Importance of a Name - Chapter 2 - ohHOLYmoves (2024)

Chapter Text

The ticking of a clock, up high above the mantle of the fireplace, scratches the inside of her ears. It always has. Each second reminds her of what she is not doing and all that needs done. Rustling fabric mingling with laughter and excited exchanging overpower the ticking occasionally. She ignores this.

Until, from past the room she is working in, she hears her name being called.

Ticking accompanies her footsteps into the lower floor that is empty at the moment. Tabletops scarred by use over the long years have been polished to a shine. As have the chairs that are tucked in nearly around them. At the bar, the only movement is Percy who is nestled into his bed by Carver’s stool. No sounds of whistling nor sizzling come from the kitchen today. They are not working the pub today. If guests arrive, she will fix them meager plates that she can manage and send them upstairs to settle. They do not work the lower floor at the end of the month anymore.

Ghedric is wearing his nicest tweed trousers with a waist coat to match. His hair and beard have been washed and combed with a nice hat set atop the coif to keep it neat. Beside him Carver is dressed for travel in her usual outfit. Though today she is wearing the white blouse with wooden heart shaped buttons.

“What is it?”

Carver lifts a distracted arm to beckon her, busy with checking her travel bag for what they need. Once it is assured it is properly packed, she hands it Ghedric who sets it in his lap for safe keeping.

“We’re leaving now.”

River stoops to kiss her father on the cheek, “Have fun. Please travel safely.”

Ghedric rolls his chair forward so the tip of his boot can nudge River’s shins, “You could come with us.”

“No, I can’t. Someone needs to stay behind to watch over things.”

“I could do it.”

“No to that too, Papa. This is time for you and your daughter-in-law to bond and complain about me when I’m not around. I’m fine, really. Don’t fuss over me.”

He does not look pleased but then, he never does when they leave her behind to handle everything on her own. Each month when Carver makes her trip to Newin and Ghedric accompanies her, he always tries to convince her to come. Suggesting that perhaps they would like to spend time together going on dates in the big city or that they sequester themselves in the inn instead. River does her best to brush it aside casually, keeping up a smile for appearance.

“Are you sure?”

“Papa, yes. It’s alright.”

“It’s just that, you two—“

River feels that tickle of guilt surge up that makes her hurry to cut him off, “We’re fine. Carver does not mind. She enjoys spending time with you, Papa. I’ll be here when you both get back.”

Carver leans down to press a chaste kiss to her cheek, “And that always makes me hurry back. Knowing you will be here waiting.”

And she always complains about me laying it on too thick.

River chokes down the admonishment while in front of her father. Instead, she turns around to set a hand on her wife’s chest, smiling up at her.

“Don’t flirt with me in front of Papa.”

“I don’t mind.” Ghedric says while he slips on his gloves.

“He doesn’t mind.” Carver says with a smile that is raw mischief.

“Be safe,” She grits between her teeth, patting Carver’s collarbone with her fingertips, “Don’t make me a widow.”

“I’ll do my best. What would you like me to bring back?”

“Oh stop it—what? Bring back? What do you mean?”

Carver reaches to hold her by her biceps, thumb pressing into the freckles on her skin shown from her sleeveless dress today. It makes her head foggy. The only time they are truly physically affectionate is in front of people, to continue the ruse that they married for love and hold each other dearly even still. Months after the trial of their nuptials. Carver’s touch is always the first fire bequeathed to man through trials long past. Something the scorches her to the root and leaves her scalded for hours afterward.

Try as she might, it is difficult not to be enraptured by her wife. To be swept into the enchanting beauty that will, at times, take her into her arms and give her doting looks. Fake though they may be, they still hold a power over her that she cannot deny. She is only human after all.

Her wife rubs her thumbs side to side over River’s feverish skin, standing so tall when beside her that her head tips back to hold her gaze. Such closeness, such intimacy, when given to a woman like River that has never felt this touch with another always wrecks her. She thinks Carver might know it, might enjoy setting her aflame for amusem*nts sake just to be the one that gets a reaction from River O’Bru.

“I will not be coming back without a gift in hand for you, my hard-working wife. So what would you like? Sweets? New sewing needles? Some fabric?”

“Have you done something wrong?”

Carver’s chuckle is winsome and winding, wrapping itself around the base of her neck like a winter chilled ribbon of silk. The thumbs swipe down again, tapping against a constellation of freckles that are more prominent on the backside of arm.

“I have done nothing wrong,” She almost pulls away, reflexively, when Carver leans down to kiss her upon her brow, “Maybe I’m trying to impress you.”

Ghedric’s charmed laugh behind her reminds her to keep her tongue in check.

“Impress me? You’ve already got me as your wife. What more do you desire?”

“It’s not a matter of desire. I do not want anything, that is where your hang up rests. I merely want to give my wife a well-earned treat. So, tell me what you would like otherwise I will make my best guess and hope it suits you.”

“I,” She clicks her tongue against her teeth and looks over her shoulder to pin her father with a hard stare, “Are you putting romantic notions in her head?”

He waves at her, looking perfectly pleased with the situation, “I’m blameless. Maybe you just got yourself a thoughtful lady, honey.”

“Hm. I’m sure that thrills you.”

His eyes are melted pools, stuck to her and unable to hide the pride and joy and the concern even still, “It sure does. This is all I could have hoped for you.”

“Hm,” She turns back to Carver who has not wavered, who stands waiting for an answer except with a softer smile now, “Whatever makes you happy, dear.”

“River. It’s a gift for you, darling.”

“You’re—it’s your allowance. Don’t waste your money on me.”

Carver issues a decisive tsk and shakes her head, “Stubborn as a mule.”

“I’m fine.”

“I’ll decide on something myself then.”

“Carver!”

“Ah! Don’t try it,” The hands float away so arms made leaner every day by archery wrap around her, drawing her into a tight embrace, “I’ll think of you every moment until I see you again.”

River rolls her eyes though no one can see it while she is crushed against her wife’s chest, “And I shall think of you only when I need something from a high shelf.”

“Very good then, that means you’ll think of me often.”

A very ugly snort laugh slips out that makes her tip her head forward from the force of it leaving her. Carver joins the chorus, clenching her fingers around River’s bodice to keep her close.

“You’re too quick sometimes.”

“Aren’t I? Don’t let any other men help you while I’m gone.”

“No, no. Of course not. Nor would I want their help when I know I have you,” She swallows a laugh that she feels Carver struggle with too, “I’ll live without pepper until you come home.”

“I knew you got out your little stool to put it up there. Just so you could ask me to do it for you?”

“Oh no, I’ve been caught.”

Ghedric clears his throat suddenly which rips her from the pleasant cloud she had not noticed she dipped into. Flushing, she pulls away from her wife to give her father an apologetic look.

“Sorry Papa.”

“Like I said, I don’t mind. It’s real nice seeing you like this,” He reaches over to grip her fingers and give her entire arm a hearty shake, “But you ought to flirt with her more when we ain’t losing daylight.”

Carver claps her hands together, “That’s true! Come on Papa Ghedric, we’ve got too much ground to cover. See you when we come home, my River.”

“Mhm,” She follows them outside, standing on the porch with her arms crossed over her waist, “Bye you two.”

“Bye!”

As they are moving down the road, Carver pushing Ghedric’s chair, she hears her father inquire, “Did you know she gets out her stool to put things back up high after you’ve gotten them down for her? Every time.”

“That little sneak. How ridiculously adorable of her.”

River rolls her eyes and returns inside to pour over some of her lessons now that she will have quiet time with them gone.

Just before bed when she is preparing the house to enter the nights welcome, there is a loud knock upon the door. Having not expected anyone to come to the inn so late, she is already dressed for bed. The only reason she heard the knock was simply because she had come downstairs to give everything one last look before retiring.

Candle holder in hand, she secures her nightgown so that it covers her night dress before opening the door.

Killian is standing outside, shadowed by the night then illuminated by her sputtering candle. Deep pockets of black stretch over his harsh features, dipping into the gaunt cheeks and beneath the chiseled edge of his jaw. Orange light pools in the dip beneath his grimacing lips, beneath his cold and empty eyes. Shaggy hair hangs around his face and the unkempt beard that is shaved along the sides but braided down off the chin. Light reflects off his shiny, dark hunter’s leathers. Mud is caked upon the boots clear up to the laces where it is caught and seeping in.

“Hello River.”

She looks past his hulking form in the doorway to check for others. A posse that has come to finish what they started in those caves. No further shadows are cut in the night, darker against a black that provides shape. Only Killian is present.

She clenches her nightgown before performing a shallow curtsy, “Lord Killian. I do not wish to be rude—“

“You never do.” He pushes her way inside without letting her finish. Muddy prints cake onto the wooden floor that had previously been mopped to a shine. She stares at them with a growing ire she cannot express.

Though he does not deserve the title of Lord, both himself and his father claim it and demand it of their citizens. To prove a lofty ideal is theirs to claim and own, that it was wrested from powerful hands in the way Semé and his sons know only how to do. Using the title that does not belong them proves a point but also keeps a firm reminder at the forefront of the villagers minds.

“My Lord, might I…help with something? You seem to have come at this late hour with a great need.”

“Presumptuous.” He strolls over the fireplace, looking at the prized collection of porcelain cups and small figures that Carver has placed upon the mantle. Where she has been getting them, River does not know. Killian taps the nose of a small porcelain dog then runs his fingertips around the hair thin lip of a teacup.

“These are nice.”

Fear is gnawing on her stomach. Killian has largely left her alone since the events of her wedding. Spiting her in the at he had, she thought, was his final blow then after that he would leave her alone. She thought he would leave her be after shaming her on the day she was bound in front of the entire village. Only a few evil looks has been thrown her way when Carver would join them on hunts or bring home kills without having accompanied them. Giving away pelts and meat for free. After long rains, when he would come in for one of Ghedric’s famously spicy soups, he would glare every step she took while waiting on him and his company.

River should have been wiser. Less immature about being wistful for a kinder future.

“Thank you, my Lord.”

“Expensive. Too expensive for a little river side inn keep. Even if the Wheel does very well,” He pokes at a cup upon its saucer, pushing it all the way to the edge of the mantle, “How did you come by them?”

“They are my wife’s. Killian—“

His eyes are beastly, not burdened by humanity, when he whips his head over to glare, “I’m your Lord’s son.”

“Yes, of course. My Lord. I’m sorry. Please, if you could perhaps have a seat? My wife—“

“Your wife. It’s always something about your wife. It’s all the people want to talk about. Fickle, diamond in the rough River Kelsey got herself a pretty bride from far away. The old spinster everyone wanted and everyone got rejected by. Suddenly with a woman! A beautiful woman with a strange accent that my Papa is enchanted by.”

The cup is dangerously teetering.

“Lord Killian are you…drunk?

He shoots her another vicious glare, “Do not hound me, River Kelsey. You are not my wife after all.”

“Of course. I only asked because I—no!” She gasps, jolting forward to no end. The teacup slips over the edge to meet the floor and shatter into tiny pieces. Too many for a possible repair. Not that she has the tools nor the funds to repair something so delicate and infinitely precious.

Carver is going to be heartbroken. Try as she might to convince River otherwise, there are pieces of her that long for her life of old. It has made little impact on their daily life because, somehow, whenever Carver longs for finery she produces it as if they are flowers plucked from a garden. Coveted rolls of silk presented to River and a hushed request for a kerchief. The fabric is never enough for anything larger but that does not seem to bother Carver. She rubs her thumbs over the fabric while she reads and smiles to herself, serene in this creature comfort. The fine porcelain that no one in their village except the chief should be able to afford. Reserved upon their mantle to be spectated but only used by River and Carver when they have their reading lessons. Where she got them, River did not ask. She was afraid the answer would be magic.

Another comfort ripped from her wife. A cherished thing she cannot ever get back.

“It isn’t fair.”

“Shut up.” Fear had left her in the face of her burning passions. The need to defend her wife from another cruel intention or another elongated torture sweeps any of that away.

Killian turns fully to face her, wobbling on his muddied feet, “Are you telling me to shut up?”

“That was unspeakably precious to my wife and you broke it in a fit. Like some f*cking child. Sit down, now,” She rips a chair from under a table and points to it, “Sit.”

He glares at her for long enough that she fears her bluff will be nothing more than a tissue veiling a stab wound. But she is her mother’s daughter and no matter the ego, they will be humbled if she gives a stern enough command. Even Killian is not immune. He grits his teeth and stomps but leaves the mantle to throw himself in a chair.

She takes the seat across from him, folding her hands atop the table. His eyes find the red marks that signify her as a married woman.

“You’re behaving like a child.”

“You can’t talk to me like that.”

“Is this truly because I didn’t marry you!? All of this!? My markings, trying to kill me in those caves!? Do you not have a rational, mature bone in your body?”

His fist slamming into the table does make her jump but she recovers smoothly, settling into a loose-muscled tenseness. The kind that prepares for measured movements. Her glare could cut glass. She refuses to be bullied in her own home. Somewhere at the back of her heart, she can feel a warmth of pride that she knows belongs to her mother.

“You made me look foolish! I told everyone you would be mine! Everyone! Because I love you, you vicous, selfish whor*!”

River stiffens in her chair, lifts her chin, and stares at the bawling man child, “You never loved me. You wanted me to slight your father. Because having me would allow you to boast that he could not have the mother, but you caught the daughter. The one he tried and failed to acquire. And that’s why he wants my wife now, no? Because he would take away from me that which I denied him. I know how your family works.”

Killian throws up his hands, “And what of it!? Marriage is a contest anyway. And I always get what I want. So why shouldn’t I get the wife I want? If I have to take one.”

“Overgrown child.”

He sets his elbow on the table and leans forward, pointing a firm finger toward the tip of her nose, “Watch how you speak to me. I could just as easily have you strung up in the street outside.”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“What does that matter? My father owns you and these people and this place. If I want you dead tomorrow, you’re dead tomorrow.”

She swallows hard, “Then why haven’t you told anyone what you saw? That I was down there, by the witches. You could have by now. It’s been months.”

He gives a flamboyant display by rolling his wrists out and extending his arms, head tilted back to better display his haughty grin, “I am benevolent.”

“No. You haven’t told anyone because if you do, I’ll tell them what I saw too. You were inside one of the witch rings. I’ll tell them you tried to kill me. Then we both hang.”

He sneers and it is the ugliest, cruelest thing River has ever seen.

“You think you can scare me? Do you know who raised me? The only thing my father respects is brutality. He told me once that the only way he would ever tell me he loves me is if I,” He stops to clench his teeth so hard she sees the muscles in his cheeks and jaw twitch under weathered skin, “I take what I want. That is what men do. And nothing gets in my way.”

Dread overwhelms her. She tucks her shaking hands behind her back when she stands suddenly.

“I think you should leave.”

He looks up and does not budge from the lounged position in his chair.

“Now. Get out.”

“Why are you quivering like that, River? What do you think I’m gonna do?”

“Stop smiling at me like that. Like you enjoy scaring me.”

He stands suddenly, knocking the table back. The screech of the legs gouging the wooden floor scratches her ears. She does not jump. The bones under her clammy skin do, rattling fiercely, but she does not allow herself the reaction. Not to satisfy him.

“You don’t even care that you hurt my feelings? Marrying her?”

River backs away from the table slowly, “Your feelings? Why should I care about your feelings!?”

“That’s hurtful, River Kelsey. Are you sure you want to hurt me further?”

“You tried to kill me!”

He snaps his fingers and points at her, “And that’s the other thing. I know those go too deep for me to measure. Why did you survive?”

If she can summon the air from withering lungs, she could whistle and Antiveli will come trotting down the stairs. Wherever the leader goes, Rolly and Percy are sure to follow. With their help, she could probably get away from him if he tries to hurt her. Carver did not just train the dogs to hunt.

“I got lucky.”

“Lucky!? No, you got more than lucky. No one could survive that fall.”

River squints at the man slowly advancing as she backs away, “What is it you are trying to say?”

“I didn’t want to hurt you, River. I still love you. I just couldn’t let you run off after seeing me. And, honestly? I was mad and hurt. You made me look like a fool rejecting me. You made me lose my Papa’s respect. I should kill you for that, but I was a good man. A better man than you deserve. But if you survived that fall because of magic. I’ll never forgive you.”

“Magic? How could you even reach such a conclusion!? I’ve never even seen magic.”

“How else could you survive!? Tell me! Tell me now!”

She whistles shortly just the way Carver does when she summons their dogs to her before leaving on a hunt. From the top of the stairs, where he had been instructed by River to stay before she came downstairs, their massive shaggy hound comes. Not slowly in the rolling gait of his usual manner. Being summoned that way alerts him to danger and he responds lightning quick. Killian stumbles backward to get away from the dog larger than a wolf suddenly upon him. Growls and barking fill the previously quiet space, accompanied by Rolly’s snapping jaws. Percy paces by River’s feet. The middle sized of the three dogs follow Antiveli who is pressuring Killian to step back, forcing a larger and larger space between himself and River. A huff—communication between the animals—and Rolly branches off to start circling around Killian. Teeth shine in firelight, snapping at his heels.

“Kelsey! Call your dogs off!”

“No,” She uses their support to find herself again, rises on the second wind and points at the door, “Get out. And do not return here with your drunken speculation again. I won’t let you bully me anymore, not in my home. I won’t let you threaten my wife.”

He makes to step forward but gets snarled at, snapped at by Rolly, and pressured to back up. The shoulders of Antiveli reach his hips even when the dog has them hunched, head lowered. Lips are peeled back to show dark spotted gums and long milky teeth.

“I’m going to find out, Kelsey. If you had told me how, we could have worked something out. But when I find out the truth, the hard way, I’m going to see you dead. In the middle of town, for the entire village to see. Just like your mama.”

Fire and venom surge to the tongue, too readily for her to pick apart to find propriety and too ugly for her to care trying, “Killian, you can threaten me and you can say whatever you like. You get free power to treat all of us like paper dolls in your father’s game and we can do little except keep our heads down and survive. But you will not ever speak of my mother.”

“Bold creature. Is that how you caught your pretty canary?”

“No! You do not speak of my wife either. You or your father who covets her. Don’t think I haven’t seen it. You can crawl back to him with your tail between your legs and tell him she is my love, my one and my only. He can stop sending her gifts and demanding her time, asking for her to personally walk beside him during his prayer walks. During the sacrifices. Both of you are the same. Take what you want with no remorse. Fine, I can’t stop you, but not here. Not in my house. Get out, get out. You are not welcome here, not you Killian Kyyl nor your father Semé Kyyl.”

The dogs seem irritated alongside her. Ears flickers, tails bristle, paws scratch at the ground while they whine and growl. Candles flicker from an unseen wind then sputter out entirely. Wisps of silver smoke curl up into the sudden dark.

She points at the door and waits for her order to be obeyed. Son of Kyyl gets an angry face, twisted by an ugly shade of red and tension that makes the muscles jump. He does not speak again. He only looks discomforted then sickly the longer he stands there. Muscular and sun touched then in a blink weakly, thin, sallow. He clutches his stomach and hiccups out words that are too slurred and soft to understand. Whatever it attempted to be frightens the hunter when it cannot be spoken. He swallows the slick of his failure back down, eyes the dogs emitting chilling growls, then turns to flee out the open door.

River stands frozen in the place she is as cornered long after the man has gone. There is still the smell of him in the air that is alcohol and mud and wet leather. Broken porcelain is shattered on the floor. The clock is ceaseless in its labor, not bothered by what has transpired or whatever transpires in all of time.

Percy circles her shins, ears still pinned back and yips.

“Right, the door,” She jerks into action, feeling tears sting her nose as she slams it shut and slides the locks into place.

After it is closed, weight of realization settles upon her.

“Divines, what have I done? He’s going to kill me. He’s going to—he’s—“ She presses a hand to her heaving chest, to press the heart back down. Antiveli nudges his head against her hip, whining loudly.

She looks down into his big eyes, wholly black and mostly concealed by the twisted curls of his shaggy fur. A beautiful thing Carver brought home without explaining the real how and where behind it. She reaches down to scratch his nose, holding her chest that is tight and buzzing.

“He’s going to kill me. Papa is going to be—“

No, that’s not true. Not anymore.

She slides down the door to sit on her rump, right on the floor in her night clothes. All three of the dogs come to her for their well-earned pats and scratches.

“I might not need to worry so much. They have each other now. Carver is good and true, and she loves Papa. She will take care of him. He won’t be alone.”

All the same, she will do her best to hide this night from them. Until she unavoidably cannot because Killian is dragging her through the streets to her doom.

When they return the next day, she is in a foul mood from how little sleep she has gotten and from a constant irritating itch on her wrists. Both of her family members—for they are surely both her family—are welcomed back home to a hot meal and her eager ears. Stories are told of haggling for items, of boredom at traveling carts selling books, of visiting Doves who sang to them. Ghedric tells her a beautiful story of Carver dancing with her siblings and singing songs with them in the lilting that had made the air boil with joy, so intensely in fact, everyone watching had bubbled over with laughter. While ripping apart bread that is dipped into onion gravy and sandwiched with venison, he tells her of the strangeness of the city having a developing water system. Something that allows for clean water to be channeled directly into a home or kitchen. Carver sits at the table far more reserved than usual. Orange eyes watch her the entire time, only looking away if Ghedric insists her join in to explain her parts of the story too.

“Wait, you were in my kitchen.”

River’s smile becomes stilted from the sudden shift in tone, “Of course Papa. How else did I cook?”

“Did you touch my knives!? Did you put everything back? I have it in an order I like!”

“I put everything back Papa! And I washed everything—“

“My pot, my pot! It’s seasoned, River!”

He furiously begins spinning the wheels on his chair to go check on his pot. River stands to call after him, “I don’t know which pot you’re talking about!”

“My pot!”

She flings her arms out in fond exasperation and shakes her head. When she turns back around, Carver is still silently watching her.

“And you, back already, and you have barely flirted with me at all. Are you feeling well? Oh, I see. You want to feign illness, so I’ll skirt around this table and check your temperature? Clever witch.”

She lifts her skirts up as she moves around the table. Percy needs a gentle nudge so she can slot herself nearest to the chair, not needing to lean down due to Carver’s height even when seated. She lays the back of her hand against her wife’s forehead, leaning over despite not needing to so that there an offer of cleavage to peruse at leisure.

She frowns when Carver does not look.

“Dear, are you actually unwell?”

Carver’s face betrays nothing at all which is quite unlike her.

“Carver? Did something happen? You’re worrying me.”

“My cup is gone.”

Instant dread twists her stomach into unpleasant, painful knots. She glances over at the mantle.

“Oh, Carver I’m sorry. I forgot to mention, while you were gone, I was dusting and knocked it off. Broke into a hundred different bits.” She pulls her hand away, intentionally at a speed that is neither too quick to be suspicious nor too slow to be nervous. Carver’s hand flashes up to catch her by the wrist, holding it tightly.

“Carver! What are you—“

A tingling sensation rises within her. Wordlessly, her wife turns her hand over to inspect her fingers one by one. Then the palm that she probes at with her thumb, feeling the divots of the creases. Then the wrist that has red patches of skin from her constantly itching at them.

“Hm.”

“Don’t hm at me with a hint of mystery in your voice. What are you doing?”

The way her wife looks at her then seers something into her undefined. Something that is terrifying and intoxicating too. For all her flirtations and charming looks and occasional physical affections, there has never been anything as alluring as this look. One that is not meant to be alluring for it is suspicious and brooding.

“What are you doing, my River?”

“I—I haven’t done anything. Are you suggesting something indecent? I remain loyal to you.”

“No, not that at all. Sit down, tell me about your night. Ghedric was so passionate, you hardly got a word in.”

“Just like that? You change your mind about pressing me?”

“I should love to press you,” Carver purrs, smile returning to the suave smirk she is used to, “Perhaps right over this table.”

River rolls her eyes and hooks an ankle round the leg of the nearest chair to pull it under her, “I’ve heard better.”

“You love making me jealous. Tell me what they said so I can do better than them.”

Upon the table, Carver’s hand rests idly palm flat to the top while the fingers occasionally lift to thump down against the wood. Never more than a hand before, she stares at it now with a secreted passion ballooning beneath her ribs. Bravery is an heirloom passed down to her and it would do her mother’s memory a discredit to be a coward now. Not after she has bolstered her spine and made herself a better woman. She reaches out to lay her hand overtop her wife’s on the table.

“I missed you while you were gone.” She hears herself say, somehow in a calm and casual voice. None of the nerves slip in.

Carver seems surprised and she thinks that is a proper response to River’s sudden boldness. Beneath River’s light gracing, Carver turns her hand over so their palms slot together.

“And I you. So, tell me how you faired alone.”

“Miserably without you sleeping beside me.”

Carver’s look is a strike of lightening, “I’ve heard better.”

Innocuous moments make her realize how profoundly in love she has fallen. Simple things such as holding her wife’s hand when she joins River for early morning chores. The way her wife laughs exclusively to her jokes. Not the usual luxurious, rich laugh that makes hearts soar but a breathy, whistling laugh without discipline involved. The kind that makes it pretty. Each new story shared with her draws her deeper into the well. Flirtations that she savors, knowing she gets too involved with them, but Carver never seems to mind. As long as Carver remains unaffected, she does not see the harm in enjoying herself.

Things will never change between them. For as rough as their start was and as unorthodox, they have found a very happy place to be. River remains terrified at the back of her mind that they will be discovered but for entirely different reasons now. Where she was afraid for her continued safety and her father’s subsequent mental health if she was caught, now she worries for Carver. Now all she does is bite her nails and her lips when Carver interacts with the Chief and his son for any reason. Now she realizes Carver means as much to her as her father does, she takes up a space of importance akin to her deepest loves in River’s heart. She is happy for the choice she made. Happy to see Carver thriving in an environment that is kinder to her. River’s Queen, reigning over her tiniest little estate and her tiny collection of dogs and O’Brus. This will be their life. Carver will never leave, and River will be glad for it, so it is fine for her to be in love. There are no consequences of her secret pining, of her endless yearning. She can remain respectful, and it will only enrich Carver’s life even if the woman never finds out why.

It is perfectly alright for River to love her wife in the silent places in her heart.

During bed, Carver rolls over just to cling to her. When she reaches around her ribs with long arms it is to slide their hands together. A long leg is thrown over her wide hips and used as the thing to bring them closer together.

“Carver, it’s hot.”

“Mm. Mhm.”

“Most at least ask first.”

“Oh, I can ask?”

River is too tired for a laugh but the amusem*nt tickles her lungs all the same. She braids their fingers together for a firmer hold and moves the pairing of their hands to beneath her chin.

“Only you can.”

“Marvelous gift. I shall ponder what I want to ask for.”

“Do not get your hopes up. I’ll likely say no. It’s what I’m rather famous for, around these parts.”

“Then I shall ask you to ask. Since that is the sure way I get what I want. You said no to every gentleman caller who asked for your affections, but you asked me to marry you and here we are. Don’t you love loopholes?”

“I so do. I’d love sleep more.”

“Mhm. Me too. Before you do, I heard something in the carver’s workshop today.”

“Really?”

“Mhm. I heard that Nester has a lover.”

River jerks her head around, mouth hung open, “You’re joking. She’s not yet married! Who is it!?”

“The funny little esquire who trundles through town every few months, on his way to deliver good or bad or worse news.”

“Divines! That’s—“

“I know! Here, roll over and lay on your back,” She does as commanded, snug against Carver’s chest as the woman leans on her elbow above her, “So, here is how it went.”

Carver drifts off to spin the tale in dramatic prose, expanding on the rumors with her own theories to liven the tale. Whatever she is saying has a compelling note to it that rings at the back of her mind. If she were able to focus, she knows that it would be enrapturing her. However, she cannot hear the words while laying mostly beneath the gorgeous woman cast in pale silver light. It makes the grey of her hair looks like molten moonlight spun around the crown of her head, harboring an ethereal glow. Full lips, never more tempting, move while she speaks and that is all she can see. The movement. So very near to her own. If she wanted, she would need only to lift her head to touch them in a kiss.

“River? You’re not listening.”

“I am trying. I’m just a bit tired.”

“Liar, liar.”

“I am tired.”

“You’ve been staring at my lips,” Carver leans down and for an exhilarating, terrifying moment she thinks her wife is going to kiss her but instead she tsks near her nose, “Do you want to kiss me, Little River?”

She swallows hard enough that it is heard. A bit of shame courses through her when that causes Carver to lift a brow.

“I would. I imagine the taste of your lips would be the sort of thing that drives people mad. I might never recover, and I might never want to.”

Now both brows raise, “Are you still flirting with me or asking in earnest?”

“Just flirting.”

Coward, guess the bravery is touch and go.

Carver nods, laughing quietly, “Good then. That made my heart leap. You’ve won that round.”

“Lucky me. It’s difficult to beat a witch at her own game.”

“You are becoming so educated Little River. Good for you.”

In the spring, there is a festival in Newin that everyone from the village travels to attend. It celebrates a holiday that is for companionship. All villagers move as a herd to the sprawling city surrounded by verdant, flat countryside. Past the shadows cast by the tall hills River’s village is nestled in, Newin has space to grow. An industrial town that has buildings poking up from inside it like long teeth in a hungry mouth. Many spew a noxious black smoke from the furnaces ever at work. Last season inventors created the small hand torch River carries, new wheels for wagons, balloons that go on the roof of a home to predict the weather. Most of their inventions are not permitted in River’s town because the chief claims they are too similar to magic. Carver informs her that is because they are magic. River thinks that makes sense considering that magic and witches are no longer an outlawed thing even if there are witch prisons dotting their countryside. Only backwater, suspicious towns like the one River comes from still live in the darker age where magic is a sin and an evil. Alongside the ceaseless work of creation are dress making shops, fine eateries, great halls for drinking and watching performers. On the day of the festival, there are garlands of flower wrapped around the lines holding up rows of dimly glowing paper lanterns. All strung above the narrow streets covered in flower petals. There are lines of games both for children who cannot usually partake in these sorts of celebrations and for aspiring couples. For those that would test the depths of their love. Some of them are simply games for the unmatched to play for prizes.

Arm in arm, River walks her wife through the streets to show her around. This is not River’s first time attending, everyone goes every year, but it is her first time doing so as a new bride so there are more expectations this year. Ghedric follows them around for a short time just to gaze up at her with pride and contentment.

“Ah! You two, I see the hands of a bound pair! Come, over here!” They both look over to see a slender man with a pencil bar mustache and hardened, sun touched skin. Dressed in a bright outfit that has a lace frill neckline and puffy sleeves, the fabric billows when he waves them over.

Carver tugs on her arm, “Let us go see, my River.”

River does not want to play any of the games. Not while there are members of their village sometimes near to them or playing as their competitors. Not when Ghedric is nearby watching them. These games are designed to test relationships or shine light upon love true between two people. If there is a single misstep or a series of failed games, they will appear suspicious. People will wonder why River knows so little about her bride, why she is so tense and terse with her. Their ruse will be up and that will cause deeper questions that may lead people to the truth.

“This one? Are you sure?”

But she cannot say no either. That would look even worse.

“Yes, it looks fun. What holiday is this exactly?”

“One for lovers. It’s called Bronth’s Renewal.”

Carver makes a delighted noise, “Oh I forgot that is what it is called outside of the Vale.”

“Here, you take a seat here,” Says the operator once they get close enough, “And you sit here.”

River gives her wife a disquieted look but Carver is already sat upon her stool, gazing into the crowd. When River settles on hers, the operator pulls a long-hooked instrument from his belt that clicks into a bar on the ground. He pulls on it and a cloth divide is raised that cuts off view of Carver for her. She can only see the shadow outline through the red and yellow striped fabric. Nerves eat at her clenched stomach. In the audience she can spot her father, aglow with pride, watching them with his hands folded in his lap. A few other faces dot the crowd behind him who she knows come from their village.

The operator claps his hands before extending his arms wide. Frills drip off his arms, sleeves baggy and thin enough that she can see lights through them.

“Shall we see how well the married pair know one another? Hm?”

There is some clapping and cheering from the crowd eating heart shaped marshmallow candies and older folks remembering their youth. Whistles merge with a sticky kind of laughter. The sort that comes from someone happy enough it sticks to others, and they feel themselves joining whether they realize it or not.

