Page 22 of Into Ember

“I know.”

“Forever.”

“Gladly.”

“Until the day you die.”

“…Longer.”

She’s asleep before I finish. Gone, mid-grievance, her breath spreading warm through my shirt. I lie there in the dark of a realm she didn’t know existed this morning, smiling at the ceiling, because she’s sounding like herself again and the price is more than fair.

I stay until her grip on my shirt lets go on its own. Then I slide out slow and tuck the blanket up over her shoulder. One foot has escaped it, sole printed with the whole three-hour walk — the strap-line of those ridiculous sandals crossed over the arch like a brand. Salve, tomorrow, before she’s up. I cover the foot, and press my lips to her forehead, once, light enough not to register.

I turn around.

Gunnar is in the doorway.

Shoulder against the frame, arms crossed, and his eyes go straight past me to her — the shape of her under the blanket, the slow rise and fall. He came upstairs to confirm it with his own eyes.

We look at each other. There’s nothing to say and neither of us says it.

He pushes off the frame and walks downstairs. I follow.

The living room has pulled itself in around the fire. Brock is on the floor with his back against one end of the couch, and when Gunnar drops onto the cushion above him it doesn’t look planned. It never does. I take the hearth, boots on the patch of stone worn pale by centuries of exactly this. On the windowsill, Gerald.

For a while nobody says anything. The fire works through a log. Upstairs, her breathing stays slow and even — all five of us can hear it, and all five of us are listening, and nobody pretends otherwise anymore.

“Well,” Gunnar says finally. “That was almost catastrophic.”

Nobody asks what he means.

“If she had shifted,” Leif says, “there would have been no controlling it. Not a first shift. Not out of panic.”

“There wouldn’t be a house left,” Rayner says. Calm. Factual.

Nods around the fire.

“But you all felt it,” Brock says. He’s been quiet, and when Brock has been quiet, what comes next has been checked twice. “What it did. When it couldn’t shift.”

Silence.

“It reached for us,” Leif says.

“She’s ours,” Gunnar says. Flat.

“Yes.” Leif looks at the fire. “But that’s not what tonight was.”

Everyone waits.

“Tonight went the other direction. Her dragon didn’t reach for comfort. It didn’t reach for one of us. It reached for all five, in the dark, in a body that has never done this before — and it settled when it had us.”

He looks up.

“Her dragon knows we’re hers.”

The fire pops. Nobody moves.

Rayner’s whole face eases, like a man hearing confirmation of something his heart decided years ago. And Gunnar is looking at the fire like it insulted him. His jaw works. The joke assembles behind his teeth, and I watch him load it, and aim it, and — put it down.