Epilogue
Seven months later. Eight, if you count by Gorrath Venn’s stubborn moons, which I’ve had to learn.
The room he built me sits off the main hall of our house, tucked into the hillside with the rest of it, dry-stone walls he read and placed himself, a window facing the Ironspine peaks.
A vein of stonemoss runs along the ceiling and warms to amber in the evening.
My machine is on its stand, and I don’t know how he did it, but one of his engineering friends made it so the stonemoss can be used to power my machine.
I don’t need to know how the magic works, just that it does.
The stone he carved me is over the door.
He mounted it before he moved a single piece of furniture in. The eyebrow dared me to argue.
I work most mornings, though litigation is scarce. What there is instead is two hundred years of memory per orc. Valdrek wants the stories down so that someday people on Earth can hear stories about orcs.
So the elders come to my little room, one at a time, and sit in the enormous chair Valdrek built for them, and they talk, and I take it down.
The clan calls the growing stack of pages the kept-words, and they treat it like a relic.
They treat me like the strange holy creature who makes it.
After a lifetime of being furniture, I am still not entirely adjusted to walking into a hall full of seven-foot warriors who go respectfully quiet because the keeper of the record has entered.
His uncle came in the second month, the loudest male in Stormbreak gone gray at the temples, and sat in the enormous chair with his hands on his knees, and gave me Kel Doru from the beginning. The true story.
Valdrek stood in the doorway for the whole telling, and at the end, his uncle looked past me to Valdrek and said, “Now it will not drift.” What passed between them after that, I kept off the page. Some records belong to two people.
At night, Valdrek reads the runes to me in a deep, soothing rumble. I fall asleep mid-sentence on the regular.
I made good on the gift basket before we left, the size of Keth’s head, as promised, and Diane says Keth showed it to everyone who crossed the lobby for a week.
He’s been thanking me ever since with new titles for the tablet that came with us.
He sends them through the relay every month, along with a bag of butterscotch taped to the crate.
The tablet lives by the hearth now, and we listen together in the evenings, me against Valdrek’s chest, his arm around me.
He remains unmoved on dukes, but he’s softened toward cowboys.
“The cowboy works with his hands and says what he means,” he told me once. “I trust the cowboy.”
Last month, a heroine spent nine chapters not telling the hero about the baby, and Valdrek stood up, walked a full lap of the house, and said, “One conversation,” with such genuine grief that I laughed myself into a coughing fit.
Brokk is here most weeks because a shieldmate bond apparently functions like a loud moon in permanent orbit.
He’s exactly as advertised, a rockslide with tusks who talks enough for four males and calls me “little sister” and takes personal credit for our entire marriage on the grounds that he told Valdrek about the program first. His mate is human, a former accountant who rates everything on a ten-point scale and rated our mating celebration a nine point five, deducting half a point because she cried and considers that a flaw.
She rates Valdrek’s eyebrow a consistent eight.
I’ve told her it deserves a ten in context, and she says nothing gets a ten except Brokk. They’re perfect for each other.
I called my family before the Thursday transport to leave Earth, all five of them on one screen and talking over each other the way they always have.
When I told them I was leaving the planet, my mother cried.
My sister, the one with the sentence about people like me, went quiet for once, then said she was glad, and meant it.
They message me through the relay, and we have a better relationship now than we ever had.
I just had to be across the galaxy. I’m okay with this.
In public, my husband still says almost nothing. The stronghold reads his eyebrow, and a few young warriors have started imitating his stillness with mixed results. I just smile when I see it.
At night in private, the vault opens, and he spends like a king.
He narrates my days back to me better than I lived them and tells me what my collarbone did to him at dinner.
He talks me through every filthy detail in that unhurried register until I lose every single thought I own and have to look for them again in the morning.
Last month, I asked for a window bench for this room. Out loud, unprompted. Valdrek treated the request like a national holiday, and there’s a bench now, with a cushion. Every time I sit on it, I win.
The mark on my neck pulses with warmth, which means he’s close, and then the whole doorway of my little room goes dark as he ducks in.
He smells of cold air and juniper. There’s one hand behind his back, and he sets a plate beside my machine.
Flat bread, still warm, and winter fruit cut into pieces small enough for a human mouth.
The elders ran long today, and he heard my stomach from the forge, probably, or the bond told him, or he just pays attention.
“Eat,” he says. Then he leans down, presses his mouth to the mark, and adds against my skin, “Then come to bed, thess’venna. I’ve been saving up all day.”
He banks the hearth, and I sit a moment in the amber light in a stone room, next to a stack of kept-words two hundred years deep.
I came to that island to keep everyone’s words but my own. Turns out mine were worth keeping. The proof is carved into a stone over the door.
He said nothing. The whole island swore to it. But once I was there, he said everything. He was just waiting for me to walk into the room and take it down.
And I do.
The End