“Very well. Now, I will ask a series of questions to each and the other will answer. The goal is never perfection but,” He leans forward, hand cupped over his mouth to give the illusion he is sharing a secret with the crowd, “Sometimes things do not need to be perfect. Sometimes it just fun to have someone help you see how deep your love runs. Or if it runs deep at all, eh? Shall we begin?”

From the other side of the curtain, she sees Carver lean forward on her stool and ask excitedly, “It’s a competition? Then my River and I shall win.”

The operator laughs loud and with such a practiced elegance it sounds like the type of laugh actors use to broadcast sound across an arena. He taps his nose, “Very good! I love your spirit, miss! However, these stools you’ve sat on have been enchanted. It prevents lying! So I hope you know your partner as well as you claim to! Sounds simple right? You would be surprised how many husbands I’ve set on this stool who fail. Now! Let’s begin!”

For a moment, she feels silly for worrying. The first slew of questions are simple things a partner should know whether they have been in love a day or a year. Eye color, hair color, preferred foods, preferred weather, favorite article of clothing, favorite colors, creature comforts. Both of them breeze through these questions because they were the trivial sort of things asked before bedtime or walks around town or when River would accompany her wife on hunts.

“Very good. Now, your turn River. What is your wife’s dream?”

“Her dream?”

Do you need me to tell you or do you know already?

River refrains from jumping on her stool only because she has gotten used to Carver’s voice piercing into her mind. The woman does not do it often but it occurs enough that she does not panic anymore. How the magic works, she does not know and she does not want to know.

“Carver’s dream is home. Making one and keeping it. She does not want much more than that. Family,” She knows Carver mourns the children already lost to her and sometimes feels morose for not knowing her grandchildren, “It’s important to her. She loves the family she already has, however small. She does not have the urge to broaden it. Though she has this horrible habit of finding things that need homes and love and bringing them…back to me.”

Is that why she always does it? Because River brought her home first, to a place that gave her the love and the safety she had been needing for a very long time. When she is out on her adventures and she encounters something broken, alone, and afraid like she herself had been. Does she bring them home to River to be given the same things she had? Does she trust River that much?

“So I suppose it depends on if she finds a baby somewhere that she thinks would benefit from my nagging,” There is some laughter she intended to bring out, “But ultimately, she just wants what she has already built and cherishes. She wants us, my Papa and I, her family. Our dogs. And I think there is a fox she has been hiding from me in the woods.”

The operator co*cks his head with a great big grin, “Carver?”

“She’s got it just right.”

Well done, my River.

River swells with pride for getting the answer correct when she was sure she had it wrong. Overly presumptuous on her part to assume herself so important in the woman’s life. They have had many talks about it before that emboldened her but none that made her feel brave enough to be sure.

“Now, Carver. What is River’s greatest treasure?”

“Me,” Carver answers instantly, sounding prideful and not at all ashamed for being blunt with that, “Oh! That’s interesting.”

These stools are a wonderful work of magic, don’t you think my River?

“River? Is that true?”

She flushes to the top of her head for being asked such a brazen thing in a public place.

Of course it is true. She has been doing her best to keep this small truth hidden very deep down so things do not become awkward between herself and her friend. Not just for that reason but also for her pride. How embarrassing is it to have unrequited love for one’s own wife?

No, she tries to lie but instead of hearing that word leave her mouth, she says, “Yes.”

Shock consumes her entirely. That was not what she wanted to say. That is not the word that was in her mouth. She looks down, eyes wide, at the stool she is sitting on. Had the magic made her do that?

“Well, I’m not sure what else I can ask.”

The curtain is whipped down by just the hooked tool being given a wave through the air. It falls back down into the platform where it had been hidden before.

The operator takes off his funny hat to give them both a gallant bow, “Thank you for playing. I hope we all learned something today.”

River rises on shaky legs, feeling her stomach tilt from the sudden movement. Before she can take even a step forward, Carver is beside her with an arm looped through her own. Together they step off the platform back into the crowd, mingling with the rest. Another pair is called up to be set in the seats that will allow no lies.

“Was he a witch?” She hears the raggedness of her own voice.

Carver lifts an eyebrow, “Why do you ask?”

“He tricked us. That was no game. It was a trap.”

“A trap? What do you feel you were tricked into, Little River?”

“I,” She glances at her wife then away again when she sees a softness in her eyes that makes her chest ache, “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t like it.”

“Does it make your heart race?”

River’s ears are ringing, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Hm,” Carver drags them through crowds mingling around booths and lining the street for a parade that will start soon.

Neither of them acknowledge what happened. They choose to both be cowards. She is not sure if she feels better or worse for that.

For the rest of the day, they do not discuss the game nor the blush that never seems to leave River’s cheeks. They drink honey wine and bitter dark beers with cheeses imported from the coastal town up north. They play more games that Carver gets too competitive over. There is an archery contest, of a sort, with moving targets that loop on circle tracks bolted to a wooden awning. Carver’s arm is faster than anything River or the crowd has seen. One arrow after another, knocking down targets both close up and distantly looping on the farthest end of the track. They visit with Ghedric who has found an open sitting area for spouses who have lost their loved to sit and gamble and smoke and become obliterated on endless drink. Hours turn her feet to sore, bruised things attached to an aching, flagging body. Ghedric intends to stay in town for the night but with so many traveling to Newin for this event, they must return home. There will be many customers at the inn and River has very little energy left for anymore games that rip out vulnerable truths from her heart.

On the mule lent to them by the woodsman, they ride the long snaking road back to the village. Birds flit above her head singing songs with the foxes who run through brush along the side of the road. Carver’s arm around her waist is solid and warm as the head upon her shoulder. They do not talk much. River is lost within her own mind that echoes that same yes over and over. Carver whistles tunes that harmonize with the birds, at first, then begins to sing. A beautiful jaunty song in the lilting that is louder in such an open space. Bells looped through the laces in her shoes jingle with each step the mule takes, becoming a bass line for her to keep time with. It is a drinking song, she realizes, from the speed and lively cheer and the few words she can understand.

She knows it is a drinking song because, when they begin tending to customers later that same day, she convinces them all to start singing it in the bronze tongue.

“Alright,” She waves her hands at the merry bunch, all swaying in their seats charmed by Carver and smashing the tankards against tabletops to keep a rhythm going, “That’s enough. Settle down!”

Carver grips her by the waist when she swings by the bar, grinning at her, “Don’t spoil my fun.”

“Keep smiling at me like that and I’ll spoil more than your fun.”

Yes, she had said. Yes, Carver is her greatest treasure. The kindest gift this world has bestowed upon her. The most joyful undertaking she has been granted, to bring this woman home and help her live a free life. Yes.

“You know River…there is no reason we can’t be lovers.”

Sitting at her vanity, she had been brushing her hair before bed. Usually it is twisted up into a tight bun to keep it off her neck while she works. Keeping it that way always needles an ache into her head that never goes away until just before bed, when she can take it down and brush out her hair. Tonight had been hectic with all the time spent on her feet. They had come up to their room late, needing to shoo out drunks or show those staying up to their rooms. A dull ache is ruining her pleasant mood. She had planned to sit there in her night dress brushing her hair for a long while, sinking into her sleepiness until it combines to leave her ready for bed.

Carver, laying on their bed in front of the fireplace, seems to have other ideas.

A sudden tremble consumes the hand holding her brush. In the mirror, she meets blazing orange eyes and the sly smirk that is endlessly attractive.

“Pardon?”

“We’re already married.”

“No, I understood that part. I’m trying to—what?”

“I’ve missed a lot of worldly things. You’ve given me back quite a lot of them already but a lover,” The way Carver sighs and drags her fingertips across her throat makes River’s mouth go dry, “We are already married. We are dear friends. I do not see why we can’t become lovers.”

“We…we aren’t—you don’t—“

“Little River, sex is a beast alone. We don’t need to think much on it.”

“I should not like to at all.”

Carver runs her eyes along the length of River sitting in her chair before sighing and dropping down into the blankets, “Fine. It was only a suggestion.”

“Horrible woman.”

“Don’t be bitter. You are breathtaking and I spent all day on your arm, being given affections in form of words but I have a craving for affections in physical form. Would you shame me for being human?”

“I’d shame you for anything. It amuses me.”

“Hateful woman.”

River taps the back of her brush against her palm to expel anxious energy, chewing on her lip. The dogs have taken to bed for the night, all around the room in the places they prefer them. After months of this, she has grown used to sleeping on the floor. There is a thin mattress beneath the pile of blankets that used to be dreadful to sleep on. Now her body has grown so accustomed to it that sleeping on the soft, thick cushion of her mattress in the bedroom is unpleasant. She approaches it after she finishes her nightly routine.

Carver is laying on her side with her back to River, facing the fire. There no movement from her when River slides herself beneath the blankets. Neither does her wife react to River erasing the divide between them to curl against her warm back. A tiny, wistful sigh escapes her.

Fingertips caress the back of River’s hand laying over Carver’s stomach, “Comfortable, my River?”

“Unusual for you to ask me that.”

“You’re very stiff.”

“I’m fine. Perfectly fine,” She clears the thorns and the coals from her throat, “Are you comfortable?”

“Oh yes. Very comfortable.”

“Grand. Good, wonderful. Goodnight.”

A laugh like a sprinkle of rain is breathed into the pillow they share, “Goodnight River.”

Dour River is a thing to avoid much like children must avoid romping through the woods at night or men must avoid the ire of their King. Sleep deprived and tense from the ideas than ran through her mind all night, River O’Bru is a beast. Everyone knows the rules that remain unspoken. Do not pester a dour River, do not bemoan plebeian issues, do not ask for more than would be normal to ask of a barkeep.

Carver has never much cared for the rules. That is why eyes widen and watch when, outside a vendor stall in the street, she pokes River in the ribs.

“What’s the matter with you?”

She sets an apple in her basket by the head of cabbage and carton of eggs.

“River, you have such a rank attitude today.”

Silently she hands over the small stack of coins to the vendor. He is avoiding her attention best he can so that he does not break the rules.

“River.”

“Carver!”

Orange eyes blink at her innocently and the head tilts, “What?”

She snatches her wife’s hand to pull her back down the road. Heels thunder from the force of her steps. Little Rodger sees her come and turns to run back into his yard with his hoop, dragging his sister behind him. A ball comes rolling across the road that she ignores when normally she would kick it back to the children and maybe even invite them to follow her home, so they could be given a treat.

“River, tell me what I’ve done. I hate when you’re cross with me.”

“Stop talking to me.”

They move across the settled dirt path that meets into the oval shape where the heart of the village is. Buildings ring the oval: a bank, a blacksmith, a cobbler and a thatcher both. Down beyond the oval, on the edge of the water, is the inn.

“Is this about last night?”

Needles prick at her spine, stopping her right in front of the steps leading up to the porch. A pair of customers who spent the night are on the porch now, with mugs of frothy beer for breakfast and drinking cigars. They are chatting amicably about something that comes from out of town. Wives and children and the perils of in-laws.

River digs her heels into the path and glares up at her wife. Beautiful beneath an early morning sun, wearing the trousers with a tan patch of tweed up the side of the calves. Short ankle length boots that have wooden soles and green laces with ribbon braided through them. When she shifts, not awkwardly but just away, the bells attached sing high notes. Long, grey hair is fixed into a pair of twinned pleats that hang clear down to her hips. Looking at her now makes the breath catch in River’s chest.

“I didn’t mean to upset you, Little River.”

What if she had lost her mind last night and given in to temptation? What if she did it now? Would it really hurt them at all? She has already been in love this long and it has done nothing but make things richer. A closer friendship with Carver because she cares that much more.

“We shouldn’t fight in public. It is going to start rumors.”

Carver’s head jerks back, “Are we fighting?”

“I don’t know. Stop giving me that look. Are you planning to help me today?”

“Not if you’re in this mood. I’ll just watch, thank you.”

“Fine. Go to your corner and do not bother me.”

Carver rolls her eyes this time and she hears the woman mutter, “Making me regret ever asking at all.”

Work is a good distraction from the racing heart living inside her, boiling the blood in her veins. It never stopped the feral drumbeat, not since Carver spoke in a low timbre and suggested things that make her want to break upon the rocks. They make her feel criminally starved.

Hours pass. Easily drifting through her fingers that do not once go idle. Work never waits. Early mornings are preparations, are cleaning our vacated rooms, are welcoming in afternoon travelers. Afternoons are preparation for supper and after work drinks. When the largest crowds come in and they become their busiest. Through it all, Carver has a fit in her corner where she was scornfully abandoned to. Any time River dares to glance over, there is a pout dragging the body into a dark place. Her chin lifts if she is caught and she pointedly looks away from River.

“Thank you, River,” One of the regular’s gives his usual charming grin and takes her hand to kiss the back of it. She slips it from between his fingers to pat his cheek before leaving.

Carver is watching over the top of her book. Just the eyes and brows show, everything else is concealed behind the faded and worn cover. A slight pinch between the brows is how she knows Carver is annoyed.

“I’m not in the mood tonight so don’t start with me.” She sets her tray down on the bar counter and bends down to rifle through some of the crates beneath it. Percy, who is always faithfully by Carver’s feet behind the bar, perks his ears up. He stretches one paw out to tap on her arm. She does give him a kindness because he does not understand the rules and cannot ever understand the rules, nor should he be expected to. A long happy noise comes from the dog when she gives his ribs a couple of pats and a scratch.

“You’ll barely look at me or talk to me but he gets nice little beard scratches? That’s not fair.”

“I said I’m not in the mood.”

“But it’s not fair!”

“You—why do you do this to me?”

Carver’s book gives a mighty thump from her slapping it shut and tossing it into the basket by her chair.

“Why do you do this to me?”

River pinches her nose between her fingers. Being tired or being hot are two of things that send her into a rage easiest. Coupled with the fact that she spent most of her night longing to give in to the flippant idea cast out by her wife. She had not been free of the thoughts even once.

“Mostly I find your jealousness adorable. Today, Carver, I just don’t—“

“I can’t even compete with that. I don’t have scruff for your to put your fingers through.”

What if she lost her mind, just a little, just once? To give into a want or a need of River’s own for once. What would it hurt? Carver had set it by her feet so flippantly last night. Surely that must mean that it is of little consequence to her. The idea of it all had been set out as something she could have or not have, it would not matter to Carver. And River can be in love without it upsetting their balance so what is one more thing?

She whips the hand towel off her arm onto the counter and stalks toward her wife. A dark cloud brimming with all the broodiness of a dour River.

“Jealous, are you?”

“Don’t get nasty with me. You’re the one always giving me reasons to be.” Orange eyes flick down to her advance then back up to her pursed lips and the angry furrow on her brow.

“You know I do that so they keep coming back.”

“And you know I don’t care so long as I get sweeter treatment or better,” Carver cants her head, curious and obviously delighted, by River planting a hand on the wall by Carver’s head, “But you’ve been furious with me all day simply because I want to bed you. So they get sweet caresses and I get hisses and not today Carver and shut up Carver. They get to feel your fingers on their face when I, your wife, never have? That’s just not fair! I’m not being childish! I have a right to throw a fit!”

“You should shut up. Let me help you with that.”

There is a soft intake between one of them before their lips touch.

When she was a girl, she would often hide behind the bar counter to watch her parents. After everything had been shut down for bed and young River was meant to be in dreams, she crept back down the stairs to hide and watch. Freya O’Bru had been sitting half off a chair so that her legs could lay draped over Ghedric’s. The laughter had been what drew her down but this, a captivating and odd thing, is what arrested her. People around town often are coy about their romances, acting with a proper care to conceal affection even though they are not from a proper kind of stock. All the affection she had seen in the world, until then, were hands clasped together or kisses upon cheeks. When she would draw near that house with opal colored shingles where women in groups lived, mother would shoo her away. There were affections inside that house, she knows because children say it so, but River never saw them. Hiding behind the bar, she had watched Freya hold her husband by his jaw and bring their mouths to touch. Ever since that time, she had developed a keen interest in romance. Always trying to see what sort of things her parents did because that is what people who are in love do. She wanted to note it all for when she was older, when she might figure out a way to do that. It looked wonderful. It had made her parents glow in rare ways, glow in a way that could not be compared to a thing she knew. Not the sun nor the moons nor the stars because they are just light. Just fierce things strung up in a black so vast and so far away it cannot be perceived. Whatever it is that love does to a person makes them something else entirely.

Growing up meant River had to learn to let that go. Time stole away joy and without joy she did not much care for the idea of love. Kisses, precious things that are not like stars but kept like them in her minds dark corners, glitter only when she closes her eyes and drifts to sleep. If she ever exchanged an affection it was in barter for work. A wink for an extra silver. A kiss upon the cheek to make rowdy men drink until they had fallen asleep in their chairs. River did not have time for anything more. Admirers she had aplenty but none of the time nor the care to entertain. The bulk of them had been men anyway which already struck a line through their name on her list. Of the women, she had walked with them through the town only a few times. One of them had made River’s head spin enough that she walked farther than she ought to pick flowers and present them in a small vase of green glass. That woman had blushed and thanked River but nothing more had come of it because River could not be available to go on walks or dates or participate in any courting activities.

Kisses remained the untouchable thing that made her parents unknowable things of beauty in her mind.

Kisses are sweeter than she could dream. Softer too. Kisses are a cloud of perfume that turn her spinning in the spot she stands. Stars long ago trapped burst into life against her closed eyes. Breath is just that perfume again, clogging her nose and her lungs.

Carver’s fingers push into her hair, past the tight threads twisted into the usual bun. She feels some threads come loose from the band keeping it bound, falling over Carver’s wrist and her cheek. A thumb tip caresses the shell of her ear, sending trickles of flame dripping down her spine.

Kisses are an addictive hobby that she now understands truly are a thing to drive men mad.

“River,” Carver’s breath chills the moisture on her lips, “I—

“Feeling less jealous now?” She licks the taste of this new affection from her lips. Hand planted on the wall with the other gripping the collar of Carver’s blouse.

“Hm,” Carver pulls her fingers free from her hair, dragging her fingertips over her cheek and lips, “Better. Especially because they are staring. Do you see how jealous they look?”

“Yes, very. Congratulations, I’m sure you’re pleased.”

“Deeply,” A sound leaves her wife then that has no place she can find it in her memory but has an effect that razes her body with chills, “You have the softest lips, my River.”

River feels some of her bravery flit away on dove’s wings, “Carver, I…haven’t done that before.”

“I assumed.”

“Was it that tragic?”

“No, no. Novice surely but wonderful,” Carver surprises her by leaning up to kiss her chastely, quickly enough she hears the sound rather than feels it, “We will practice.”

“Practice?”

“Yes. I shall expect kisses far more often now,” The book is plucked back out of the basket and flipped open, “Should not have opened that door if you did not expect me to be greedy. It’s in my nature, River.”

River swallows hard and says nothing. She rights herself and starts fixing her hair instead. As she hurries away to get the table of the customers who just entered, she hears Carver mutter to herself, “As if just one would ever be enough.”

For the rest of that night, her lips buzz and her head remains fixed so firmly in clouds she is muddled. Hardly able to take orders or be congenial with her customers. There is also a heavy weight upon her that leads her back to her wife’s stare upon her. When she does turn to catch it, Carver shifts her eyes back to her book rapidly. It does little good. River catches her staring each time.

On a random winter day, Carver steps from a hiding place in the hall to catch her around the waist. Pulling her backward so they are pressed together. Close enough that she can bend down to set her lips against the soft cartilage of her blazing ear.

Swaying them both slightly, she whispers, “Let me show you magic.”

She grips Carver’s wrist, panting from the swallowed screams of terror tickling her lungs.

“Carver O’Bru. You scared the life from me,” She turns her head, craning it from the angle, to glare into those beautiful sunset eyes, “How long were you hiding there!?”

“Long enough. Come, come with me. Please.”

“No! We,” She realizes she is shouting and there may be people in their rooms still so she lowers her voice to a hissed whisper, “We cannot do that. Its too dangerous. What if you get caught!?”

“It’s not like it has a smell, darling,” Carver’s lips brush her ear when she talks, “But, since you offered, what does happen if I get caught?”

“I don’t want to think about it.”

“Entertain me.”

“I…I don’t know. Nothing good. Nothing sane. I don’t want to think about it. So no ma—not that.”

Carver’s fingers dig into her hips for leverage to start pulling her backwards, walking in tandem with her, “Come up to our room.”

“No! Not there!”

“I want to show you something. Don’t fight it. Give in to my alluring charms.”

“That was not—“

“I heard it too—“

“You sounded just like—“

“I know, I’m sorry. Just, please come with me?”

River purses her lips. The idea is one that has been nagging at her. Thus far, any magic that has been done by her witch wife has been done in secret. Mixed into tonics and poultices that help tremendously with River’s daily pains and Ghedric’s arthritic hands. Some of their neighbors then eventually the town folk in the know had come to purchase some of Carver’s items that she explained as ‘grandmother’s remedies.’ Secrets shared between neighbors. Aunts and Grandmothers of the village had raised eyebrows and swore a silence that unsettled River’s stomach. Carver had been delighted and commanded her to not worry. Outside of those occasions, there has never been even a crackle of embers from blankets when she made their bed in the mornings. Because River assumed the only way their bed is always so cozy and warm is because Carver had put some kind of magic in them.

She turns, slowly, for she is defeated by her own curiosity.

“You swear it will not…attract attention?”

“River, I’ve been doing magic in this home since my very first night under this roof. Not even you noticed, and you share my bed.”

“I have—do you work magic on our blankets? There are four feet of snow on the ground outside and I never feel a chill. Not…anywhere in the inn,” She gives the hallway a suspicious glance, “Have you done something to the Wheel?”

“It is a bride’s disposition to make her home once her spouse brings her to it, is it not? Never mind that, we aren’t talking about the Wheel. I want to show you magic. Please, let me show you.”

River glances at the windows and the floorboards and the wallpaper that is starting to peel in a corner up high. There is nothing amiss she can see.

“Very well. If you swear this will be safe.”

Rather than say a word, Carver grasps her jaw to lift her head and meets her in a kiss. One of such passion she is lifted upon her toes to chase her wife’s lips when she begins to back away.

“Wait—“

“More will come if you follow,” Carver backs away, curling her finger to beckon River, “Hurry along.”

“Of course, I—did you just kiss me to make me do your bidding?”

“And because we have not done it in some time, and I wanted to. River, you stubborn donkey. I know you want to see it and I want to show you. I’ve been dying to.”

“Where exactly are we going?”

“Our room.”

An arm reaches back with the hand extended for River to take. That hand drags her up the winding stairs to the small hall outside of the attic door. It is narrow enough to just fit them shoulder to shoulder. There are no windows in the hall, no pictures to decorate it. This place is still River’s. Lonely and barren for the work she chooses above all else.

Inside the room is a different story. Once upon a time it was sparse and inordinately neat due to the fact that she would spend very little time in it. Just enough to sleep and change and bathe. Up the stairs after a long day when the joints in her ache to the point of bringing her to tears. Down the stairs in the morning when she is drowsy from how little sleep she got the night before. Head aching, stomach churning. Up the stairs to change after a drunk spilled an entire mug of beer on her. Down the stairs again to wipe tables, chop wood for the stove come morning, mop floors, scrape the ash from the fireplace. Back up the stairs to collapse in bed. She had not cared for a sense of home in her own space. Neither had she put much thought into making it a room fit for welcoming in a new bride, the day she brought Carver home.

Perhaps that had been the better choice for her room—their room now—was the place that started as Carver’s comfort. Slowly changing it to accommodate herself in a way that facilitated bravery to exist here. In the village, in the Wheel, in River’s life. Their first few weeks, months even, were not simple. Both became efficient at portraying a particular kind of self in public that was habitually carried into their private lives. Except for when their unfamiliarity bumped into small moments. Arguments they had to keep quiet so as not to wake guests or, worse, Ghedric on the dirt floor. Carver threw fits about fabrics and foods, about the smells of things, about people and watchful eyes. About the Chief Semé who would come to the inn often with lustful eyes and expectation that he could make Carver accompany him and no one could deny him. Their distrust for one another making living difficult. Until one day they seemed to have gone past it. Little things, acts of kindness, even trivial conversation started to push gauze into the open wound. And their room had helped. This place is where they started speaking honestly, being open with themselves. This place gave Carver courage and River some steel to face the fact that her wife is a witch and that is not so bad at all.

Now the bed is entirely gone. They never use it anymore so there is little point. Instead there is a thin mattress heaped in comfortable blankets set in a box no taller than two inches upon the floor. Just in front of the fireplace that is small and made of iron painted black. With a guard on the front of it that looks like a knight’s slatted helmet covering. Dog beds line the wall where the bed had once been. Rugs that are far too posh to be purchased by an inn keeper cover the wooden floor. Another thing Carver found. Now there is shelves for books on the wall with the door in it. River’s working desk for sewing, trunks and a small wardrobe. Plants hang from strings on the ceiling, dried or in the process of being dried that leave an herbal scent in the air. More plants grow from pots all around the room.

It is lovely because of how dearly it reminds her of Carver. Modest but beautiful, welcoming but lush.

“Let’s sit on the bed.”

“Of course.” She takes the job of shutting their door and giving each of the dogs a greeting.

When she turns back to their bed, she feels her palms grow sweaty from nerves. Just as Carver is, she sits with legs crossed beneath her and faces her wife.

Carver reaches between them to squeeze her knee, “You look faint.”

“I’m nervous.”

“Would you like another kiss?”

“No, no—yes, just one perhaps.”

Carver holds her by the jaw and gives her a very chaste kiss. River curls her shaking fingers around Carver’s wrists.

“My mother died just for stepping foot in one of the circles.”

“I know.” Said with a kind of softness that nearly brings tears to her eyes.

“And I…I married a witch. I pulled you out of a circle. And that is not even the worse of it because you are the witch that started the war. You killed the King. And I married you.”

Carver gently caresses River’s cheek with her thumb, “I know.”

“I’m only saying it because I’m frightened. If anyone finds out—“

Carver’s fingers curl inward, gripping her face to turn her eyes up. To make River see the seriousness in her own.

“I would never let anyone harm you. Not ever.”

River shakes her head, “You misunderstand. I’m not afraid for me, Carver. I’m afraid for you. I do not—I cannot—see harm come to you. You’re my wife. You’re important to me, so important.”

“My River, sweet as that just was, do not fret. No one will know.”

She nods though she knows how shaken she must appear, “Very well. I trust you.”

“River, darling, you’ll enjoy this. I swear it.”

She does not think that to be true. Her concern for being found is paramount to anything else.

“If you say so.”

“Magic is fascinating. You won’t believe what I can do with it. Especially as an O’Bru. You’ve perhaps made me more powerful than I was before. True, I cannot be the thunder that splits a mountain apart as I once was, but I am theoretically limitless,” Carver dips her head to follow River when she lowers hers, “Aren’t you curious?”

“Of course, but so is the cat and you know what they say about him.”

“Hm,” Carver draws away to lean backward, reaching with her long arms to pluck a pair of River’s traveling boots from a shelf, “Let’s start with these.”

“These? These are my boots, not magic.”

“Are you sure? Have a closer look.”

These boots are one of the two pairs of shoes that River owns. One set are for work which are the ones she always wears and sets aside money from her salary to have them repaired when the need inevitably rises. This second pair is just for when she makes trips to Newin or across the lake or, occasionally, beyond that if she has reason for it. Most often they have sat in the steamer trunk at the end of her bed, but they had been moved after Carver began redecorating. Tall and tan treated leather with dark brown laces. Nothing abnormal about them. Except, when she flips them around, she notices the outsoles have been replaced. So has the insole which is now a vibrant red.

She looks up at her wife, perplexed, “I don’t understand.”

“Magic is both complex and very simple. It has evolved a great deal since my imprisonment, and I have had to confer with a lot of witches—“

The boot slips from her hand to the bed between them. Both her hands reach out to secure a grip upon her wife, around the arm and clenched into a sleeve. She pulls the woman into her space to plead, “Please tell me you have not been going into the caves. Please, please Carver.”

“I haven’t, calm down.”

“Carver. Killian goes down there, often. He taunts them and kills them to make himself feel like a man. To prove some stupid point to his father. He is already—“

Predictably Carver snaps her teeth around the sentence she did not finish, “He is already what, my River?”

“Nothing. He’s just the son—“

“You,” Carver shakes a finger at her then her head, “Keeping secrets from me, River. I loath it.”

“No, no I—“

“You?”

She sinks into herself, shoulders lifted to her ears, “He just hates me, and he is looking for a reason to separate us. That’s all I was trying to say.”

“Mm,” Carver does not appear convinced at all, “I was talking about the witches here and in Newin.”

“H—what do you mean here? We don’t have witches here. Chief would know.”

“River, don’t be naive. This village was full of witches once. The grandmothers tell me so. I mean, you all hold so many old traditions. Your wedding ceremonies are very similar to mine, your grieving ceremonies. Men take the women’s surname here. That is traditionally something witches did. Your birthing ceremonies, the naming convention of your children. Why do you think your mother had you by the river and then named you River? It was to bestow a little bit of power in you. Make you wild and untamable, vicious when stirred but serene and beautiful otherwise. Far more complex beneath the surface than appears upon first sight.”

“That’s—“

“O’Bru witches are known to me. An old and storied line.”

“I already told you, I’m not—“

“Not at the moment but you could be. And that isn’t my point. My point is, this was a coven before Semé came here. Of course there are witches hiding here and there are plenty in Newin. They’ve taught me how to be a witch in this age. In some places, like here, it is still not locally legal to be a witch and so there has been a new fad of hiding spells. I’ve gotten very good at it. Like with your boots.”

River blinks, “My boots?”

“I’ve slipped spells in them. So your feet never sink into liquid no deeper than the heel and water cannot ever sink past the tongue and the laces to soil your sock.”

“That is…practical. I didn’t realize magic could be practical.”

Fingertips trace the curve of River’s knuckles, creating a road from one freckle to another, “It makes lives easier. It is innovation. It is no different than a fireplace which can be used to cook your meals or heat your home or burn it down.”

“It sustains, gives, and takes away.”

“Yes,” Never has she heard Carver breathless with excitement, so overjoyed she seems unable to keep herself still, “You’re getting it.”

The red insole is a charming look for the boots. The new outsole is a darker wood that matches the laces nearer in color now with a heel slightly taller than the old one.

“Does it have a preference?”

“Does a man with a sword? Will he use it to defend, uphold, or slaughter? Does the sword decide or does the man?”

“Fair,” She sets her boot back on the floor with its partner and releases a long-held anxiety, “Show me more.”

Without a warning or a presumed reason, Carver leans forward to kiss her. Holding her hand between both of her own, fingers petting the tender inside of her wrist, Carver kisses her.

When she pulls away, it is only an inch distance. River’s head is flooding with the waters where she finds herself, secured in the place she drowned the girl with petty desires and wants and selfish things she had no time for long past. Evidently she never died. Just waited for the time to swim back to surface.

“That is precisely what I wanted you to say.”

“I’m beginning to enjoy this new system of manipulation you use on me.”

“I would never dare try, my River. I don’t need to. You always answer the call of my every need,” Another kiss is touched to her jaw, “The perfect partner you are. Who would have guessed?”

“Insulting.”

“Not what I’m talking about. Come on, let me show you more.”

Magic is pressed into every nook and cranny of the inn. How she ever missed it before she cannot fathom but after Carver shows her, she can find more of it. Magic is equal parts knowing how to speak as it is being crafty. Phrasing the names of things with the right intent on a piece of paper, in charcoal, creates a small candle that only burns as long and as bright as the room needs. The candle of course needs supplies that Carver calls components and each must fit a certain qualification. Fat from an animal she killed, a wick of braided hair, eyelashes from the unsuspecting and sleepy. Little rules that are mystifying and somewhat exhilarating for the puzzle they present. Such a gleam appears in her eye because Carver notes it and teases her for it. Floorboards that eat dirt when no one is looking and only when no one is looking. What becomes of the dirt, Carver waves that away and explains that the result is the floor becoming shiny afterward. Knives that get sharp from use and go dull when left in a drawer. Chairs that will make folks with hot tempers grow drowsy when they sit in them. Wallpaper that turns spiderwebs into real silk threads and the spiders themselves into small needle-like worker drones that process and refine the material into a workable, usable fabric. Windows that watch the outside as easily as a person can watch inside by looking through them.

