Epilogue
Sofia
Here’s a thing nobody tells you about orc harvest festivals: they happen outside. In Colorado. In November.
“It’s tradition,” Dakvaar had told me that morning, hauling his fourth armload of firewood past the kitchen window in the tone of a male who considered the matter closed. “Kap’parral is held under the open sky, so the gods can see what the clan protected this year.”
“The gods are going to see a bunch of frozen humans, is what they’re going to see.”
“The fire will be large.”
“That’s not an answer,” I teased, “that’s a threat.”
He’d stopped then, stacked wood balanced on one forearm like it weighed nothing, and bent down to kiss me—slow, unhurried, tusks bumping my cheek in the way I’d come to love almost ten months ago.
“The fire will be large,” he’d repeated against my mouth, “and you will stand near it, and I will bring you hot cider all night, and you will admit that my people know how to hold a festival.”
I mean, not gonna lie, that sounded like an okay compromise.
And it turned out that when he said the fire would be large, Dakvaar meant…colossal.
The fire was visible from space, probably—a roaring tower of orange in the middle of our backyard that Bardon and Kardok had spent two full hours constructing while each telling the other they were doing it wrong.
There’d been an argument about airflow. There’d been a diagram, at one point, drawn in the dirt with a stick.
Now half of Bramblewood milled around the finished product with drinks and paper plates, faces gold on one side and freezing on the other, while Rosa and the other kids dared each other closer to the heat until some adult hauled them back by their collars—an endless tide of children going in and out like the world’s most flammable surf.
A year ago I would have been freaking out about this, trust me.
But now? Surrounded by a community I’d come to love almost as much as I loved the life I’d built with Dakvaar, I didn’t feel the need to be as vigilant.
I kept an eye on Rosa the same way I kept an eye on all the kitlings—human and orc—who were here tonight, content in the knowledge that their parents were doing the same.
The picnic tables groaned under a spread that would’ve made my grandmother cheer: green bean casserole and pumpkin pie sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with a whole roasted bkarn haunch and a jug of something fermented that Torrk swore was traditional and nobody else would touch.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Legare had brought her ambrosia salad. It sat, untouched by human and orc alike, a bridge too far for both species. Some things unite us all.
My contribution lived between the two worlds, half-demolished before sundown—three dozen cinnamon rolls, Sunrise Café recipe, scaled up for orc appetites.
Dak had eaten four before the party even started, standing at my counter licking icing off his thumb and looking zero percent sorry about any of it.
“You’re going to ruin your festival dinner,” I’d told him.
“I am three hundred pounds, dkaar. Nothing ruins my dinner.”
“Uh-huh. Save some for your daughter.”
“Our daughter,” he’d said—mild, automatic, the way I knew he would—and I’d had to turn back to the oven so he wouldn’t see my face do the thing it still did whenever he said it.
Some things don’t change, is what I’m saying, and thank every god on both worlds for that.
Every morning he still drops Rosa at kindergarten—which she loves so ferociously she’s begun assigning homework to the rest of us; I got graded on my letter Q’s last week and did not do well—and then he follows me down the mountain to the café and takes his same booth, and I bring him his eggs, and Maggie pretends that the sight of an enormous orc mooning over his waitress wife is a great trial to her personally. My favorite customer. My best tipper.
He still leaves too much, and I’ve stopped fighting it; I put the tip right back in his wallet each evening, because I know I’m never going to want for anything for the rest of my life.
Although waitress isn’t the whole truth anymore.
Maggie offered me the assistant manager job again in September, and this time I said yes—mornings only, so I’m off in time to meet the kindergarten bus at the bottom of our road.
Turns out that during the years of carrying plates I had been quietly filing away opinions about scheduling and vendor orders and which distributors were cheating us on produce.
This meant I was just the person Maggie could hand a clipboard to. I still wait my old tables, though.
Some regulars you don’t give up.
Look at you, said the voice in my head—the one that used to only ever count exits. A job with a title. A town that knows your name.
A husband, added the newest voice, the one that still did a little spin every time it got to say the word.
I turned the ring on my finger. Plain gold, human-style, because he’d insisted on doing that part “the way of your people, so no one can mistake it.”
