Chapter 28 #2
Robin bounced Birdie on her hip, laughing at something Eric was saying.
Sylvie was there, examining the latest beds.
Sara and Ben. Gladys. Nichola from Bridge Mechanics.
People Maris had sold plants to, and people whose gardens she’d built, and people she only knew to nod to on Main Street.
Every one of them had given up a Saturday to help a gargoyle carry his father into the roses and celebrate his presence.
Garrick straightened. He looked at the statue and said something to it that only the two of them heard, his mouth barely moving.
Then he turned around and faced all of them, and she watched him do the hardest thing she had ever seen him do, which was speak to more than three people at once about a feeling.
He was quiet for a long moment. Long enough that anyone who didn’t know him would have thought he’d changed his mind. Then his grey eyes flared to gold.
“Thank you,” he said, “for coming.”
That was nearly it. She could see him deciding it was enough, and then deciding, right after, that it wasn’t. His gaze found her at the edge of the terrace and stayed there.
“I sleep the way my people sleep.” His voice didn’t rise, but it carried, low and even, the way stone carries sound. “Last winter I went under meaning to come up at the end of January. I came up two weeks early instead. And for eight months I couldn’t have told you why.”
The whole garden was silent. Even Birdie had stopped fussing.
“I can now,” Garrick said. “It was her.”
He didn’t point. He didn’t have to. Fifty faces turned towards her on the terrace steps. She felt her face go hot, and did not care.
“Maris Calder is my mate,” Garrick said, in the flat tone he used to state an undeniable fact.
“And her son Toby is mine now too, by his own request, which is the only permission I’ve ever cared about.
” His hand came to rest on the top of Toby’s hard hat.
“They’re moving into this house. I wanted my father out of that room before they did, because—”
He stopped. And this was the part she hadn’t known was coming, the part he’d never said even to her.
“—because a grave isn’t a door you shut,” he said. “I forgot that for fifteen years. I’m not going to forget it again.”
Flora made a sound that in a lesser woman would have been a sob and in Flora was clearly a suppressed I told you so.
That was all. He’d used maybe sixty words, which for Garrick was practically an epic.
And he stood there in his mother’s garden with his father in the light and his hand on his son’s head, and looked at her as though the entire town weren’t watching.
She crossed the terrace and the grass and went straight to him, rose up on her toes, and kissed her mate in front of half of Fairhaven Falls.
The town, being the town, did not fall respectfully silent.
“FINALLY,” Sylvie hollered.
“That’s going in the newsletter,” someone said.
“I called it in August,” Flora announced to no one and everyone. “August. Ask anyone. I have witnesses.”
“You have coffee,” Rona said, pressing a paper cup into the old orc’s hand. “Sit down, you’ve been standing since dawn, you’ll fall in the roses and I’m not fishing you out.”
Garrick lifted his head from the kiss just far enough to speak, his forehead against hers. His voice was pitched for her alone, under the rising noise of a party that had decided to happen whether anyone planned it or not. “Was that too many words?”
“It was perfect,” she said. “Do not develop a habit.”
“No danger.” He wrapped his arms around her.
And over her shoulder she felt him look at his father, sitting easy now in the open air among Elowen’s roses, where the two of them had once fought every June and made up every July.
The living warmth of the town was spread out on the grass around them.
A five-year-old in a pair of hinged wings was tugging at his sleeve to ask if they could plant something.
“Later,” he told Toby. “We’ll plant something later. Right now we’re going to let Rona feed everyone before Grondar eats the tray.”
“I heard that,” Grondar said, with his mouth full.
Toby considered it all—the roses, the grandfather in the sun, the mother and the not-a-stranger-anymore wrapped up together on the grass, the entire loud full impossible town that had turned up for a closed door.
Then he delivered his verdict with the grave, thorough satisfaction of a boy who had been right about everything all along.
“Good,” he said, and went to find the trowels.
Flora came down the Stonehaven drive and turned towards the square, finally satisfied.
Eight months for that foolish male to realize his mate was on the other side of the wall. Honestly. Still, he’d got there in the end, and Corwin was out in the roses where he belonged. She’d call that a success.
She smoothed the glitter down over her chest and took a look around the square. With any luck her next victim—subject—would prove less obstinate. But who?
Aidan came along the far side of the square at that exact moment, his hands in his pockets, bound for the Moonlight Tavern without a care in the world.
Hmm. A wolf wouldn’t wait eight months. A wolf wouldn’t wait eight days.
As she watched him go, a cold breeze swept down from the mountains bringing the distant scent of snow.
Snow.
Now that would be perfect…