all of that.”
“So, it’s tame, then.”
“I mean, yeah.”
“So, if I got invited to an orc Winternights party down by the river, by Tom, you wouldn’t think, like, it’d turn into an orgy or something?”
“Tom?” said Hiljd, shaking her head, laughing. “Doesn’t Tom try to turn everything into an orgy?”
