Epilogue Thyran
She is singing.
Not well. Not in tune. Not any song I recognize.
She’s in the storage alcove and she’s sorting the dried herbs — again — and she’s singing under her breath, a low tuneless thing that wanders from note to note without committing to any of them.
She doesn't know she’s doing it. Or she does and she’s stopped caring.
Either way. It fills the hall.
I'm at the table, sharpening a blade that doesn't need sharpening.
I sharpened it yesterday. But the work keeps my hands busy and my hands being busy means I'm not crossing the hall to the storage alcove and pressing her against the shelves and making her stop singing by finding something better for her mouth to do.
She'd probably let me. That’s the problem. She'd let me and then the herbs wouldn't get sorted, and she'd blame me for it later and I'd let her because listening to her blame me for things is one of the better sounds in my life.
The hall is warm. It’s always warm now. Outside, spring is coming. Reluctant. Stubborn. Thawing one inch at a time, as if the land has to be persuaded. I used to sit in my chair and freeze.
Now the chair is closer to the fire and the fire is mostly for light because the heat comes from me and from her and from whatever happens between us when we're in the same room.
She comes out of the storage alcove with a jar in each hand and a smear of dried rosemary on her cheek.
“The dill is mixed in with the sage again.”
“It was like that when I found it.”
“It was like that because you don't label things.”
“I know what everything is by smell.”
“You know what everything is by smell because you've been eating the same seven things for fifteen years. We have more than seven things now. We need labels.”
She puts the jars on the table. Goes back for more. The singing resumes.
I pick up the rosemary jar. It has a label on it. In her handwriting, small and precise. She’s labeled everything in the storage alcove.
The jar of comfrey oil has a label in Jotunn. I pick it up and read it. She got two of the letters backwards. I don't correct her.
Tarn comes by in the afternoon.
He walks up the path from the east with a brace of hares over his shoulder and a look on his face that says he’s going to sit at my table and keep me company and not apologize for either.
He’s been doing this once a week since the battle.
He doesn't announce himself. He just appears in the doorway, ducks his head, and comes in.
He’s shorter than me by half a foot. Broader. The scar across his cheek catches the light when he sits near the fire. He sets the hares on the table and looks at me.
“Tracks on the north ridge.”
“What kind?”
“Mountain cat. Young one. Heading east.”
“It'll be in the valley by nightfall.”
“Want to go after it?”
I look at him. He looks at me. This is how it goes. He brings information and I decide whether to act on it and somewhere in the transaction we are becoming something that neither of us talks about.
Friends is not the right word. Jotunn don't use that word the way humans do. But there’s a thing where two people share space and trade information and eat at the same table and the silence between them is comfortable instead of empty.
“Tomorrow,” I say. “Early.”
He nods, then reaches into his pack and pulls out a folded bundle. Dark fabric, heavy, the color of autumn honey. Fur at the collar and cuffs. He puts it beside the hare without comment.
I asked him to find it three weeks ago. Something soft. Something beautiful. Something that isn’t what a soldier would wear.
He takes one of the hares. Leaves the other.
At the door he stops.
“She’s got plants in the ground.”
“I know.”
“South wall. I saw them when I came up the path. Green things. In the Wastes.”
“Chard. Potatoes. She says the ground is warm enough.”
He looks at me. At the hall. At the warm air coming through the doorway.
“Your heat?”
“My heat.”
He considers this for a while. Then he nods, the way he nods about everything. Slow. Like he’s filing it away.
“Good,” he says, and leaves.
She says a word in Jotunn at dinner and gets it wrong.
“Hrothvan,” she says, reading from the book propped against the bread basket.
“Hrothv?n. The vowel is longer.”
“Hrothv?n.”
“Better.”
“What about this one?” She points. Her finger on the page, the nail still dark with soil from the garden.
She’s been digging all afternoon. Her hands are rough and brown and she hasn't bothered to wash them because she’s reading and the reading won't wait and food is a thing that happens between pages.
“Rauemin?n,” I say.
She goes still. She knows this word. She’s heard it. In the dark, in the heat, in the moments where the old language breaks loose and I can't hold it back and she doesn't want me to.
“That’s in the book?”
“It’s an old word. The histories use it.”
“What does the history say it means?”
“The person you came back for. The fire you keep lit.”
She looks at the page. Looks at me. Her eyes are warm and her face is open and she’s not guarding anything.
“Say it again.”
“Rauemin?n.”
She tries. “Rauemin?n.” Closer this time. The vowels are still wrong but the shape of it is right. The sound of my language in her mouth, in her voice, filling the hall.
“Again,” I say.
“Rauemin?n.”
She smiles. Not the controlled almost-smile she gives to strangers. The real one. The one that changes her whole face and makes my hands grip the table edge because if I don't hold onto something I'm going to reach for her.
I reach for her anyway.
The book slides off the table. The bread basket follows. She laughs against my mouth — a real laugh, surprised and warm — and her hands come up to my face and she’s saying the word again, broken by the kiss, syllables scattered between her lips and mine. Raue — min?n —
I pick her up. The table gets knocked aside. Her hands find the back of my neck and she says the word one more time, correctly, right against my ear, and the fire in the pit flares bright enough to throw our shadows across the ceiling.
“Show-off,” she says.
“You started it.”
“I was reading.”
“You were reading my name for you.”
She pulls back. Looks at me. Her hands on my face, small and rough and warm. Soil under her nails. Rosemary on her cheek from where she leaned against the jar.
“Take me to bed,” she says. “The book will be there in the morning.”
The book is there in the morning. So is she.
So is the bread basket, on the floor where it fell.
The fire has burned down to embers and the hall is warm without it.
The comb is on the table where she set it last night.
Her garden is outside the south wall, green things pushing up through dark earth in a place where nothing has grown in centuries.
I lie on the platform with her back against my chest and her breathing slow and deep.
My arm tightens around her and I listen to the hall.
It’s not silent anymore. The drip of meltwater from the eaves. The creak of the timber frame adjusting to the thaw. The sound of her breathing. Small sounds. Living sounds. The kind that fill a space without crowding it.
The fire doesn't need tending. Neither do I.