Epilogue
Moerrven
More than two weeks from when I gave Sky the necklace, on a ship out in the middle of the Qoksmere Sea, the trolgar bond reached its peak.
I had begun to feel Sky more and more, even when he wasn’t touching my horns.
I knew it was coming, but I still wasn’t prepared for the full force of feeling him as he walked into the room, feeling him as he spanked me, as he buried his cock inside me, as he laughed with Poppy, playing with a feather he’d found.
Of knowing he was mine and I was his, and it was a forever sort of thing.
It wasn’t just the thread I’d felt when I lost him to the dragon. It was the full of him. It was the last step in the slow, steady formation of a trolgar bond.
Sky had spent the first morning of the voyage draped over the starboard rail, sharing his morning meal with the ocean.
He had spent every hour since discovering that ships agreed with him.
He knew the name of every sailor aboard.
He had organized a betting pool concerning the first mate’s courtship troubles and appointed himself its commissioner.
He had talked the cook into a dish he called fusion cuisine.
The crew adored him. I understood them completely.
He had also, on the fourth morning, begun teaching the crew tai chi.
It started with the first mate, who wanted to know what Sky was doing alone on the foredeck at dawn, moving as though the air had grown thick around him.
By the sixth morning there were nine of them arranged in ragged rows, barefoot on the boards, following him through the slow shapes while he called out corrections with obvious delight.
“Sink into it, Havversen. You are a jellyfish with knees. Beautiful.”
I attended as an observer. I brought a book. The book went largely unread.
“My grandfather taught me this form,” Sky told them, turning his palm over as slowly as honey poured in winter, and nine sailors turned theirs with him.
“He’d have had opinions about your elbows, Havversen.
Loud ones.” The laughter that moved through them did not disturb the shape of the practice at all, and I suspected that trick was his grandfather’s too.
Afterward he folded himself under my arm, sweat-damp and grinning, and stayed there while the crew dispersed to their stations still rolling their shoulders.
“I thought I left my whole family on the other side of a mirror,” he said.
“Turns out I packed some of them. Every time I run the form, the old man is right there, counting me through it. And now nine Qoksmere sailors are going to carry it around in their bodies for the rest of their lives. He’d lose his mind. In the good way.”
“Then you must keep teaching it,” I said.
“Yeah.” He tipped his head back against my chest. “I think I will.”
Poppy had ruled the cabin since the first hour, and we moved a dresser in front of our small window, placing her bed there so she could sit and stare out at the sea birds.
And we worked, reading text after text on Liminia, from the history and customs of the land to accountings of the Liminal Order. Everything was vague, but the information was there, buried deep, and we were determined to root it out.
And in the evenings, when the accountings blurred into one another, I wrote.
A new story, the first in years that was not marching toward a graveyard ending: a dancer from another world, and the grumpy bridge-keeper who loved him.
This time it was something I knew Sky would swoon over.
He had made his opinions on my backlist abundantly clear.
He pretended not to read the pages over my shoulder, and I pretended not to write faster when he gasped.
The peak didn’t hit when I was inside Sky.
Instead it hit when I was standing on the deck with him, watching Oallian swoop in.
The dragon had something in his claw, a missive, perhaps, and despite the fact that I’d just spent fifteen minutes calming the crew, they all looked ready to faint as he drew closer.
Oallian dropped a small barrel containing a note from Pip, a note from Aeldryc, and a bundle of hand pies that made Sky squeal.
We’d kept a status update written and waiting, because Pip had promised dragon post. I laughed with him, placing the update into the barrel and holding it high so the dragon could dive down and get it.
The sea voyage was long, and we didn’t have much to report, but being able to communicate was nice.
Sky opened the letters eagerly, laughed at Pip’s letter, which was mostly jokes and sexual innuendo, then read Aeldryc’s brief, terse accounting of the news in Feravael, which wasn’t much. Then he tore them up and let them fly into the sea, unwilling to take the risk of someone finding them.
Oallian didn’t stay, but Sky reached out and patted his foot, a hello rather than the reaching touch, and could tell he was still at the surface, telling everyone we likely wouldn’t appreciate it if Vyranthos regained control of that big dragon body.
As he flew away, I wrapped an arm around Sky, and he leaned his head against my shoulder, and I felt his worry and care for the dragon as vividly as if it were my own, every shade of it, no trolgar touch, no reaching. That was the first sign of the peak.
“He’s hoping,” Sky said, the last of the wingbeats fading off the water. “He’s headed back to Clovermere, hoping for what we have.”
I loved that about Sky, the way he saw people, the way he charmed even a wild dragon into being his friend. And a sparkling current of intense warmth passed between us. Sky shivered, and looked up at me.
“Did you feel that?”
“It was our life-wells, forming into one,” I said. “The trolgar bond is complete.”
Sky blinked. “I thought it was complete when you gave me the necklace.”
“You should know by now that trolls take their time with things, no matter how impatient little humans are. Our magic is the same, slow and steady.”
“No flash, all substance,” he said, beaming up at me.
“Precisely. Shall we retreat to the bedroom and enjoy this?”
“We shall,” Sky said. And he took my hand and led me back to our cabin, magic surging between us that was as deep and lasting as our love.
***