Chapter 16
CHLOE
A month into being a wife, I'd learned that the best seat at Kazan and Maisie's long table was the one wedged between my husband and the cider.
I had a hand on each. Lorkin took up the whole left side of me, warm through his shirt, one heavy arm slung along the back of my chair.
The cider sat on my right and kept not being empty, because every time it got low Maisie reached down the table and topped it without breaking whatever she was saying, the way she'd been topping my cup since the worst night of my life on her porch.
Now she did it over a board of roasted figs and somebody's terrible joke, and I let her. It didn't mean anything sad at all.
"It does not have horns," Kazan said. Flat. Final. The way he said most things.
"It has little ones." Zarcal had both elbows on the table and a glass of water in front of him, and he was grinning around the whole argument. "Nubs. They count."
"A goat is not a bull."
"I'm only saying there's a family resemblance, and you've all got the same look when you want something off somebody's plate.
" Zarcal forked a fig off Korfas's board to prove it.
Korfas let him. Korfas, who was the size of a doorway and had said maybe nine words all evening, watched his fig disappear with the patience of a male who'd been losing food to Zarcal since before any of them were free.
"That's mine," Korfas said. Words ten and eleven.
"It was an offering. To the resemblance." Zarcal ate it.
I laughed so hard I had to put my forehead on Lorkin's shoulder, and he rumbled under me, that low sound I felt more than heard. I thought I'd have traded every dinner I ever sat through on Earth for this one loud, crowded table.
"Where's Remmen?" I asked because the table was a chair short.
"Busy." Maisie said it dryly. "He's been busy for weeks. Won't say with what."
"Mayor things," Kazan offered.
"Mayor things," Maisie agreed, in a tone that said she'd get it out of him eventually, and the subject moved on without anyone deciding to move it.
By the time the jar of fig syrup had gone around twice and Zarcal was three glasses of water deep and still somehow the drunkest-acting person at the table, I had enough cider in me to think the goats were a wonderful idea.
"We should go see the goats," I told Lorkin, low, against his arm.
"It's dark."
"They glow."
He looked at me. I'd learned to read the look by now, the one that pretended to be a no while his whole body was already deciding to do whatever I wanted. "It's muddy," he tried.
"Lorkin." I grabbed a fistful of his shirt and tugged, which moved him exactly as far as a person can move a building. "Take me to pet the glowing goats. I'm a married woman. This is what marriage is for."
So we snuck out, which is a generous word for what two grown adults did, one of them seven feet tall, easing out the side door past Maisie's pointed and unsurprised glance and down the slope toward the pen while the warm noise of the cottage fell away behind us.
The orchard glowed faintly in the dark, and at the bottom of it the goat pen sat full of little white shapes lit faintly from inside. They saw us coming and started up an outraged chorus, the way they do, as though we'd personally promised them something and failed to deliver.
"Okay." I climbed up onto the bottom rail and swung a leg over. "We're getting in."
"Chloe."
"We're getting in, Lorkin."
We got in.
It went badly, in the best way. The goats did not want to be petted on our schedule.
They wanted us to chase them and then bolt the instant we got close, bleating like we were committing a crime against goatkind.
I went skidding across the muck after a fat one with a black ear and got precisely nowhere, wheezing, while Lorkin moved through the pen like a man wading after ducks, slow and enormous and entirely outmatched.
Then one of them came for me. It dropped its head, gave a war cry that no creature that size has any right to, and charged my shins.
I shrieked. And before I'd finished the shriek, my husband had stepped between me and a small, angry vegetable of an animal and put a hand down toward it, grave as anything.
"No," Lorkin told the goat.
"Defend me," I gasped. "Defend my honor."
"I'm trying." He fended off another headbutt with two fingers. The goat reversed and rammed him in the knee, and the man who'd put a minotaurs through a wall went down into the mud. "It's got me. Go on without me."
That did it. I went down next to him in the cold muck, both of us sitting in it now, and I laughed until my ribs hurt and no sound was coming out, just air. The goat that had slain him trotted off victorious, and Lorkin lay back in the mud and let me wreck myself against his chest.
We stayed down there. Slowly, once we'd stopped being a threat or a game, the goats lost the plot of it and wandered back, and a small glowing one picked its way over and leaned its whole warm side against my leg like I was furniture.
Then another. Lorkin got a careful hand on the nearest, and it shoved up into his palm, greedy.
He scratched it behind one of its little nubbed horns, the exact gentle way he did everything when nobody was supposed to be watching.
"This one's Zarcal," I said, reading the bit of rope around its neck with the name burned into a tag. Kazan named his goats. Of course he did.
"He'll be pleased."
"He'll be insufferable." I leaned my head on Lorkin's muddy shoulder and got a goat warm against each leg, the two of them glowing faint in the dark, the cottage lit gold up the slope.
I was sitting in freezing mud at the bottom of somebody else's orchard, covered in other people's livestock, and there was nowhere I was getting ready to leave.
A door opened up the hill. "Chloe?" Kazan's voice carried down the slope, the careful tone of a male who'd come looking for two missing guests and was bracing for what he'd find. "Lorkin? Maisie sent me to fetch the both of you."
The goats heard him. Or the gate. Or they simply decided a third large warm body had arrived to adore them.
As one delighted, glowing mob they abandoned us and stampeded the fence toward him, screaming their furious little welcome, and I heard Kazan get out "no, I haven't got anything, get off—" before he went under a tide of goats.
Lorkin's chest started shaking under my cheek. I tipped my face up into the cold and the glow and laughed, and laughed, and didn't stop.