Page 67 of The Orc's Gift

“From what I understand,” I say.

Walt looks at Rhazgar for a moment with the expression he gets when he’s reading something. Then he nods once and goes back to his coffee. Walt is at a table near the stage tonight, not behind the bar. He’s been at a table near the stage every Friday for two months now, since the papers were signed and the bar became Kragen’s in every sense it hadn’t already been. The order is the same every time. He tips well. He doesn’t offer opinions unless asked, and when asked he gives one sentence that lands like a dropped stone.

For perhaps the first time since I’ve known him, he seems genuinely happy.

The room fills the way it usually does on Fridays—the regulars first, then the people who’d heard there was something worth hearing at the Taproom on Fridays. Ed and Pete are at their usual spots. Grulk has claimed a chair in the front and is currently explaining to the people on either side of him how he personally engineered this entire situation, which is not accurate and also not entirely wrong. He catches my eye across the room and pauses just long enough to look at me—warm, satisfied, completely himself. I raise my glass slightly. He beams and goes back to taking credit for everything.

Kragen finds me backstage—which is to say, in the hallway by the storage room, because this is a bar in Missouri and there is no actual backstage. Then Grulk appears at the end of it.

“Kragen.” He points with great ceremony. “You are more StillWater than you ever wanted to admit. I have always known this.”

Kragen is quiet for a moment. “A year ago, I would have argued with you about that.”

“Yes,” Grulk says. “And you would have been wrong.”

“And I would have been wrong.”

Grulk beams with the proud satisfaction of a male receiving credit he feels is long overdue. “I take full responsibility,” he announces, to both of us and possibly the storage room. “For all of it. You’re welcome.” He disappears back toward the bar at a volume that parts the crowd.

Kragen looks at me.

“He’s not wrong,” I say.

“No,” he says. “He’s not.”

The small stage at the Taproom holds two stools, two instruments, and approximately zero room for anything else, which is exactly right. My grandmother’s dulcimer on the left. Hisvelaradulcimer on the right. The wood-burned flowers pale under the stage lamp, the same pale pink I mixed from his description in my workshop before I knew what any of this was going to become.

We open with something of his, a melody from his world, old in the way that folk music is old, the kind of song that carries the weight of everyone who’s sung it before. The room goes quiet when he plays it, his voice and the dulcimer together, the way they’ve always been. I now understand, and somehow I’m only hearing it for the first time. Not more attentive. Held. Like the sound is asking something of them.

I watch the back of the room. Vraag and Riona are there. Riona’s hand is on his arm. She’s watching his face the way someone watches a face they’ve learned to read.

I watch Kragen watching what the music does to them.

What moves across his face says everything. Not a new thing: the completion of something that has been building since before I knew him, since a male who had been performing belonging for years sat in a bar with a guitar and didn’t yet know the performance was almost over. He is not performing now. He is just playing. His world’s music in his hands, his people in the room, a woman beside him with her grandmother’s dulcimer, and none of it requiring anything except that he be exactly who he is.

I come in on the third bar with the dulcimer, the way we’ve practiced, the Appalachian melody finding the spaces he leaves open for it. Two traditions in conversation. Neither subordinate. The room stays still in the way it stays still when something real is happening.

We play three songs from his world and four from mine, and then Generations, which is not from either world but belongs toboth of us and to our property and to a woman who cleaned up a broken plate without making it about the plate. When the last note fades, the room holds it for a moment before it applauds, which is how you know it was real.

A woman at the table nearest the stage—I don’t know her, she came with someone who knows Ed—leans forward while Kragen is adjusting his tuning.

“What are you called?” she asks. “Do you two have a name?”

I don’t have to think about it.

“The StillWater Duo,” I say.

He looks at me.

I look at him.

He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to. What moves across his face says everything, all the way through, the way he always does everything—completely, without apology, present in all of it.

After we play the second set, after the bar closes, Kragen’s hand finds mine on the edge of the stage. His thumb moves across my knuckles, slow and present, the way it does when he’s not thinking about it, which is always.

I think about the last verse of a song I heard through an open door on a Tuesday afternoon in July. A child’s hands on the dulcimer strings. I think about it the way I’ve beenthinking about it for months—not with the old fear, not with the old careful distance I kept between myself and anything that required believing the future would be different from the past. Just with the feeling of a door that is no longer closed.

I turn my face into his shoulder, breathe in the reassuring scent of him, cedar and flannel, and feel an optimism I haven’t let myself feel in a decade. He doesn’t say anything. Neither do I.

The Taproom settles into its after-close quiet. His bar now. A room that has held eight years of his life and is holding something different now: not the performance of belonging but the thing itself, arrived at last in a Missouri bar with avelaradulcimer and a woman who burned his flowers into wood because her hands took her there.

Outside, twenty-three miles east, the creek is running.

StillWater Place is waiting.

We know the way.