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I had no idea how best to act, or to be, if I should beg for forgiveness, or pretend to be aloof—I just knew I didn’t want to do the wrong thing with all my heart and soul.
So I tried to do the only thing I could. I knelt down and reached for a scrubby plant that was out of season and willed it to grow.
“Just—fucking—please,” I cursed at it, with my hand out, urging my magic at it, trying to force it to doanythingfor me.
I felt it hear my plea and decide to be stubborn—all plants were stubborn, I was learning, and they did their own things in their own times, and they weren’t ever very interested in listening—then it chose to give me one small purple bloom, barely the size of a thumbnail.
I groaned and plucked it anyhow and kept walking on the rough trail to the road.
I protected the flower carefully,guarding its fragile petals from the wind with one hand so that I would have a gift to give her, as I finished making my way to the road that abutted Xelrim’s property. I rose up on my toes as I heard a thundering carriage come through the distant kaorak trees.
Sometime in the past mile I’d realized I was lucky Xelrim had bothered to send me. Shayla had always been so self-sufficient—even when we were younger, she’d been better at everything than me but magery—so I couldn’t imagine her needing my help with anything at all.
And whatever fears I’d had about our situation evaporated the second the horses slowed, because all I could think about was how excited I was to see her again. Of course I’d dreamed of meeting her someday—and of course in those dreams I’d already managed to become powerful, the kind of mage who would be able to stride up to her as fresh grass rose out of the ground to meet my feet, and for whom boughs of trees would graciously sweep aside...rather than still being just me, Wyrval—a cumbersome name, given to me by my mother after some long-dead relative, and one I only heard when Xelrim was yelling for me.
But none of that mattered, because in moments I was going to see her face again and hear her call me Val.
The door to the carriage burst open, framing her inside it, and I knew it was her, she had the same cheerful face and the same bright blue eyes, even if they were a little lined with exhaustion. But so much had changed with her body—the gentle curves she’d left with had somehow become rolling hills, and she was even more beautiful to me.
“Shayla!” I exclaimed, without thought, and she beamed.
“Val!” she shouted back, and suddenly the four years without her may as well just been a day. She was managing a large bag and a basket as she stepped out. I reached to take the bag from her at once—which freed her arm up to loop around my neck, wrapping me in a hug. “You got so tall!”
I laughed and briefly held her, breathing in her scent, which had slightly changed in her absence. Having seen her safely off, the door to the carriage snapped closed behind her and it continued, leaving her there with me.
“Are you staying?” I helplessly asked her, driven by the need to know. The bloom I’d made for her was crumpled and lost, just like I would be if she left again.
She took a deep inhale and gave me a tight smile. “For as long as I can.”
I briefly wished she were a kind of plant, something my magic could touch, and force to root to the ground. “I missed you,” I confessed.
“I missed you, too,” she said, and rose up on her toes to brush my cheek with a kiss.
I suddenly felt too much.
Every piece of clothing I was wearing was too hot and scratchy, my heart was too much for my ribcage—my very marrow was too much for my bones.
She didn’t notice any of that as she set her basket down to start fussing with something inside of it.
“There were three other people traveling with me,” she shared, shaking her head. “I didn’t want them to gawk, but poor little Frenel must be starving.”
And then she started slipping the right shoulder of her dress off.
It was a moment I had spent too many idle nights in bed considering with my root in my hand, stroking myself until I spilled sticky green, and now here it was at last and happening by daylight: the top half of her heavy breast exposed like a waxing moon—then I heard the sound of a child.
I whipped my head away, turning my body too, so she wouldn’t see how my imagination had tormented me. I felt more foolish than I had in months.
I heard her lightly laugh. “I take it Xel didn’t tell you?”
“Not a thing,” I said, shaking my head, turning red while facing the direction of the trees.
“That’s entirely like him, I suppose.”
Once again, I didn’t know what the right thing was to do around her, and so many other questions were riding on my tongue. Luckily I managed to only voice the most important one: “Shall we go home?”
“I’d like that.”
I somehow managedto pick up the basket and walk slightly ahead of her, slowly enough for her to keep up, but where it was impossible for me to see anything inappropriate.