All the time she had spent in the corner behind the bar, she had not been idle. She was watching River preform the tasks of a daily routine and making notes on improvement. Anything that would make the O’Bru family have an easier life.

Upon the work desk in their room, Carver works a magic in front of her eyes. Utterly enchanted, she crowds as close as she can in her own chair beside her wife’s. Using mud collected from the riverbank where River was born, shards of a broken porcelain teacup, and a live coal from their fireplace Carver makes a small man. Pudgy and very round, smaller than River’s hand and with no definition to give a face or musculature. The man remains limp until Carver stuffs a piece of paper that she drew something on into the head where the live coal is. Instantly he straightens and clicks his heels as he gives them a salute. To arm the little mud knight, Carver pokes a large needle through the stubby end of one arm and affixes a thin, jagged river rock to the other. Sword and shield, he gives another salute before hopping off the work desk to wiggle himself through one of the holes in the wall made by mice and disappears.

“Is that why I have seen far less vermin making a mess of my house?” She hears the breathless wonder in own ears. She does not feel ashamed for it because it makes Carver glow with unrestrained joy.

“You’re welcome.”

“You—you’re the most remarkable woman I’ve ever met.”

Carver’s joy only brightens, “I knew that would make you fall in love.”

“I was already—“ She stops, catching her heart between her teeth before the sick bastard can leap out.

“With magic, yes. I think I might be in love now,” She scoots her chair even closer, grasping her wife’s arm in both her hands, “Show me more.”

Orange eyes flick down to River’s lips then away, back to the components spread across the work desk.

During winter the inn is far more popular than any other time of the year both for its size and for its constant warmth. There is always food because of Carver’s hunts throughout the year giving their stores a surplus of meat. The inn is also a heart and in winter, that is an important thing indeed.

Winters are sacred in the village where River was born. It is the time for community, when the world is so harsh it would kill a man simply for being outside. Often during winter people come together in ways that does not happen any other time. Chores become communal to get the work done faster and get the people out of the element quicker. Elders of the community are moved from their homes, temporarily, to be put with families that can keep them warm and fed. Meals are often shared together in places with heart though it is not an expectation. Families bring small items—some flour saved in jars, salt given to them by a cousin that works the spice trade, pickled onions, dried fruit—and the heart provides. Small items are mixed with the larger contribution they at the inn can provide. Ghedric cooks mighty meals at least once a week that half or more of the town comes to. An old tradition to make sure the ones with less get through the winter just as safely as the ones with the most. Something the chief had not liked, had considered a weakness because only the toughest should be allowed to survive. Something that their village had not let him take away from them.

Winters are hard on River. Aches that have persisted since childhood are worsened by the cold. Nausea persists from the fatigue that runs her ragged. Work needs done everywhere she looks and her hands do not know how to be idle. She works with the blacksmith despite not having a skill for it nor much knowledge. She works with the carver and the canner, works to chop wood for families with new children. Works to deliver meals to the ones on the outskirts of town who do not make it to the inn for community gatherings. Snow needs pushed away with shovels so that it does not build up in community areas for walking. Motion is all she knows until she has to stop for sleep. Meals are optional things she neglects until she physically cannot anymore.

Winter brings out the giving spirit in Carver. Already the woman had proved to be far more generous than she had expected from a witch. Because of Carver all of River’s misconceived notions of what a witch is were changed and made right. Winter puts Carver in the snow beside her, tending to laborious tasks for the first time since they have been married. Carrying wood inside, bringing water indoors, scrubbing tubs and plates, walking with River to preform check-ins on the villagers at the outer edge of town.

Under a pale sky darker than the world around them, the pair of them stand knee deep in snow. Knee deep for River, not so bad for Carver who is much taller than she is. Before they left the hunting bow that Carver made was strung in preparation. River had questioned the choice and Carver had waved her off with a just in case. A deep hood is drawn over her grey hair to defend sensitive ears and neck from the cold winter wind.

“Are we done yet?”

River sucks in a breath through her nose, shaking herself out of the daydream she was lost in. The one where she knocked the hood off her head and gripped her by the neck to pull her down for a kiss. Then she would kiss each eye to melt the snowflakes clinging to dark lashes.

“Yes, mhm. This was the last house. Shall we ride back?”

“Yes, please. My feet ache. I hate work. I had better get cooed over and thanked a million times for what I’ve done. I’m really sacrificing a lot here, River. I may never be the same.”

River falls in step with her wife who is gracious enough to go slow so that her short legs can keep up. Tied to a tree is a horse that belongs to the blacksmith. A rust colored mare that is placid in nature, unbothered by the snow and their approach. Carver rushes past to run her hand down the muscled neck of the beast, brushing aside the corse black mane while whispering to her. Thanking her for the patience and the work she has done today.

Ice coats the bark of the trees near to the ground. A hand print might be melted into it if she were to move her wife toward one, make her lean on it. If she did, River might be able to kiss her wife’s neck while standing. One of those divine notes of song will leave Carver, breathed into the air amidst a cloud of silver. Hands might get impatient and grabby, they might rip at clothing, seek skin. To see as well as hear her panting.

“River?”

She sucks in another sharp breath and stumbles forward, “Mm. Mhm! Coming.”

“Are you alright?” The concern in her voice is touching and embarrassing. A gloved hand reaches out to knock some snow from her hood, trace a scorching path across her cheek, and squeeze her shoulder.

Carver is, as it is becoming more and more clear, an incredibly affectionate person. To begin with she assumed all physical interactions that sought some sort of intimacy had been purely because Carver had been alone for so long. Kissing her changed things enough that she realizes this had never been the truth. The truth had been that Carver was being respectful and holding back on what she actually wanted. Which revealed itself to be every scrap of affection River can and is willing to give. One kiss had created a monster and River is falling apart. One kiss had given Carver the permission to add this sort of affection into their usual interactions and, occasionally, River herself had even been the one to initiate again.

Kissing is no longer enough to satisfy either of them. Realistically River can surmise that there must be feelings between them that goes both ways. No one without a heart would kiss River as often as Carver does and have it mean nothing. The flirtations have gone on for too long and become too fiery for it to be friendly anymore. The longing in their shared looks, in the touches shared in their bed are charged. River is not a fool. They clearly share an intense connection, and the passion River feels is mirrored in Carver.

She is just a coward. Too afraid to try anything and too afraid to ask if Carver is in love with her too or if it is just the richer lust she feels.

Either way, kissing is no longer enough. She has started going mad in the daylight outside of the safe confines of their room. She cannot hardly think when Carver is near to her. She cannot go more than an hour without being struck by her own want. She is hanging onto each kiss like the driftwood keeping her afloat in the rapids trying to drown her.

Carver steps closer to reach into River’s hood, holding her face to tilt it up, “What are you thinking about?”

“I—well, not much when you hold me like this and look at me like that.”

“River.”

“Just tired,” She lies easily, pulling away from the soft hands with far more difficulty now than in days prior, “Shall I lead or would you like to?”

“Hm. You may.”

Clipper—the rusty mare—nibbles on her jacket cuff while she makes her cold hands undo the reins tied around the tree. She gets the occasional pat on the nose to stop but Clipper does not listen to anyone. River swings into the saddle first so that she can extend a hand down for Carver. Lightening strikes the poor body that cannot bear the distance between them any longer. Even when they are just beside each other, even when their lips touch, she feels a yawning distance that is eating her alive.

Carver sinks into her the moment she is on the horse behind her. Arms wrap tight around her waist so the chilled hands can seek warmer places to hide. Into the folds of her hood, Carver presses her face there and sighs. Not despondent or annoyed or tired. Relieved.

“You can try to sleep. I won’t let you fall off.”

“Not a chance,” Carver adjusts a bit so she can be pressed even tighter to River’s back, “It’s my job to keep an eye out for any game that may wander past or a starving bear. Or a starving man.”

River leads the horse into the torn-up snow that marks the path they took to get here, “Can you shoot from horse back?”

“Are we playing my game again? It’s been some time.”

“That—we don’t need to anymore. You know me better than anyone alive.”

“You started it. Let’s play anyway. The answer is yes, with tremendous accuracy. Queen’s in the Vale were infamous for our archery. Much like how your socialites have balls and wear your gowns and compete with your blustering, archery was our event. We would make our own bows and compare. If you were a poor archer, then prospects you had for a partner were very slim.”

“Hm,” She smiles widely, confidant that her hood will conceal it, “Then, by your Vale standards, have I secured myself a highly sought after prospect?”

“You have. Before there was need for me to marry your country’s king, I was much like you in that I had hosts of people vying for my attention. Only, we did not propose upon first affection.”

“No, of course. The name thing.”

“Mm,” Carver reaches up to tug River’s hood aside just enough for her to press her nose down into the warmth trapped there, by where her high collar meets her throat, “How many proposals have you had in your lifetime?”

“Ah—what do you count as a proposal?”

This laugh is a short burst. One that sounds surprised by itself for slipping out so cut off abruptly.

“Sorry, forgive me. I was assuming the usual will you marry me but are there qualifiers for you that don’t involve the words?”

“Mm…no. I suppose not but sort of. There have been…three? Who asked my father’s permission in place of me, by passing me entirely intact, to which they were summarily told no. There has been one man that was out of town who offered my father a cow.”

“Only just the one? My River, I would give Ghedric ten cows for you.” Prickles nip at her skin, racing across it and back against to the point where Carver kisses her neck. Most of the lush touch of those lips had been upon her collar but even the edge of her kiss touching hot skin had been enough to ruin her. She shifts in the saddle, clearing her throat of the thickness suddenly coating it.

“There has been a decent amount of proposals in words and two with actual rings. Those were preposterous. We don’t even use rings here. I’d say twelve total? Much more if you count the drunks who shout it at me from across the room or suggest we get a quick marriage so we can go upstairs.”

“Twelve. It does make sense. You are ravishing.”

“I look like everyone else in this town. Men just flock to me because I seem an easy target and then, when I prove not to be, I’m a challenge. That’s all it is.”

Carver’s breath warms the shell of her ear, “Are you fishing for compliments?”

River bites her lip to keep herself from smiling, “No, no. That’s not like me. But if I were?”

“That is most certainly not the case, River. Your waistline is mouth watering. Your hips compliment it. You are not exceedingly tall, but your legs are most of your height. Your freckles are perhaps to taste but they suit mine so I’m bias. Your face is the stuff of art. Steely and sharp, reserved enough that when you do light up with a smile or give me a flirtatious look, it’s heaven on earth. And you have what my uncle would call large udders.”

River chokes on a laugh now too, raising a hand to stifle it but is unable to do so. The noise rolls across the open space, bouncing back at her off the half frozen trees.

“You’re enamored with me because I’m a leggy, buxom woman?”

Carver hums against her neck, “Well, obviously. As is every other man that encounters you. Why do you think I’m such a jealous chit? And also, no. I’m enamored with you because you’re mean to me and you’re very soft and you make me laugh and make me feel safe. Because you are my dear friend who knows me best in this world. The other bit about you being buxom and leggy is why I want to bed you.”

“It’s nice to be wanted I suppose.”

“You’re very wanted.” Carver purrs against the side of her neck.

River reaches down to squeeze Carver’s thigh beside her own, “As are you.”

“Mm. Your question next.”

“How many times have you been in love?”

“Finally, a simple one. Only once.”

This surprises River a great deal, “Only once?”

“I am, in fact, still passionately in love with my very first love.”

River’s stomach clenches into a painful knot. She stares ahead, focusing on keeping Clipper going down the same path while her ears ring.

Could that be who she hopes?

Could it possibly be anyone else?

Are they going to confront this?”

“They say that a first love never leaves you.”

“I have found that to be remarkably accurate. Me next? What were you like as a child?”

“Spacey and wistful. Too well mannered, probably. I never misbehaved. Deeply romantic.”

Carver slips her fingers inward to grip River’s waist under her riding cloak. She can feel her wife’s smile against her neck, “Deeply romantic? As a little girl?”

“Is that hard to believe?”

“From someone who has rejected twelve separate proposals and never taken a lover? Yes!”

She purses her lips, “As an adult you must let childish things die in the bed of your childhood. I buried my romantic fantasies long ago. But they were there once. My parents were hopeless for one another. You’ll have to ask my father about their story some time, he loves to tell it. I grew up near them, not knowing at first what love was or why it made adults more than emotionally intimate. Physically too. The first time I saw them kiss, I was baffled. Most children I think would be disgusted. I asked the local children about it, and they told me different things. Likely all the strange ways their own parents skirted explaining intimacy. I conscripted three different friends to kiss me so I could figure out what the idea was but they blew raspberries at me and called me weird.”

“Your mistake was asking your peers. Children are never romantic, my River.”

“So I learned. I went to the aunties and the grandmothers. They told me all sorts of things that made me clutch my doll and listen enraptured by their tales. Widows have just the most fascinating stories to tell about love.”

“Primarily that they never experienced it?”

River huffs out a sigh, “Unfortunately. But not all of them. And really, the good and the bad and the middling stories helped. It convinced me that leaving romance behind was for the best, eventually. Before then though, my head were in wispy pink clouds that held pictures of pretty woman and my lips upon the rolling hills of their bodies. I would see a girl in the village with ribbons in her hair and grow flushed just thinking about walking up to her and telling her I thought she was pretty. Because in my romantic mind, pretty was never a solid enough word. Heavenly perhaps, like you are.”

A delighted noise from her wife, “Go on.”

“I’d think of how I’d plant flowers for them and build them a home and—really, I think my child mind wanted to be like my father who made my mother glow brighter than the sun. Perhaps I still try with you, in my own way.

“Do not convince me you are not a romantic anymore. It may break my heart.”

River laughs in rare form. Loud and unbothered by the idea of being anything but that. There is no one else here, just her wife and Clipper whom carries on through the snow without complaint.

“Are you trying to work in a complaint about my performance as your wife?”

“A little romance wouldn’t hurt.”

She grins, cloudy from her own joy, “Noted.”

Unthawing after a long trip through the snow needs to be done in steps. The clothes then the bath then laying lazily under blankets by the fire. Naturally River does not waste her daylight on that. Some things are changed but once her socks are dry and her apron is exchanged for the wet winter frock, she goes back to work. This day Carver stays upstairs to slowly warm herself back to working temperature. Questions abound about the whereabouts of her lovely wife from villagers who come for family dinner hoping to see her. Many grannies inquire about her health to which she is pleased to rest their minds. Some laughter when she teases her absent wife for being lazy and more teasing from villagers for River spoiling her wife. She works longer that night than she does most because of the winter months. Leaving food on the tables for anyone who may need it after the house has gone to bed and were too proud to seek it during day. Stoking the fires and feeding them wedges of fur before wiping everything down and mopping. There is more she wants to do but Rolly comes trotting down the stairs to bite the hem of her skirt. Something she knows Carver has trained him to do.

“You did not need to send the dog after me.” Their bedroom door clicks shut behind her. Her apron is taken off along with the scarf tied around her hair to be hung on the pegs by the door.

“I didn’t want to put shoes on to come collect you myself and you were taking ages. It’s been our bedtime for well past an hour now,” Carver’s voice comes from beneath the pile of blankets on their bed, “It’s cold.”

“We get a lot of snow here. Did you need anything? I could run back downstairs and make you something to warm you up.”

Blankets are shifted so a head can poke out, hair bedraggled, “I want my wife to come to bed.”

River hums a contented note, “Sorry for making you wait. I try to get ahead of chores before bed during winter. There is too much to do in a day.”

“It’s fine. I’ve been waiting to speak with you, but I wanted to wait for when you wouldn’t be mentally preoccupied with work. This gave me the time to go over what I wanted to say and decide that I didn’t need as many words.”

River hums to acknowledge this while she is disrobing her work clothes for a long nightdress suitable for winter. It buttons at the wrists to trap the heat in the long sleeves. Feeling the weight of her wife’s eyes upon her while she changes, she glances over her shoulder and encourages her to speak with a roll of her wrist.

“I would like for us to stop please.”

Her fingers freeze over the long line of buttons down the front of her night dress, “Stop what? Have I upset you?”

“Oh, no. This isn’t a fight,” Blankets slide off Carver’s shoulders like water when she rises into a sitting position, leaning back on her palm and watching River from beneath her lashes, “After our trip this morning and the long ride back, I was thinking about it. And I’d like for us to stop playing with this fine line we’ve been treading. Where we both flirt and kiss and pretend like it doesn’t mean anything more and that we aren’t both desperate for deeper intimacy when we both know exactly what it means. I’m frustrated and desperate. I know you must be too. I want to make love. I want to kiss you in total honesty. I want you to flirt with me and not get lip-bitten shy. Let’s just stop pretending like we aren’t hopeless for each other.”

First comes deflection. The urge wells up quickly, filling her throat with words to placate, to wash away the situation. To rush it under a tidy rug where it will be shielded from honesty and kept safe. There can be pleas for keeping things hush-hush. There can be lip-bitten shy honesty but only if, after that, she can shove it all into a dark corner where they forget it. Instinct drives her to this place first. Afraid first to confront this thing so openly that she has been nurturing in private for months now. To back away like a coward she has never really been if only because this thing is so large and so unlike what she has ever had to confront before. Feelings can become so rich, so deeply and horrifically tangible that she did not want to touch them. The woman who caught a lightning bolt only to die by the burning once it was in hand. She could not do it first. Not when she was the one who asked Carver to come here, to step into this life.

Second comes aching embrace. The spilling of truths that have been swelling her tender for as long as she has been suffering in her own ridiculous denial. Holding herself back and for what? She had known, Carver did not lie. They both knew that the kisses and the flirtation had crossed a line into becoming a free, fun way to make their marriage tolerable into something else entirely. Longing had saturated the pair of them so profusely they had settled into their half-way place, somewhere between complacency and hesitance. Looks had been given to incite fires that ravaged River any time she closed her eyes to see them again. Before now, they should have done something other than want. Want in the fever pitch of a burning sun. Want so badly it stripped them of sense, pushed them into a what if we just stay here instead. Why they had hung her, between, for so long she does not have a good answer for. It had felt good while it also had been killing her. Day by day, the taste of her lips had been driving her mad. Never enough.

She breathes something. Reedy, raggedy that tickles the backs of her teeth from how hopelessly it had been. Whatever the words are do not touch her mind that sings and screams. They twist her throat up in barbed heat, echoing the hooks catching her belly. Everything is sensations. Clothes are prickling discomforts. Breathing is wheezing, stinging nettles. Thinking is an oppressive blanket that is swallowing her, drowning her rapidly. Air is a syrup she has to fight against just to stay standing.

Carver reaches her arm out, palm held up to her, “Go ahead. Give in. I want you to. I’m asking you to. Please, love me. Love me, River. Please.”

Permission given sunders her. She is moving but her world is a blur, only able to focus on the single point that is her wife. Through the haze her body finds instinct that brings her to her knees, kneeling by the woman who takes her face into hand and kisses away what remains of sense. Fingers are greedy, grabbing and ripping and squeezing. Buttons come loose, hair is dragged across knuckles, skin burns beneath skin that wicks with a sweat sudden and feverish.

“We waited too long.” Carver’s voice is a husk, is a choked fire dying and blazing all at the same time. Sputtering out from lack of air but an inferno that sinks into her, scorches her ruthlessly. Lovingly.

Hands are gallant and ignoble. Courteous enough to be slow, caressing skin in places where River has never felt touch but her own. Exposing skin that has never been appraised, never been held under lustful watch and held with such a want that her partner licks lips and whispers eager things. Devilish enough to grip her such that salacious sounds are rent from her. Sounds she did not know she could make.

“Can I take this off?”

From the place she lies, on her back beneath Carver, she only nods. She is not entirely certain how she got here. Drunk on the taste of love, drunk on the passion burning between them. Carver kneels between her bent knees—somehow the skirt of her dress has worked up around her hips—with one of River’s delicate wrists in her hand. She cradles the back of River’s hand in her palm, thumb rubbing over the knuckles, and undoes the buttons of the sleeves. One by one. Heady kisses rain upon her burning skin. On arms exposed, on the stomach when the dress is pushed up to her neck and tugged away. On her shoulders. River awakens to senses when she feels her wife press to her, when that feeling reminds her that her wife is mostly naked. The weight and pressure of another body atop hers nearly brings tears to her eyes. There has not been perfection like this. A sensation so divine it strikes her as lightning. It feels beyond comprehension. Reality severs from perception and what remains is a floating, twisting headiness. Puffs of air feel blister-hot against her neck, against her lips that stay parted. Stay wet with the taste of Carver’s kiss.

Carver makes a whining sound, almost bratty from petulance, but saturated in a wine that makes it low and fuzzy, “Your freckles, River. Your body. Oh my love, you are beautiful. No, heavenly.”

Fingers push over the soft swell of her belly, over the curve of her wide hips, up the narrow taper of her waist.

A storm lives beneath her mortal shell. Thunder is rattling her jellied bones. Lightning is prickling at the tender parts, nipping at nerves brilliant and flayed. Wisps of hot air are clouding around the crown of her head and the crown of her sex where heat has gathered. Tremendous roiling heat that is making her useless. Boiling her where she lays. Gripping and sinking, twisting and heaving.

There are briars in her mouth rooted under the tongue, cording around it in a spiral that keeps it pinned down. She wants to speak adoringly of her wife’s own beauty, of how hers is the first body laid bare to her and the weight of that meaning for her. To sing praise of all the months she has spent loving this woman, tell her that she has inspired things in River no other has. Taught her new feelings and is teaching her new sensations now. To sing of the sinewy body laid bare, to worship the scars war has left. To thank her until tears come for choosing her, for loving her. Everything is tied together, held down by the weight of her enormous love, kept solid and unspoken.

Instead she whines, mewls, breathes out her wife’s name.

Carver is glowing above her, hunger so prevalent her impatience makes her fidgety and indecisive. Glazed-over eyes and red lips, licked by her tongue to taste what remains of River. She is breathing hard already. Eager but unable to take what she wants because everything is being offered and it’s too much for one woman. Her hands seek, searing into silken skin that is virgin to another’s touch. Blisters must be left in the wake. River sighs for being held and Carver eyes grow darker, clouded by lust.

“We waited too long.” She says again before leaning down to kiss her. Threads of hair are braided around Carver’s fingers. Held in a vice that is tight but does not pull, not yet. Her back lifts from their bed, body shaking from anticipation. The band around her breasts is slowly undone by the pair of them. Slow not for the lazy seduction that comes from being undone by one’s partner. Slow because they are struggling while kissing, unwilling to part for more than a breath. A wispy name drips from her lips that makes Carver shiver above her.

She ends their kiss abruptly to turn her head, push her ear near to River’s stinging lips, and beg, “Again.”

Against the soft cartilage, she struggles to swim through sensations to breath, “Carver.”

Shudders run through the lean back muscles under River’s palms. Teeth nip skin, along the hinge of her jaw. Eagerness makes her twist, makes her arch, makes her seek what she can grab and hold and kiss. Part of her is trying to focus on what Carver is doing so she can replicate it when the time comes to tend to her wife. Focus is nearly impossible. Her ears catch a whimper that makes her look down between them to see what is happening. During her moving, one of her legs has slipped between Carver’s and pressed against her clothed sex. Damp heat scorches her skin.

Fingers in her hair tighten. Air touches the skin of her shoulder quicker. Stars fill her vision, fill her head, from the first roll of Carver’s hips. So very light that her sex just grazes River’s thigh.

“Divines,” Her own neediness is a wretched breath expelled and a soft moan, “It’s been so long…”

Another roll of her hips, another filthy noise that is close enough to River’s ear that it slips in. That is tickles the skin, works down through the jaw where teeth rattle and slithers as a lick of flame down into her writhing belly.

“Sweet River,” One hand caresses the length of her calf, “Set your foot down like so. Good, perfect.”

When Carver bears down this time, she feels more of it. Firmer, pressing for friction that leaves a wet stain upon her goose-pimpled skin.

“Oh, I’d love to…” Carver trials off, gripping her waist and rolling her hips another time. Whining, needy pants slip past lips that nearly graze River’s. Suspended in the breath they share, tantalizingly close but pulling away when her head snaps back.

“To what?”

“To—oh Divines, I might. It has been so long, and you are so perfect, my River. Would you mind? I want to touch you, I will,” Fingers cinch long strands of her hair, eyes blossoms of a petal blooming under immense heat, “I will teach you pleasures tonight, I will show you my love. When I taste you River, mm. But I—“

River surges up to claim her mouth in a vicious kiss. Teeth gnash together, mouths opened for a deeper taste. She clasps her fingers around the back of her wife’s lovely neck to keep her near, to press their foreheads together.

“I want you to feel good. Whatever you’re begging me for, take it.”

With awe she watches and feels her wife begin to grind down on her thigh in earnest. Each roll of her hip makes her body jerk, makes her eyes snap closed, makes her whimper and whine. Softly at first. Just the first grace of pleasure, the bone-rattling climb toward something River has only experienced by her own hand. To watch it on another is an experience that is enlightenment. Heavenly. Carver tries to kiss her, manages only to pant against her lips with her eyes squeezed shut and her body rocking against River’s. In a swiveling shape, she begins to rock against her, grinding down harder and faster.

As a witness to passion, it does not occur to her until her wife looses a moan, a real and raucous and hoarse moan, that she can participate. Do more than watch the thing that her peers have blushed about for years, collecting spouses just to experience. Carver had asked for her to be honest with her heart and set aside their chosen ignorance about heart songs and worship. First she catches her lips by leaning up, swallowing down the knit-brow keen that settles in the crown of her head. Thumbs mold to the shape of her face, feeling the different angles that appear as she feels the sharp tugs of passion. She feels across the bottom lip she just sucked on, wiping away the sheen of spit left behind. Feels the ripple of muscle in her back each time she ruts against River. The flex of her ribs from her heavy breathing. When she reaches to cup one of Carver’s breasts, firm and small enough to fit wholly in her palm, her wife breathes out sloppy praise. Ragged and writhed in embers burning them both alive. A tandem dance of twin flames scouring one another, feeding off the last of the air they share. Kneading one makes her shudder, hips rolling faster. Half in a frenzy, chasing a pleasure that seems just at the tips of her fingers. Even through the thin cloth barrier, she can feel the wetness building. Growing slicker and adding ease for her wanton rutting.

Lips descend next to taste the favored places she withheld from until now. Neck comes first as the most obvious choice. Skin is sensitive here, flushed and satin beneath her kisses. An ear because it is close, and she adores the shape of them. A shoulder that is buzzing from heat, tacky from a sweat building from the pace she is setting. Taste too. Tongue touches skin that is salt-slick, reddened from a full body blush. Stained nosies escape her wife from exertion. River’s body rocks with her just from absorbing the momentum.

“Close, so close,” Carver’s hands are restless, reaching and gripping and kneading. Jolts of pleasure ripple down her own spine from fingertips, callused from archery, roughly grazing one of her nipples.

Eyes jewel-bright open to settle on her, “If you touch me right now, I’ll fall apart.”

At last, the moment has arrived. Her very first experience with touching a blushing desire that is not her own. Working roughly, impatient and inexperienced and uncaring that she is either, she slips her fingers past the small clothes. Just for a moment Carver stops grinding against her so she does not miss her mark, so they can both watch. Wetness squelches around her fingers, found in such wealth that it moves up around her fingers and makes her slip. When she dips lower, just by accident, Carver whimpers and presses her face into River’s hair. More wetness soaks her to the knuckles, wets her palm from the damp bush of hair.

Carver gives a sluggish roll of her hips and sighs blissfully.

“You don’t need to—I’ll finish either way. Just cup me, hold me, while I—“ Voice fades, replaced by a slippery winding moan. Slick noises of wetness accompany River’s work. Fingertips find the stiff little nub beneath its hood and press down, rubbing in hard circles just the way she does to herself. With abandon now, Carver vocalizes her pleasure. Ears ring from the height of it, the choral notes that are supernal. Hips begin to grind again, bearing down on the fingers that work against her. They meet for each press. River’s hand is flattened against her thigh inside the small clothes and the angle becomes unpleasant, tweaking muscles in her wrist. She does not stop. She watches the furrow appear in Carver’s brow, watches her mouth come open so she can lick and bite her own lips. The feeling of touching another woman is unlike touching herself. Carver is pure dripping fire that tightens her belly.

A craggy series of breaths accompany harsh thrusts. Rapidly chasing the sensation of her climax approaching. Quicker than River can keep pace with though she witnesses for herself that this does not matter. What she is doing is enough. Frenzy, chaos that is quick and quivering and heavy. Then she rattles from a wheezed noise and goes suddenly tight. Holds there in this place for a blink, two blinks.

One long exhale washes over River’s lips seconds before they are claimed in a savage kiss. Like a puppet with her strings cut, Carver collapses atop her. She swallows every tiny moan, every breathy whimper that comes after. Body shudders each time she grazes River’s thigh. Lightness consumes River. Swirling high, lifting her beyond where she lays, ripping the air from her like riding hard across country roads does.

Carver is a pool of satin piled atop her chest. Muscles have loosened to the point of loss, control slipped from the fingers. When she reaches up to cradle the back of her head, to brush away and lay flat some of the strands poking out, she can smell Carver on her fingers. Light catches in the wetness saturating them. A heavy heartbeat rings in her ears, banging on the drums that echo through the whole of her. She feels her fingertips itch from every hard pulse.

Little skittering, scratchy breathes against her shoulder start to even out and when they do, Carver stretches her legs and arms out. A long, satisfied hum comes from between her kiss swollen lips. Hair spills around her ears like water when she lifts her head to smile at River. Nothing guarded, this smile is blinding. There is not a tiny little hesitation in the corners where she puts the playfulness, so that it is just a flirtation to hide behind. There is not a veneer coating the color of her eyes to hide the real light of her love. This is all loose, slippery from the depth of it rising up around them, this is unyielding and unburdened.

It strikes her in the chest as an arrow.

Why had they waited so long if this is the way Carver looks at her when in love?

“Hold on,” Carver’s voice is dragged over glass and coals, cracking on just the two words. She licks her lips and drops her head again, cheek sticking to River’s sternum. Tenderly she traces the length of her nose with a fingertip, over her cheeks a little red still, into her hair. She kisses each eyebrow, following the hairline to kiss the part on top of her head. The smell of Carver is clean and crisp like a fresh rain, and it twists up the air left in her to choke her.

Just enough movement to hook a thumb into her smalls and wiggle them down to her ankles to be kicked away.

“Should have taken those off first,” Breathed over the flush on River’s chest, accompanied by a wet and lazy kiss pressed to the swell of her breast. Sparks spread from beneath the touch, sizzling throughout to leave her dizzy and spinning and filled with longing.

“Sorry,” She licks her lips, pupils dark and vast in the low light and filled with hunger that makes River burn anew, “This is not how I planned for things to go.”

“You planned this?” She hears the grit in her own voice. Hears the desperation, the dripping desire.

“Not particularly in the things will go my way if I do this and such planned this. More that I’ve been imagining this for months now, wanting it for so long and in my fantasies, I wasn’t selfish right off the top.”

“I don’t think you were selfish. I enjoyed that quite a lot. What though…what were you planning to do?”

“I’ll show you but before I start,” Carver rises onto her knees between River’s spread legs, “Are you comfortable?”

“Yes,” Croaked, cracking from the burning pools of tension knotting inside her, “Just eager.”

“Good.” The single word slips like smoke from Carver’s smiling mouth. A mouth that quickly meets her own after the single husky word is offered to air. Pathetic noises escape her, scraping the channel of her windpipe and the soft tissue of her nose.

Little fires. Blessed stars that burst and burn but burn heavenly, burn wonderfully. Stars that sink past body, sink all melty and slicking the inside of her. Sitting heavy on her bones, on muscles that usually ache from the horrible burden of existing. Little fires under lips that chart brave new paths across uncharted lands. Over the hills of her breasts. In the valley below, across her waist. Fingers squeeze, holding and gripping just tight enough she feels it in her soul.

When she feels the blazing touch of Carver’s tongue between her legs, her consciousness divides from reality and she sinks into luscious waves of burning desire.

Wet lips drag across her shoulder toward her neck, “You haven’t spoken in what must be an hour or more.”

“My throat is,” Her voice cracks and if she had more of a mind left in her, she would probably slip in shame for that, “I don’t have a voice back yet.”

“High praise.”

