Chapter Eleven #3
“Ever,” Marin said firmly, both to him and herself.
She’d learned her lesson. “Romantic entanglements are, for me, off-limits. All they do is make you smaller. Make you compromise and slice off parts of yourself until eventually you risk losing everything that matters.” She yanked her nightshirt on and then realized that Dax was staring at her. “What?”
He shook his head and then asked gently, “Who hurt you?”
“Um.” It could have been a rhetorical question, but there was a specific answer.
She froze as the memories burst out of their box and flooded through her.
It took her an extra minute to form the words, and Dax waited.
“His name is Iovar Revinok. He was my fiancé until I discovered he was trying to sabotage my family’s business because he didn’t want his future wife and whatever future children to risk themselves on the sea.
” She said it as flatly as she could, as if it didn’t still cause her insides to twist in a knot of shame, regret, and anger whenever she thought about him.
From his pot, Ree gasped, “No sea?”
She supposed that was an oversimplification.
Or maybe it wasn’t. “No sea. He owns a shipyard, and I trusted him to help with the family’s finances …
He used that access to our accounts to try to destroy us—my parents, as well as me.
Their ships were seized, their savings drained …
It all would have been gone and we would have been sunken into debt, beholden to him for food and shelter and all of it, if I hadn’t, by chance, noticed.
My parents lost a lot, but not everything, and they used what they had left to help me escape, even going into debt with the local sorcerer, Yvex.
” Still matter-of-fact. Still hurt to say, to admit.
She’d been so na?ve. So trusting. So in love.
It was better for Dax to know the full truth before he showed up at the End-of-Harvest Festival.
He’d hear about it from someone, and she’d rather it was her.
“I was an idiot, and it will never happen again.”
“You weren’t an idiot,” Dax said. “You were deceived.”
“I let myself be deceived.”
He snorted. “That’s like saying you let yourself break your leg when a cart hit you. Something happened to you—was done to you—and the blame isn’t with you.”
“I should have…” Marin cut herself off and took a deep breath. She wasn’t going to rehash this. She’d already been through it a thousand times in her head. “It doesn’t matter. It’s over. You get the right side of the bed. Unless you want the left.”
“Right is fine,” Dax said.
“Good. I like the left better.”
“Then it’s yours.”
“I don’t want you drifting over to my side,” Marin said. “Or stealing the covers. Or snoring, if you can help it. If you can’t help it, then whatever.”
“I’ll endeavor to snore purposefully or not at all,” Dax said gravely.
“Great.” She looked at him for a moment. He looked back. An awkward moment passed, and then Marin scooped up her pouch with her teeth-care supplies and ducked out to find the washroom.
By the time she returned, with thoughts of Iovar neatly smushed back into a tiny box and shoved away in the back corner of her mind again, Dax was already in bed.
Ree, in his pot, was chattering about how much he wanted to see a whale or a mermaid or a dragon, while Stowy was curled up at the foot of the bed, his wings folded.
His orange fur was dusted lightly with flour—proof that he’d clearly been underfoot in the kitchen—but he didn’t seem to care.
As Dax blew out the candle in the lantern, Marin climbed into the left side of the bed.
She immediately sank into the gryphon-feather mattress.
It smelled like lilacs, and she felt as if she were swimming in floral-scented sea-foam.
She wasn’t sure she liked it. How could anyone sleep on anything this squishy?
She squirmed a bit, trying to get comfortable.
“Are you all right?” Dax said.
“It’s soft.”
“Um, yes.”
“I usually sleep on the deck with just a blanket.”
He leaned on his elbow, which sank into the mattress.
She saw him silhouetted by the moonlight through the window and was aware again of how close he was—and how kind he’d been.
Outside, the tops of the trees shifted in the night breeze, and she could see the darkness that was the sea in the distance, an emptiness beyond the village.
He suggested, “You could remove some of the pillows?”
“Or I could sleep on the floor.”
“If it’s me…”
“It’s not you.” She slid off the bed, taking one pillow and one of the blankets with her. She folded the blanket around her and curled up near Ree’s pot. Better. Except … No, just better. It felt more normal. Plus it removed any temptation to see if his skin was as smooth as it looked.
Not that that was why she moved to the floor.
It didn’t have anything to do with Dax.
It didn’t.
Really.
Gently, he said in the darkness, “If you want to return at any point, your side will be there. I won’t cross so much as a finger. It’s yours, whether you use it or not. I would never take what you don’t want to give.”
