Epilogue
They hadn’t been back to the cabin for months, and as always, Inga found the rapid pace of the changes through the short northern summer startling to see up close.
Flowers were blooming in vast profusion, softening the rugged, rocky hills.
On their ride up the coast, using Nita’s borrowed skiff, warm winds blew to them from the coast, fragrant with the rich scents of a thousand growing things.
The cabin was as they had left it. Rogue bounded around, reacquainting himself with all his favorite rocks to sniff and mark as his own, while Inga and Luke opened up the cabin door and unboarded the window, aired it out, and unpacked the food and other supplies they had brought with them.
There was a flurry of squawking and flapping, and Inga looked out the door.
They had brought more than just dehydrated eggs and sleeping bags.
They also had two of the teenage trash griffins with them, the ones dubbed Cinnamon and Sugar.
The young ones had turned out to be incredibly friendly, following people around the streets, begging for food, and generally being a nuisance.
It was easiest to just make pets out of them and have done with it.
Nita’s sister Wyona had taken one for her kids.
Bernie, who had delivered a healthy baby girl two weeks ago, flatly refused to adopt one in spite of Inga’s wheedling, because (she said) her cat would probably eat it.
Cinnamon and Sugar had attached themselves to Luke and Inga, and it looked like one of Stieg’s fishing buddies was going to take the remaining one.
Inga had not quite been able to bring herself to ask Mace if he wanted one.
She and Luke were now on friendly terms with the gargoyles—not just Mace and Thea, but also Mace’s niece Jess and her husband Reive—but there was still a certain sense of dignified serenity to Mace and his household that didn’t seem especially compatible with a screaming, squawking half-seagull half-raccoon.
Although given how both Cinnamon and Sugar had taken to following Luke and Inga around, together or separately, it was probably only a matter of time ...
“How is the work with Mace going?” Inga asked.
Luke had just finished formalizing his position in Mace’s household as a sort of handyman/general workman-around-the-house.
Inga wasn’t sure exactly what he was doing, but she was pretty sure the answer was “whatever needed doing at any given time.” Mace regularly hired people from the village to do what he needed done, from cooking to housekeeping, but in general his household ran with few to no permanent staff.
Luke was apparently going to be an exception.
“I’m enjoying it so far. Yesterday, Thea had me helping her transplant plants in the garden. I feel like to some extent, they’re finding things for me to do.”
“Nonsense. I realize I don’t know Mace and his family well, not as well as you do at this point, but there’s one thing I think I can say for sure, which is that he wouldn’t do anything out of obligation. If you’re there, it’s because he wants you there.”
Luke smiled and didn’t argue. “What about you? Have you heard back from the uni yet?”
“Yeah, it’s much too late in the year to be accepted for a formal degree program in the fall, but I’ll be taking correspondence classes over the winter, and we’ll see how I like it.
If I do, I might end up having to move to St. John’s, or even the mainland, to finish my degree.
I don’t know how that would work out with your training with Mace. ”
“No need to gloom and doom about it,” Luke said lightly. “A year is a long time, and who knows what we’ll be doing by then? One thing I’m sure of, though, is that wherever you go, I’m going with you.”
“Mmmm.” She leaned in to kiss him, and they didn’t come up for air for a while.
“Where did the animals go?” Luke asked, breaking the liplock.
“Uh ... I’m not sure. We should probably go find them.”
The hillside was quiet and to all appearances deserted, flowers bobbing in the afternoon sun. They wandered along the path to the spring, and Inga crouched down to scoop up a drink of cool water.
“Hey,” Luke said suddenly. “Has that always been like that?”
He pointed to the rocks above the spring. Inga turned to look. For a number of years, the gargoyle statue her dad had acquired from Mace had crouched at the head of the spring as if to guard it.
Now it was quite a ways higher up the hill, and had its wings half-spread.
“Uh, no. I don’t think it was always like that. You think the ones up here can come to life, too?”
“I’m choosing not to think about it,” Luke said. “I’ve come to the conclusion that if I believe Mace’s statues are staring at me or moving when I’m not looking, I’m going to end up a paranoid wreck.”
They climbed up the hill, hand in hand, through knee-high flowers.
When they got to the top, Inga smiled reminiscently at the place where they had made love for the first time.
Somehow, it seemed that all their firsts were tied up in this place.
Their first meal together, their first kiss, the first time they made love . ..
