26. Epilogue
EPILOGUE
ASH
The garden has never looked like this.
I built it over centuries, tended it through her continued absence, spoke to the roots when there was no one else in either world who would sit still long enough to listen to me talk about her. And it was beautiful. It was mine—for her—and I was proud of it.
Then my flower touched it.
Four months later, the arches have doubled in height. The lilacs bow so heavy the paths beneath them have purpled with fallen petals, and the roses along the eastern wall opened wide enough that they cup rainwater. On the rare times it does rain.
Nothing died back. Nothing shriveled or struggled. Whatever she is, whatever the Bright Gods stitched into her before they lost track of her and shoved her into a mortal body, it emerges from her palms and into everything she touches.
Including me.
She walks a few steps ahead of me now, barefoot as always, though I’ve had a dozen pairs of slippers made for her that she refuses on principle. Her loose hair sways down the length of her back while the hem of her dress drags through the petals and gathers them.
She stops at the new bed near a fountain and crouches, thumbing a leaf.
“They’re doing better than I thought,” she murmurs. “I figured they’d hate it here. Not as much sun.”
“They would not dare.”
“Oh, they wouldn’t dare?” She glances back at me with one brow raised. “Did you threaten my hydrangeas, Ash?”
“I have an understanding with everything in this garden.”
“That’s a yes.”
I say nothing, because it is a yes, and because she laughs at my honesty. I would trade a great many things to keep hearing that sound.
It comes easier now. It used to be a rusted hinge of a thing, dragged out of her by force. Now she laughs at me before breakfast, when I bring her fruit she does not want, and she calls me a menace with her mouth full.
The hydrangeas are a favorite of hers right now.
She’s waited to grow them, insisting she’d only kill them.
I watched her rationalize it many times.
Each time she wanted them, she talked herself out of it, and each time left a sour taste in my mouth.
I need her to have everything she could possibly want.
So I planted the seeds myself and let her take over when she realized they wouldn’t perish.
Now forty of them bloom along the fountain, and she tends to them each day, only to wipe her dirt-caked palms down her thighs when she’s done. I hope she doesn’t ruin what she’s wearing—it’s my favorite dress of hers.
I asked her to wear it this morning while she was still half-asleep and pliant, my mouth against the notch of her collarbone, and she agreed to it before her mind woke enough to protest. She’s not fond of wearing her nicer clothing to garden, but I ached to see her in the backless wonder.
Thin mauve silk that clings and gathers, the neckline low and loose enough that when she bends, I catch the whole length of her.
Including the small scars beneath her ribs, the ones she used to hide and now leaves out in the open air without a thought.
But the best part: she wears nothing beneath it but one scrap of lace that’s promised a very short life.
She has no idea I chose it for exactly this reason. Or perhaps she does and wore it anyway.
Both possibilities please me.
“Elise sent a letter,” she says regarding Vorin’s—the God of Gluttony—promised. “Well, not a letter. She sent a list.”
“Of what?”
“Places she wants to drag me. Apparently, there’s a market at the edge of Nemoris’ territory where they sell fruit that changes taste based on what you’re craving.
” Her nose wrinkles. Mine too—the God of Forgetting’s market is rumored to be a strange place.
“Which sounds really gross, honestly, but she says the vendors are funny.”
“Elise talks a great deal.”
“Elise talks a great deal,” she agrees, and there’s something warm underneath it that makes my throat tighten. “I like it. She doesn’t leave any silence for me to panic in.”
The gods came in a slow parade over the first weeks.
Nemoris arrived first, gracious and grim, and told my flower he was glad he’d never been permitted near her memories.
Calruin brought a gift and an apology for feeding off her regret in her four hundredth life.
She forgave him because she is better than the rest of us. I do not forgive him.
Acherin—the God of Despair—stood in my foyer for eleven minutes and said just as many words. Maven declared afterward that he seemed nice, which nearly killed him. The Nameless God came and went and came again, and each time it’s as if she meets him for the first time again. As it is with us all.
And Vorin brought Elise. He is the only other Dark God to obtain his promised.
I did not expect that, truthfully. He is not a generous man. But he arrived with her on his arm and let the two of them fold into a corner with wine; by the time I looked over they were laughing at something with their heads bent together, and Maven’s hand was on Elise’s forearm.
She made a lifelong friend that day.
She came to me later that night, buzzing, cheeks flushed, pacing the length of our room in one of my shirts, telling me every stupid detail—what Elise said about Vorin’s eating habits, what Elise said about the market, how Elise asked if she could come back next week.
“And she meant it,” Maven whispered, lost in her thoughts. She could always tell when people didn’t mean what they said, but Elise meant it.
“I haven’t had a friend,” she said, and then stopped in the middle of the floor with her hands out as if she’d caught herself saying something ridiculous.
“Ash. I haven’t had a real friend since…
I think it’s been a few lives? Is that right?
There was a girl with a red braid; she made bread and we used to—”
“Ismay.”
Her eyes brightened considerably. “Ismay. God, I remember her! I remember her happy little face.”
She remembers everything now. Sort of. The mortal barrier broke the moment I brought her through, but memories of her other lives are slow to flood in.
She weeps through most of them and laughs through others, always needing hours to process what she’s seen.
At one point she sat straight up and said, you wore a hat once and it was so ugly, and then went back to sleep.
She remembers many of her rejections and has apologized for that exactly once. I did not permit a second.
Because I would live through it again. All of it, every rejection, every hundred-year stretch of watching her live and die without me.
