Chapter 18
Moerrven
I stood on the far bank in the gold light of late afternoon, looking back over Bryndala’s bridge, with Sky still on my shoulders, still rubbing my horns, and I felt his strength and his warmth, and behind all of that, a gentle determination to make sure I got through this in one piece. That alone made me smile.
Behind me, Clover huffed and stomped her hooves, and Poppy meowed for release from her habitat.
“So,” Sky said as he twisted on my shoulders. “Is that the edge of Frostholm down the road?”
“Yes,” I said. “You can see the bridge from town. Oh, that makes me feel so much more guilty for deceiving you.”
He chuckled. “It’s okay, sweetheart, we talked it through. You released your guilt last night under my paddle, unless you need that treatment again.”
I groaned, rubbing his leg. “Would it be wrong to say I do?”
There was a rush of warmth through the trolgar that told me that was a reply that pleased him. “We’d better give your body a night or two to rest. Do you want to continue on? Or stay a while?”
“Maybe just a while longer,” I said, walking back to the bridge and looking down into the gorge, then across to the statue of Bryndala.
I studied the face of the broad-shouldered troll woman, trying to remember if that was what she looked like.
It felt right. Her long hair was swept back in a loose braid, and she had a roll of plans clutched in her carved hands.
She was set to face back across the gorge so that she might regard her own work for as long as the stone endured.
Bryndala would not have liked a statue of herself. That was not her style.
I wondered how the person who had carved it had created her likeness.
I could not, for the life of me, remember if I had given the artisan an image of her, or if I had agreed to this statue at all, though during the numbness that followed her accident, I suppose I probably went along with a great many things just to save myself from having to talk to people.
And standing here, looking back across the bridge, I could feel her with me. She’d say that the bridge had turned out quite fine indeed, then walk around inspecting the mortar joints for any recent damage.
“Could you keep an eye on Clover? I’d like to go talk to her,” I said, lowering Sky to his feet.
He stood on his tiptoes, and I bent so he could plant a kiss on my cheek. “You go. I’ll watch both of the animals.”
I walked slowly back across the bridge and looked more closely at the statue, wondering if this was where her ghost would linger, if ghosts were real.
Up close the likeness was imperfect, as all likenesses are.
The mason had made her jaw too soft and had missed the crease that came to her brow when she was solving something.
But he had caught her hands: broad, and blunt, the hands of someone who built things that outlived her.
I looked up into the carved face that was almost her face.
“I think I should like to find love again,” I told her. “It does not mean I did not love you, you know. I think it means my heart has room in it for two great loves.”
She did not respond, because she was a statue. I glanced back over my shoulder to where Sky had released Poppy from her habitat and was goofing off in the grass, doing a series of cartwheels for absolutely no reason I could think of.
“I fear I might have accidentally found it already,” I whispered. “I hope you understand. He is quite ridiculous, and at the same time, so full of warmth and strength. I find it charming.”
A strange warmth filled me, and at once, I knew that Bryndala found him charming, too. I looked up at the statue and smiled. “I’ll always miss you, my love. Thank you for making my first century so full of joy. And I’m sorry for avoiding your bridge. I think I should like to come back here often.”
Something told me that would be quite welcome, and I was smiling a little as I walked back across, stopping halfway across by the railing.
I looked down at the gorge, a little queasy about the fear she and her workers must have felt as the water slammed into them.
Then I turned to the mountains the flash flood had come from.
The skies were clear in the mountains, and the water flowed steady and slow.
Sky came up beside me. I glanced over my shoulder to see Poppy back in her habitat and Clover’s lead tied to a tree.
“Could we stay here a while?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, big guy. We can stay. Talk to your statue for as long as you like.”
I huffed. “I wouldn’t talk to a statue. But do you want to say hi?”
He laughed and nodded, and I took his hand and led him back over to her.
“Hi, Bryndala,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind too much if I fuck your husband.”
