Epilogue
Ronan – One Year Later
I’m sitting on the edge of the bed in our room in what must be the worst inn in all of Larunia, my hands in Sylvie’s hair as she kneels on the ground in front of me.
She moans softly as I tug the last strand into place, finishing the braid. “You can’t be done already.”
“Check my work.”
She rises and goes to the dingy mirror on the back of the door, turning her head from side to side. “It’s a little lumpy over here.”
I stand up and wrap my arms around her waist, resting my head on her shoulder. “Where?”
She tugs at a loose strand on the right side. “Here, it’s—”
She stops speaking abruptly as I reach up and tickle her viciously. “It’s lumpy where? Where?”
“Stop!” she screams through her laughter.
“My darling, I always knew you’d be the death of me, but I didn’t think the cause would be hand cramps. I’ve already done it four times.”
“Stop! It’s good enough. It’s good enough.”
She relaxes back into me as I stop tickling her, and my hands cradle her hips, the proximity of her body and the image of us together in the mirror sending a pulse of heat down my spine.
“I think I’m going to mess it up again,” I murmur as I kiss her ear. She groans and spins around to face me, dropping to her knees for a different reason.
After I’m done braiding her hair for the fifth time, I help her with her disguise.
“That’s a lot of nose.”
“It is not!” She adjusts the illusion in the mirror, shortening the tip a little. “Is that better?”
“Maybe something like this,” I say, projecting my own illusion on top of hers. I stretch the nose out long and thin until it resembles the beak of a hummingbird.
“We are never getting out of this room, are we?” Sylvie turns her head to the side, detaching my illusion from her.
“Hey,” I say when I feel her genuine frustration beneath her joke. “You’re doing great, my love. I’m just trying to help you keep it subtle. It makes it easier to maintain.”
This is the first stop of our first diplomatic mission together, and I don’t want to discourage her. In truth, this mission is a trial run of a much longer campaign I’m planning, one that will bring us to all of the places we planned to visit together.
But first, I need to be sure she can keep up her disguise long enough for us to sightsee.
While we’ll be formally received at the palace of Larunia in two days, no one realizes the God-King and God-Queen of Selara have already made it to shore and are staying in what is definitely, I realize as I trap a spider the size of my palm under a jar, the absolute worst inn in Larunia.
After a few more tweaks, I declare the disguise a success. My wife has been replaced by Hazel the traveling acrobat, a larger-nosed, squarer-jawed version of herself, complete with a tightly fitted silk outfit in blue that I’m deeply enjoying.
“Try making the eyes hazel,” I say as I dress in Soren’s brown doublet, donning a nice rapier to complete the ensemble. If anyone asks, I’ll just say my business is doing well.
“Isn’t that too on the nose?”
“No, it’s on the eyes.”
I get a pillow thrown at me for that one, and it was worth it.
Finally ready, we make our way out into the city. There’s a lot to see here: markets selling brightly colored produce, rows of white-stone buildings with blue roofs that stairstep down to crystal clear waters, gardens where children run under broad leaves shaped like gloves.
But my wife has set her sights on one thing and one thing only, and according to the locals I ask for directions in broken Larunian, until they take pity on me and switch to Selaran, it’s right down at the end of a cape as far from the palace as we can get.
The statue is visible from our path winding down the hillside, but not the part of it she wants to see. “It’s facing the harbor,” she says. “Maybe we should have taken a boat.”
“I don’t know about that,” I say, spotting a narrow strip of beach down at the bottom of the path. “How warm do you think that water is?”
Her eyes light up when she looks back at me, the hazel in them flashing a little unnaturally, but I could never dream of telling her when she’s looking at me like that, like she’s as happy as she’s ever been, and I’m the one responsible.
We race down the last steps to the beach and then strip down to our underwear, dipping our toes into the shallow blue water.
“It’s so warm.” She crashes with delight into the gentle waves, her braid floating on the surface as she tilts her head back towards the sky.
I follow her in, swimming out until we’re facing the statue. The water stays so shallow here near the reef that I can still touch the bottom.
She can’t.
She treads next to me until I pull her into my arms, holding her there as she looks up.
“They’re so much bigger than I imagined,” she says, her voice hushed with awe.
There, at the end of the cape, is an enormous statue of a woman with cascading curls of hair, her waist draped with a loose cloth. Our guidebook said it was thirty feet high, but it must be closer to forty. It’s as tall as the Temple of Vayla tower, at least.
And sure enough, wrapped around some of the largest stone breasts that must exist in the known world, is an octopus.
“Is it everything you ever dreamed of?”
She cradles my head in her hands, dropping her disguise with no one around, and I do the same. “I know it’s silly, but it really is.”
“If it makes you happy, it isn’t silly,” I tell her, kissing her softly.
“It’s the greatest thing in the world.”
And so is she.