If someone offered me a version of this where she said yes in her first life and I had all of eternity from the start, I would refuse.
Take our current situation every single time.
This exact woman with her scars and her snarky mouth and bare feet in the dirt.
A thousand lifetimes carved her into something that fits against me like our two halves were cut from one piece.
She was promised to me. But that is not why she is mine.
Even if the Bright Gods had never promised her, I would have found her. I would have followed her longing through every crowded city on that miserable little world until I stood in front of her and refused to move.
I know this the way I know my own name.
“You’re staring,” she says around a bitten lip.
“I am.”
“You do that a lot.”
“And I intend to continue, my flower. You are too beautiful to not be stared at.”
She turns to face me fully, there in the middle of the path with the arch of black roses bending over her head, and her chin tips up as her eyes narrow. Half challenge and half invitation.
I cross the distance in two strides.
My hands find the backs of her thighs and lift; she clings to me without hesitation, her legs locking around my waist, arms around my neck, and her mouth is already open when it meets mine. She kisses me like she’s been waiting a thousand years, and perhaps she has.
“Hold on,” I mutter against her lips.
Incoherent words leave her mouth as I carry her to the arbor post at the fork of the path, thick oak sunk deep in the ground, and press her spine against it. She makes a sound that shoots straight to my cock.
“Do that again,” I breathe, grazing my teeth across her chin, “and you’ll not like who I turn into.”
“Is that a promise or a—” I bite her lower lip only for her to laugh.
Her tongue slides against mine. She tastes of the tea she drank an hour ago and of herself underneath it, so sweet and floral.
It’s a combination that drives me crazy.
Fingers grab my hair before tugging hard, the way she learned I like within the first week.
I shift my grip to hold her weight with one arm and slide the other hand between us.
Fuck me—the lace is soaked through.
I groan into her mouth, unable to help myself, and drag the fabric aside. Slick. Hot. So ready, and I haven’t even touched her yet.
“You wore this for me,” I say against her jaw.
“You asked me to wear it, don’t get—” Her words break when I press two fingers into her. “Oh.”
“What were you saying?”
Her answer doesn’t come until I pause my movements. “I forgot.”
I hum and work her open with slow, deliberate pressure, savoring the way her head drops against the post and how tightly her thighs clamp my waist. And the sounds she makes? They’re a drug. I need them. Thank every deity ever that she doesn’t hold them back. No, she gives me everything.
I cannot wait another moment—I’ve no interest in pretending otherwise.
She whines when I remove my fingers, but angles her hips when she realizes I mean to free my cock.
There is nothing in this world or the next as delicious as this moment: when the tip slips inside her wet heat and we both sigh from the relief and anticipation.
We enjoy it for a heartbeat before I fill her in one long stroke.
She screams as her hips rock against my pelvis.
“Fuck,” she breathes.
Her channel is tight and slick and gripping with impossible strength. It pulses with each breath, and my forehead drops to her shoulder as my hips still. Every time. Every single time it undoes me, the way she takes me, the way her body welcomes what it was built to welcome.
Ecstasy.
“Move,” she growls against my mouth. “Ash. Move, or I swear—”
A grin occupies my face as I drive her into the post, the thing groaning against its joints while the roses shake loose above us and yesterday’s rain showers us.
Her heels, locked at the base of my spine, dig in with each thrust, demanding more and more.
Nails scrape my neck raw as her breath leaves her in broken pieces of my name.
“Look at me,” I tell her.
She does. Gray eyes wide and glassy flutter open to search my own. I have not gotten used to being seen by her. A thousand years of white silk between us, and now she watches my mouth while I fuck her into the next life.
“There you are, my flower,” I say.
“I’m here. I’m here, I’m—” her eyes roll, “there, do that again.”
I adjust the angle and she keens as her walls flutter in the way that has ruined me a hundred times over.
My hand slides up her back and closes at her nape, holding her steady while she comes apart around me, shaking, her mouth open against my cheek, the whole of her tightening to the point of subluxating my joints if I were mortal.
But I’m a god and she is—
“Mine,” I demand into her silky hair. And it is no longer a claim. It stopped being a claim the moment she said yes. Now, it’s merely a fact I declare out loud at least once a day.
Her answering shiver shoves me over the edge. “Yours. Always.” I bury myself deep and let go, gripping her hip hard enough that she will find marks in the morning, only to press her thumb into them and smile.
Our breaths combine as we melt into one. Her forehead rests on my shoulder, my mouth kisses every inch of her throat, both of us high from the other.
Petals stick to her damp collarbone. I brush one off with my thumb and she catches my hand and holds it there.
“You know what I keep thinking?” Her muffled voice tickles my sweat-licked skin.
“Tell me.”
“That I spent my whole life waiting for something and never knew what it was.” She lifts her head. There’s dirt streaked across her cheek, though I leave it. It’s her. “And I got it. Do you know how insane that is? Nobody gets it. People just want things forever and then die.”
“You are not people.”
“No. I’m yours.”
I disentangle her with care, straightening the silk over her thighs as she leans against the post and watches my hands.
“Stay out here with me,” I say. “Until you’re hungry. Then I’ll feed you before I take you back to bed, and we’ll do this again.”
“That’s it? That’s the whole plan for the day?”
“That is the plan for the next several thousand years, Maven.”
The garden preens as her eyes wander—each flower basking in the attention of its creator.
“Okay.” A hand slides into mine. “Good plan.”
I smile as we walk, deigning not to tell her I would have waited a thousand more years for these four months. She knows.
She always knew.