Chapter 136 Something Ordinary
ARYA
The sound Ryker made was not a word.
Sage grabbed my arm. Her grip was tight and warm and entirely un-Sage-like in its immediate emotional legibility.
“Spring,” she said.
“Spring,” I confirmed.
Ryker pulled me into a hug that lifted me slightly off the floor, which was not something I’d anticipated and which made me laugh in a way that surprised me.
“Careful,” Luca said from behind us, appearing at the exact moment the hug reached its most enthusiastic.
“She’s fine,” Ryker said, setting me down. His eyes were bright. “She’s more than fine.” He looked at Luca with an expression that moved through several things and landed somewhere genuine. “Congratulations.”
Luca took his hand. A pause.
“You’ll be good for this,” Ryker said. “Both of you.”
“We’re working on it,” Luca said.
The music changed to something slower and Sage pulled Ryker back toward the dancing with the specific efficiency of someone managing a moment that had reached its natural conclusion. I stood with Luca in the warm edge of the firelight.
“He took it well,” I said.
“He loves you.” Luca took my hand. “He’s going to love whoever comes from you.”
“And from you.”
“Yes.” Something in his voice that the word didn’t fully contain. “And from me.”
The fire was warm. The dancing continued. Across the room Mira had been pulled onto the floor by a young wolf who’d decided that shyness was someone else’s problem, and she was laughing in the surprised way of someone relearning how.
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LUCA
When the celebration had wound down and the guests were dispersed to various accommodations and the night was quiet and cold and full of stars, Arya and I walked the perimeter of Silver Creek’s grounds.
Not for security reasons. The night was good and neither of us was quite ready to stop being in this particular day.
The snow was packed down from the afternoon’s gathering, and our footsteps were quiet in it, and above us the stars were very clear.
“Tell me something ordinary,” she said. It has become a sort of tradition for us now.
I thought about it. “This morning I couldn’t find my second boot for twenty minutes. It was in the library. I don’t know how it got there.”
“I put it there,” she said.
“Why?”
“I found it in the garden and I was going to the library and I forgot to tell you.” She glanced at me. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not annoyed. I’m curious about the trajectory between the garden and the library.”
“It’s a long story involving a particularly persistent ward signal and a cup of tea I didn’t want to put down.”
“That’s not a long story. That’s two sentences.”
“The ward signal part is potentially longer.” She looked at the sky. “I’ve been tracking a low-frequency anomaly in the southwestern ward boundary for about a week. It’s not threatening. Just — interesting. Something I would have missed six months ago.”
“The land connection is getting more detailed?”
“More fluent,” she said. “It’s not more information. I’m just better at reading it.” She gave a slight pause. “There are things happening at the boundary level that I think have been happening for years and nobody’s been aware of. Small variations in ward maintenance quality, pressure from micro-environmental changes, the way the magical infrastructure responds to seasonal shifts.”
“You’re building a picture of the world’s magical baseline.”
“Slowly.” She looked at her own hands in the starlight. “It occurs to me that this is what the Moonbornes were doing before the massacre. Not in an intentional political sense. They were the people who were connected to the world’s magical infrastructure and they maintained it the way you maintain any living system. By being aware of it.”
“And when they were killed—”
“The maintenance stopped. Gradually, over centuries.” She was quiet for a moment. “I’m not saying I can fix what’s been deteriorating since the massacre. I’m saying I might be able to start understanding the scope of it.”
“Is that what the Institute is really for?”
“Partly.” She looked at me. “It’s for the void work and the dimensional safety work. But for this too. Saving a structure that can do what I’m doing without requiring it to be just me, because I’m not always going to be at full operational capacity.”
She said it as a matter of fact.
“Among other things.”
We walked on through the snow, the stars overhead and the ward network humming its background note and the world being large and full of things happening that were worth paying attention to.
“Luca,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Are you happy?”
I didn’t have to think about it.
“Yes,” I said. “Genuinely. Completely.” I squeezed her hand. “Are you?”
She looked at the stars for a moment.
“Yes,” she said. “I think I might have been working toward this my whole life without knowing what it was.”
“A cold night in Silver Creek?”
“Everything the night is made of.” She turned to face me. “The work that matters. The people I love. The thing we built together.” A pause. “You.”
I kissed her in the starlight, in the snow, with the ward network humming and the world going about its business in all directions, and felt the specific quality of something that didn’t have adequate language.
Real, my Lycan said. More real than anything.
Yes, I agreed. Exactly that.