River means to flirt back, to ply her wife with every bit of praise she has earned. She means to gather energy to keep their lovemaking going. She means to sink fingers into her hair and kiss her fiercely.

What happens is she chokes on a breath and whispers, rapturously and reverently, “I love you.”

The words are sizzling. Wind swept over the top of a wildfire, blistering the top of her mouth as they leave.

Carver lifts her head from River’s shoulder, finally peeling them apart after being crushed against her for long enough River has lost time. Pink patches of her skin from River’s fingers digging in or her teeth make her sparkle behind the eyes. Seeing it now that the haze of lust and climatic bliss have faded to a pleasant buzz warming her muscles makes her lick her lips and reach to touch. Fingertips lay over the dark splotch on her throat, tracing the outline.

“Does this hurt?”

Carver holds her wrist, thumb caressing the pulse thumping against the vein, “Is it bruising?”

“A little. It’s just a bit blue.”

“Do yours hurt?”

River’s eyes widen, “Do I have them too?”

Carver’s softness when she tilts her head, smiling down at her, sends her heart racing. She leans down to kiss her sweetly.

“I love you too.”

“Of course you do. Everyone does.”

Carver laughs against her tingling skin, “I’ve heard better.”

River is still a little breathless, “I’m still coming back down. Give me some time. That was a new experience for me.”

“Mm,” River watches her wife lift her arm so she can kiss a blazing trail up River’s bicep and forearms to the tender inside of her wrist, “It felt like that for me too.”

“Because of how long it’s been?”

“Perhaps a bit but I’ve never been with anyone outside of my husband. And that was a very quick and efficient chore. Very little feeling outside of the natural responses. He was…fine I suppose and even occasionally managed to bring me to completion. I certainly haven’t been with someone I love before,” Carver is the heavens themselves, supernal and sterling, “Until now. And that is like blinking awake after having not realized you were sleeping and now the world is vibrant and alive and just perfect.”

The flutter of her own heartbeat does not feel healthy. It almost hurts high in her throat, tickling the back of her teeth.

“So the first love you mentioned?”

“Don’t play coy. We haven’t been subtle.”

River supposes she cannot argue that. It should have been obvious the moment Carver said it.

“I suppose my issue is the surprise. I just never expected this. Maybe my falling in love with you, that I could expect. But not the other way round.”

“Now that’s unreasonable.”

“Ah! Why? Don’t use that knowing tone.” Her smile feels so good. It feels freeing. The first selfish moment she has allowed herself since her mother’s passing and she is using here. To be in love with her wife. Carver looks pleased by the sight of it.

“I could go on about what a beauty you are. But really, it should be pointed out that your selfless heart is alluring. You love richly and deeply and every day I saw it, I felt a longing to experience it for myself. I wanted to be your whole world. And then I realized, in a small way, I was and I am. Even if our arrangement was connivence, you put forward every effort to make me welcome and happy. You did small things for me. You—it was inevitable. This is my home, I’ve made it my home. You are my family. How could I not fall in love?”

River is rich with adoration. Bursting at the seems with it. Overwhelmed and delighted to be so. If she could press this feeling into Carver, make her experience the depths of it she might understand. Maybe if she did that, it could make sense to her just how deeply those words affect her.

“You may have created a monster so if at any time you wish to retract any of that, I wouldn’t hold it against you.”

“No, no. I have carefully cultivated an environment to bring this monster out in you,” Carver kisses the point of her chin, laughing to herself when she lays her cheek in the valley between River’s breasts, “I want to soak it all in.”

“Have you?”

“Maybe,” A contented sigh, fingers gripping her by the waist just to keep a firm hold on her, to keep her close, “Maybe I did it by accident. Maybe you were more than I ever expected to have when you offered me a way out. And then you just got better and suddenly became not just an ideal partner but the partner I wanted. Maybe I’ve been losing my mind because we’ve been just right here but never actually here.”

Carver’s desperate words sing in her memories, we waited too long.

She curls arms around her wife’s broad shoulders, muscled now from archery where before they were sunken and slender. To squeeze her closer. To bring her tight enough to her chest there is a hope they will merge into one and their heartbeats will slow, synchronize into a perfect harmonization.

River was content with living the rest of her life alone. Part of her always would have mourned never having a romance for all the dreams of a little girl who listened, starry-eyed, to stories about love. After some point all ideas about that became distant from her. Just whimsical fancies that she lets her mind snag on but kept far back, away from reach for the sake of reality. One where she works and will work until she hits the inevitable snag of being unable to anymore and flounders for someone to hand to inn over to. That was going to be fine with her.

Now it can never be. Now she sees that gaping hole that her father always knew but one she missed within herself. River is a loving woman. She has built herself into the shape of a home for others to rest inside when the need arises. She is warmth and generosity, and she is love overflowing. Denying a part of herself had been bruising her. Hollowing her out. The loneliness had been eating her alive and she had been ignoring it so proficiently that it became invisible to her. She needed Carver more than she ever realized.

She tucks a length of grey hair behind a pierced ear and lays her palm over it, thumb caressing the soft skin near the edge of her hairline. Carver leans against her hand, blissful and glowing.

“I look forward to you sitting on your stool getting jealous over silly things for the rest of our lives.”

“Is that all, my love?”

Air gets sticky to the softer parts of her. Stuck fast as a fly in glue.

How many daydreams did she have of this moment? When she was younger and full of whimsical ideas of love? When she was a younger woman discovering her true attractions and her dormant desires to have a wife? Spend a life with a woman who worships her and who is River’s world in turn.

She clears her throat, feeling at once silly for her reaction while she lays naked beneath the woman she is married to.

“No,” Voice a thick trickle, pouring over the pair of them, “Not all but there is only a lifetime for me to lay it all out. I can’t overwhelm you with it all too soon.”

Carver leans down to kiss her cheek, “You’re blushing.”

Simple words that fan the flames building in the base of her skull, spreading heat outward.

“Having it pointed out is cruel.”

“Terribly sorry,” A kiss to her brow and her burning ear, “Can I make it up to you?”

“I ah,” River pushes herself onto her elbows, forcing Carver to rise with her, “I’d like to do that to you. What you did to me. With your mouth.”

Carver’s hands swirl across her naked skin like a wash of cool water. Over collarbones, down the arch of her neck, across each rib, beneath her navel. When River squirms and asks again, she is treated to a dazzling smile and kiss.

“Are you sure? You do not need to and it can be to taste, doing that. If you don’t like it—“

“I know that I do.”

Carver lifts a brow, “Do you now?”

“I tasted myself on your lips. I don’t mind. And don’t you want that? Aren’t you also dying for attention?”

As if to prove her point, Carver squirms a bit and licks her lips before dropping dark eyes to look at River’s mouth like it tempts her, “I do but I don’t want you uncomfortable.”

“I want to. I very much want to.” Carver huffs out a laugh when River reaches to grip her ribs, to pull close then push back.

“Then let me help you, darling.” She grips River’s forearms to bring her along when she rolls over onto her back.

The brush of soft skin against her own makes her stomach lift into her throat. Carver’s fingernails lightly scratch up and down her arms and across her shoulders while she kisses River softly.

“Mm, thank you. I needed that. Now,” Carver threads nimble fingers through her hair and gives the slightest push against her head, “Show me what you’ve got.”

“Guide me? I don’t want to disappointment.”

“You won’t,” With her free hand, Carver holds her beneath the chin to look into her eyes, adoring and joyful melting into a softer emotional that makes her burn like a fire, “You couldn’t.”

“Just in case though, be firm with me. Guide me back on course,” River is hopeful that her eagerness will compensate for her inexperience, “Tell me if you’d like something different like my fingers perhaps. I know how to do that to some extent.”

Carver licks her kiss-swollen lips, “Is that so?”

River shrugs one shoulder and smiles a smile saturated with her adoration and absent any shyness. There needs not be any here between them, in their room with not even air separating them.

“That is usually what I do with myself.”

“And how often do you do that with yourself? Because I share your bed and I haven’t noticed,” Eyes clouded by a heated, hungry lust shift down to River’s lips, “And I would notice. Believe I would.”

“During my baths usually,” She drifts down her wife’s sleek body, kissing a shoulder then the curve of a breastbone, “When you go to Newin and missing you takes a heady turn. Sometimes when you leave for a hunt, if time permits.”

The shaky little gasp Carver lets out when her lips brush against the darker skin around a nipple pleases her. It feels like a reward for something she did not mean to accomplish.

“That’s simply unfair,” Another pitiful whine, another shuttered breath, as River’s lips crest round the ridge of her breast, “I only can manage it when you’re busy and I can sneak up here for a little while.”

Each bump of rib bone gets a kiss. Fingers tighten in her hair, not yet guiding her downward but expressing a gratitude.

River looks up for a moment to offer a little mischievous grin, “Hadn’t you noticed I wait to take my bath until after you insist on rubbing away some of my muscle aches? That much touching does me in. Innocent or otherwise. Fire lives in your fingertips.”

Carver drops her head backward into the pillow with a soft, petulant huff, “You’ve made me jealous of a bath.”

“You could get jealous over anything.”

“It’s almost a talent, isn’t it?”

“I would argue it is a specific talent. Considering the only other times I’ve experienced people being jealous over me left me with this distinct feeling of slime on my skin. You, perhaps uniquely, don’t overly care as long as you get more than whatever triggered your jealously. And that is always charming, to me at least.”

Carver’s thumb taps her lower lip after she lifts her head, stopping just for a moment to meet her wife’s eyes. Hair is pushed from her face behind an ear and Carver sighs blissfully once her whole face is exposed.

“Your smile is precious.”

“Thank you. Shall I continue?”

“Mhm. Please do.”

Carver’s flat stomach is soft beneath her hands and lips. Only the slightest ridges of muscle push back against her questing touches, around her hips and far more in the thighs. Months of slowly working herself back into a condition that was more normal for her before the hundred year imprisonment. Walking then running through the forest by way of early morning light, through mist and over tree root. Moving slow and crouched through brush with a quiver upon her hip hunting for the sake of familiarizing herself the surrounding area. Building back muscle and grace the gains of which she can feel now.

Flexing beneath her lips when she kisses the soft inside of a thigh. The rough ridge of a thick scar bumps against her lips. Drawing back, she opens her eyes to look at it. Touching the edge with her fingertip, she traces down the length of it and kisses the end once she finishes the path. She does not ask about the scar. She is not sure she has the stomach to hear how Carver received it. Not while there is a blanket of heat covering them, not while they hide from winter together and glow with love. To welcome colder memories into this space would be a cruel thing. Pain has no place here. Not for Carver, not for her wife, never again.

With hands braced on the inside of her wife’s thighs, she pushes ever so gently to encourage them. The slight spreading of legs sends a fizzling, fuzzy feeling dripping down her spine.

Carver slides her foot against the outside of River’s calf. She looks up, heart on her throat, and swallows it down with the heat of desire at the look in those smoldering orange eyes.

Just as she can recall Carver doing, she bows her head to kiss the sensitive place that River had only felt and not yet seen. Not until now. A rosy little piece of soft heat that makes Carver’s breath hitch to hold and her body to shudder in delight. Not yet fully wrapped in love, Carver still releases a satisfied groan and melt down into their bedding. Her legs fall wide open, hips jerking only when she tries her very first taste. A broad swipe of her tongue that collects sticky residue.

A fluttery, fluty noise comes from her wife who jolts and grips her hair tighter. The faintest brassy whine when River licks her lips and mutters, quietly and more to herself, that the taste is not what she imagined but not unpleasant. Nice even when she closes her eyes and is allowed to connect this distinct flavor to Carver alone.

Another taste brings her eyes shut again to savor it, to focus all her sensory positions at the tip of her tongue. And to the ears which catch gold spilling from her wife’s parted lips. Each little quake and jerk, every muscle the twitches and breath that thins is reward. It is wood upon the fire building and burning between her hips, in her heavy chest and in the hollow basin of her empty skull.

Turning her head to change the angle of her lapping makes Carver breathe a high whistling note through her nose and arch her back. Continuing there brings forth a moaned, mangled set of repeated iterations of her name. With her eyes closed, it becomes easy to narrow her world to a single point of focus. To remain rooted in this feeling and fix all her self into the act of giving her wife pleasure. Little noises of her own slip free while she learns this new art of loving someone. She cannot quite help it. The need to share this with Carver who is steadily rising into a mess of sounds, writhing and reaching, is great within her heart. To share that she is enjoying this too. Little hums and stifled almost-moans. Especially when Carver starts tugging at the roots of her hair and lifting her hips desperately chasing River’s curious tongue.

Just for a second, she opens her eyes to see what this is doing to her wife. Her chest is heaving. Their blankets are pooled mostly around River but they have slipping down because of her writhing, lending enough material for her to ball into a hand and tug on each time she rises upward. Her hair is a mess around her head, hanging across her throat and caught in the knit cover for their pillow. Eyes are squeezed shut and her poor lip is raw-red from her teeth grazing it, biting down when her brow knits and she chokes on a loud moan.

River chokes on her own moan at the sight. She is the most beautiful thing. It sunders her to see it. To know that she is causing it is more than she can handle at the moment. This helps enlighten her. All those years of misty-eyed men and occasionally slack-jawed women lusting over her make more sense. The flirting to get this. And all the chatter from widows who slyly told her stories behind fans that hid their sinning lips. New brides blushing come morning when they would come to the inn for tea and gossip. A glow, a halo, around them when they would whisper about their wedding night between smiles that River had held a skepticism for.

It all makes sense to her now.

“River, River,” Fingers unclench just to grip the hair at the back of her head, using that new position to push down, bring her closer, “Your—divines, that’s good.”

Not much more. River moves herself lower and that, somehow, prompts Carver into hooking her legs over River’s shoulders. She changes the speed and the pressure along with the angle, basking in the musky tang she can taste as well as smell. In the tacky skin against her cheek and along the rest of her. Noises flood her, sensation combining with the river that takes her to sea. Slipping sweetly beneath heady waves until she is broken from revere by Carver’s jerkiness and loud keening.

Belatedly and with a little disappointment, she realizes it is over. Along with the rush of reality coming back to her is a subtle ache in her jaw and her elbows.

Carver is panting hard, fingers held between teeth that shine with firelight. Without opening her eyes, she releases River’s hair to start petting it down. Then, like a billow with the wind pushed from it, she flattened into the bed and flops her arms to the side.

“f*ck.” She whispers huskily, licking her lips and swallowing against a sticky throat.

River wipes wetness from her lips with her thumb and from her chin against the back of her hand. When she tries to rise up for a kiss, the legs on her shoulders tighten and clench inward to lock her in place.

Thrills rushing through her make her flush, “Do you want more?”

Nodding, Carver croaks out a noise then rubs her throat. She offers a strangled laugh and continues petting down River’s mused hair.

“Give me a moment.”

She relaxes back down onto her belly between Carver’s legs and rests her cheek against a thigh. When she starts to draw idle swirls against flush skin and kisses the crease between the thigh and Carver’s sex, her wife jumps.

“Do you feel like,” She stops to clear the burs from her throat, looking down at River then biting her lip from what she sees, “Do you feel like trying your fingers now? I don’t want to be greedy but—“

To assure her that they are on the same page, she shakes her head and husks, “I don’t want to stop yet.”

Orange eyes are burnt dark, pupils enticing voids that are swallowing up the color, “Neither do I.”

“Can I use my mouth while I do? I really liked that.”

A needy velvet sound rattles in Carver’s chest. She unclenches her thighs to let them fall open again, propped up on her elbows this time to watch.

“Go slow, I’m still sensitive. Start with your fingers.”

Carver keeps fussing with her hair, kindly sweeping it out of her face then wiping away the smear of wet from her cheeks for her. Her gaze is soft and adoring, fixed upon River.

“Darling?”

Her fingers, curiously sliding through Carver’s folds to feel the silken heat, pause. She looks up, besotted and hopeful Carver can see it too.

“Yes?”

“Nothing. I just wanted to look at you,” Carver holds her by the jaw for a fleeting moment, thumb rubbing over the swell of her bottom lip, “Keep going.”

She has never felt so loved.

Over breakfast the pair of them act like teenagers with a secret and one they must protect else they will be punished. Usually they share a family meal in the back corner of the kitchen. Around a card table that is short enough for Ghedric to sit at in her chair comfortably. Breakfast is a sacred time in the O’Bru household because it is the longest and quieted stretch of time they can share together. Usually Carver reads with one hand and chats with Ghredric about his menu ideas and whether he will like help making dough and if he would like her to bring in a jar of honey. Usually River is content to listen to them chat, stiring in some of the medicine Carver makes her into an airy morning tea and mentally preparing for her day.

Today her body is light and fuzzy still from the after effects of their night. Each memory that surfaces—hands and teeth and Carver’s mewling breaths against her ear—constricts her throat. Tightens a hand around her aching love-sick heart. She glances over at her wife who is always already watching her. A slight smirk on her lips. River would lean over to kiss it smooth if her father were not at the table with them.

“You feeling alright, honey?”

She nearly chokes on her bread. Less air gets in her when Carver leans over to rub the nape of her neck, as if that will help.

“What? I’m fine Papa. Absolutely fine.” She rasps, tapping her chest that burns from nearly lodging a lump of half chewed bread into a lung.

“Are you certain? I’m with Ghedric,” Carver tucks some loose strands of hair behind her ears and grips her jaw to turn her face, tilting it toward morning light to inspect it, “You’re terribly red. Did you sleep poorly?”

Were River not intimately familiar with the knowledge Carver has of the night she had, she would believe the fawning worry. They are both aware of how little sleep they got. How wrapped around one another they became because just once was not enough.

“I slept fine. I’m fine, both of you,” She sharpens her look at Carver’s smile, “Stop it.”

“I am only worried about you, my darling. You have a horrible tendency to work yourself too hard.”

“I am fine. You know I’m fine. I just…got too much sun.”

You’re a better liar than that.

Ghredric sets his fork down, growing visibly more concerned, “Maybe you should stay in bed today.”

Now there is an idea.

“Papa! I’m fine. There is too much work for just you to do.”

A perfect excuse to see you naked in the light of day. I can finally take my time to count every freckle.

“Laying in bed might be a good idea. Perhaps even for a few hours,” Carver nods to show Ghedric she agrees as she says this, “I’ll take her back upstairs and get her settled.”

I already miss the taste of you. I need to have you.

River clears the heat rising into her throat, “Actually, maybe laying down for a few hours might help. I am a bit…woozy.”

The way that brightens Ghedric nearly changes her mind. Especially so when he reaches over to squeeze Carver’s hand and beam at her with pride.

“This is exactly why I was telling River to get married. She needed someone to balance her out. Do you know how many times she was hurting so bad she would fall sometimes and only catch herself on tables on the way down? I couldn’t even convince her then to go lay down. She’d insist on just sitting down for a while to catch her breath. It does my heart good to see you two now. I’m real grateful for you, Carver.”

“Don’t be grateful. She’s easy to love even if she is a stubborn donkey,” Carver, standing behind her chair now, bends to kiss the top of her head, “And I’ll always look after her. It’s all I want in life, nip at her heels and drive her crazy. To be here, with you both. To make sure she eats and doesn’t push herself too hard and lays down when she needs to.”

Ghedric sounds choked when he says, “And that’s all I ever wanted for her. I’m not sure I’ve said it yet but Carver, honey, we’re happy to have you in this family. You’ve been a blessing. We love you.”

Stunned delight freezes Carver in the halfway place between getting River out of her chair and making a joke. Softness replaces the wagging tongue that was about to let loose something that would make River roll her eyes. Softness brings her to Ghedric’s chair so she can lean down to hug him.

“Those words have a weight,” She promises in a thick voice, “Having you two has saved me in ways you cannot imagine.”

Ghedric reaches up to pat Carver’s arm around his neck. River catches his eyes and feels her chest prickle from the intensity of his joy. That is not a look she has seen without a haze of endless grief since her mother died.

Ghedric O’Bru is a family man. All people have to at one thing at the core of them that matters above all else. Money, status, honor, power. For Ghedric, family is the paramount place for a man to place his every care. If not for the fact that River pregnancy had been so difficult for Freya, there would be a host of siblings to keep her company. He had been fearful and did not want her to risk herself for the sake of more. They had River and each other and that was his everything. All he ever needed. Until they lost Freya and then his family was broken, his only thing that mattered. Part of his enduring sadness that drove him to ask them sometimes borderline beg River to marry had always been this. She had known that. She had not known the real depth of it nor how much it would mean to him. Having Carver has given him family again. More than just River who was content to be alone because that had frightened him. Leaving her without family was his final failure, the last crack in his broken family that would finally sunder it in totality. River had not thought past wanting to give him peace so she had never considered what having someone else to love would do for him.

She never thought he could become okay. Able to smile freely, able to be entirely present without being flung back into memories that hurt him. Beyond the oppression of it at least.

River stands to collect the bundle of her wives fingers in her palm, lifting the back of her hand to her lips.

“We do love you. More than you know.”

“What is going on? Why the sudden heart?” Carver is gleaming, a jewel lodged into the heart of their quaint country inn.

Ghedric rumbles beneath the hug, shrugging enough to encourage Carver into releasing him. His smile is wide and that is enough air-theft blow to the chest.

“I have been thinking of it for a while. I haven’t found the right way to word it until now, I suppose.”

“It didn’t need said,” Carver touches his shoulder and holds River’s eyes, “I have felt welcome from the moment I stepped foot into your town. Well fed, kindly kept, and endearingly overwhelmed with care which is how I know you stubborn O’Bru show love. Now, you, come to bed.”

Ghedric chews on a laugh, swallowing it down when River sets a chastising look upon his crown. He mouths the word fussing.

She allows herself to be herded to the rickety stairs that have, almost by magic, become less rickety in the last few months. Far more pleasant to walk on after a long day too. Carver keeps an arm around her waist while they make their path, looking content but slightly puzzled. Every few steps her eyes dart over to gaze at River’s profile.

Just outside of their bedroom door, Carver stops her. Grasping her by the hip and holding her jaw in a soft palm, she continues to appear puzzled.

“You given me family again and a purpose,” A pause so she can catalogue River’s reaction to those words, “You know that, don’t you? I am me again because of you.”

“Has my father’s sappiness gotten to you?” Stunned as she is by the conviction, by the steel-firm utterance, by the sincerity turning orange iris to liquid flame.

“No—yes. The transition was difficult. The people here are brusk and clannish, quiet and distrustful from years of trauma. It’s not like home and I have been so homesick I’ve gotten used to the whirlpool of venom in my belly. When you asked me if I wanted to leave and I said no, it was not entirely because I was protecting myself. I didn’t know if you were real or a hallucination. I was on the brink of madness when you found me. I only knew for certain you were real when you handed me a bowl of soup and it burned my tongue, from the spices and from the heat. I was not alright when they put me there, I was still not alright when you sat on your knees and asked me if I would mind marrying you. You think your father’s grief is a sinkhole. My love,” Carver’s breath is long and shaking, sputtering across River’s forehead when she blows it out, “Witches line your countryside in prisons because of my grief. And the rage it turned into. I was losing myself the moment they put me in my prison.”

River tilts her face into the warm skin pressed to her own, reaching out to hook a finger in Carver’s belt when the woman steps closer. Just grounding contact. Places to keep them tethered and tight.

Memories are swimming from how much has happened in such a short period of time. That far back feels like a lifetime ago. Thinking back, Carver had been placed in a position unlike any of the other prisons River has encountered prior. Deeper in the woods behind the inn—three miles on foot—beneath a towering boulder is a witch cage. Out in the wild for the elements to do what they will. Some along the sides of the road. In the past, young River had wondered if perhaps they were ensnared where they had been during the war. Halfway through a march when suddenly magic swirled around them and cursed them to be rooted where they stood. Even in Newin, there are businesses that have been built in odd shapes to avoid a cage. Cobblestone stops there meeting old grass and dirt and buildings creep to the edge of the street. Down in the caves, all the witches she used to pass had been placed haphazardly. Not Carver though.

Carver had been placed in the lowest part of a castle that she used to live in with her children. The one built for her as a wedding gift and the one she stayed in six months out of the year. The one that was destroyed in the war. At the bottom of it where the dungeons used to be. And around her circle had been bodied impaled on poles and bones in the rivers.

“You haven’t told me much about that.”

“It took a while for me to clearly remember it. If I’m honest. When the war ended, all that remained of the royal family was my husband’s great aunt whom I never met. She was brought in to sit as a regent until my daughter could come of age. I didn’t know much about her but her bitterness over what I had done was profound. That is why we were punished so harshly. She ordered witches who had turned coat at some point to make our prisons and then,” Carver’s breath catches around something raw, something that makes her lose her steel and go quiet for a second, “The bodies. Those are my family. Not my daughter but everyone else. They sent knights to gather the rest. I had long since given up my fight and offered peace but this was the price. I didn’t know and it was too late for me to find my rage again. When I was brought downstairs, my whole people. From my kingdom, all dead. Bloodying the rivers and the river walk. The floor. My brothers. Everyone I had left aside from my Emmera. They made me sit in my circle and watch them decompose. Turn to wither-rot and bone. I was not okay, River. When you fell, I had been lost to myself for a bit. The blood shook me back to life. I thought we were in the Vale because I had lost my place in reality. I was present and then slipped away. The conversation we had felt like a fever dream until you came back and made me some sort of fish soup and proposed marriage. I think often now about the fact that I probably would have lost myself to madness within the next year. Perhaps less time, maybe more. If you had never come along, I would be gone.”

“Then I’m glad I died to meet you,” Her smile feels like the warmth of a fire, warm against her swollen heart, “Was that tragic?”

“It was a little shaky,” Carver leans down to kiss the swell of her lower lip, “I adored it. I adore you. Now let’s get you to bed.”

“And you too.”

“No, just you.”

River’s knowing smirk wipes away. They move through the door into their room that had been left ajar for the dogs to come in and out of at their whim.

“What? But, I thought—“

“Oh that was a clever ruse. A tricky witch plying her trade so I could trick you into spending the day in bed.”

“What!? No! There is work, I—“ Hands push gently on her shoulder to sit her down on their bed. Not sitting at the height of a usual bed frame but tall enough she can sit up with her legs over the side.

“You work too hard. I know that we don’t have the lush life I had but that doesn’t mean you should work yourself into the ground. I’m here now. I can handle it sometimes. I want you to relax and recuperate today. Go back to sleep and when you wake up, you can sew or take a walk with our dogs or you come sit on my stool and watch me flirt with customers.”

Carver, in a pair of high waisted trousers, kneels by her to begin unlacing her boots. Her fingers curl around her calves after the boots are gently slipped off, sliding upward to hook behind her knees. Just to hold her there when she leans down to lay her cheek on River’s thigh.

“Please?”

Breath catches in her chest. Feeling helpless, she nods and mumbles, “Fine. This will not become a habit though so don’t get any ideas about the power of please and your big eyes.”

A quick kiss to her clothed knee and then to her pursed lips, “Perfect. Rolly, love, come keep your mother company while I’m off toiling.”

“You don’t even know what the word toil means.”

“I will soon. Remember me fondly for I’ll pass in the coming hour.”

River rolls her eyes.

Crisp air burns her lungs. Wisps of silver curl from her parted lips upon each breath. Needles prick at her fingers even beneath the leather gloves hugged against her ribs under her arms. White covers everything. The sky is a grey blanket, covering the sun, yet she still squints from the harsh white-out against her eyes. There is no reason for her to be outside. She already filled the wood box on the back porch and Carver tends to the bees. She claims they have the honey they need and she has ensured they keep warm in their cozy cluster deep in the hives she has made for them so River does not worry. She trusts her wife about most anything but especially this. Everyone is currently inside the inn—who wish to participate in the community dinner—so there is no one for her to go check on or bring food or clean water or dry firewood.

There is no reason for her to be outside freezing. She just does not want to be around anyone right now.

A squeak from a hinged door. The crunch of snow under boots that come closer to her. Hands tap the small of her back first, a warning of presence and a greeting, before they wrap around her waist.

“What’s the matter, my love?”

River sighs, hooking her thumb around Carver’s wrist and leaning back into the embrace, “Not sure. I think I’m in a bad mood. I get like this during winter. Papa says it’s because I can’t stand being cooped up.”

“Is that true?”

“A bit. I feel stuck and cramped. Annoyed at everyone—“

“Except me.”

She smiles and continues, “Except you. I just was feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the people. Closed in. I didn’t want to snap at anyone for undue reasons so I came outside to get away for a bit.”

“Mm. I think I know the issue,” Carver gestures with a finger toward the copse of trees under layers of snow, “Your river is frozen over.”

Her laugh is more air than sound, “Is that right?”

“The power in your name means more than you know. That is your river and you are tied to it. Part of your power comes from that place. When it is frozen—cramped, stifled, stiff—you feel a part of that in yourself which likely manifests different in a human woman.”

“You’re citing the fact that I’m named after a river and that it is frozen as the reason for my mood? What would ever—that’s silly, Carver.”

“That’s magic, darling.”

“Hm,” She blows out a breath that is white upon white in the vast stretch of winter before her, “Witch nonsense.”

“Do you usually feel better by spring?”

She only grumbles a bit to affirm this fact. Laughter tickles the back of her neck shortly before her hair is shifted aside for a kiss to touch snow-chilled skin.

“Shall we go for a walk then?”

Immediately she begins to reject the idea, “No, Carver. It’s cold out here. Much to cold to be outside—“

“You’re outside.”

“But I’m used to the winters here. And—“

“And what, my love? You don’t want to cause me discomfort? Come off it, I don’t need the nurturing or the nobility. It won’t earn you points. Let’s have a walk.”

Chewing on the softness inside her cheek, she pitifully tries one last time, “Aren’t you meant to be telling stories for the children?”

“Not for another hour or so. Are you trying to get rid of me?”

“No! I told you I was in a mood. A walk sounds nice,” She pulls away, looking out at the snow undisturbed by feet for anyone with sense only takes the carved paths from home to home and stay inside where they can, “How about a loop around the house?”

“Perfect,” She gives a sharp click of tongue to cheek and whistles shortly, “Come.”

Dogs come rushing from the kitchens back door to follow the pair of them. Arm in arm they walk through snow that has developed an icy layer on top from the winds. It cracks under each step. Before stepping out of the house, she had put on the deer skin fairies treated in oil to protect her boots from the elements. Carver had not. Yet when she looks down, snow does not seep past the tongue, does not sully the suede, does not even wet it.

Magic, of course.

She should not have worried.

Wind that brushes her skin is sharp as needles. She tugs her shawl up to tuck her nose beneath it before it falls off. They make into the shin deep stuff under the webbing of white light from a sun draped in its winter finery. Thick white clouds behind darker grey in a dance far above. Conjoined, they patterns across the sky create beauty. Deadly beauty. Light snowfall dusts the top of their hoods and shoulders. Unlike them, the dogs are unbothered by the elements. They bound through snow, digging snouts beneath to fling it up or prance through it. Rolly snaps his jaws around snowflakes as they drift down, and Percy keeps tunneling beneath then popping back up to bite the larger dog’s tails.

Most of their yard behind the inn is wooded. Only a fraction of a patch is grass before they merge into the civilization of the town itself. When River was a young thing, she would walk beneath their guard beside her mother who held her hands in her sleeves. They moved in silence, peeking at one another to snort when the peaceful ambiance did not suit them. Great bundles of thread were brought for River to gift her favorite trees some unusual color. Seasons have not robbed the trees their gifts. Gifts which River would give again each season, roping it around the old one and tying them together in knots that her papa showed her from his sailing days.

When they walk past one of those trees, Carver’s hand reaches out to brush away a bit of snow. Her finger traces over the thick bundle of purple and blue threads. Some of them have been swallowed by bark, biting into the girth of the tree that had grown past the original gift River tied around it. New layers of orange have been added though, interestingly, they do not overlap a single thread of River’s. They are just beneath it, at times woven around it and braided in small sections where there was enough room to wiggle it under and tie it.

River huddled against her wife’s side to keep warmth between the pair of them. The orange is bright and beautiful and almost the same color as Carver’s iris.

“Did you do this?”

“It was one of the first things I did. I found all of the trees. The ones that were marked by you and your mother,” They step around this one as a pair, looking through the labyrinth of trees that spread as far as the eye can see, “And your grandmother. And her mother too.”

River snickers but the sound dies away from the seriousness of Carver. She looks deep into the wood too, using new eyes that did not know her history was hidden here.