“He’s so cheeky. You’d probably tell him to hush. Handsome, though, isn’t he? Almost makes up for the mouth.” I could almost imagine the statue grinning.
“Almost?” Sky gasped. Then he looked back up at Bryndala and winked. “He knows he can’t resist me, just like I’m sure he couldn’t resist you. I promise to spoil him for as long as I am able. We don’t want him writing any more sad books, the fans will revolt!”
“Those books were well-reviewed, thank you very much,” I said. “You would enjoy them, Bryndala. You always said my books had too much sex in them.”
“Too much sex in a book? Is that a thing?” Sky sounded horrified. Then he reached out and laid a hand over Bryndala’s. “Seriously, though. It was very nice to meet you. He always speaks highly of you, and I hope that wherever you are, you’ve found someone to snuggle with, too.”
My mood stayed light as we crossed the bridge. We walked back to Clover and Poppy, and led Clover and the wagon up off the road, to a flat green clearing above the gorge, overlooking the town of Frostholm.
He planted his hands on his hips. “Look at that view,” he said. “Perfect place to camp for the night, so you don’t have to hurry the little conversation you’re having.”
“No one talks to statues, it’s ridiculous.”
He grinned. “I talk to a picture of my grandfather, and I agree. It’s completely ridiculous. But I hear his answers in my head every time.”
I surveyed the clearing. It was high ground, well above the waterline, above the reach of any flood the mountains could throw in a wet spring. I knew exactly how high the water had come the day it took Bryndala, and Sky had walked our camp up out of the reach of it.
I did not know whether he had chosen it on purpose. He knew how she had died, and he was capable of a tenderness he would rather die than have named aloud, but he was also impulsive, and it was sometimes difficult to tell if he was being kind or following some random whim.
“It will do,” I said.
“It will do. Listen to him. It’s the best campsite in the kingdom and he says it’ll do.” He was already dragging the bedrolls off the wagon.
We made camp without discussion, each of us moving into the gaps the other left.
I saw to Clover and the fire. He arranged the bedrolls into one big comfy cushion for both of us.
He liberated Poppy from her habitat, and she conducted an inspection of the perimeter and chewed on some grass.
By the time the light went amber and thick, Poppy was tucked in for the night, eating the last of her dried fish, and we had bread, hard cheese, and a packet of nuts and dried fruit Sky had picked up from a vendor in Highmark.
The canyon below had filled with shadow, and the first stars had come out over the place where the bridge stood pale against the dark.
I had been quiet a long while when I said the thing I had been turning over since the statue.
“How do you do it.”
Sky looked up. “Do what?”
“Stay as you are.” I gestured, inadequately, at the whole of him. “You fell out of your world into mine with nothing. And even after several weeks in the company of a troll who isn’t very good company, you are—” I searched for the word and found only the imprecise ones. “Buoyant. You float.”
He was quiet for a moment, which was rare enough that I marked it. Then he stood and brushed the crumbs from his hands.
“Okay,” he said. “Don’t laugh.”
“I almost never laugh. It is one of my better-known features.”
This made him laugh, lean down, and kiss me right on the lips. “I think I’ll try and change that feature, if you don’t mind. You’re sexy as fuck when you laugh.”
Then he walked out to the open center of the clearing, where the grass was cropped and level. He settled his weight, and the restless animal in him went quiet.
“This is how I find my calm. The way my grandfather taught me.”
He went still first, not the restless, vibrating stillness of Sky waiting for his turn to speak, but a stillness with foundation under it, a quiet that started at the soles of his feet and rose.
He let his eyes half close. He raised his hands in front of him as though lifting something that had no weight, and he began to move.
It was slow. That was the first surprise.
Everything about Sky was fast, and this was, mostly, the opposite of fast. His arms turned through the air in long unhurried arcs, one hand pushing while the other yielded, his weight pouring from leg to leg in a continuous unbroken line, one foot lifting high, above the height of his shoulder, while he maintained perfect balance, then sliding out and wide, into a low, stable stance.