Marin wondered why she felt like crying.
All of them fell silent after that. The orange cat began to snore, sweetly and softly. Ree’s leaves rustled, which was perhaps his equivalent of a snore? Dax didn’t snore at all. His breathing was light, even, and gentle. Like he was.
Halfway through the night, Marin climbed up into the bed, sank into the pillows and the ridiculous gryphon-feathered mattress, and slept soundly until dawn.
After breakfast, they went to see the cheesemonger.
A cream-colored cottage with blue shutters and a thatched roof, the shop was tucked away from the town square, up a side street, with a field behind it that had a herd of unicorns grazing.
Just right there. Grazing. As if unicorns weren’t rare to the point of often being assumed mythical.
Marin stopped in the middle of the cobblestone street as she marveled at the five wonders who were nibbling at the grass like sheep, blithely unaware of their near-mythical status.
“I thought unicorns were…” Dax waved his hands at the abundance of impossible in front of them, as if that sufficed for an adjective.
“Uh-huh,” Marin agreed.
“Wow,” he said.
She noticed there was only a fence between the field and the street.
Beyond the field—or meadow, given that it was filled with wildflowers, as well as near-mythical miracles—was woods.
The unicorns were clearly free to go, yet here they were.
Each was more luminous than the last with white hides that were simultaneously every color at once and the absence of all color.
Their spiral horns were purest gold, and when one lifted its head to regard them …
Marin saw its eyes, as blue as the sea on a perfect summer day.
Her knees buckled, and she reached out to steady herself.
Dax caught her arm, and she locked her knees, straightening.
“Nice horses,” Ree said, with a note of confusion.
“They’re unicorns,” Dax told him.
“Ahh,” Ree said. “Fancy horses?”
They were beings of pure magic given flesh, but sure, call them “fancy horses.” “Okeydokey then, um, cheese shop?” Marin squared her shoulders and marched toward the shop. The sign over the door was a large wedge of cheese carved out of wood and painted yellow.
A bell rang as she stepped inside, followed by Dax and Ree. Stowy flew at hip height into the store. From the back, a woman with a wobbling voice called, “No cats in the shop! Cats lick cheese! Eee, shoo-shoo!”
Marin scooped Stowy up as he landed beside a pyramid of cheese, and she deposited him outside. “You can have extra fish when we’re back on the boat,” she told him. “Don’t bother the unicorns, okay?”
She doubted he understood her, but he flew up onto the thatched roof to nap in the sun or chew on the thatch. Or both. She returned inside to see the shopkeeper had emerged.
The shopkeeper was tiny and as wrinkled as a walnut, with ears that were covered in pale pink fur and draped down to her shoulders.
Her nose was rabbitlike too, a pink button with whiskers sprouting from either side.
Her eyes and body were human. Marin couldn’t see if she had a tail.
She walked with a cane that was painted as yellow as the wood cheese outside.
“Welcome to the Magical Cheese Emporium,” the shopkeeper said grandly.
“The only cheese shop in the Crescent Islands that offers an array of dairy products derived from creatures of magical origin.”
“I … did not know that was a thing.” Marin consulted the list she’d taken from the job board. She’d known they were cheeses because it helpfully said “cheese” at the top of the list, but she didn’t recognize any of the particular types of cheese.
“This place is amazing,” Dax said. “The unicorns outside…”
“Yes, I milk them myself,” the shopkeeper said proudly.
“Although it’s getting tougher for me to squat down there.
” She put her hands on her lower back and arched with a wince.
“Thinking of retiring, finding a nice sunny spot where I can plant a few tomatoes and catch up on my knitting. Been training my granddaughter, now that she’s finally free of that soul-sucking city, but is her heart in it? I can’t tell.”
Marin was stuck on that first sentence. “The unicorns let you milk them?”
The shopkeeper snorted. “Let? If I miss a milking, they practically bash down the door, and their hooves sound like bells. Absolutely drive you to screaming if you’re trying to sleep in and all you hear is ding-ding-ding-neigh-neigh!”
Dax’s eyes lit up. “I’d love to hear their hooves.”
“Me too!” Ree chimed in.
Okay, this was all fascinating, but they were here for a purpose. “After we make our purchase,” she told Dax and Ree. She handed the list to the shopkeeper. “Do you have these in stock?”