“This house is old. It used to be just a shack but my grandmother—I’m told—married an exiled prince from far past these shores. He used his stolen fortune to build it into something greater and my mother with father made it into this. I just…wasn’t aware my mother and I’s thing was tradition.”

Seriousness remains. Face and body held still as a grave keeper at night presiding over the silent and sleeping.

“More than you know,” Carver reaches to brush away snow from another tree, revealing bundles of colors—orange, blue, purple, teal and amber—that she touches with her fingertips, “My color has always been orange. My eyes are meaningful where I come from. My mother chose her partner specifically to bring it into our bloodline. So Orange has always been mine. My mothers preferred grey and blue. Grey welcomes history. Blue is vast.”

Something pulls at her belly. Something like worry she left behind when she realized all too quickly her wife is not a woman to fear. For a moment it returns. The solemnity frightens her. The implication more so.

“Carver, it’s just thread. A family tradition.”

“Yes. As it was mine. Because I am first Princess Altier Vu Alwynn Carver. And you are an O’Bru. Perhaps your family lost some titles when they fled the Vale. Perhaps they lost books and the lilting. But that does not change the fact that you and your mother and your grandmothers were casting spells here. That this—the family thread—is the oldest tradition. It is the very first spell a mother teaches her daughter,” Such reverence when Carver touches the purple thread beneath the orange, such tenderness too, “Your first spell.”

Firmly she gives her wife a shake by the arm to take her from the fantasy place she has gone, “Carver, I’m not a witch. I’ve told you this.”

“But you are. Or least, you could be. Your mother was.”

River shakes her head before she realizes that she is doing it. Seeing the rise of strangling emotion in her, Carver reaches to soothe. To pull her into a hug that is tight, perfectly suffocating. She squeezes her wife back just as hard.

“Just because she spoke the lilting—“

“That is not it. She did speak it because she is a witch but that isn’t how I know,” Very gently and slow enough to give River a choice, Carver separates them so she can gesture in the direction of the inn, “This is how I know.”

“What? The Wheel? Carver, that’s nonsense. It wasn’t magical until you started changing things.”

Her wife shakes her head and reaches to touch the thread. Right over where the orange is just beneath River’s purple and blue.

“This spell. A witch’s domicile is a powerful place. Some are made fresh and new. There is likely still sections of the castle that belong to me and me alone. Some are passed down generationally. It is how we say ‘and now you are the matron witch of our name.’ This thread is how we do that. Your great grandmother fled the Vale and made this place O’Bru territory. She marked the trees to create her property line. When she was ready, she took her daughter into the woods and had her cover the original thread with her own. This passed magical ownership to her. And so on. When your mother walked you out here and had you place your thread, you my love became the Wheel’s mistress. And all the land past your boarder. And the reason I know your mother was a witch because there are parts of the inn that I still can’t access. It allows me some leeway as your wife and an O’Bru but not full control. I can do floorboards or the fireplace but nothing larger. The kitchen is heavily warded. I can only do items like Ghedric’s knives. Anything else is dangerous for me. Because,” Carver has a soft look, one that is meant to make this information easier for her to ingest, “all your mother’s former wards and medications and charms are still in place. Because the current mistress hasn’t changed anything yet. Only one thing has been altered, I should say.”

Carver rubs down the length of her arms for support, for warmth, for charting a loving path down to one wrist. With it grasped in her hand, she turns it over and taps against the inside of it. Through layers of cloth, she feels it like a mallet striking a drum.

“You forbade entrance. You wrote their names into the foundation of our home. When I came home with Ghedric, the house was still seething with your rage and hostile toward the names you invoked during your banishment. You made it magical law that those invoked may never cross your property line.”

Killian and his father had not once come to community dinner. Never before that either had they come for drinks nor lunches before prayer walks. She has been busy with work so truthfully, without them coming by, she has not seem much of them at all. Not since that night with Killian.

“The details of which you remain cagey about. Don’t think I’m not holding a grudge that you lied to me, River.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to worry.”

“Mm,” Carver hooks an arm through hers to pull her along, back onto their walk that is only half finished, “But you did cast a spell that night. A powerful one. It terrified me when I saw it because, my River, unintentional casting is dangerous. Untrained witches can hurt themselves very badly if they invoke magic they do not mean to. It doesn’t happen often because there has to be certain rules met but this house is your domicile, your sacred place. It will always answer you and you nearly broke your wrist when you did that. Because you did not have components to work through, you didn’t use the lilting. I hardly slept that night thinking about what could have happened. How much worst it might have been.”

River brings them to a stop right at the edge of the small arched bridge that covers the creek running beneath the wheel. Right now, it has frozen solid so the wheel itself is doing nothing but catching snow. During the summer, bright flashes of green and red shine on the bed and fish often swim through the greenery. Their bridge never seems to need repairs even through their temperate seasons. Even from the snow that would normally peel paint and swell the wood. It is stout and faithful to their family, hidden just around the edge of the home from street view.

If Carver is right—and she does not doubt her wife when it comes to matters of magic—then had her mother done this? Or had her grandmother?

“I seem resentful about learning this, don’t I?”

“I wouldn’t have used that word,” Carver dusts some snow off her shoulders, “Do you feel that way?”

She takes in a deep breath and blows it out quickly.

“A bit. I feel like I never got enough time with her. I often worry my memories of her will be gone before my father is and then I’ll have nothing of her left except the image I get when I look in a mirror,” Wood creaks softly under her feet, each slat in the bridge slick with ice under the snow, “And now you’re telling me she was a witch. It feels like you plucked this huge piece of her out of a well I never knew existed. Like you suddenly know my own mother better than I do. Or ever will.”

Carver hurries to follow her on the bridge so she can lend a supporting arm, bracing her by the small of her back, “That can never be true.”

“For now. Time will change that.”

“I didn’t mean to bring this up for this reason. I didn’t foresee making you sad. I’m sorry, darling.”

River waves her off because she also does not want to upset her wife. She did not realize she would become so melancholy either. She expected more fear to rush up. To become frenzied with worry about what this means for their future and what it meant for their past.

Now though, River is not afraid of magic or witches. Only afraid of the people who are. River adores magic. One of her favorite indulgences is pulling up a stool to sit beside her wife and watch her weave magic into mundane items. Magic is breathtaking. It’s wondrous. She loves it and maybe part of that is because Carver herself is magic come to life and River loves her beyond words. One cannot exist without the other, never again. Magic will always be orange eyes and the taste of sweets and whining about anything that will get her sympathy.

They go through the small wicker gate onto the snow covered street. A few patrons are huddled together on the porch with clay mugs of steaming drink. One is smoking while the other leans against his meaty arm. Pipe smoke blends with the steam. A pair of lovers stealing a moment alone.

“River, I brought it up for a reason.”

She squeezes Carver’s arm and jerks her head pointedly at the couple. Carver rolls her eyes but obediently waits to speak again until they are further up the street.

“I want to teach you magic. I want to teach you how to become a witch.”

Her steps falter again. In the mucky show outside of the inn. Just far enough away that the lovers cannot hear them. Still, a drumbeat starts in her chest that echoes in her ears. She tries to be subtle when she casts around, checking windows and streets for ears beholden to eyes somewhere near enough to hear.

“No one is around. They are all inside.”

“Carver, I love what you are and what you do. Believe that. But,” She still looks again, around and at the couple, and still lowers her voice, “I don’t need to learn that. It’s dangerous enough already—“

“River. It is dangerous. What if you do that again only this time the ingredients you need to cast the spell are too close to your heart? What if it’s shreds it? What if you need to sacrifice your memories because you didn’t have ceded and bloodied ash? I don’t want to lose you to ignorance when I could have taught you. Please darling, it is important. You are the mistress of our home. You need tutelage.”

“That…that was an accident. It won’t happen again.”

Carver takes River’s hands between her own and holds them to her chest, imploring, “It could. And I’d rather you know what to do. I can’t lose my wife. Please?”

“I…”

“It will be wonderful to share this with you. To have this deeper connection we can bond over. I want to feel the rush of your magic. I want to see what you can create, O’Bru,” Carver leans their foreheads together, lips dangerously close to her own, “Could you think about it at least? Don’t reject me outright. Just consider it.”

This at least River can do. With a heart heavy by the care shown and the yearning evident in her wife, she can at least consider it.

“Thank you,” Carver breathes then steals a feather-soft kiss, “Now let’s go inside before we freeze to death. No more moping on the snow. Go upstairs next time.”

“Don’t boss me.”

“Don’t make me.”

One winter morning, she wakes to reach for her wife and finds absence. Confusion clouds her through the process of dressing and lacing up corset and boots. Usually Carver only wakes up as River is kissing her upon her lovely head and wishing her a pleasant morning. Early chores are not expected of her wife even though she has started helping more.

River suspects she likes the feeling of being helpful and that she always intended to help. She just needed time to get her body back into a healthy condition. When she first came above ground, just walking up and down the stairs would wind her. Her pride meant she would never admit that so she had waved River off and whined about her soft hands.

When she steps into the main room on the bottom floor, the sun has not yet risen. Candlelight and dying flame color the room where shadow still clings. Memory helps her navigate herself around the unlit places to find out why one of the rooms are spilling light through a doorway. Usually River is the very first one awake to gather water and set things out. Choo vegetables and collect meat from the shed for her father once he gets up. Bring wood on and get fires started so they are good cooking coals ready for him.

Low murmurs drift from the kitchen that is lit up. Sizzling and soft laughter accompany the smells of cooking vegetables and meat. Above that is the strong smell of freshly baked bread.

Outside of the door, all three dogs lay in a multicolored heap giving her a pretty good guess as to where her wife has gone. Quietly, she creeps toward the doorway to listen.

“—slow. That’s it. Go ahead, honey.” That is Ghedric’s rich voice.

“Are you sure?” And Carver’s lilting sweetness.

“Yup. Go on.”

A crescendo of noise that starts as a violent hiss and mellows into soft bubbling and a few pops. She glances around the door when she hears her wife shriek.

“Ouch!”

Ghedric’s deep belly laugh rolls through the room like a boom of thunder. By the stove is a large pot of oil with little dollops of some kind of yellow dough booping at the top. Carver is cradling her hand again her chest. A fierce pout is darkening her face that is absent any cosmetics this early and unobstructed due to her hair being wicked back into a tight bun. Another pan is sizzling on another cooking plate atop the stove and nearby a large cauldron is hanging from a tripod over the fireplace.

Ghedric wheels himself closer to get a peak at Carver’s hand then gives her arm a placating pat, “It’ll get ya.”

“Evidently.” Carver whines, lower lip poked out. She gives the pot of oil a nasty look.

“Part of the passion,” He folds his thick’s arm over his chest and jerks his head toward the pan, “Stir that or it’ll burn.”

“Oh! I forgot about that.” Carver has to stoop because everything in the kitchen has been modified to accommodate Ghedric. Wielding a well seasoned wooden spatula, Carver shoves around the food in the pan. Ghedric leans over his chair to watch with a critical eye.

“Looks good. Time to add seasoning.”

“Why didn’t we earlier?”

Ghedric moves his chair backward so Carver can step around him and reach into the cupboard below for his jars.

“We didn’t want it to burn and lose all the flavor. Don’t let your buns burn either.”

Carver bumps her head against the inside of the cabinet from how quickly she jolts up. Hissing and clutching a jar of powdered mustard, she rushes back to the oil to flip the buns over with her spoon.

“The pan.”

Carver emits an annoyed sound, “I can’t do both.”

Ghedric tsks her and gives a shake of his head, “You gotta learn.”

At that, River steps into the light with her arms folded and asks, “What’s going on?”

Both of the people who River loves most in this world wheel on her with looks of surprise. As if her presence here is the abnormality.

Ghedric recovers from his surprise first. With a large smile, he rolls over to give her arm a squeeze, “Mornin’ sweetheart.”

“Hello love,” Carver gives a little wiggle of her spoon, “I’ve asked Ghedric to teach me how to cook.”

“Why?”

“Because one of us needs to be prepared to take over for him some day.” She says aloud with her back to River so she can return to the cooking.

In River’s mind however, I’m not a King’s wife nor a princess anymore. I should learn some of these life skills that keep you peasants alive, shouldn’t I?

River purses her lips, “I’m more than capable of keeping you alive, Carver.”

Ghedric blinks, looking between the pair of them, “What?”

Carver waves the spoon in the air which is a good step toward becoming the next Ghedric as that spoon has been a weapon of admonishment since River was small.

“Maybe I want to be capable of keeping you alive. Had you considered that?”

River shifts her face into a look of disbelief that is wasted on Carver who is not looking, “You whine about your death coming if you aren’t plied with snacks between each meal.”

“Buns.” Ghedric interjects quickly. He rolls back to make a path for Carver to quickly cut over and not trip over him. He watches with the same sharp eyes that guarded River’s childhood. A small slip sends the cooked dough plopping back into the oil with a splash. Carver rips away shaking her hand and hissing out curses in the lilting and in the bronze tongue and in another that River has never heard before. Bickering flares up after Ghedric tips his head back to laugh. Nothing nasty or dark. Snippy but with affection the way families tend to do when irritation spawns but love prevails.

To think, one wrong shift could have prevented this moment from ever happening. If she had not been driven by panic and if Ghedric in his grief had not been near begging River to take a spouse so she could not be alone.

Carver’s retort cuts off midway because River tugs on her sleeve to turn her around. Clouds fill her head as she stands on her toe tips to kiss her wife. Nothing gaudy. Not in front of her father, she is not trying to embarrass him or herself. Just a quick meeting. A soft touch to spend and share some of the mounting feeling rising within her.

When she pulls away, she fixes Carver’s collar and smiles up at her.

Carver looks preciously dazed, “Good morning.”

“Your buns are burning.”

“Blast! Move, stop distracting me! Ghedric, make her leave!”

Her father snickers, arms folded over his chest. There is a happy sparkle in his eye that she has missed.

“Breakfast is probably going to be late now.”

“That’s alright, I’ve got things to do first anyway,” On her way past Ghedric, she stoops to give him the obligatory kiss on his head, “And thank you.”

He co*cks his head, “As if I’d ever tell my favorite daughter-in-law no.”

She does not explain that the thanks is not for Carver’s cooking lessons. It is not important for her to make herself clear so she just keeps her truth for herself.

“Don’t let her burn herself too badly, please?”

“Don’t fuss. That’s part of learning how to cook.”

“I’ll fuss as I please. She’s my wife and I’d like her in the same state I left her in. Carver, love,” She taps a fingertip under her eye then points toward her wife looming over the pot of oil, “Come get me if he doesn’t listen to me.”

“Alright, shoo. Off with ya.” He swats at the air near her hip to hurry her along.

When the join again for lunch, Carver wilts like a dying flower. Exhaustion crowns her bent head. River listens to her complain about sore feet and aching wrists while she is massaging the joints in her hands and coos over the perceived mistreatment that she herself asked for. A small cut from a knife is found and given a kiss as is a lash of shiny skin that bears a burn. She kisses near that rather than overtop.

“He said I have to help with the supper rush and that’s the busiest.”

River kisses the knuckle on her thumb, “You asked for this.”

“I didn’t think it would be this hard!”

When River splits out a laugh mingled with half formed jokes about misunderstanding how hard labor is, Carver whines and complains about being misunderstood.

The kitchen is shaped funnily to accommodate the small dining set and the private room for Ghedric. Most of the cooking area is compact and small due to this. Not often anymore does River come back here. That stopped once her father was getting himself out of bed and didn’t need her anymore. Not like he did for months after Freya’s death.

Today she gives a short knock on his door and waits. There is a bit of noise on the other end before Ghedric calls out, “Come in.”

“Hey Papa,” She says as she pushes the door open to enter, “Sorry to disturb you.”

“That’s alright. I wasn’t quite asleep yet. Come have a seat,” Bundled under his blankets, his chair set against the side of his bed, he reaches out to pat the mattress by his hip. With a whispered snick of the metal, she shuts the door quietly behind her before doing just that. Folding her skirts over her thighs before she sits down, back uncomfortably straight.

With just a candle lit on his bedside, Ghedric’s room is dark. The bed he shared with his wife is too big for him all by himself, but he had gone pale when River gently broached the subject of getting him something smaller. Colorful stitching used on the quilt that River has been told was a wedding gift. Such care has kept it in good shape all these years later. She smoothes her hand across it, watching her fingers create ripples in the fabric that distort an image.

“You seem troubled. Are you and Carver fighting?”

“No more than usual.” One wrinkle she smoothes down with the tip of her finger, tracing it from the tail end all the way to where it disappears once it is flat again.

“Is that…usual?”

She looks up at the nervous tone, one that is trying to be supportive while poorly concealing the worry. She gives him a faint shrug, “For us it is. We’re fine, Papa, don’t worry. We are better than fine actually. Better than I ever imagined we could be.”

“That’s good,” He shimmies himself upward to prop himself against the headboard, “Then what’s the matter?”

“I wanted to talk to you about Mama.”

The air prickles with instant discomfort. She does not look her father in the eye. The blanket and the folds in her skirt are enough to hold her attention.

“I suppose it’s time,” Wreathed in briars that prick at a wound that will never close and the blood has darkened his softness, has made it slip on itself and rise breathless, broken, “What did you want to know?”

“Do you…do you know what she was like before you two met?”

“That’s a tricky question.”

River knows. She is taking the cowards approach by skirting herself around what she really wants to ask. Picking at the blanket, she offers a meek shrug and mumbles, “You knew grandmother. I didn’t. So, I just figured you might have stories.”

“That’s true,” From the corner of her eye, she sees his crestfallen face, his somber eyes, “Your Mama was a rascal. That’s what I heard. You know, when your grandma was still alive and your Mama was just a girl that was before Chief Semé got here. When her family was on charge of everyone. They had a bit of money then and your Mama loved horses. She had three. She’s sneak off to go riding for hours, sometimes days. Neglecting her lessons for becoming the next village leader. Course, they lost it all once Semé got here. He took it all as a plundered treasure and when the old King said he could keep the village to sate his conquest, he got to keep your family money too.”

Most of this River had already been told. When she was a child that their village elders would look at like the ghost of everything they knew that died, she had asked questions.

“Did I ever tell you that was why your grandma hated me? For a little while anyway.”

River feels uncomfortable for what she says next only because she knows it will make him twice as uncomfortable, “We don’t talk about Mama or Grandma much. Or at all, really.”

Just as she expected, this suffocates her father in a morose air that sees him sagging, sees him shifting his eyes away to the vanity against the wall. Her mother’s vanity that he refused to touch so that everything remained exactly how she left it but now has been dusted and shined. The tube of lipstick has been set inside the drawer and the little tin of blush powder along with it.

Something she has not seen since her mother passed.

“You’re right and I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry for all of it honey. I haven’t been much of a father in a long time.”

Something nasty and urgent seizes her heart, clutching it so tight she feels breathless, “Papa, that isn’t true.”

“It is,” His hand reaches across the divide to settle overtop hers on the bed, “It ain’t the child’s job to carry the grief and the burden of running the home. You never should have taken care of me the way you did. That was my job. I let you down.”

This feeling is the slimy sick of maggots wiggling out of the meal she intends to eat just when she goes to take a bite. An unsettling squirming twists her guts around the heart that is sinking with each second that passes.

“You—“ Just acknowledging it to argue upsets her. It is an apology she deserves but not want she wants. Not one she ever wants.

It does the trick though. By making her so viciously uncomfortable under her own skin, racing away from the very idea of her father apologizing for the way grief broke him, she can just spit it out. To violently change the subject.

“Was mother a witch?”

Ghedric flinches. Physically recoils from her words. His head jerks backward fast and hard enough the back of it bounces off his headboard. She does look him the eye now. She holds sharp and unblinking eye contact.

“Who—why would you ask me that?”

“This is why I wanted to talk about. I want to know. Was my mother a witch?”

“No,” He rushes to answer and there is not a part of her satisfied by the answer. At the back of her mind she soothed herself by telling her that she wanted this. She wanted her mother to be innocent.

Now she realizes that had only been the same anxious part of her terrified of losing Carver to the things that threaten witches. Knowing the truth from his lips will not change the past. Whether her mother was or was not a witch will never alter the fact that she died because of those bandits chasing her into a witch ring. What it will change is the future and the knowledge that her father probably lived with the fear of losing Freya in the same way River is afraid of losing Carvee.

Except he did lose her.

No, the real fear she holds is that he may have never known. That her mother never told him and always held him in the dark. Freya O’Bru was a silly woman with a wry sense of humor but, occasionally, she would grow stern. Hush River quickly and tell her that minding her own is the best thing a girl can do. Had this been one of those situations?

If River agrees to the thing that has been churning in her mind since the idea was introduced, will she have to hide this from Ghedric too?

Worse than that. What if Ghedric had known and he chose to keep this secret from River her entire life? River feels she might be angry about that and she does not want to be angry with her father.

“Papa, be honest with me.”

Ghedric’s laugh is curled milk, turning the air to a foul thing she pinches her nose at, “River, doll, I’m—“

“Carver told me she was a witch. So, either she lied or you did. Which is it?”

Neither of them seem to enjoy her clipped tone. River ducks her head only because she remembers she is a daughter but it bobs back up when she also remembers she is a grown woman. And he may have hidden this from her for all her life. All her life where she spent useless hours out of the day being afraid of witch prisons. Sneaking down into the caves to pick mushrooms and developing a stupid system for safety she never really needed.

“Carver? Why would Carver accuse your mother of being a witch?”

“Because,” In for a Penny, in for a pound, “Because, Papa, my wife is a witch.”

Stillness in a room that is not often known for much else. The last time she had spent so long in this room had been when her father still needed help. When she would bring him meals because he refused to get out of bed and implore him to eat at least half. Mess had started to build in the forgotten corners when River could not get to it except but once a week. Now it is spotless but still chilly. Still missing a life that kept it warm and vibrant.

Still like this feels sharp and accusatory. Pointed directly at her for all the guilt she has carried alongside this secret. Now that it is free, everything suppressed with it comes out too. Her shoulders feel burdened by the weight. She hunches, ducking her chin and going back to fiddling with her skirt instead of looking at her father.

“What?” He finally manages and even that sounds flabbergasted. Sounds like a man who has been knocked in the chest.

River says nothing. She tries but nothing comes out. She has never been the type of girl to carry secrets like these let alone from the man who raised her.

“River, look at me,” She does but only by turning her bowed head slightly and looking with the corner of her vision, “This is not something you ought to toss out lightly. That sort of thing could get the woman you love killed.”

“I’m not—Papa, I know she is a witch. It’s not me thinking anything, I know. I’ve seen it. And I don’t care. I love her more than the world, more than I even know how to say. It wouldn’t matter to me if she was a rock or a foggy morning. She’s my everything and I’ll do just the same to keep her safe,” She does not think such a cruelty of the man who taught her kindness, who showed her what love is, but protecting Carver makes a beast of her, “You have to understand that. If you don’t, if you try to tell Semé what I’m telling you—“

“River, I would never—“

“I’m just being sure! She’s my—I’m just being sure.”

“Your mother was a witch.”

A blow to the chest. To the ribs and the gut. She curls inward, hunched over the arms she hugs around herself.

“River, you should have told me something this monumentally important. I should have—“

“You want to lecture me!?”

All the blood in her is scalding and in her face when she jumps from the bed. Whirling on her father to point a furious finger at him. Something she has never done.

It feels like her heart is breaking.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” The rage is so vicious beneath her burning skin that she can do little more than whisper.

“River don’t be angry—“

“I’m angry!”

“Well, fine, but could ya just let me explain first? Then you can be angry till you’re sick of it.”

Clenching and unclenching her fists, she stews in a rare instance of being overcome by herself. Rage simmers under the skin. She just nods.

Ghedric sighs. Now he is picking at the blanket and avoiding eye contact.

“Your mama didn’t want me to say anything. She was gonna tell you once you were old enough but,” He pauses to let space and memory fill in the silence space, “and after, that’s my fault. Taking about her hurt and especially ‘cause of the way we lost her. I don’t know why I never told you. It never felt like I needed to even when I felt like I could. I’m sorry. I don’t have a better explanation.”

“That’s it? That’s your reason?”

“I was worried too. Worried that if I told you then you might talk and if the chief knew Freya was a witch, he might think you was too.”

She does not like the answer. She understands and would be hypocritical if she did not extend the curtesy of trying to understand. That does not make it sting any less.

“River, I’m sorry. I—“

She stubbornly firms her jaw and shakes her head, “I don’t want to do that. I don’t. What I want is for you to tell me everything you remember.”

Then, when the exhaustion overcomes her, she releases some tension to slump. Melting back into the edge of the bed.

“Please.”

When she finally returns to her room for sleep, the hour is late. Later than she prefers staying up. Even with sleep dragging on her bones and turning her eyelids to weights, she feels wired. Anxious and angry still but also relieved and even a little happy. To have another piece of her late mother. A memory she will not forget.

Carver is unsurprisingly fast asleep. There is a disquieted knot to her brow even in sleep. Her arm is stretched across their bed toward River’s side, fingers hooked into the corner of her pillow.

As quietly as possible, she changes into sleep clothes and slips into the bed beside her wife. Thoughts race through her head even when her eyes close. Sleep eludes her.

“River?”

She cracks a stinging eye open, “Did I wake you?”

No words in response. Carver lifts herself onto her elbow to fix their blankets, adjusting them so more of the weight can lay over River and she can tuck some under River’s calves. Satisfied, she drapes herself across River’s chest with a yawn and curls the arm around her hips.

“You look like you’ve been crying.” Carver slurs tiredly, lips brushing the side of River’s neck where her face is pressed.

“I was.”

“Are you alright?”

“I think I am. Papa just was finally—it’s nothing. I’m alright. Go back to sleep.”

“I will,” A large yawn cuts through the words, lifting the end into a blur of sound, “Once I know you’re actually alright.”

“I am.”

“Mhm.”

“I am.”

“Mm.”

River stares at the beam of wood cutting through the ceiling. Her eyes hurt from being awake. Her legs hurt from standing all day and then pacing by the hearth in the main floor after her father told her stories about spell craft and travel before and after River had been born. He told her about the house having a place she used to go that he never found. Somewhere she made magical items to give to their community for small issues and needs. Fertility assistance, arthritis medication, hair growth serums.

The frustrated sound she makes it not intentional. Carver snags it between her fingers to take and keep safe. Instead of a smug I-told-you-so, her wife lifts into her elbows again. Tiredly she inspects River’s face.

“You’re thinking too much.”

“I may have confronted my father a bit. And I told him you are a witch,” Carver does not seem worried, but she hurries to appease regardless, “He isn’t a threat though and I don’t know if I plan to tell him our whole story. Just this. He isn’t going to tell anyone. I mean, he kept my mother’s secret apparently. Even from me. It’s just rolling around in my head. I’m angry and I’m never angry and that’s only upsetting me more. I hate this. Why would he hide this? I understand why but that doesn’t make me any less angry.”

“Want my help?”

She drapes an arm over her tired eyes, “Please.”

Heat blossoms beneath the lips that press to her ear shortly before a whispered, “Go to sleep.”

River pulls her arm back to shift on the pillow, turning to give her wife’s smirk an incredulous stare. Tired as she is, it takes her a long moment to realize this is not some spell with a funny phrasing.

“You—horrible. You’re horrible. That wasn’t funny.”

Carver chuckles and rises to throw a leg over River’s hips, “I’ll quiet your mind for tonight. You can spin and overthink and be furious tomorrow with some sleep.”

“You—what?”

“Shh,” Her wife bends down to kiss her softly, “Just lay there, close your eyes, and empty your mind. I will take care of you.”

Sighing her relief, she closes her eyes as told to do. Lips touch her neck like a whisper of wind that drifts off the top of the river she sneaks away to.

“Thank you.”

A him and a whispered praise that mingles with affection and a warm, “You’re welcome.”

“I love you,” Her voice thins, growing choppy and gravely from her attempts to prevent a sob from rising, “I—“

Carver waits then breathes a gentle loving sound against her skin, “I know you do. Hush now. I’ve got you. Drift away, I’ll handle everything. I will always handle your everything.”

Four days is all she can manage. Four days of sullen air, stinking looks, cold shoulders, and silence. Holding a grudge is not something she turns out to be very good at. Especially not toward a man who shows genuine apology in everything he does and more so after he joins her on the porch to discuss things with her. Explain himself without being put on the spot after having time to collect words and express his feelings better. After the tears and River expressing herself too, they get to do something they haven’t done yet.

They discuss Freya in kinder light, with soft hearts and smiles. Grief will always be a weight they carry, heavier than the other can understand for the burden is different for each, but time had lessened the sting. Talking about it now in an honest light has surprised River for how refreshing it is. When she has felt her mother slipping from her for so long, clutching tightly to what small memories she still had. Terrified they would be gone soon.

Stories of the struggle to conception until, that in itself, was the catalyst for Freya revealing her skills as a witch. Ghedric claims that she dubbed herself a talentless witch, that she had little knowledge except that which was passed down, so there was not much to worry about. However what she did know helped them finally conceive River. Opening this door allows for Ghedric to tell River stories she has not heard yet, stories that do not even connect with the working of a witch. Stories that he seems to have kept in himself and now finally feels free enough to share them. About the foods that made her mother sick while pregnant. About the strange quirks she had, the things that ticked her off, things that River even had in common with her.

“I’m sorry you didn’t get more time with her.” He says after Carver leaves them with a fresh pot of hot water for the little tin of tea leaves she gave them.

She cradles her cup to her chest, feeling the warmth spread through her entire body. Carver intentionally left them with the priceless porcelain teacups that usually collect dust on the mantle of the fireplace.

“Me too.”

Ghedric adds, soft and broken, “I’m sorry you didn’t get to grieve her because of me.”

“I’m glad I could be there for you, Papa,” She does mean it, more now than she did before, “Even if I held any grudges which, I may have unintentionally, it is different now. I understand how that can happen to a person. If I ever lose Carver, I don’t know how I’ll keep being River.”

Her father’s hand is warm too, cradling the back of her head to pull her across the small table dividing them. A kiss touches the crown of her bent head.

“Divines, I pray that doesn’t happen. But if it does, I will be there for you this time,” A breath is released from them both that feels cleansing, that knocks t loose the last of the grief sediment they have been carrying, letting build up for too long, “River? About Carver…thank you for trusting me. And we’ll keep her safe. This is her home, and we are her family. That’s not going to change. I kept your Mama’s secret with my blood, and I’ll do the same for our girl.”

River’s chest is tight but this time it does not feel bad. This time she touches it with the palm of her hand and smiles.

Not today, not any time in the future years that lay before them, but maybe someday she will tell him how River actually met Carver. They need more healing first, more time to get as comfortable in this place where they can finally heal first. For now, this is a good start.

When the snow begins to thaw, that is when River returns to her wife with a tentative acceptance of her proposal. Carver accepts her with a twinkle in her eye and a kiss upon her brow.

Lessons start different than how she expected. Everything, to begin, is just reading and learning the lilting and names. Everything is names. The lilting is the form in which human tongue can convert the names granted by the Divines—their holy stars—into a shape of power. They do not wield a power in themselves. Just the knowledge on how to shape that which exists already. Then, after language and learning the names of everything, comes the rules. Their limits are what makes a witch. Controlling the name of a human can be done if it, like what River did, is written into something with a strict circ*mstance. It cannot be used to control the person, change their unwillingly, or alter their character. Curses circumnavigate this by being a waspish retort that can only leave a surface level affliction that only lasts as long as a witch’s ire.

The more rules she learns, the more she begins to understand what Carver meant about witches going to war being against their nature.

“River, darling, please pay attention.”

“I am.”

“You aren’t,” In a circle around where they sit are colorful mushrooms in a ring, “Put the frog down.”

In one of her open palms is slimy green fellow who keeps crawling around the heel of her palm onto the back of her hand. Each time he hops off, he disrupts the pile of leaves and the twined together sticks. Each time the little frog hops back toward River and she scoops him up again to pry between his bulging orange eyes. Little bubbles form along the seem of his closed mouth each time she picks up a leaf and grinds it into bits against her palm. When she goes to sprinkle them, muttering in the lilting, they turn to water that showers gently over the frog.

“He keeps coming back to me.”

