Page 54 of The Orc’s Comfort

Later, we eat in comfortable silence. I’m thinking about all of it: what today looks like, what tomorrow does, whether any of this is real in the way it feels right now. He catches me watching him and doesn’t ask what’s in my head. Just reaches over and refills my coffee like it’s the most natural thing in the world, like nothing life-changing happened twelve hours ago.

“Your quiet thinking is loud,” Rhazgar observes.

“I’m a librarian. We have a lot of inner monologues.”

He considers this. “In WarmHearth tradition, when two people have claimed each other, it is customary to make it known. Not announced. Simply… visible.”

“It’s already pretty visible.” My hand flies to the mark as pride flares through me.

“More visible,” he clarifies. “There is a tradition…” He stops. Sets down his fork with the same deliberate care he uses for everything he says out loud to me. “I would like to give you something. When you’re ready. Not yet. But soon.”

“What kind of something?”

“A connection band.” His gaze meets mine. “In WarmHearth tradition, it is silver. Open-ended, the ends curve toward each other but do not close, because the bond is chosen each day rather than locked in place. I would shape it with both our hands. The metal yields to shared heat. It cannot be fitted alone.”

I look down at my wrist. Bare. Ordinary. The idea of something there, something his hands made, shaped to me specifically, does something complicated to my chest.

“I haven’t made it yet,” Rhazgar says. “I wanted to ask first. Some things should be chosen, not assumed.”

The care in him, asking before doing, makes me reach for his hand instead of answering right away.

“Yes,” I say. “When you’re ready.”

Something eases in his expression. Not relief, but the quiet certainty of a man who has arrived somewhere and knows it.

“Then I will begin.”

We finish breakfast. He washes the plates. I find my dress.

Later, walking back to my own condo with his scent still on my skin and his mark warm on my neck, I think: this is what it looks like. Not grand declarations on mountain plateaus. Just eggs and a question asked properly and a man who already knows the answer but asks anyway.

I will tell Eliza on Monday; she will already know from my face. My mother will call on Tuesday with opinions I’m already prepared to answer. There will be board meetings and grant cycles and the singular adventure of presenting next year’s cultural programming while being entirely, visibly besotted with one of the presenters. None of it frightens me. A whole life ahead, full of healing broth and late-night herb labeling and arguments about whether alphabetical or thematic organization is superior.

The band first. Then all the rest of it.

I can’t wait.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Julia

Three days after he tells me how the connection band works, he knocks at my door.

It isn’t the eight o’clock knock I learned to anticipate like a heartbeat during the weeks I was healing. This one comes at a different hour, quieter and more deliberate. I’ve been expecting it, but hearing it makes the moment real. Something inside me settles into certainty.

I open the door.

He’s holding a small leather pouch in both hands. No broth. No containers. No notebook. Just him in the afternoon light, and that expression I’ve learned to read: the one that means he’s already past the point of uncertainty and arrived somewhere on the other side of it. Settled. Certain. The version of him that exists when he has stopped managing the distance between himself and the world.

“If you’re still willing,” he says.

I step back to let him in.

He sets the pouch on my kitchen table and opens it with respect. Inside is a curve of silver: open-ended, the surface worked with small geometric impressions, the ends curving toward each other without quite touching. It looks unfinished. I know enough now to understand that’s the point.

“I shaped the base,” he says. “But the fitting requires both of us.” He looks up. “You know how it works.”

I do. He told me three days ago, and I’ve been thinking about it since: about metal that yields to shared heat, about a thing that cannot be made alone.