“I had three tasks to accomplish, but I did not fulfill them.I did not feel fit for the world and I thought that you....”He snagged his bottom lip with his teeth.“Not knowing that you had confessed your love, I thought that this shape would be the one that would cause you to abandon me.”
“I should have known,” she said.“You’ve always needed words.”Her hand dropped and her face hardened.“What were the tasks?”
“To receive your forgiveness for my sins, to mutually declare love, and to obtain your consent to marry me.I should not have changed.I did not know of your declaration, but you never consented to wed me.”
“Oh, by the gods!Didn’t you realize?”She laughed.“The fire — for Narrapaug Seip?We were careful with our words, but we married that night.Do you not recall the binding of our hands and our pledges?You need not have asked me to marry you for we are husband and wife already.Baró!”
He flushed and the invocation of the name warmed his face still further.
“Vallon,” he whispered.He cast his eyes down and away from her.“A common, ordinary man.Your Baró was a god.”
“You will always be my Baró,” she told him.She dropped his other hand and put both of hers on his face again, moving closer to him on the bench.“And you are not a common ordinary man.You are the Fir’Darl, a masculine otherworldly god, who has simply taken human form to walk among men again.”
“I can barely walk without wanting to drop to all fours and my frame is no longer suited for that.Even with all the difficulties, I could navigate the other body.I am weakened by this new change of circumstance, disoriented in a way most would not understand,” he said, his head still bowed.“I did not want this.”
“It’s not bad,” she assured him as she had assured him each time he had grown insecure and self-conscious about the alterations of his body.“I tried on occasion to determine what you might have once looked like, but when I first saw you in camp, I disbelieved it.You looked so familiar and I knew your scars....”
He took a deep breath before meeting her eyes.He reached up to remove her hands from his face and held them.
“I love you, Sahtiya.I want to be with you.What I need to know is — do you want me like this?Can you want me like this?”
“I miss your fur and your horns and your claws.”She squeezed his hands.“I will miss feeling so little next to you.It doesn’t feel right to sit beside you almost at eye-level.”When he bowed his head again, Sahtiya shook hers.“But you’re still tall and broad and well-made.And you’re free.Free.And you’re with me.If the price of that freedom is that you look like a man, then what of it?You’re still beautiful, my love, and I would have you be happy above all else.If you can bear this, I will be beside you every step of the way.Don’t you know that I love you, more than any form you take?”
He squeezed her hands.“This doesn’t feel like me anymore.”
“I will make you a cloak of sable and a headdress of horns so that you might feel whole again.”Sahtiya leaned forward and captured his lips with hers.
When they parted, a flash of pleasure crossed his face before his brows furrowed.
“We’re married, but that does not explain how, without the roses, I still changed.My declaration of love was not made until after you cut them.”
“The original rose cutting, the one that I repaid with my time.It took root.It did not die.”She released his hands and stood, brushing the tips of her fingers through his tied-back hair.“I love you, Baró, even like this.”Her fingertips traced old scars in his scalp.
When she withdrew, he stood also.
“How does the story end?”he asked.
“The Fir’Darl, again in human form to walk among mankind, found his wife so that they could begin a new story.”
“And how does that one start?”
She offered him her hand to lead him to theirvyardin.
“By welcoming you home.”.