“Because you smell like home,” Carver flips a page in her heavy tome and, despite the stern tone of a displeased teacher, has a soft smile, “He wants to go back to the river.”

“Then he should go.”

Carver taps an impatient finger against the book, “If you were paying attention, you would know how to teach him to go back with magic.”

River stops petting him to look up, eyebrows raised, “You can do that with magic?”

“I can. Because I listened and paid attention when I was being taught.”

Rolling her eyes, she leans over the circle of mushroom caps to set him down on a mossy rock. With one final pat that makes him squat down and clenches his eyes closed, she bids him a silent farewell. Gathering her notebook and her spiral shaped glass pen to take notes, she settles back down for lessons.

Carver gives her a sharp look that is slightly nullified by her quirked lips before resuming explaining the law of nature and the witch’s right to nurture, shape and shepherd, but never kill or steal. Words blend into one another, sometimes catching against her unpracticed ears. Whenever she needs to interrupt and ask Carver to explain translations for some words, changing into the bronze tongue, her wife is patient and lets her work through it.

Learning to become a witch is nothing like she expected. Not terrifying, not filling her with anxiety about being caught or increasing the risk of exposure with two witches in the home. Getting to sit in a glade of green, surrounded by unbothered pines and elder poplar trees, listening to her wife passionately and patiently explain her practice is a gift. To watch Carver manipulate the forces of their world into a working had been one thing but to feel the rush of it herself is different.

Her wife had been right. She loves it. More than loving it, she feels like she has come home inside the feeling. Something of it feels like sitting on the cusp of childhood again, running through beds of fallen leaves while Freya gave chase and Ghedric shouting to them about being careful. It is reminiscent of the fuzzy joy she felt when she tied her strings around the trees while her mother crouched behind her, steadying her arms by the elbows. It reminds her of the stomach drop she felt when she was cast from the rocks in a forgotten cave. Like watching Carver lick her fingers clean and Carver’s orange eyes reflect firelight. Freeing, exhilarating, intoxicating, and like home.

“Darling, again?”

“I’m paying attention.”

“You aren’t.”

“The frog has gone!”

Carver tilts her head to convey her disbelief and clicks her tongue against the back of her teeth, “River, you’re staring at me.”

“Yes, well, that—the light coming through the trees is making you shine and I’m terribly in love.”

Carver’s smirk is pleased.

“Come have a kiss but after that, you must focus.”

“I am focusing.” She leans forward over their collection of spell ingredients.

“You aren’t,” Carver meets her partway, “Now you must.”

River snags her by the collar before she can retreat to press their lips together again, more firmly. Carver hums, reaching up to sink her fingers into River’s hair. When she reaches toward her wife’s lap to grab the book and shift it aside, Carver sighs against her lips.

“I suppose we aren’t getting anything done today.”

“We can,” She reaches between them to shove aside the bundles of components, “Later.”

“You’re a terrible student.”

She pulls on her wife’s collar to convince her to lay down, crawling atop her to steal another kiss before the air can cool between them. Using just the tips of her fingers, she drags Carver’s skirt up to bunch around her hips.

“I’m an excellent student. Let me show you everything I’ve learned.”

Carver bends an arm to prop her head on, gazing down at River through dark lashes, “A pop quiz. Good idea, my pupil. Grand idea. Go on then, show me what you’ve learned.”

Learning to become a witch is fun.

The first time it happens is when Carver comes home from her monthly trip to Newin. Laden with treasures wrapped for travel, stuffed into the bags over her shoulders. Slightly red from the spring sun that has started peeking past clouds, come to burn the beautiful slopes of her cheeks and her long nose. Outside of parcels, oiled paper, and travel clothes that mark her travels, there is also a fold of cloth. Something in it wriggles.

River, who always waits with the sun, for her wife to return is standing on the porch leaning against a supporting post. When Carver approaches, she lifts an eyebrow.

“What’s this now?”

“A carriage was overturned on the highway. I think those bandits old Suim mentioned hit them.”

River softens her posture which had been tight and pointed before. She steps over the porch to unfold the outermost layers of the bundle. Beneath is a baby with a thick head of tight curls and warm brown skin. Little patches on the chin and around the neck look burned and scraped. Clearly Carver has already taken a wet cloth to the babe to clean the wounds.

“Is this the lone survivor?”

The bleak look in her wife’s eye is confirmation enough.

River dusts her hands of the ash from cleaning the fireplace moments ago before taking the bundle. The jostling of being transferred to a different set of arms makes the little eyelids pinch but they do not come open.

“We’ll take care of the babe until we can find someone to adopt them.”

Carver has a soft knowing smile, “I assumed we would.”

River folds the blankets around the little neck, leaving the face exposed. Frowning, she lays a hand over the chest that rises and falls gently. Unburdened by any ticks or catches.

“I told him that there would be no safer place than here.” Carver stands at the base of the steps looking up in a way that cascades soft morning glow against her shape. The shadow that cuts across the grass lightens River’s aching heart that has felt the absence keenly.

“This is where lost things come to find their way. To be given a home.”

River swallows those words with love, with tremendous fondness. She reaches down to cradle the underside of her wife’s jaw and pull her head forward to kiss her upon the brow.

“And that is just what we will do. Now,” She draws away but keeps within enough range she can feel the wash of Carver’s breath on her chin, “your wife has missed you dearly. Please hurry with a wash and changing so you can come tell me about your trip and liven my heart.”

“I will. And I got you something I want to watch you open. I’ll hurry with the wash,” She pecks River on the temple as she rushes past, throwing the main door open to shout inside, “Ghedric! I’m home! I brought you salt!”

From even on the porch, she hears an excited shout and the noise of her father’s wheels on the wood floor.

“Carver love! We missed you! Hurry inside, hurry over here! Let me see!”

“River says I have to wash first!”

“Don’t listen to her!”

River’s voice catches in her throat she hurries so quickly to tell her father off, “H—Hey! Hey now! You have to listen to me!”

“Papa Ghedric said I don’t!”

“Well, I say you do!”

The baby is a fussy thing with the deepest dimples that charm the entire village. He hangs on River’s hip or sleeps in a sling when she goes about her chores. Carver displays an expertise with his care that surprises her because she did not think that a queen would know how to change a soiled set of britches. Only for four months does the baby live with them, sleeping in the attic with them, being doted on by Ghedric. One fawning couple who tell them about their inability to produce a child come to stay in the inn. They are moving to the village as a fresh start from their old life where they knew only toil and loss and misery. Too many miscarriages, too many meddling and cruel-intentioned relatives. Too much stigma and shame. Both of them fall in love with the little boy bearing bright eyes the color of the night and grabby hands. The wife cries because she says he looks just like her departed father and the husband weeps too about what a blessing it is.

River makes it her job to help them settle into their new home. Comes by four times a week with supper and walks around their home, checking the baby for signs of abuse or mistreatment. Watching the way they hold him and care for him and speak to him.

Carver gives her an elbow to the ribs after the second week of this. Agleam with an all-knowing look.

“He is safe with them.”

“I am only making sure.”

“We will watch them, don’t worry. But he is safe. He is their blessing,” Carver’s fingers glide across her pal and her hand is taken in a firm grip, “Like how you are mine.”

“Oh don’t flirt with me.”

“You love when I flirt with you.”

“Well, maybe just a little.”

The second time Carver brings home a child that needs a temporary home it is after a hunting trip. The girl is malnourished and trembling. Only a young thing—fifteen or sixteen—walking on legs that are scraped raw, scabbed over and bleeding where they crack just from walking. For the first month she does not speak a single word. She takes each meal to the room they have allotted to her and always washes her own plates. River finds half the meals she hides in the bottom of a shoe box in the wardrobe. Instead of taking it away, she replaces the quickly perishable items with hard breads and jams and bars and little honey candies Carver makes. After the third month she smiles for the first time. After the fifth month she tells them about the arranged marriage she ran away from leagues away from their village. So far away she had to stowaway on a ship then a wagon to get here. She still fears her husband will find her and cries from relief when they, as a pair, assure her that no one will take her. That she can stay for as long as she likes. After a year and some time, she tells them it is her birthday and that she has met a nice boy from the town across the lake. He comes to court her in the proper way and Carver alongside River are always waiting on the porch, with tea, when he walks her home. They are engaged shortly after and the village celebrates a wedding in their style. The O’Bru family honor the groom’s family by hosting the event and the O’Bru family send her off when she gets on the barge with her new husband to go to her new home. She visits them once a month, afterward, full in the cheeks and always smiling to bring them news and gossip and have lunch.

After the third time, River expects it. Ghedric is delighted as he too had realized this is their life and their way. Their means of making community and family. With so much love to give, the O’Bru family become this shelter for children lost in the world. Some stay for a week. Some too feral for love and too distrusting to stay even a night. Some need them longer than they know how to ask for. Some of them are not children at all but receive their shelter all the same. Some of them, River knows are witches whom Carver has plucked from circles and welcomed back into the world. Now that she is a fledgling witch herself, she can recognize he verdant nature inside a person that denotes them as kin. None are turned away. None are left unfed or unloved. All are welcome.

“Here my love, behold,” From behind Carver’s back, a cane is produced with a flourish, spun around her wrist and bounced off her forearm to be caught in the other hand, “a gift.”

River, still dreadfully dizzy, looks up at it through hazy eyes, “Why?”

“It’s for when you need it. I’ve also put some rails on the bed to grip. Easier to get in and out of now. Even easier, I should say. I’ve also lifted it an inch and a half. It’s knee height now.”

“My knee or your knee?”

“Yours,” Carver bends to lend a hand, pulling her gently so that her weight doesn’t hang and grief her joints but that Carver lifts her mostly with her own strength, “Are you alright?”

“M’fine.”

“Don’t be stubborn,” She says instead of pointing out the obvious. That River’s legs gave out when she tried to bring in a bundle of firewood to refill the box. Nor the fact that when she had tried to get out of bed this morning, she had set her foot down, felt a jolt run up her leg, and fallen backwards into Carver. ‘Just still sore from yesterday. I overdid it, I’m alright.’ She had said when Carver jolted awake, clutching at River even half asleep.

River leans against her wife, folding her arms between them so she can be held close. Arms keep her already, round the waist and holding her by the nape of her neck. A thumb rubs beneath one ear.

“Come inside and sit for a while.”

“I’m fine.”

“You cannot brute yourself through your own hurt, darling. You’ll only hurt yourself more. Come sit.”

She makes a grumbled attempt at argument but goes the moment Carver sweeps her up the back steps. This time she does not lift River bodily the way she did the first time River worried her. Flushed and both embarrassed, they had argued afterward about the entire thing. Carver moving through town with River in her arms, knees hooked over her arms and face hidden against her shoulder. Carver had defended herself because she watched River attempt to step down from a slightly raised bridge and had stumbled off the path into the grass. ‘I only fell because I tripped. I had myself.’ Carver had screwed her face up and refused to argue more.

It had unfortunately earned her this black mark in Carver’s mind that she is stubborn. And maybe that is true but she has her pride.

“Carver—“

Her wife ushers her into the kitchen through the back door. Each of the dining table chairs have hearts carved into the backs of them, swirling ferns encircle the hollowed heart by a tool that burned the wood fashionably. Carver hooks her fingers through one heart to pull the chair out for River to sit in.

“I said I’m fine!”

“I said you’re not. And also look at your gift! I made it!”

The cane is beautiful. Likely made using that same woodworking skill Carver has to make bows. Made from a type of wood with dark striations in the grain and a gnarled root for a foot that has been carved to subtly look like chicken feet. The head of it is shaped like a hen with two little quartz rocks jammed into the eye sockets.

“This is not a funny joke.”

Carver bends to kiss her on top of the head, “Then why are snickering, my love?”

“I’ve got something in my throat.”

“Is it humor?”

“Shut up,” Another kiss that she takes with resolute stubbornness to not smile, “Thank you.”

“Don’t be stubborn about it. You need it. One of these days I’m going to walk out the back door and you’re going to be face down in a puddle. I would not like that.” Carver hovers near her chair, moving some hair from her face to behind her ears and massaging the back of her neck.

River leans into the touch, “I would not like that either.”

“Then?”

“I will stop being so stubborn.”

“Thank you.”

She gives her new cane a little wiggle, “Thank you.”

“But you hate it.”

“Yes, but I appreciate the care, and I appreciate you,” She blinks tiredly up at her wife, head rolled back so that it rests partially on Carver’s wrist, “Can you make me a cup of tea?”

“Of course. Let’s have a cup together with some scones,” Carver rubs her thumb across the cartilage of River’s ear as she sweeps past, “Did you hurt yourself?”

“No,” Then she stops because eyes like a vibrant sunrise turn to regard her suspiciously, “I scraped my elbows a bit.”

Carver makes a display of her frown, so River rolls her eyes and shoos her off to fetch hot water and chip off a bit from the tea cake.

“You are such a burden, my River.”

“Is that why you’ve strengthened your arms so? To hear the burden of your terrible wife?”

“No, that is because I like you feeling across the muscle and praising me.”

She cracks a grin that is radiant delight, “Good then. Hurry so I can get my hands on them and praise you some more.”

With each lesson her ability with magic expands her confidence enough to try. Walking through the house, feeling the earth through the floorboards, and running her fingers down the walls. She can feel generations of witches beneath the shingled roof, carved into the bones of the house, remembered by name and laugh and spite. Every drop of magic that has been shown has been kept and is now known. Every grain in timber that built it, every rock, every speck of dust is a library for River to peruse. Only now does she see the vibrancy of the inn. Looking back at her time before feels like wading through an oil-mist that smeared everything, darkened the colors, made it all drip and bled together. Now that everything has a name, a purpose, it has intense clarity.

The house does not speak to her with words but it has things to say all the same. It has its own way of whispering things. Ways to tell her who is inside and who is approaching. The state of each thing that breathes within her walls. And they are her friends walls now. Not wood within her vision but a soft wet sand for her mold into any shape her fingers desire, shifting it upward or outward if she had a want or need. An entire floor could be added with a flick of her wrist. All the windows could turn to gaping maws waiting to consume, sentinels of tooth and boredom with a sure name spoken and a few chicken bones bound in wine-soaked wire. Everything is a tool, worthy of work both humble and grand, and the inn is her greatest one yet. A witch’s domicile is a place of great power.

There are three rooms with no doors. One whispers of a grandmother from long past. The first who fled the Vale to rebuild here as a witch barely in her adulthood. A room for her to bury her youth in jars and books, in trinkets that have little meaning to a woman raised in the cradle of fear. In the shadow of an unbroken line of kings that seethed with hatred generationally. This room she shows to Carver, hoping it will be a kind gift. She does not expect her wife to weep until her body aches, until her throat grows raw, and her eyes turn red. What is hidden inside the vault of her greatest grandmother strips away healing that has taken years to gain then rebuilds it again in seconds. Seeds, historical texts, gifts given to coven leaders from the reigning witch queens at the time. Coins bearing the side profile of Carver’s mothers. ‘Heirloom gifts,’ Carver had explained while tears struck the faces on the coins in her palm, singing faint notes of metal song upon each gentle impact, ‘These are only given to our greatest allies. The ones we trust to carry on our line and protect the Vale and its children if the worst should come to pass. I forgot. I forgot about everything they say but my mothers didn’t.’ River had no words for this. No comfort she could muster would treat a wound this violent. Instead of words, River had sat with her wife on the dirt floor of the old, hidden room and held her. Promised her anything inside could be hers, that the coins were too. If an O’Bru was meant to be the new Witch Queen then that is exactly what Carver is now. That she did not say out loud because she realized, as it sat on her tongue, that it could be another blow when she is already bleeding out.

After that day, River does not go into that room again. She leaves it for Carver who walks into it with the eyes of a grief stricken woman visiting the grave of her entire family. Books are brought out to be read by the light but most often, when River checks on her, there are tears running down her cheeks and she is just touching the pages. Running over the yellowed pages and River’s ancient grandmother’s neat handwriting filling ever inch of the page.

The second room alongside the third belonged to Freya. One was a storage room to dry herbs, treat animal fats and bones, and prepare spell ingredients. Many of the herbs she hung to dry still remain in pristine condition. Whatever spell was placed here was done by Freya’s mother before her, one with enough power to preserve. So that nothing could be wasted to time. Freya’s abilities within the bounds of her name had developed from the need of her time. Secrecy and security. Her mother had made things last and River’s mother had hidden them away like gleaming gems within a mighty mountain. Only the skilled and practiced would ever find them. Located behind the wall between rooms on the second floor, behind a painting of a frog wearing a whimsical wig.

The last room surprises her because it is in the attic. The entire time she has grown up inside the inn, she never knew that her mother had hidden a space just behind the fireplace that Freya would sit beside and read River poems about folly animals with lessons to learn.

This room is small. Box-shaped with a steepled ceiling and windows that cannot be seen from the outside of the inn. Each have star maps made of a paper River had never seen or touched before pressed to them. Thin enough for light to shine through. Stars dance like ribbons of flame across the rich royal blue carpet. When it is night, she suspects the moonlight makes them look as quicksilver. This room is a workspace but it is mostly barren. Empty jars on a shelf, a kettle on a copper plate, brand new corks in a tray and sticks of wax neatly aligned in a small wooden box. Sticks of charcoal beside a small knife used to sharpen them. One with a knobby antler handle and an etched flat. Little hens dance across it wearing boots and bonnets. Fresh journals bound with canvas and leather, tied together with thick thongs of leather. Boots with wooden heels that are hollow, filled with sand from the riverbank. Nothing of any actual magical use. Just an empty, ready to use work space.

Save a single item on the desk. It is not something she recognizes because she is still a novice. Thankfully, her mother must have had some foresight that this issue might arise because there is a slip of paper with instructions. All the incredible to complete the spell are set upon the desk beside the goblet that sits in the middle, overtop a doily that looks like something her mother made.

It is not what she expected to find.

Her heart feels like it’s in her fingertips when she pours the items into the goblet and stirs it with a specific twig taken from a specific tree.

“Lastly…speak a name and drink? What?” The chair at the desk creaks when she sits in it. A near perfect match to their dining room tables except these have blue cushions on them and the armrests are carved to look like rushing rapids. Sitting in it evokes the same sense of serenity that only washes over her when she sits at her river with her feet in the water, pressed deep into the silt.

If Carver were present she could explain to River what it is she is walking blindly into. It would be simple to go downstairs and collect her wife. The woman has hardly left the cellar since it was discovered. A large part of her, however, feels this moment is meant for her and her alone.

So she takes the chalice in hand and softly says her wife’s name before drinking the mouthful of liquid at the bottom.

Vision swimming, she struggled to stay seated. A pin prick starts in her temples that rapidly spreads throughout the whole of her skull. Little needles of almost-pain that increasingly makes it difficult to see. She squeezes her eyes shut to fight the feeling and when she opens them again, she sees something else entirely.

Not in the room nor sitting at the desk. She does not even see herself, her hands if she looks down or a body for them to be connected to.

Instead she is in a forest far more verdant than even the painting famous for its ability to capture the brightest green imaginable in oil, hung in a public library in Newin. A painting she recognizes must have been made after seeing this place and the attempted recreation is paltry in comparison to the real thing. The trees here grow tall enough to blot out the sun and grow thick around the base in a way that almost makes them seem like a trickle of slime that came from high and collected in a heap upon the earth then hardened. White ivy grows around them, thick enough in places to create bridges between trees. The sight of them invokes cobwebs but instead of dusty wisps, they are cords of green that create curtains hanging down. Into the thick trunks of some trees, intricate carvings have been made of women and men larger than the inn is tall. Some hold bowls, some bows, some smiling in adoration eternally while others harbor a churlishness that is magnetic. Between the trees is a trail of white rock laid with a green material River has never seen before. It makes the road shine, smooth and weaving through bushes of wolf lavender and fox gloves, wisteria and grapevines. Each tree has a branch forking off the main road to circle around it.

Standing in front of a tree still under construction is Carver. This Carver has shining umbral hair but the same orange eyes. The same long limbs, graceful beauty. The clothes she wears are strange and bright, sitting fashionably around the shoulders and knees. Embroidered with real gold. A rugged cape hangs from one shoulder, made with strange opalescent scales sewn into it, and belted down with something that has a feather shaped buckle. A massive dog with sharp ears and no tail lays by her knee-high riding boots. She is rolling her bow between her hands, back and forth each time the taught string bounces off her wrists.

This Carver is shorter though. Youthful in the way she moves, the way her face is unblemished by scars of war and soft with life.

“Carver, we must leave soon.” A voice, lush and gravelly, comes from the trees.

Unperturbed, this young woman who is a only just having become a woman in whatever this is, rolls her bow and stares at the tree. Half focused, she mumbles to the air, “I’m thinking of running away.”

“Is that right? And after this whole thing was your idea?”

Young Carver stamps her heel down on the ground and shimmies it side to side, putting out the smoking end of a stick of incense that is not actually there. When she turns around, the dog jumps to her feet to follow.

“It was a bad idea. Princesses sometimes make bad decisions.”

From behind a tree steps a woman divinely beautiful. Wrapped in a dress that hangs off one elbow, exposing both shoulders that are covered in golden tattoos. Bangles clink around her wrists and ankles, chiming with each step she takes. Shoes made of some sort of thick blades of grass that is orange and green wrap around her feet and legs clear up to beneath each knee. Orange eyes made brighter by dark makeup and orange specks that sparkle under the sun. Much of this woman is what River recognizes her wife to look like now except this woman has softer angles, a curvier build, and hair the color of fire.

Petulantly, Carver tromps her way to the woman and presses her face against the woman’s arm.

Even her laugh sounds like Carver’s.

“You are not a princess anymore, my love.”

“I’m not married yet.”

“You are not a princess here. You know the rules. You are our new Queen by law. Words are magic.”

Carver reels back to smack her forehead against her mother’s arm, twice.

“He’s handsome.” Her mother tries in a lilting tone, meant to intrigue.

“Good for him.”

“Oh, don’t be sour, pet. I hear women love handsome men. They make grand husbands or some such.”

“I don’t care about that. I would prefer to keep things as strict and professional as possible. Three children, only because I must. One heir, one back up, and perhaps if I’m lucky a daughter. Then I can be washed of it,” Carver knocks her head against the shoulder again, “I don’t even care for men overly much. Only as a fancy, from time to time. Most often they are too…I don’t know. Men. But work is work.”

“Work is indeed work. Might I remind you this was your idea?”

“I don’t overly care much. It’ll just be a few minutes and then I can do what I like.”

This grand woman snorts indelicately into her cupped hand, “Here you have it all worked out. Yet you want to run away?”

“It’s not the work of being a wife that is daunting,” She heaves a weary sigh, the kind that comes from the soul, “He hates dogs.”

Orange eyes flick down to the dog sitting faithfully beside Carver, “Ah.”

“I don’t want to leave my home. My people,” Finally Carver pulls away, sighing loudly, and gestures toward the trees, “The Augury said it’s fine if I run away.”

“Oh, is that right? Our most sacred, immortal elders have used their divine sight to look into our coven’s future and proclaimed unto you ‘it’s fine’ have they?”

“Mhm. They have. They gave me a tree wave and said goodbye even.”

“My, we shall have to alert the elders of each clan. They will be blown away that the immortals moved.”

With a sly grin unimpeded by years of loss and grief and loneliness, Carver stretches her arms wide and proclaims, “Tell them it was for their great Queen Carver!”

“Oh, I shall.”

“Perfect.”

“It won’t get out of your chores, your majesty.”

Carver’s arms droop along with her shoulders. Cheerfully, the mother collects her daughter into her arms for a fierce hug.

“What did they actually tell you?”

“That there will be war either way. If I run, if I marry him, if I don’t. All outcomes, blood. Always my fault. The only outcome that witches aren’t entirely wiped out is the one of marriage. A marriage I don’t want, to a man I’ll likely nevet get alone with, let alone love. Which is fine, I don’t need that. My duty matters more to me. But—“

A mother’s love ignites the tenderness shown in the hand that cradles Carver’s head to her breast.

“But those things do matter to you.”

“Maybe a bit. I can sacrifice it though. I can handle a lot for my people,” Carver, just a fifteen-year-old if this is the moment that River assumes she is seeing, “It will be nice to be a mother.”

“Mm. I assume the Augury told you that was assured since you had a rather specific number and gender range.”

“Mm. Two sons and a daughter. My oldest is going to look like grandmother, apparently. And mother.”

The woman makes a disappointed noise, “Nothing of me? And after all those negations to give my special features?”

“My daughter will look like you. Like us.”

The mother is confirmed to be the one that Carver inherited her haughtiness from, “Good. Someone has to carry the beauty.”

Together, with arms linked, they walk down the shining path between the goliath trees. The loyal dog follows lockstep with Carver, craning her neck up to lick Carver’s fingers.

“I have to pack.”

The woman hums, “I thought you were running?”

If River could, she would tell her wife to run. Knowing what will come, what will happen to her, she would rather a future where River does not exist because witches are wiped out rather than one where Carver suffers.

“Obviously not. I have a duty. I am a Queen. My word is law, and law is the most sacred thing a witch can commit to. I don’t commit to bonds lightly and I already said it. So it must be done. Can we delay it? I want to spend more time with you two and the dogs before I’m shackled.”

“Shackled,” One of them reaches a hand out to wiggle her fingers and the other does the same, “You mean those silly rings?”

Carver twists her nose in disgust, “It’s going to be heavy.”

“What have the Augury said?”

“That it will be a trial and there will be pain. That there will be loss but that this is the truest path. This is how the witches survive.”

The mother lifts a finger to wag, “You’ve mentioned. I’m asking about you. What did they say about your path?”

Both of them gaze up at the trees, to the face of a handsome man immortalized in the wood. In his arms is a baby sealed in cloth that looks so real it could be touched and feel like the rippling silk it appears to be.

“They…were cryptic. They told me what I needed for the marriage. After that, they said there would be darkness. And loneliness. They said our name will be lost but…”

“But?”

“We can trust the O’Bru.”

This causes the woman to raise her eyebrows, “The tinkerers? They gave a specific name? That is not how they usually do this.”

“We are facing a rare event. The end of our known world. The world for witches, I suppose, so they recognize their own demise in that too. We have to do anything we can to save ourselves and the Augury know it. They are changing whatever they can to help us.”

The woman glances up at the trees as they begin walking away, not skeptical but perhaps sad. Mourning what has not yet come to pass.

“What was the specific wording?”

“When you are most in need, hear the name O’Bru and walk with faith into the unknown. You will find the seeds to plant. To rebuild.”

Pins and needles again. Blurring vision that accompanies tremendous pressure. The image of her wife as a determined young queen facing a danger she cannot even begin to prepare for fades into nothing. Just streaks of fuzzy light she has to squint against and try to wipe away with the heel of her palm.

When her vision clears, she is still sitting in the chair in the last secret room.

Her first instinct is to find Carver and demand to know why she did not say anything. That cools within the steps from the desk to the walls where the barrier for where a door would be. Those trees had been vague with the wording. Carver had said that was more concise than usual for them and yet it had still been vague. And a lot of time and trauma has been between those words being spoke. In all likelihood, she had forgotten about them until something shook them free.

River does not even understand what she saw. She cannot race downstairs while her mind is behind of where her heart is. They need to be aligned first.

Turning back to the desk, she approaches it with more caution this time. The chalice is made of a light wood and the situations are softly green. Almost glowing. Picking it up and turning it over in her hands, inspecting it for anything off. There are no faces or fingers or even a nose. It is just wood. Wood that emanates a magical aura stronger than even Carver though. It must be made from one of those strange trees. The Augury.

Names are important.

This time when she rushes from the room, it is to race to the second floor instead of the lowest where the cellar is. To collect ingredients to preform the spell again. This time when she finishes the concoction, she looks inside.

Liquid starlight. Blackness that rolls against the wood, moving off the sides like water on wax. Specks of light swish inside when she rolls the cup around, surfacing then slipping back beneath the dark.

River drinks it again and this time says, “Freya O’Bru.”

This time the transition is less violent. Almost no pain at all aside from the discomforting pressure and the blurred vision.

When she can see, she thinks it did not work. Her novice hands did not measure out the correct amount of each ingredient the way her mother surely had when she left everything on the desk. Something had gone wrong.

Then she hears movement. Behind her, the brick in the wall shifts and peels itself away, almost receiving itself in time from the way it was built. Through the new opening, Freya walks in looking almost exactly like River remembers her. A bit younger around the eyes, missing the scar on her hand from the rooster attack. Plain clothes that she has made herself: a frock over a work shirt and a skirt made of a quilt pattern with a petticoat beneath. Not a tall nor muscular woman aside from the sort of muscles a woman earns working for a living. Small, rough hands earned from a life of labor. Nails chipped, cuticles split and scabbed over, dirt sullying the places where hangnails have been torn off. Scuffed boots smelling like oranges from the oil she uses to clean them. A tough beauty. A truffle found on the forest that appears hard and maybe ugly to the untrained eye but a fortune for those who know. Who can see it.

It is her mother again. After so long. Whistling softly to herself with a bundle under her arm trapped against her rib.

The room is almost exactly as it is now. All the stored items sans ingredients. A work area prepared for a witch to assume as her space and make magic. Everything except the chalice and the ingredients.

The package is set on the desk and opened with a small knife from Freya’s belt.

“Hello darling.”

River’s heart seizes in her chest. She tries to respond but there is not a throat or a tongue for her to use.

“I know you’re watching. I hope you are. Assuming I’ve figured out how to use this thing correctly,” From the box, the chalice is pulled out and set on the doily, “Mother told me not use it often. It wasn’t meant to be harnessed this way. I figured out this little trick after everyone fled. Before the Augury was burned down, we took what we could. I’m sorry I can’t answer questions you may have. I don’t know as much as I should. We lost a lot. More than even I could say. Grandmother kept her pain to her chest and never once let me into her cellar. Forbid mother too. Even after death. What I have is what she taught my mother. I’ve always considered myself a half-baked witch.”

More than anything, she wishes she could sit beside her mother and talk to her. Tell her she forgives her for everything and that she wishes she could have been braver. To apologize because some part of her had always blamed herself for her mother’s death.

Freya pulls out the ingredients one by one, lining them up the way River had found them.

“The way my grandmother explained it, when the Vale fell, our Queen had already been captured. The enemy had put her in those awful prisons you’ve seen. The coven was divided during the invasion. We were supposed to take as many as we could, keep them together. The Queen Mothers entrusted us with that task, to keep everyone together. It was nearly impossible. Our name doesn’t lend to great power the way theirs did. We make things. Grandmother decided to save the Vale by taking as much workable material of it as she could. People too—some of the elders in this village are children of the great families. We hid here. Most of them left when grandmother died. They didn’t think we could keep our promise to the people, didn’t see us as a replacement Queen for ours we lost. For whatever reason, grandmother never told them about what she took. I don’t even know what is down there, like I said. Secretive old broad.”

Freya leans back in her chair to eye the layout, reaching to adjust the cup placement with just the tips of her fingers. Her eyes lift to stare through the window at the snow falling after she appears satisfied with the placement.

“Mother was better than me for obvious reasons. But grandmother was a poor teacher. Grief has a habit of haunting this family and the way it twists us makes beasts. So while mother was better than me, I’m not saying that she is good. I don’t…ah,” Freya pauses to squint, long earrings laying against her neck and two tiny nubs of bone piercing the cartilage in the shell of her ear, “I just realized I don’t know what makes a good witch. Regardless, mother spent her entire life trying to get into mother’s cellar. I think that was more her focus in life than anything else. That and this village. It was supposed to be the new Vale. But Semé happened. It got messy. Mother needed us to keep this house, to keep the tentative position as leaders. Our marriage was arranged, and I was furious. My mother was signing me away for the convenience of keeping things dear to her. I told you, grief makes monsters of O’Bru folks.”

Freya looks over her shoulder at the doorway she made and gestures at it, “This is the sort of thing I do when I’m angry. I build things to vent. I tunnel away and hide and curse while pricking my fingers in needles and resurface smiling. And my temper—sorry darling girl, I think you may have gotten yours from me. I decided since I was going to be used as a sort of political piece instead of being given my place as the community leader like I was promised, I’d get back at mother. I’d do what she couldn’t and—well. Grandmother’s cellar was confusing. I wasn’t the witch who owned the house yet and from Mother explained, that meant I was only allowed to do some things. I could only get an arm through the door. I grabbed what I could. And what I got was a chunk of wood.”