He’d worn a tux to our tiny courthouse wedding in June, custom-cut for shoulders that don’t come standard, and when I’d walked in wearing a knee-length white dress from a shop in Denver, my enormous unshakeable Wall of a Mate had made a sound like someone had checked him into the boards.
Torrk cried. Loudly. Through the whole thing.
There’s video, and in the video you can hear him honking into a handkerchief while the judge tries to keep a straight face, and I wouldn’t trade that video for anything I own.
I drifted away from the fire with my warm cider, past the ring of light and laughter, out to the dark edge of the yard.
To the pond.
Don’t, said the old voice.
It’s fine, said the new one. Look. It’s just water.
It was just water—dark and glassy, not frozen enough for skating yet, patient under the cold sky.
Rosa asked almost daily when the ice would be ready.
Dakvaar tested it every weekend, and I knew—because I know him now, down to the marrow, the way you know your own heartbeat—that he’d tested it twice today before letting a single festival guest set foot in our yard.
And I could stand here and look at it. That was the new part. For months I couldn’t face the back windows after dark; I’d catch the black shine of it from the corner of my eye and my whole body would go cold from the inside.
Now it was mostly just our pond again—except on the nights it wasn’t, and on those nights Dakvaar wrapped himself around me in the dark without asking a single question, one hand splayed over my sternum like he could hold my heartbeat steady from the outside.
Sometimes he can.
Rosa, being five, had internalized the whole thing like one of her animated movies: the bad man fell through the ice because he didn’t follow the rules.
She’d announced exactly that to her entire kindergarten class during a unit on winter safety.
Her teacher relayed it to me at the parent-teacher meeting with a very careful expression, waiting to see what I’d do, and I’d laughed right there at that miniature table until I cried—both things, at once, as Dakvaar held me and shared a simplified version for the teacher.
Kids are terrifying. Kids are also, occasionally, exactly right.
The bad men didn’t listen to the rules about the thin ice. It was true, and also a teaching moment.
“There you are.” Lila materialized at my elbow with a fresh mug and traded me for my empty one. She didn’t say anything stupid, like are you okay? She just stood with me, hip to hip, looking out at the water.
Skaters understand ice. I think she understood mine.
“The detective called last week,” I said, a little dully. “It’s closed. Officially, finally. The inquest ruled accidental death back in the spring, but there were estate loose ends, paperwork. Now there’s no file anywhere with my name in it.”
“And the other thing?”
The other thing. Degas. I still don’t know exactly what Dakvaar’s people did in those weeks after—only that he drove to Denver twice with Lila’s terrifying lawyer, came home grim and satisfied both times, and that whatever debt Anthony owed had died in that pond with him.
Nobody ever came. Nobody ever called. My daughter was nobody’s collateral, not anymore, not ever.
“Gone,” I said. “Like it never was.”
“Good.” She clinked her mug against mine, let one more quiet moment pass for both of us, and then—because Lila has an impeccable sense for exactly when to rescue me from my own head—tipped her chin back toward the fire.
“Now come explain what’s wrong with our goalie, because Kardok’s theories are getting unhinged. ”
Torrk was, in fact, being weird.
Okay, so Torrk at a party is normally a natural disaster with a highlight reel. Torrk at this party had spent the entire evening on a hay bale, staring into the flames, checking his phone, and sighing. Audibly, like a Victorian widow.
When Jord bounded over to show him a video, Torrk had patted his shoulder. Gently. Jord had backed away like he’d witnessed something paranormal.
“Twenty bucks says it’s a female,” Holly said, appearing at my other side with a plate of pie. Jord’s girlfriend had a bloodhound’s nose for gossip and absolutely no shame about it, which is why I liked her so much.
“It’s not a female,” Kardok called from the entirely separate conversation he was supposed to be having. “He probably lost a bet. Or found a lump. Hey Torrk, did you find a lump in a weird place?”
“Gods below!” Bardon groaned. “Don’t give him an opening to talk about his testicles!”
“Leave him be,” Dakvaar rumbled, ambling over with Rosa riding his shoulders like a conquering general, mittens buried in his hair, cheeks blazing from fire and sugar. “Perhaps he’s reflecting on last season.”
“Last season was good,” Jord protested, instantly abandoning the Torrk mystery for the better argument. “Conference finals! Two whole rounds farther than last year—”
“And then we lost,” said Kardok.
“Two rounds farther—”
“In five games.”