One shape became the next without any visible decision to end the first. Then a long stretch of slowness broke into a sudden burst of pure speed and power, a strike, a snap of a kick, and the calm rolled back in as though the burst had never happened. His breath went long and even.
“It’s beautiful. What is it?”
“Tai chi,” he said, not breaking the motion. “It’s a martial art, kind of, combines movement and meditation. It’s popular with old people where I’m from, but my grandfather made me learn it when I was a kid.”
“It’s quite lovely.”
“I used to hate it, I thought it was slow and boring, but my grandfather would say, if you can find the calm while you’re moving, you can find it anywhere. Nothing is perfect, but it helps.”
As he spoke, he continued to move. His weight sank and rose, the movements deceptively simple, made more difficult by the grace and balance with which he executed them.
“He died last winter.” The arc of his arm completed itself. “Anyway. This is the thing I do. When the floor falls out. I imagine my grandfather telling me to breathe, even though he’s not—” He breathed, movements shifting from fast to slow, then fast again.
I did not fill the silence. Some silences are a kind of company and should not be interrupted with comfort. The calm he was describing filled the clearing, and though his hands were nowhere near my horns, his calm reached me anyway, the way one steady person steadies another.
He brought the form to rest. He stood a moment with his eyes closed. And then he opened them and grinned, a grin with teeth in it, and the stillness broke like a held note resolving.
“Is that what you do for work? That’s the dance?”
He rolled his eyes. “No, the dance I do for work, well. That’s not for a place like this. But if you want, I can show you wushu?”
“Why couldn’t you do your dance here?”
He looked around, like he was afraid someone might overhear, then leaned in close. “Can I tell you a secret?”
“Who would I tell?”
“I used to love the dances I do at the club. They’re fun, sexy, playful and full of joy. But there’s only so many times you can shake your ass before it gets a little old. For me, anyway. It was just work, like any other work. Not my passion.”
“Ah.”
“Wushu, though, that you can perfect. You can spend a lifetime getting your foot placement just right so the flow of a movement works how it should. It sounds silly, but—”
“Sky. Why don’t you just show me?”
He nodded, then shook out his arms, rolled his neck and did a few quick stretches. He set his feet wider, dropped his center, and for a moment he was motionless — and then he came apart into motion so fast and so total that I forgot, for the length of it, to keep breathing in any organized way.
“This is long fist,” he said. “One of our forms.”
He dropped into a stance so low his thigh ran flat to the ground and rose out of it into a turn that took both feet off the earth, his whole body laid out sideways in the air at a height I would not have believed of him, the line of him from fingertip to pointed toe one unbroken stroke against the darkening pines.
He landed without sound. He swept a leg through the space where he had just been standing and was already somewhere else.
The discipline of it was the part that undid me.
Underneath the spectacle, every wild thing his body did was governed, chosen, paid for in some childhood of repetition I would never see.
The flexibility alone was an education. I had known the shape of him for weeks, had mapped it with my hands and my mouth and thought the survey complete.
Here was a whole further country of what he could do with it.
Sky could fly, spinning through the air with his legs out and landing soft, like a cat.
I applauded. There seemed nothing else a reasonable person could do.
“That,” he said, breathless, hauling himself up and crossing the clearing toward me, “was what I did before the clubs, before I decided to leave everything behind and find myself. It was my grandfather’s whole deal, and when he passed, I just… couldn’t. I needed a break.”
“But you want it back now?” I asked.
“Maybe. I kind of forgot I had it in me. Forgot how good it feels.”
He dropped onto the bedrolls beside me, close, the heat coming off him in the cooling air.
He was still breathing hard. He reached up and set his hand against the base of my horn, his thumb finding the trolgar point the way I had taught him, the way that opened the door to everything he was feeling, and his calm washed into me, his breathless joy, his energy.