Freya now gestures to the cup, “O’Bru witches make things. That’s what we do. I made this. It took me a very long time to figure out how to use it and I think it still may be imperfect because once mother found it, she nearly fainted from rage and then whinged about how the future is not for untrained witches to see. That I should be careful and so on. Using it too often is jarring and physically painful and exhausts me. I got migraines for weeks after I overextended. I had to make a lot of attempts, you see. To find the right dosage to even make it work and then for a specific amount of time spent in here. I don’t have a way to explain the cup. It works the way it wants to work. All I can figure is how long you can safely spend here viewing the memory it decides you need to see. Which is why I’m talking to the air because I’m hoping the cup decides this is a memory you need to see. If you ever become a witch.”

Her mother sighs and it is just as River remembers it. The same sort of weary noise she made when she was exhausted with a child and irritated raw by the little things a husband can do that drives a woman insane. She leans back in the chair to pinch the bridge of her nose.

“I know I’m going to die.”

River feels that. There is no body in this dream, this memory or some phantom presence of a timeline she has touched. Nothing physical for her to feel pain in but she feels it all the same. Were there legs for her to have, they would have buckled in that moment.

“I’ve known since I had you, my darling. I use it sparingly now that I’m older and content. Unlike my mother, I don’t care about grandmother’s cellar nor our duty to build a new Vale here. Semé has taken the village. It can’t be taken back except by force, and I just don’t care, River. My only things in this world that matter to me are my family. You and your father. I use it once or twice a month to check on things. It does not specifically show memories when I view the future, it is more like a dream that has not be given in sleep yet. I saw you as a grown woman before I even knew I was pregnant,” A doting smile lights up her mother’s face, eyes shiny from unshed tears, “You’re beautiful. You took my breath away and I ran to your father, tears in my hands, to demand we take every strep toward conception immediately. Everything I ever wanted in a daughter. Everything I’m not. Braver than me by a mile. Strong, willing to fight, loyal alongside protective and that couples with your selflessness. I wish I could watch you grow into that woman but it’s alright. You’ll have my hardheaded husband to guide you and love you. And you’ll be perfect. I’ll be proud of you every day, I want you to remember that.”

River hates this. There is so much she wants to say. So much she wants to ask. If this vision just gave her a single sentence, she’d use it to tell her mother she loves her.

Freya smiles up at the ceiling as she sinks down in the chair, eyes sliding shut as if in bliss.

“I know when I will die. I’ve seen myself hanging there. Not how it comes to pass though. I’ve been preparing for it. Right now, you’re only a few months old. You’re sleeping,” Freya lifts an arm to blindly point toward the mouth of the brick entrance beyond which is River’s room, “just there. I’ve got an ear out for you while I set up what will one day be your work room. If things work out. I don’t know that they will. I know that I won’t be able to teach you and I’m somewhat relieved for that. As I said, I’m barely a witch. I just know how to make things. Small things. But I wanted to have some part in your ascension, I wanted—your mother wanted to give her daughter a proper gift. From one witch to another.”

Freya lays a hand over her eyes, “We were tasked with a burden too great. We know how to build, not rebuild. But I was trying to raise you differently than I was. I’m hoping you’ll be stronger, wiser. We shall see. If you are watching this, then you have become a witch somehow. Please be careful. Know that I love you and that I want the greatest life for you that can be achieved. I’d do anything for you, River, and that includes being selfish. I’m asking you to live a good and happy life. Find joy if you can and when you do, keep it. Don’t let grief warp you the way it has done to your elders and everyone who married into our family and took our name. This room and this village are my gift to you. My last goodbye. You’re receiving it because you are the last O’Bru witch. This is your plot of land, my love. Build something worth loving. Worth fighting for. But if you don’t, if this frightens you and you decide the same thing I did, good. f*ck all this anyway. If it threatens even a hair on your beautiful head, f*ck it. Let it rot. Let someone else be the builder. Just stay safe.

Freya stands from the chair, smoothing out her skirts and shaking away muscle fatigue from the awakes position. Giving the empty room one last look, one last assurance that it is an empty lot waiting to be built upon. Then she smiles with all the grace River can remember.

“Kiss your father for me. And cause a bit of mischief where you can. It’s good for the soul. Good luck—oh! My girl, please do not let your father plant any daffodils near my grave. I detest them and he can’t be trusted to not plant them. I’m counting on you!”

The last thing she sees before the vision ends is her mother’s dimples and the lighting softening her caramel-colored eyes.

When she rushes into the cellar, Carver drops whatever she is holding from the shock of seeing tears and snot running from River. Blotchy and heaving, she chokes on sobs and clings to her wife. Through half formed sentences broken by sobs, she manages to tell her wife what she found and what she saw. Including the vision she had of a young Carver.

For a long while, Carver sits with River curled up between her legs, holding her tightly, and explains what she can. The cellar has endless amounts of witch history stored in it. Enormous, walnut sized seeds that is a soul of a sage that if planted could become a new Augury. Which Carver explains to be an ancient counsel of elevated witches who divine the past, present, and future to witches in need of wisdom. Or they reach out to living sages to pass on their visions as warning signs of ill omens to come. There are teaching journals from the very first witches and textbooks for the newer generation that raised Carver and her mother before her. With tremendous pride and relief, Carver tells her that River’s great grandmother did save all the witches in the Vale. By saving their history and everything they would need to rebuild, she had kept her promise.

“But I don’t know how to rebuild a witch city. Let along build one from scratch. I don’t even know how to build little things. My mother called herself half-baked so what does that make me? How can this be my job? I’m brand new. I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s not right.”

“You are not the last O’Bru witch anymore, love. And this burden is not yours alone to bear. I am with you. We can do this together,” They still sit curled into one another on the cool floor, safely bound by love and secured by the arms wrapped tightly around shaking shoulders, “I should have explained what this room meant to me. I didn’t have the words. I still don’t. You cannot fathom what we have here. What we can do.”

River presses her wet cheek to her wife’s shoulder, swallowing down the sobs that are fading, “What can we do?”

“Bring everyone home. Give you a proper education. Anything. We can do anything. I can—I thought, once I remembered, that they meant you. Our love. That the O’Bru they told me about what you delivering me from my encroaching madness and giving me what I needed to become myself again. It was always so much more than that.”

River lifts her head to look around the room. It’s similar to how it was when River first came down here except the walls seem to have expanded. And stairs seemed to have appeared. When she gets up, Carver follows her quickly and reaches to curl their fingers together for an anchor.

The stairs are short, made from compact dirt and from shovel that dig and cut them into shape. The room at the bottom is small, smelling of stale air and wet mud even though there is no water down here. Barrels are crowded into one corner that have nasty gouges in the varnished wood. Each look made by something sharp and swung hard. Books are stored in glass cases inside each barrel that, River realizes, must have been transported out of the Vale like this. Hidden in these places and later secured by her great grandmother. Somehow. This would not have been a simple task. This would also not have been something her grandmother could have done quickly unless she had help.

“What are these?”

“The collected history of the Vale since its founding. And this,” River turns to watch Carver take an enormous tome from a box, needing to heft it into her arms like a heavy baby, “Every witch that has ever been born has their name recorded here and a brief history of their life and then dates of when and how they died. It updates itself magically so nothing is ever missed. Another section of the cellar has nothing but spell books. One of my spellbooks even, River. Your grandmother would have had to go through the castle. She got everything she could grab. Look, look come.”

Her hand is taken again so she can be pulled from this room into another. On the walls where these new sections have appeared, she can see Carver has carved runes into the dirt that ask permission for all doors to be unlocked in River’s name.

This room is an odd shape with the floor shaped in a slow downward slope into a small trench at the end. Nothing but coffins fill the trench. Coffins and boxes and tombstones that are not made of rock but instead made of a type of wood that feels harder than rock. Along the slope, some boxes have been opened to reveal urns, vases, small busts, and other artistic creations. And paintings. Some massive while others are smaller than most windows. One that Carver brings her too has a sheet thrown over it for protection. When it is whipped away, Carver’s stern face surrounded by a thick mane of black hair stares back at her. A crown of thorn and bone rests upon her brow, poking up through where hair has been draped over it. Paint—teal and red—covers her face and arms just the way it had when River first found her except without the chips in it, without age discoloring it. She looks fierce and furious and ready to slaughter.

“A war portrait of their Queen before I vanished in the war machine. I don’t even know how your grandmother would have managed to get this. I didn’t want to sit for it but it was—and then the artist vanished. I thought they died. Our camp was attacked in the middle of the night. You O’Bru, you really are capable of anything.”

River crouches down to pick it up by the frame, traveling across the regal arch of her wife’s grim set brows and the bow of her pursed mouth, “You look beautiful but very different. What happened to your hair?”

“It turned grey in the circle. We don’t age in them, but certain aspects of our body disobey the spell. Hair greys as if we were aging, in some cases. Others wrinkle or lose teeth even though they are still only the same age they were when ushered into the circle. It’s not meant to be a kind spell.”

River touches just the corner of the canvas to feel the bump of the artist’s signature made, mindful of how the oil from her skin could upset it but wanting to ensure it is real, “I don’t understand any of this. How could all of this have been under my feet? An entire room on the other side of the place I lay my head? A cup that let me see my mother again? It’s always just been here? This whole time? And I—Divines!—I’ve had a painting of the woman I would marry in my root cellar I didn’t even know I had and of which is not a root cellar for my entire life!”

Arms encircle her waist from behind and a kiss is pressed gently to her neck, “Perhaps we were foolish to not assume fate did not bring us together.”

“Fate? I don’t believe in nonsense.”

“But you are a witch now, you must. Fate is just another form of magic that guides us. And magic is untold,” She can feel Carver’s smile against her neck, “Magic cannot obey mortal law. It is the will of the world, it will behave as it deigns. And look at where it has brought us. Isn’t it incredible?”

To hear Carver filled with hope is an important marker for how far they have come. How different they are now as women, as a pair, and as separate people entirely their own. Carver is a gleaming thing without the haunted shadows following her steps, no more dodging questions or agreeing to things just to escape. Just surviving. And River is a witch now. Someone who has grown so past fear she has embraced and become the very thing she ran from. Now she talks about her mother without a lump in her throat and her father does too. They have all felt the change.

Maybe fate did bring them together.

“Can I hang this in our room?”

Carver makes a noise but affirms.

“What do we do with the rest of this?”

“Just what you love to do most,” River receives a firm pat to her stomach before Carver pulls away, forcing her turn around so she can watch her wife hike her skirt into her belt and set her hands on her hips, “We get to work. Room by room, chore by chore. We start with our home then we do the people next and little by little we will return your town to you. The rightful ruler—”

“Hold on!”

“—and I will rebuild the Vale here. With all the good lumber and seeds saved for me. O’Bru,” Carver chuckles and shakes her head, “This was always the plan. Immaculate. Come here, I want a kiss.”

“No, you’re covered in cobwebs and dust, and you smell like sweat. And I’ve been crying. And it sounds like we have a lot of chores added to the daily mix so we better get started now.”

Carver grins, “Let’s start with the seeds. This is the perfect time to add them to the garden.”

Planting the sage soul seeds requires a magical touch. Each has to be wrapped in strips of paper, need words spoken over them, then burned in a fire using specific wood and herbs. Once they are glowing coals, they use tongs to press them into the dirt in the woods behind the inn. Just along the edge of the property line. Carver cries but does so with a smile that splits her face, joy radiating from her like heat from the sun that is pale and still yawning awake above them. Together they sit on their knees, arms hooked at the elbows, leaned against each other.

“You gave me a home again in more ways than I realized,” Carver turns to press her nose behind River’s ear, “I cannot ever express my thanks properly. I cannot love you enough.”

River gives Carver’s arm a soothing caress, “You deserve it. After everything, you deserve this and more.”

A bird flies above their head to land on a branch, spreading his blue and white wings to preen the feathers. One drifts down to land on Carver’s shoulder which she gently plucks off and tosses to the grass.

“I want to help with all of this. My mother said I could choose to—that I get to decide. She didn’t want it and I wouldn’t have either if I had never met you. If in some world my father finally told me what my mother was and what I could be. But in this one, I have you and I feel stronger for it. Now, I think. Braver. I want to help. I want to return everything back to you if I can. If that means more lessons, I’ll work harder. If it means doing the insane and taking the village back, I’ll do that too. I’ll fight for you.”

She would fight anything to see Carver smile like that far more often.

When her wife only pulls away to silently stare at her in awe, she clears her throat and finds the purpose buried within.

“I’ve been thinking about it since I saw the vision of my mother. She did raise me to be strong and brave and she may not think she was, but she was wrong. She stared down her death and patiently prepared for her end. I don’t think—she was brave and I’m just like her and I don’t want to forget that. My great grandmother took all of that for a reason and for better or worse I’m a witch now. It’s my duty. So, I want to help,” She reaches to take Carver’s hand into her own, rubbing her thumb along a red line, “Just tell me what to do.”

Instead of doing that, Carver pulls her into a fierce hug and squeezes her so tight she wheezes.

“I’d marry you again if I could.”

“Well—“

“Together. We will rebuild our future for our people together.”

Another child comes. This one a tiny, fragile girl abandoned alongside the road. This time the blacksmith finds her, and, because of their reputation, he knows where to bring her. This time Ghedric and Carver have just left for Newin.

This time River takes her and looks up. Killian is watching from down the street. Close as he is willing to get. Even at that distance, he looks ashen and gaunt. Hollowed around the cruel eyes that still occasionally haunt her step when she moves through markets or stops at elder’s homes for a visit. After a beat, he just turns away to walk back into obscurity.

Unease halos her after that. Carver is usually only gone for three days. Sometimes four if weather or her own curiosity delays her. Often when Ghedric accompanies her, the two will spend an extra day just to peruse vendors and curiosities that might hold a treasured new pot or dish or sale on spices. Normally this would not bother her in the least except for how awful an empty house and an empty bed has come to feel.

For some reason, this time, River cannot escape being watched. Not the usual kind of watched that she had gotten used to. Halfway between a lust and a jealously depending on who is looking. Not even the sad fondness from elders who helped her be born into the world on the bank of her river or know what they lost through her. These eyes are hawkish, sharp upon the skin at the back of her neck and wisps when she turns to find where the prick came from. Some of the villagers that she has always known to be the most afraid of magic—the ones who told her stories that terrified her as a girl—turn the other direction when she comes.

That is when she realizes something has happened. Something she cannot take back.

It is on the third day of her family’s absence. Walking around the small market with the tiny girl holding her hand. Shopping for some of the fruit that Hester still sells even though her arthritis has gnarled her into a hunched, knobby wood stump of a woman. The plan had been to turn them into a jam while she canned some of the peppers and cucumbers.

The plan is dashed when her wrist is gripped so violently, her basket is shaken from her grasp and all her freshly bought produce scatters. Immediately the child begins to scream. Citizens milling around the small market stop to stare, to raise their voices that die away when Chief Semé steps out of the crowd.

No. It happened.

“River Kelsey,” He clearly intends to say more but his eyes flick to the child screaming and squirming in the vice of another man, “Is this child your apprentice?”

“Chief Semé, please—“

“Don’t start. Answer the question so I know if one or two need to die today.”

Movement behind his shoulder draws her eye. Killian is there. Of course he is. There is a nasty snarl that means harm. His version of betrayal. A spill of victory taints the darker shades, hanging off the gaunt structure of his face.

How did they find out?

She stopped looking for him. Enough time had passed that she got lazy, got comfortable. Every day spent with her wife has been a deeper love she has tumbled headfirst into. She has been content, fat with laziness and love. She stopped hunting and now she is going to be snatched between hungry jaws.

No time for panic or fear. No time to care about what comes next because she has little time and she wants to use it wisely.

First, “She is just another girl. We are looking after her until her father can find her. Isn’t that right, darling? You two were separated. It’s okay, don’t be afraid. Yusef, put her down please. She’s just a child.”

A rough hand clamps around her shoulder. Another twists her arm behind her back. Both use the leverage to push her onto her knees. For the sake of the child, she does her best to remain calm.

Yusef looks to the fuming chief. He waits a tense moment before jerking his head to the side. Rudely, Yusef lifts the girl by her arm and throws her toward the gathering crowd. The sweet wife—Merrium—who adopted the first baby Carver brought home quickly snatches the girl up and blends into the crowd with her. Shushing and cries and screams come from the mix, but River cannot see either of them.

“What’s the meaning of this!?” Elder Cara—hobbling upon a gnarled ancient root for a cane—calls from the crowd. One of her eyes is bisected by a deep scar that puckers the skin around it clear down to her jaw. One of the five oldest members of their community who, in the world before Chief Semé, would have held the respect and council of a leader before. Not the official leader but the ears who a leader voiced issue and whose lips offer counsel. Elder Clara who had set a hand on her shoulder when she was hidden by the mourning vale and stood by the grave they made for Freya.

“Silence. I allow some of your old ways to persevere through my kindness but not today. Not for her.”

“That is River! Our River! We deserve an explanation!”

“She’s a witch!” Killian snaps, teeth flashing and lips shining from spit that comes from the fierceness of his accusation. Part of him seems thrilled and the other betrayed. Wrapped into one complex emotion.

Careful. This has to be careful.

Telling the truth will get her killed but they already know and she is going to die anyway. That is of little matter now. Time is all she has now.

Is this how her mother felt when she crawled into that ring and realized her life was gone from her? Had she laid there, listening to a gentle song, knowing her doom was upon her and that all she had was time left? Had she the same thought River has now?

They’ll be alright. They will have each other.

Murmurs spread. Murmurs that become shouts and fighting, arguing between the stout folk and the fearful. The ones who obey their Chief but never truly followed him, not from the moment he planted a foot upon their soil and ripped up their historic roots all while demanding they follow his saplings. Saying his were better, stronger than their ancient forest. Ones that she never wanted to acknowledge had always viewed Freya—the next in line, a witch—as their rightful ruler. The others are the fearful folk, the jolly and just King’s lovers. The ones who suffer in Semé’s charge but do so happily because they think it is a fine price to pay for a type of protection only he can offer. Where their loving King had abandoned his father’s spine and relented the vice grip on the witch’s throat. Allowing magic legal again even if he has not yet allowed to prisoners free. Made what Semé is illegal in the same breath. A mistake in their eyes, a blessing that they are here and found this relic that is hard to live with but better to keep.

All of that is silence in the closing of Semé’s fist that is held in the air.

“I’ll not have this argument. Believe me when I say this pains me more than any of you. River was a staple of our community, we trusted her. Trusted her with our children, our wives, our food. But the truth is no longer a thing we can deny. River has been practicing witchcraft. My son has seen it and warned me of it but I did not want to listen. I wanted to believe better of our River,” The look Chief Semé sends down upon her head could wither a fresh spring bloom, while fields of flowers and vines, “But I cannot any longer. It is true. Others have seen it too. Do you deny it?”

They could not have caught her. She and Carver have been so careful. Even when they discuss it is public, they keep their mouths obscured behind their hands and their voices too low for anyone to hear that they would not notice standing nearby. Each time they have committed to lessons it has been in their room or deep in the forest behind the inn. Wards had been placed to catch any stray hunter moving through brush from a distance that human eyes could not see them before they knew the human was there. Of the witches Carver has saved and brought home, each had been given a strict warning from their Queen to be discrete. Most of them that were not children had fled early, leaving behind the village to seek out their ancestral home. Neither could they be the thing that causes this truth to come out.

Killian looms behind his father as he always has. Not as bulky, not as thick around the arms because he chose a bow instead of a sword, but taller. Thin and cruel and filled to the top of his head with wrong ideas that has sickened him to the core. A ruined child made a broken man. One who is rife with contempt. Looking like a beastly boy whose favorite toy was just taken from him.

Time enough in that look. It means they do not know for sure. Killian got tired of waiting for her to prove something he suspected. This is his desperate last attempt force her into the light so her punishment—the one he thinks she deserves for embarrassing him—can finally be dulled out. The tiniest modicum of relief swells against her heaving lungs.

“No,” Gasps from everyone, no doubt for different reasons, some looking heartbroken, others afraid, and some concealed, “No, I don’t deny it. I’m a witch. But Chief, please, my wife and father don’t know. I’ve kept it a secret from them, please don’t—“

“Don’t what, Kelsey? Don’t tell them you’ve been lying to them!? I will make it my personal duty to expose you for what you are.”

Thank the Divines. He ate it straight from my hand.

“No! Please—“

“Shut it! I don’t take orders from a witch,” He leans down to grip her face in his massive hand, lifting it toward the sunlight to inspect the humble beauty that has been passed down to her, “Not especially for you. The greatest betrayer.”

Now as victims of her lies too, maybe they can survive this. Maybe in the haze of his unwarranted grief, he will assume the father and the wife another victim in this tragedy. That good and kind River Kelsey tricked even those closest to her.

They will be okay. They have each other.

That is all she wants. If someone has to die—if this was always the inevitable end—thank the Divines it is her. Her selfish heart does not have to survive this. She gets to die knowing they live and it’s unfair to them but this is the only outcome she can handle.

She sags, chin falling to her chest in a way that conceals her face with her hair falling around her ears. Arms splayed in front of her, bunching hunched over her knees that ache from being on them in this position. To the outside specters, she probably looks like a defeated woman. They cannot know it is relief.

Arguments. Shouting. Elders fighting for her right to live, trying convince Chief Semé that this is a misunderstanding just as a way to save her life. Others try to say they always knew there was something wrong with River, something dark, but this is cut down as quickly as River soon will be.

Hopefully soon. Hopefully before they come home.

“She’s never done a thing unkind!”

“She’s one of us! One of our true lines! The founders of this place!”

“A witch is a witch! Corrupt to the bone! She can’t stay here! Kill her! Kill her!”

“No! Just cast her out! I held her when she was a wee, wiggling thing! She can’t hurt nobody!”

“She’s a liar! Deceiver! Betrayer! Witch!”

“And if she is a witch, so what!?”

This causes a violent silence. Chief Semé fumes, glaring at the hunched old man who said it.

“River Kelsey has been nothing short of a blessing for all of us. When your kids get sick, who is the first person to bring them something useful? When you get hurt, who is the first person to show up and help with your chores? Bring you supper? Check on each of you to make sure you’re alright? Tedri, when your grandmother died, was River not the first person to comfort you? Didn’t she visit you every day to make you feel less alone? Not a single one of you can convince me that girl is not an angel. If she’s a witch, well. Maybe they aren’t so bad after all.”

There is not time to scream, initially. Shock of seeing it happen means she does not even register the death until the body hits the road and blood spills from the gurgling lips. Fingers slip against the crimson spilling from his split throat.

That man used to tie ribbons in her hair when she would ask him for sweets, and he would sneak them into her basket. He would wink at her and set a finger over his sealed lips.

“Anyone who sympathizes with a witch is no better than one and will be treated with the same contempt,” Blood runs bright along the edge of Semé drawn blade, “Does anyone else want to talk about how great and wonderful the lying bitch River is!? Go ahead, don’t be shy! We all want to hear it!”

River gets a vicious kick for trying to break away from the hands holding her down and crawling to the old man. Time still remains for her to fix this before it is too late. He is still gagging on the blood. Without components she will have to pay with her own bone and body but that is alright if he lives.

Struggling does her no good. Her body is not one built to ensure suffering when the majority of the time it produces suffering on its own. One more kick makes her crumple on the ground, curling around the hurt.

One last hiccupping suck comes from the failing man before he becomes, no longer man, but a corpse.

Words for apologies grow in such wealth within her sticky, screaming mind that she fails to notice when they turn from jarring thought to mournful wails upon her tongue.

Shadow falls over her form, broken and curled inward, that lifts her wet gaze. Killian crouches down beside her, elbows braced on her knees.

“I warned you. This? All of this is your fault. This wouldn’t have happened if you were honest with me.”

Eyes squeeze shut and she lets her head fall back onto the hard earthen road.

One of the first things Carver expressed was contempt for this family. They are a blight upon this quaint village, a sickness that has taken them to the grave slowly over years of having this infection. River has promised to fight but the truth is, she does not know how. All the magic Carver has taught her and what she has been teaching herself from their newly sourced library does not lend itself to combat. Curses seemed a fanciful thing that she did not want to shove her wife awake to explain and instead focused her energy on expanding the type of magic Carver has started her on. Growth, building, breaking to remake. The sort of things she knew River would naturally take to. Now she regrets not studying more.

If she knew how to attack, she could have overthrown the men holding her back and she could have saved a life.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m—”

“Apology not accepted.” Killian’s smug voice is a knife against tender flesh.

“Not you.” She hisses into the fold of her arm, into the dirt where she will soon rot.

“You little—”

“Killian.” Semé speaks his son’s name evenly, almost bored. Within the same instance of the uttering, Killian’s face morphs into a tamed mouse and shy eyes. He hunches his shoulders and backs away from River.

“Sorry Father.”

This has only happened twice in River’s lifetime with her making three. In the first event River had huddled, small, against the back of her mother’s legs. Everyone was forced to attend by order of Semé and enacted by the men he sent to knock on doors and usher people to the site of execution. Father said it was a fear tactic, something to keep the oppressed happily under thumb. Mother had hushed him and made sure River did not watch. Did not even peek. Not that she wanted to, the noises alone haunted her nightmares for months afterward. That time had been quick she thought but there had been a lot of work concealing it from River.

The second time had not been quick. Every second had been an agony that Semé drug out because of his ire. The second time is when she, as a seventeen-year-old woman, had learned just how deep the sickness of this man ran not just into his own deluged mind but in others too. Some people are born into homes that shape them wrong, that rip out the good to fill them with poison and nothing can ever change them. They can be so vile, so twisted into an inhuman shape, that they do not seem real. In the early years of her life she had tried very hard to find the edges of that tar, scape it away, and use her special heart to repair the hurt. That had, unfortunately, only resulted in Killian’s obsession with her and made her realize people sometimes cannot be fixed. That evil is what they choose and what they wrap their person around even if there is a speck of humanity in them. They forsake it out of fear, in Killian’s case, because being stripped means being weak and he cannot survive like that. Choosing his hate, his blatant lack of empathy, is how he survives being his father’s son. Whereas the chief keeps himself cold through his enormous ego.

That second time had been something he perceived as a slight to himself. When he took his first wife, the moment she became heavy with child, he took two more wives. The third one had been someone River loved beyond words because she had been Freya’s childhood friend. Knowing what she does of her mother now, it makes sense that the third wife of Chief Semé had been a witch. Someone River owed a great debt to because she had stepped in, winsome and kind, to soothe his ego after Ghedric had told him in no uncertain terms that if he attempted to force River to marry him, there would be hell. Because their Chief never lets something go once he has decided he wants it and especially if he has been told no. Due to the fact that his own wife had turned out to be a witch, he had made the process personal. Made her sit in the square for days before he finally declared that she would die just like that. Tied up, gawked at, given no help from the eyes that watched her. River had snuck her water, just once, in the dead of night and been reprimanded by the woman. That risk had been too great. If she had been caught, he would make a spectacle of her too.

River feels the apologies surging to her tongue again now that she looks back with her new steel-wall heart strengthened by Carver’s love and realizes just how truly poisoned their waters have become. How much of the village was robbed from her elders. What her mother gave up to just spend her life quietly with her family, for what little time she had left. Carver had seen it right away, had seen the sour spoiling the heart and knew it needed cut out but River had ignored her. That is what everyone in this village does. They see the signs and they ignore it because it is safer that way and she has grown so used to doing that, she has done it with everything in her life.

Now it is her turn.

This village should have been her birthright. She should have been the one who was ensuring that old man was being taken care of by his community and now he is laying in a pool of his own secretions because of her.

Semé is going to take this more personally than the others. River who is beloved by her community, the one who often feeds more than half of them, has betrayed them. And a betrayal to them is a betrayal to him.

If she had learned what she was sooner and become the brave creature she knows she can be, none of them would have died. She would have taken care of them. Instead she is going to be the one who dies next and she is going to leave two people behind who will be swallowed by grief. Her father will never recover and Carver is going to be split apart, left alone to bleed without anyone who can fully grasp the depths of her despair like only River can.

She should have dealt with this long ago. She is like her mother but she is not. She does not want this over her own happiness, not anymore.

Blood has seeped far enough away from the body to reach her. When she scrambles to get away from it, her hand slips in the muck and streaks up the palm across her fingers.

It is too late now. The Chief is going to make a show of her death for this rank betrayal to his name and she will have no successor to take up the mantle. Just a broken father and a widowed wife. She failed.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”

Failed as a partner, as a would-be leader, as a daughter, and now as a fledgling witch.

Words are being spoken that cause a surge of violent chatter in their group. Someone grabs her by her hair to drag her and that causes shrieking, promises of violence, and shoving. Trembling low with the vibration of a thunderstorm, their chief shouts back but this time his promise of a firm hand does not quell the crowd. The village loves River too dearly to let this happen without at least trying to argue for her. All it does is irritate the ones afraid and the ones who are obedient and loyal to their chief.

“Stop it—”

“Let her go!”

“I will—”

“She is—”

“What is going on!? River, love,” No, no, no, she’s early, “Stop it—get your f*cking hands off me or I’ll remove them from your useless body! River!”

At the edge of the crowd, her wife is fighting against the assemblage. Somehow, while she was drowning in her own misery, she was dragged all the way to the village center where there is a brick foundation creating a start shape that a fountain is built atop. Long past have the waters stopped flowing, leaving behind a dried crust that is white along the basin of the fountain. Magic used to feed it and since the village passed into the chief’s hands, that has seen that it never flowed again. Many have requested that it be destroyed but of the ones who attempted it, immense misfortune had fallen. Grady Donolyn had lost his entire fortune and then his wife alongside his three sons had gotten a rot in their wounds—small scrapes from day to day chores—that put them all in an early grave. Marcy McKrak had developed a sudden illness that slowly decayed her vision and rendered all sense of taste and tongue gone from her.

No one had dared touch it again.

Her back is leaned against it now. The stone is cool through the layers of her shawl and her blouse. Comforting even, feeling like the breeze that waifs off the top of her river when she sits on the shore reading or practicing spell-craft. It feels like the jolting touch of Carver’s freezing feet against her calves when they slip into bed together. It takes the sting out of much of her hurt, the sore knees and the places she was kicked that she knows are bruised already.

Bodies are a meager opposition to the fire burning within her wife’s eyes. Before River can even try to speak around the lump in her throat, she has shoved herself to the front and is trying to get to River’s crumpled body.

Chief Semé catches her by the bicep to haul her backward, settling his rough voice for the woman that he fancies, “Carver, stay back. She is dangerous.”

“Get off me! She’s as dangerous as a field mouse—is that blood!? Did one of you hit my wife!?”

“Carver,” Semé gives her a rough shake to knock sense into her, holding her back with just one hand, “She admitted to being a witch.”

“What?” The shaken tone to her voice confuses Semé who mistakes this as her own betrayal. When he attempts to comfort her by giving her a hug, he is violently rebuked by palms that stab at his collarbones to push him away. A schism of hate slices through his gentleness.

“Carver—“

“Don’t f*cking touch—move. I want my wife, I’m going to—“

Again he shakes her and this time she knows it hurts. This time she rises reflexively to help but one of the men who accompanied Chief Semé kicks her again. A cry slips out that turns Carver’s eyes deadly. Flame-touched, furious and sharp. A type of anger only the trees know to be an untamed wildfire hot enough to peel paint off a windowsill from miles away.

Carver, don’t. Just let it be. I just want you to be safe, please. Go home and look after Papa. This will be over soon.

Carver’s cheek twitches and a pale shadow is dropped over the eyes. Something that does not tamper the flame but channels it into a white-hot point.

One arm lifts to point at the man who just kicked River, “Make your peace.”

No! Carver, listen to me, I cannot watch anything happen to you! Please go!

“I can go to war again, River O’Bru,” Carver reaches up to grip Semé’s thick wrist since he still has a rough grip on her arm, “And I will if you do not come home with me.”

“I understand the betrayal, I feel it too. Justice will be served—”

Carver whirls her glare upon the man who speaks, he has a touch upon her she does not like, and snarls, “Justice!? I will show you justice if you do not hand my wife back to me! I will burn your name to ashes and bury what remains of your pride in your bloated corpse that will have no grave for not a single soul will come to admire you! Give her to me. Do it now. Now!”

