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It had to be.
Her coming back into my life and letting me take her like this—there was no other explanation.
I groaned, shoving myself forward, feeling my body answer hers, wanting to paint the womb I should’ve claimed with my sticky green seed. I shuddered and grunted, the first wave passing through my body and into hers.
“Val,” she panted.
“I’m not done yet,” I got out through gritted teeth.
“I love you,” she said, and it was like I came uncorked.
“Shay—” I shouted as I thrust and it was like I felt everything that was important and true and good in me was flowing directly into her. “Oh—Shay—Shay—”
“Mmhmm,” she agreed as my hips rocked her to my completion, and when I was done I grabbed her in my arms and pulled us both down to the ground.
“I don’t want to leave you,” I said, while I was still plugged inside her.
We lay there, catching our breaths for a very long while, and then her hand drifted up to stroke my face above her shoulder. “You don’t have to—as least not until I’m very old,” she said then. “Once I am, and you are still the same, I suppose you can find a new pretty girl.”
I growled at that, to refute her—but then I realized she’d also run away for her own well-being.
Because loving a mage could only break your heart.
“Shay,” I said, determined to somehow be different from all the other mages that had ever come before.
Then Frenel made a sound, and the same hand that’d been petting me reached out to rock his basket, so I kept my thoughts to myself.
I was exhausted. Physically, from mounting her, and emotionally because the last four years of my life had been empty, and now I was filled to overflowing. I took a look around the room and marveled at what I’d done while I’d been inside her. Broccoli plants had set to flower, wildly out of season, and tomatoes that’d only been small and green before were now lush and wide-hipped.
They’d all needed something I hadn’t been able to give them, until just a little bit ago.
Maybe just like my plants needed sun, and dirt—maybe my magic had just needed her this whole time?
But what was its cost? I couldn’t claim to know, as I kept stroking her from shoulder to hip, in the same rhythm as she kept rocking the basket.
“We should probably go back,” she whispered, not wanting to wake him. I made a denigrating sound at that, and she chuckled. “I’m going to have to launder this dress, and comb my hair—and what will Xelrim do to you if he catches us?”
“Probably pop my head off like a tick,” I said with a groan, rising to an elbow. I felt a slight tear where my skin had been pressed against the earth, and looked at it strangely, before offering her a hand. “It’ll have been worth it.”
She shook her head and wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know if I can be in love with a headless man,” she said, making me smile.
“Then we won’t tempt fate today,” I promised. “But...maybe tonight? His hearing is going, I swear it, he regularly sleeps through thunderstorms.” And the man had never once woken up when Frenel was crying that I could tell.
“Yes. If we can,” she said, giving me a delighted look.
I leaned down to kiss her—and something was wrong.
I felt a rising horror in my gut—was this the price of my magic? Had its pendulum swung?
Then Shayla gasped too. “I smell smoke,” she said, looking out the barn doors with wide eyes, before whirling on me. “Did you leave anything on fire this morning?” she asked. “Think hard.”
I shook my head. I always had my same routine—there would’ve been no reason for the ember I used to heat our morning kettle to have jumped out of its safe metal pan.
Then I caught sight of her sheer terror as she jumped up and hastily reassembled her clothing.
“We have to go, Val—now. This is what I was afraid of,” she said, quickly sweeping Frenel from his basket, and installing him in his wraps against her chest.
“Why—and to where?” The ominous sense of wrongness I had was only getting stronger—like nerves I’d never listened to before were responding, making unused parts of my brain light up.