“What do you think of getting married here?” she asked.
Luke gave her a look of alarm. “What, now?”
Inga shoved him playfully. “No, not now. Who’s going to perform the ceremony, the dog? He’s smart, but I don’t think reading vows is in his skill set. I just think that if we do, you know, do the deed somewhere, I’d like it to be here.”
“I think that it feels right,” Luke said slowly. He had been doing that more, she’d noticed—consulting with the instinctive animal side of himself. Then his nose wrinkled and he grinned. “Do the deed?”
“You know what I mean—”
A sudden, distant bark echoed through the warm afternoon air.
They both hurried along the top of the hill until they could look down.
The wrinkled coastline undulated in and out here, and Rogue was apparently down on the rocky shore somewhere behind the jutting point of land that sheltered the small cove where the cabin was located.
“Rogue!” Luke bellowed, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Get up here!” He whistled, the shrill sound cutting through the air, then shook his head. “No good. He must want us to come down there.”
“We’d better be careful,” Inga said, looking down the steep rocks dubiously. “Some of us can’t phase out our bodies if we get in trouble.”
They scrambled down the hill, and she found herself glorying in the pleasure of using unaccustomed muscles.
Rogue was soon visible, as well as the two griffins who seemed to be having fun scampering all over some kind of .
.. structure? Object? Or was it a shipwreck .
..? She let out a delighted cry when she realized what it actually was.
“Luke! That’s the Dingboat!”
“The what?”
“My missing boat! It washed all the way up the coast here.”
The boat had been driven high on the rocks by the storm. It was overturned, but as far as Inga could tell after an examination, although it had developed some new dents and there was no telling if the motor would work, it was still seaworthy.
Rogue danced around happily. Luke scruffed his ears.
“Nice job, fella.” He looked over at Inga, who was crouched to examine the motor.
It was definitely going to need a thorough overhaul.
“How are we going to get it anywhere? I don’t know if even a couple of shifters can carry something up a hill that steep without using ropes. ”
“Don’t be silly. It’s a boat. It floats. At least, it had better float, and if it doesn’t, it’s not going to be much good as a boat anyway.”
Working together, they flipped it over and maneuvered it into the edge of the rolling waves. It did float. Inga tried to start the motor several times and failed.
“This, on the other hand, is going to need tools I don’t have with me. And it’s lost the oars. You know what, you may have a point.”
“No,” Luke said. “You have a point. Get in. You too, Rogue.”
Inga cautiously climbed into the bobbing skiff, holding fast to a rock to keep herself from being washed out to sea, boat and all. “What are you planning?”
For an answer, Luke began stripping, tossing his clothes into the boat.
“Oh, I like where this is going,” Inga said.
Luke braced himself on the rocks, the texture rough under his bare feet, and turned into a bear.
“Or not,” Inga added.
But it was playful. She knew that Luke had been working hard on his shifting, as well as controlling his other abilities. And it made her happy to see how simple and easy it was for him now.
Luke used his big front paws to push the boat containing the woman and the dog away from the shore, then slid in after it. Water slopped around him.
Inga settled down, sitting in the stern while Rogue stood up in the prow.
It was only a short distance around the point of land and into the cove, so as Luke began pushing the boat, she decided she might as well settle down and enjoy the ride.
Even if the little craft did get away from him, it wouldn’t go too far, and she could always shift and swim ashore if she had to.
The only casualties on a warm, calm day like this would be her clothes.
But the ride went smoothly. She glided into the cove propelled by that most unique of conveyances, the bear-powered boat motor.
Inga laughed. She looked up at the hill with the cabin on it. Against the clear sky above them, Cinnamon and Sugar, who had turned up their snouts at the possibility of a ride, swooped and squabbled and occasionally dived to hunt for fish in the shallow cove.
What a strange, crazy life. She wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Luke pushed the boat into the shallows, and Inga hopped out, getting her feet wet, to pull it ashore. Luke gave it a tremendous push from behind that propelled it dozens of paces up the beach, well out of reach of any ill-behaved wave trying to pull it back to a watery grave, even at high tide.
“Nice work,” Inga said, and she laughed again as Luke shook himself all over, shedding water like a big dog.
Rogue immediately followed suit, and Inga laughed harder, covering her face to keep from getting dog and bear water in her mouth.
“Come on, you guys.” She patted Luke on his furry shoulder. “I think we’ve done enough work for one day. Let’s go home.”