“She is a witch! She will die a witch’s death!”

Carver swings herself closer to him, baring her teeth like a snarling animal, “Then kill me with her because I am a witch too!”

“Carver, no! She’s,” River chokes on her own heart, trying to rise onto her knees so she can get to her wife, to grasp this situation and rip it back into a neat order, “She’s lying! She isn’t like me! She’s innocent, please! Please don’t hurt her, please, I’ll do anything! She’s my whole world, please!”

“It’s not a lie. I’m a witch, I am thee witch and you, tiny man, you should be afraid of me. All your nightmares, all your years chasing us and burning us, breaking us, should mean something only now. You’ve killed innocents for too long but not me,” Clouds crawl unnaturally quick across the sun above, casting the entire square in a shadow that sickens everything, “I am the monster you have always been afraid of. I can be a horror. I will be if you do not tell your blood-spoiled sickness you call children to take their hands off my wife. In fact, I don’t even need you for that. They have bones, don’t they? Blood that sings? That’s all I need.”

“Carver! Do not, don’t! You’ll frighten them,” River pleads with more than her voice, hoping the desperation can be seen through the tears in her eyes and the way she cannot keep her lips from quivering, “It’s okay, it’s alright love. It’s okay.”

“My Little River. Always giving, never taking. I do not give a single f*ck about what happens to anyone but you—”

“I do! Think about the ones who are afraid of—of that. You cannot win them over this way—”

Fire in the eyes, ash upon the tongue, and sparks that fly with words, “I don’t care! They took you! They took you while I wasn’t here to protect you, and I come back home to this!? No! This isn’t—”

“This is our home now. We are building it brick by seed, by every heart we touch. These are our people,” It is a desperate plea to save a situation she cannot fight in, to save her wife above all else, “War hurt you, my love. Leave it behind. This time fight with love. Please, just walk away.”

Such a softness can only be found after splitting something open and pushing fingers through the ruins. Wet with tears, aching from the sundering, Carver’s shoulders sink and she watches River softly. Broken open like a tree beneath the point of a lighting strike, still smoldering and unable to escape the burn.

For a brief second it might have been a victory. She knows Carver never would have let her die but she would have at least reigned in her violence.

If Semé did not get his truth from their argument, if he did not just receive another betrayal that does not belong to him. With his hand on Carver’s wrist, he pulls her forward and throws her at River. For as tall as her wife is and how strong she has built herself back into being, she does not compare to the burly mountain that Semé is. Momentum sends her stumbling and rolling onto her back, sliding across the brick into River.

“Two of them!? Under my own f*cking roof!? Two of them!? And not one of you noticed,” He casts his gaze upon the crowd who roll away as water does from the shore, bending down to escape the heat of his ire, “Not one of you saw a single thing!?”

River reaches for her wife, hoping to curl around her, to check for damage, but she is held back. Carver starts to rise but Killian is there to plant a boot on her spine and push her back to the ground.

“I cannot believe two of them,” Semé clenches her fist, “You, Carver? How could you do this to me? I let you into my home, into my heart! You walked with me—“

“I love my wife. I do not understand how often I have to explain that to you. You acting like we have a familiarity when we hardly speak if I can avoid it is vexing. Once a week coming to the inn to ask after me is just embarrassing. Look at her,” Carver’s smile is bloody and that makes River’s ears ring because she did not even see how she got hurt like that, “As if anyone could see a thing outside of her. Why would I ever care about you? Now you strut around with a hand over a wounded heart like I struck you some blow? You are a bane on this village. A curse no witch would wrought because we do not fill earth with sickness. We sew seeds and share our harvest. You are killing this place and these people. You keep a title strange to these lands, stuff your traditions into the cracks of a foundation that is breaking from your intrusion. You see, you want, you conquer. You do not care, you do not grow, you do not lead. Witches are not the problem here, you are.”

Some of those in the crowd begin to ascent, softly and loudly, shouting and drawing attention. Even the ones who have spent years afraid, some who even grew up beneath Semé and have only ever known him, look around. Eyes wide, burning with hope. Just the smell of an escape is enough to flip them if the door appears opened and it is coming open. Elders are pushing to the front of the crowd, hostile because their boots have trod through blood-made mud, and they refuse to lose another. The founding bloodline for which this village was stood upon. Some of whom may be old enough to have met River’s grandmother and had been told stories of her great grandmother.

Hostile and tired of the way things have been, this becomes the breaking point. Everything slows for River to just the fraction of a second. No sound except the wild race of her own thundering heart. Chief wields the only blade allowed in town. His sons knock arrows upon their darkly stained bows.

Fighting starts too quickly. Before words to quell them can be loosed. Horrified, River watches a man who clearly wants freedom push his wife, who is against rebelling, hard enough that when she hits her head falling she crumples. Semé cuts through two people in one swing. Arrows make thumping noises when they sink into flesh, past ribs into soft meats that will cause a kind of bleeding she does not know how to cure. A young person who needs crutches to get around is knocked over in the scramble to escape. Someone grabs a lantern from the collection of their trader’s supplies and hurls it, lit, at Semé. He bats it aside with the flat of his blade effortlessly but it smashes against the side of a stack of crates and flame erupts that licks at canvas tarp and ignites.

River realizes this is the fight her mother wanted to avoid. Watching her entire village cannibalize itself to no end. Everything is going to burn and die, and River’s prophetic destiny will be becoming the wraith queen of a field of burnt bones.

“No—stop! Stop this please! We’re family, we’re friends! We don’t do this! Please—“

An arrow skids off the stones until the tip catches a groove in the brick, shattering into pieces that fly into her face. Stinging like embers where they strike and bury themselves in her skin.

Carver reaches into the deep pocket of her travel coat and lifts her free hand, hand positioned like a knife. Muttering words in the lilting that mean ‘imposter’ and ‘that which slithers’ a thrum of power makes the air shake. From her pocket she pulls out a hand of sand and sea glass and slaps her hands together.

Within the hands of each archer, each bow string begins to swell and discolor, growing shimmering scales and a triangle shaped head. Copperheads unfurl to land over forearms or over the tops of boots where they are shaken to. One of them shrieks when a lithe snake manages to bite exposed skin. While they are busy trying to shake off biting snakes or stomp on the heads of the ones that have fallen on the brick, Carver starts to mutter again. Touching her palms to the brick and bidding it to change, speaking the suffix of her name in the lilting alongside their shared surname, calling to the ancient roots laid here and the new ones they have begun making. Orange eyes glow with the fire of war, held upon Killian while she works her spell. Something enormous that will be unlike anything she has taught to River so far.

Her eyes are in her target. River’s are on the threat that she does not notice because of this. Semé has turned his back on the crowd who have started fighting with each other. The ones who have not flipped against the rest who are ready to revolt, to seek change, who have been waiting a generation to be free of this man. Semé who is fuming, standing on shaking ground. Semé who has been obsessed with Carver from the moment he laid eyes on her for no reason other than his own sick mind completed a fabulous story of romance that existed only for him.

He grips the hilt of his sword tight enough she hears the leather squeak.

River’s heart shakes and withers.

Silver-glint sparkles like stardust on Carver’s back. Light shining off an arcing blade.

Orange eyes flick over, moving only out of instinct to seek River out. They watch her as she rushes past her wife to intercept the falling blade. Both attacker and victim realize the attack is not going to land upon the intended target because River has gotten there in time.

She cannot fight. She would not know how to if she tried. All that she knows how to do is protect the people she loves with the tools allotted to her.

Pain is nothing new. Such a sharp and instant pain is even familiar where the uncomfortable intrusion is not. A short, strange gasp is the only noise she makes.

Carver screams. A scream that is both wretched, stricken by heartbreak and sorrow, and a scream that is burbling with unending hatred.

River had been standing when she intercepted the blade angled downward, intended to bite into the back of Carver’s neck while she crouched. The way it had bit into her cut deep, stopping only because it hit bone. Spine or hip, she cannot tell. Things are already starting to go numb from the sheer amount of blood spilling over fingers that she uselessly holds against the gaping wound. Twigs trying to stop the flood of a river before it drowns an entire town.

Spots dance in her vision.

Distantly she registers the blade being wrenched free because her body is pulled with the momentum and thrown back to the ground.

Carver is still screaming.

River’s vision is tunneled. Shaking makes it difficult for her to tell if there is actually earth under her or if she is being flung around the swirling scope what she sees. Blood is seeping between the brick that is old, grey and growing vivid veins of moss where there are hair thin cracks.

Something whispers her name.

She gets kicked by someone in a scuffle. They trip over her and the person they were throwing fists at trip with them.

Another whisper. A woman’s voice.

She tries to lift herself onto her elbows but does not have the strength. So she makes claws of her hands and hooks the tips of her fingers between the bricks to drag herself along. It hurts but it is a distant hurt.

It is not Carver’s voice. It sounds almost like Freya. It sounds like someone else too. More than one voice. Three voices? No, far more. It is a chorus. An entire army of whispers.

The voices are coming from the fountain.

Earth splinters beneath her. Caving inward, spiraling from cracks like a massive hammer has struck the surface of the brick. Crawling stops because now she is on a slight slope downward.

Carver is still screaming. Now chunks of broken brick are ripping away from the ground, collecting to spin into balls. Balls that twist in the air and slams together, taking shapes that are slightly familiar. Memories of sitting at her work desk while Carver proudly showed her a tiny knight made of clay surface.

These knights are ten feet tall, made of sharp brick and clumps of unmoored earth and tree roots. One lifts a nearby crate and throws it over their head at a group of people blocking its path to Chief Semé.

Half sliding, half dragging herself along, she reaches the fountain.

Now the whispers are a chorus so loud they have blended into one sound. A rushing sound. Something that fills her head and blocks all other noise. The sound is home to her. It stirs a power inside her that she only ever felt during winter when the wilderness was affected by the elements.

It is the sound of a river swollen by rain. Her river.

She laughs. She laughs because her mother chose her name so very carefully. A witch with a cup made of wood that came from immortal trees holding spirits of the most powerful witches to have lived. A cup that let her see a future where, not she, but her daughter would need the power of a name to save her.

To save her village.

Tugging first. Down in the pit of her belly and at the base of her spine where it meets hips and where it meets skull. A vice that is nearly unpleasant and keeps building in pressure. If she were not already accustomed to pain, this may have pushed her past the limit.

Then, it breaks and with it comes a surge of cool water that bursts from the fountain. A raging river that has been strengthen by spring rain. Fish and turtles come with it, pulled straight from where it had cut like a vein down the side of the mountain before. River is swept up in the tide alongside everything and everyone else. Fires that were chewing through the first set of shops in town, ringing the square, are quenched in an instant. Fighting must stop because River cannot hear anything except the roar of water. Being turned over and under, ripped side to side with the tide, bumping against houses that shudder from the force of a sudden flood.

Then, unexpectedly, the water retreats. Sucking itself backward into the fountain where it burst from and everything that is caught in its flood is drawn with it. Light is blotted out, turned to a fuzzy shimmer that is reflected from the top of the water she is suspended in. It fades as she is sucked downward. For a long, long time in a snaking pattern that grows darker the longer she goes. It never seems to end.

Just when she feels the aching burn in her chest that means she needs air or else, she breaks surface.

Disoriented, weak, and dazed she does not immediately realize that she is not beneath the doting sun. That her river did not lift her from harm and bring her to her sacred place hidden where only she and her wife can find. Instead of blue sky above her, there is rock. Water still runs across slick stone and bends the stalks of lonely mushrooms growing in a place not kind of living things.

Against all reasoning, the river has brought her back into the caves where everything began.

When she looks up to see where she is, she understands. This is where her river flows, where it was always meant to take her. When she reaches into its knowing depths to pluck out a favor, it had only given the town an increment of its care. She is River and it swept her away to save her. Washing her right back onto the stone bridge where she once fell and died.

Carver’s circle is inert but still carved deep into the stone floor, filled with runes in the lilting she can read now. A power impermeable to the river that flows while the name written into it belongs to Carver. Magic like this is far beyond River who is by all accounts is still considered a novice by her shrewd teacher. Even Carver, whose name had changed and power alongside it, would not know the crafty O’Bru way around a working such as this. Too much evil and hate had gone onto the making of it and her wife nowadays only spends her energy toward what is natural to her. Healing, growing, helping. Even if her wife knew how they might have worked once, long ago, she could not and would not touch one now. Let alone teach River how to do the same.

Getting it to work for her means the difference between her living or dying.

By some grace, River gets another moment in which she gets to be proud for being Freya O’Bru’s daughter. Built of sturdy stuff that continues forward in spite of life’s oft awful machinations. Not making the circle work after her river washed her here is beyond comprehension. It is her only path toward living. She does not understand the depth and complexity of the witch circles as they are layers of curses and workings that are forcefully bound to unhappily cohabitate. What she does have is the small ability to get creative.

Blood loss is making her sick and shaky and cold. Her eyes are starting to darken like the setting of the sun. Trembling on her belly she reaches to strike through her wife’s ancient name bound to this circle. In the stone beside it, she expands the bounds of the circle using the blood on her finger and in the added space she damns herself by writing her full true name in the lilting.

Magic flares to life. Enchantments inside it start attacking the places where she is dying, where the cruel magic of the witch’s prison do not let it die. That is good and fine because it means she will not die.

It does mean she is trapped now and that is a bit of a bummer.

Carver is going to be furious with her if she ever finds her. Hopefully it happens before Carver is ancient and Ghedric has long since passed.

That will have to be a predicament she mulls over later. At the moment her mind of foggy, at the cusp of losing consciousness. The only thing keeping her awake is pain and the discomforting feeling of magic. A new feeling that was not present last time she was inside this circle because last time it was not trapping her and she was not a realized witch. Witch circles prevent witches from using magic while inside them so she has always assumed that meant a road was cut away. Now she feels that to be a poor assumption. Magic is not removed from her but compressed, wadded up and shoved somewhere high she cannot reach but can feel the pressure of. Thinking about using the magic increases the intensity of the pressure so much so that she can feel it in the root endings of the nerves running to her teeth. No matter the thought that tries to drag her away, she can feel it. A constant reminder. The mending of meat makes for an awful collection of sounds and sensations but even that does not take her away from the feeling.

Her river is still running through the streets of her village. Her waters and her blood have marked the soil, sunk deep and made a claim. Now that the water has resided it just runs ankle deep but the ground beneath and the water around it belongs to her so she can feel who is in it. Where they are. She can feel Ghedric righting his chair and pulling himself into it a street over from the inn. Bitty feet in boots River put on this very morning stomp after the family that scooped her up when the problems began. Through the earth she can feel the beating of hearts but in the water she knows the shape and name of the body that touches it. Water claims whatever it touches as its own and blood binds.

Carver is moving in manic patterns. Running so hard her body is shaking, heaving for air. The dogs are with her too, of course. Hunting.

Killian is on his knees but not being held there. There is no one around him. Finally brought to a humbled state. His brothers are near him wandering, kicking through River’s flood that has washed the streets clean. Some of the homes—now awash in river water that harbor swimming new tenets—hold snake bitten boys who will suffer and die a bloated agonizing end all alone. Alone aside from River who lays many feet below the surface of their world, a days walk outside of the village. In the deep green of the world where nature has overtaken the rubble of an old castle destroyed ages past.

Semé is not in the village. His body is laying face down in the river that washed him away but, unlike her, he is under sky. Floating down the rapids the way a drowned corpse does. When the water has tired of showcasing its spoils, he will sink to the bottom where his limbs will tangle in sunken logs. Crustaceans and fish will make a meal of him. Only she will know where his bones lay.

Carver has reached Ghedric, has kneeled down in the water in front of his wheelchair. Both of them are shaking in a way she can only feel, not see. If she closes her eyes and strains her senses against the rising pressure, she can almost make out the sounds of sobbing and her name being broken by harsh breathing. Sounding as if coming through water. Horrible aching apologies and the same sentence over and over. ‘I can’t find her.’

For someone like River, the worst part of being imprisoned is the boredom. With nothing to do except sit in her circle, chores become something she misses. She cannot even get up to pace. The circle is not large enough to accommodate that. Not speaking of the dread that she may never be found, the guilt for leaving, the horror of what her her being gone must be doing to her family.

Once the waters of her river run free, soaking back into the earth or joining the creek that splits the village or down the banks into the lake, she loses some sense. Only the heartbeats tap against her ear though these are less refined. Just sound and life. Occasionally accompanied by a burst of emotion or whispers she cannot quite make out. Without her river running through the street that she has laid some unintentional claim on, clarity is lost to her. While the pressure is unpleasant, the connection keeps her sane. Knowing that Carver likely felt the beating hearts of her people is probably the only thing that kept her sane during her hundred and some years. Until each one was snuffed out like a candle set upon the windowsill during a storm. Save the few who have survived despite all that came for them. Most of which now reside in their own circles all across the land but a few—she lays a hand over her own heart—who had escaped and survived generationally.

Time is slippery in the shadowed vale of a mountain hole she buried herself in. Only occasionally is there a spike of something in the long flat line of nothing. When fingers wrapped round tin cups, watering pales, and whole buckets dip into the fountain full of fresh mountain run off come clean straight from her river. Rekindled by the ascension of her gift where she, under duress, awoke and realized the full potential of the power held in her name. When water would pour on flower beds and, strangely, the brick surrounding the fountain she could catch a glimpse of a villager and be awarded a sense of personhood again. However short lived. Cool water mighty trickle down a wrist—hello Jagheir—or get scooped into tiny hands and thrown at children—good to see the young ones are well—then fade when the water would dry. Or sometimes she would jolt awake from the feeling of her darling dogs jumping into her river and her wife’s willowy body wading into the depths to follow. Not for a leisurely dip in waters that would still be too cold this early in spring but to thunder across for the opposite shore.

Carver has been restless, relentless in her search for River.

Without a day night cycle to gauge time, she gets lost in the dark. Sleeping fitfully, suffering aches from laying on rock and no longer having her wife’s medicines to take the edge off. Sleeping alone. Shaking and afraid, strained to madness to catch any sound that may be a threat to her. Realizing that she is in a compromised state as she cannot defend herself in this circle but anyone could wander in to do what they will. Much like Killian and his hunters did.

Time is an oil between her fingers that just blends with the rest of the blackness.

Barking wakes her from a troublesome sleep. Rock has bruised her soft curves, hip and spine and shoulders, after being down here for some increment of time. The only way she can manage to fall asleep is by exhausting her beyond the point of no longer noticing pain.

When the barking and the sniffing and the clacking of nails on rock happen, she is only half sleeping. All three dogs have rushed the small room to sniff along the rock and circle her. Rolly paws at her floor near her boot, acting like he cannot enter but really wants to. Percy yips then spins to run back the way he came. Their great big shaggy beast who leads the pack tips his head back to howl.

Footsteps and frantic breathing from where she knows that staircase is.

Rising quickly onto her knees, heart hammering, she calls into the dark, “Carver!? Carver, I’m in here! Is that you!?”

Her throat stings from raising her voice. Despite not needing water or food, her body still thinks it does. She has felt sick from hunger and dehydration for some number of days.

A light, dim at first then growing in brightness, spills from the stone hewn staircase. Across the mosaic she stumbled her way up so long ago to escape this same room. Bursting through the crumbling archway, in simple brown trousers and a long-sleeved blouse, is her wife. Dewy with sweat that has collected bits of ancient dirt and created smears on lightly sunburnt skin. Heaving from exertion. Shadow creates slippery coils that move around her where the light does not touch. Orange eyes glow like the lantern in hand.

“River?”

“It’s me!”

Shock makes her drop the lantern and begin sprinting. Only after she has dropped to the stone floor by the circle does she seem to realize she has lost it. A soft curse slips between sobs.

“What are you doing here!? I don’t care, I don’t care, I’ve found you,” Without hesitation, her wife crosses the ring to reach for her, “I thought—everyone told me to give up. They said you were dead, that you had to be, but I refused. I would have looked until I was old. And you’re—I found you. I found you. My life, my River, thank the Divines! Thank anyone, everything, you’re alive.”

Hands are everywhere. Touching skin beneath the torn shirt crusted in filth and old blood. Touching her hair and her fingers, her ears and nose and crying all the while.

“Are you real? Are you my girl, my River?”

“Yes, I’ve got the scars to prove it.” Lifting the tattered blouse to show where the blade bit into her and nearly ended her life sunders Carver. Palm presses to her flaming skin, over the ugly ridges of milky scar tissue, Carver pulls her close and holds her there. Between sobs she slurs words that are too stricken with grief for River to understand. Fingers grip her skin harshly, needing a terribly intense connection to ground them and River does not begrudge her that. She pets her wife’s hair and coos gentle reassurances each time Carver trembles, heaves, or whispers words. The dogs nose at her, eager for their reunion too, but Carver keeps her too tightly for her to do more than pet their muzzles.

Sharply from the suddenness of it, Carvers rips them apart. Tears reflect the poor light of the torch-lantern she brought down with her still laying by the bridge.

“Why are you here? In my prison?”

“I don’t know. My river brought me here and I suppose that was to keep me alive,” She lets out a sigh that carries all the weight of her troubles, things she does not need now that her wife is here to hold her up, “I’m sorry I worried you.”

“Worried me. River, I—” Rather than finish with words, Carver grips her by the jaw and presses a searing kiss to her lips. Skin still tacky from tears and dirt she must have clawed through to get down here again. No doubt the rains and winter since they left filled the hole back in. Smelling of loam and petrichor and sun-baked tree sap. Teeth to tender lip, encouraging the press of a silken tongue.

“I scrubbed my skin until it was raw everywhere your blood was. I ran frantically—“

“I know. I felt it.”

Carver’s eyes flash to the water then back to River’s relaxed, contended expression, “You felt me and yet I could not feel you. The circle was preventing me from feeling your connection to the earth.”

“You don’t feel heartbeats?”

“No, it’s different for each of us,” Carver mumbles this as if distracted because her focus is on holding River’s face, touching her hair and her neck, and holding back tears, “Can I bring you home please? I don’t have the energy for more tears. I’ve been running for days, I haven’t slept or eaten—let’s leave. Please.”

“I may need help walking.”

Gallantly Carver lends an arm around her hips to guide her onto shaky feet. Lips touch the top of her head tenderly the first step they take over the circle into freedom.

“This is ironic, in a way. I helped you across after a hundred and some years in your prison and you help me across after—how long has it been?”

A swallow that she can hear, the clearing of a throat to fight off tears, “In four days it will have been two months.”

“Two—“ Time has been so slippery down here. Without the sun and moon to keep her steady, without chores to mend her busy soul, she has not known where she was. By her best guess she had thought at most three weeks. A long, exhausting unending three weeks. Everything she thought was a day stretched so inordinately long that time moving quicker than she realized felt like a drip of cold honey.

“Darling, I’m so sorry.”

“Once we get home, I will have a much larger and intense breakdown, but I can’t do that right. I need to get you home first,” Carver’s hand squeezes her hip just shy of too hard, “Otherwise this may be a figment of my imagination.”

“I think I may need that too. I feel like I’ve been in shock of a sort. I need to be home too.”

Similar to the one River released moments ago, a bone-weary sigh comes from her wife followed shortly after by a grieved noise, “And do you know the worse thing about all of this?”

“Tell me, love.”

“You haven’t been around, so I’ve had to labor. I have blisters! Chopping wood is so hard and it’s terrible and torturous! How could you leave me?”

Laughing hurts after—evidently—two months of disuse. Coughing up sand on the brink of becoming glass feels, in her mind, would be a better thing than laughing at that moment. It tapers into a harsh cough that brings them to a monetarily halt and makes the dogs anxious. Carver looks like a miserable dog but, now, a shade of something happy in her eye for having made River laugh.

“Sorry, I haven’t done that in a while.”

“Yes, it’s a real bitter sting, isn’t it? Come here,” Because they are still, Carver drags her into another hug so tight it feels as if she is trying to make them one person, “You are the light of my life. I love you beyond everything. Never leave me again. Never make me see you get hurt like that. It broke me, fundamentally.”

Nose smushed to the side, cheek and jaw firmly pressed against her chest so her voice becomes muffled, “I have missed you and Papa so badly it hurts to think about. I was so scared and so alone and I tried so hard to be brave, but it was hard, Carver. It was so hard.”

“Being down here has that effect,” Sounding distant and broken, the same roughness she had when River spoke to her for the very first time, “Let’s go home. We need to go home.”

Nodding, she licks her dry lips as she draws away, “Most of all I’m furious. I would have loved to listen to you whine about your blisters while you chopped wood.”

“They hurt.” The most precious pout pulls on Carver’s face that looks a little thinner. She has definitely lost weight she could not afford to lose.

“My poor darling. It’s just wrong, what’s been done to you.”

“And absolutely no one flirted with me while you were gone on top of that. Not even one little overly sexual comment about my long legs or my delightful rear. It’s been hell and misery.”

They loop arms and River lays her temple against Carver’s bicep, “I am back now, and I will be sure to harass and sexualize you as often as a good spouse should.”

“That brought me such joy to hear, I could cry.”

“You’re so silly,” River squeezes her wife’s arm and feels herself settling back into a human place, feels too the unthawing of everything she was keeping frozen so she would not have to feel it while alone in the dark, “And I am so, so glad you found me.”

“You cannot know how glad I am too.”

Two months makes a remarkable difference on the village. When they return, amidst jubilant welcomes that are bright and tearful, she gapes at the change. Where her river flooded streets and homes, great vibrant green has sprouted. Through brick cracks, a carpet of flowers and the softest of grass have sprung up healthy. Up the supporting pillars of homes, through windows, more green grows and like in the vision she saw of the Augury, they grow across space to create vibe bridges. Long tendrils of green hang down between the roads cutting through buildings. Semé’s signs that were built for his Gods have been ripped up, the longhouse burnt down, and his totems removed.

The overall air of the community feels different. Alive. Where before, the oppression of a collective breath being held was stinging eyes and bitterness souring the soul. Now a full lung after a rain upon upturn earth and smooth stone. Even the ones—maybe especially them—who were flighty, flinching away from witching work or anything Semé broadcasted as evil have opened heart to happiness.

Her people are thriving.

That is another strange thing. Now people now to her in deference. The older ones make a strange folded shape of their hands they tuck under their breast with a knee bent behind them and head to chest. Carver tells her it is an old symbol that the public were bless upon the witch queens of the Vale. River is amazed that, all this time, they kept this secret love in their heart for the home her great grandmother intended to build here. Carver points to the changes, tells her how there had been little seeds—seeds, in magical terms, do not always mean the things for green and growing of physical vegetation—planted throughout the town. Not one generations worth either. Her grandmother had sewn many and Freya herself had planted nearly all around the fountain and had the fountain—which Carver tells her is a seed in itself—built shortly before the invasion that halted all magical innovation. Things that had been waiting for the high flood of a daughter who would come into her power once she embraced her destiny in her name.

Freya’s foresight with her cup had stretched far and been used to prepared the future for her family to seize it in gentle hands and usher them into the promised tomorrow.

Most awe inspiring are the trees blooming into maturity in their backyard. With thick bark split by green veins of light and reaching ever heavenward. Her river had washed clean the magical seeds waiting ages down to the fledgling Augury they planted and kickstarted life.

Construction for the new Vale has happened by her blood and name in the moment of crisis. Debris rotting at the bottom of her river and flotsam to wash upon other shores. Along with any who chose to follow Killian when he was banished and sent far, far away.

For a week they spend plenty of time in bed because River needs recovery and Carver cannot stand to be apart from her. Ghedric is a mess that falls apart near the same way River does when they are reunited. Salt upon tongue from the disastrous outpouring from them both. They take meals together that River finds a new appreciation for. Time above means she realizes how her time below was more traumatizing than she first felt. Heavy as her hand was to push everything down until the moment she was saved and the second she was, it fell upon her as a hammer blow. Another week of walking the new bounds of a village that seems brand new to her and for being received differently. When she tries to wave them off, to chide them for bowing or giving her that witching salute, they admonish her in turn and tell her in grand words that this position is hers by birthright. River O’Bru—not River Kelsey—is their born and chosen leader.

That takes a great deal of time getting used to.

Another month in and she still feels shaky. Flighty in the shadows, haunting by the moments when Carver is not by her side. It illuminates the fights they had when Carver first came into her life. Being alone after being alone in the dark is a daunting thing nonperson should have to carry. But in that month she expands upon her magical talent in massive strides. Carver glows with pride and becomes the heavens themselves when she declares that River is no longer a novice.

That is why, another month and some weeks later, she has her skirts tucked into her belt and kneels in the dirt. With small hand sized gardening tools she boils under a hot sun and dutifully digs up daffodils. Each, with dirt clinging to their delicate root systems, are laid in a small box that she will take with after she leaves. They can be transplanted somewhere in the village. She thinks she will do it herself even, just beside Elder Hedra’s home. She loves the color yellow.

“I’m sorry mother,” Wiping sweat from her brow on the back of her arm, she gives the recently cleaned headstone a smile, “You were right. He couldn’t be trusted.”

In each rupture she has gently made in the earth, marigolds are planted. The sort that remind her of her mother for the sweet shade of solar drippings that swaddle her in memories of youth. Of clicking tongues followed by whistles to beckon her, tell her off, then scoop her into arms for eyes of such a color to wink at her.

“I hope you don’t mind these. Carver and I have been growing them behind the inn just for you. She didn’t come today because we are important people now,” River takes off her straw hat to move some of the hair stuck to her forehead back, “Which is still strange. I’m not used to it yet. I don’t think I ever will be. Especially because it doesn’t feel like I did anything. They just gave it to me and, yes, I’ve been doing decent enough in the position but still. Odd.”

From her pouch she pulls out a water skin, a deep clay bowl, and some sugar. Sugar goes in the bowl with the water—from her river—then set lovingly against the headstone. A small spell to keep this marker at the back of River’s mind always. If anything comes near the grave, she will know, or if any natural damage should seem to harm it.

“Carver is thriving. It is embarrassing to admit because I’m not a child but I get giddy watching her in this way. The way she lights up and takes to leadership. It is not the same woman who rots in a corner with books, whining about chores, and giving us big eyes to earn treats. She’s remarkable. You would love her.”

Lastly just a short handheld broom to sweep everything and make things tidy. All the debris had been raked up by Carver some days prior—to River’s surprise because it had produced sweat and Carver does not sweat—so there is little work for her to do.

She sits in front of the headstone on her knees and reaches to lay her palm over Freya’s name, “I miss you.”

With her thumbnail, she digs out the littlest bit of moss she missed in the etching of O’Bru in stone. Dirt and green flake away.

“I’m sorry that we didn’t visit you. Papa would fall apart if anyone in town even mentioned your name. He used to say that you’d be furious with him for how he let himself go because it meant I was left to raise myself and take care of him too. But I don’t mind. I’m alright I think. Now at least. And I understand because I couldn’t come here either. The guilt was eating me alive. I only let myself think of you in situations where you were an idea instead of my mother. I’m sure you knew it would be hard. You seemed to know everything.”

She gets off her knees, patting away the dirt clinging to her stockings and her skirts. Sun glances off the brim of her hat, striking her eye swiftly and making her wince. With her hat more forehead on her head, she reaches down to brush her fingers over the curved top of the headstone one last time. Clearing away the incremental evidence that it had been slowly being consumed by moss and dirt.

“I’m going to plant blueberries on the backside of your headstone. It will make those pretty little birds you love come visit and maybe some fawns too. I’ll be back once a week, I promise. And next time I’ll bring Carver. We’ll have a lunch. Before I go, I just wanted you to know I love you and I’m sorry that I never got to tell you how grateful I am for being your daughter. And for my name. I take your pride with me wherever I go and you make me stronger. I hope someday, when we meet again, you can look at me and tell me I did good. I am still trying to live up to all the expectations—namely, I know, the ones I’ve placed on myself—but I feel confident now. I’ll do a great job. You would not have given me the tools for the job if you did not think I could do it. Anyway,” She smiles and collects a single sprig of lavender from her apron pocket that she lays atop the headstone, “I’ll see you soon. I’ve got to go help Carver oversee the making of a new building and we’ve got officials coming soon to oversee the new transition of power. Or some such. She promised she knew how to handle that, and I believe her. Oh, tell grandmother and great grandmother I married their Queen. Then tell me how their jaws dropped once I get there. I can’t wait to hear about it. Bye for now.”