“How many children do you have?” she asked. “One daughter?”
“A daughter and a son. Lissy and Austin. Lissy is nine and Austin is fifteen.”
“Oh, those are marvelous ages.”
“We’ll see if you still think so after you meet Austin,” Tyr said, but he was grinning. His hair was wind-mussed, and she had a terrible urge to touch it. “No, I’m joking, they’re great kids. The best kids.” He stopped smiling and frowned. “There’s something about my kids—I’m going to trust you with this, Cela, because I’m not sure if it’ll be possible to keep it from you once they start coming over, but this is the biggest secret I could entrust to anyone. You mustn’t tell a soul.”
“I won’t,” she promised, touched by his faith in her. She had no one to tell, anyway.
“They’re both griffins,” Tyr said. “The enforcers don’t know. And I don’t want them to. I want our children to growup free, without having to deal with magically restrictive tattoos and clan laws. If they want to go visit their ancestral homeland as adults, that’s up to them. I’ll support them if it’s what they choose to do. But I want them to have that choice. And if anyone from Griffin Island finds out, I’m afraid they’ll be taken back by force, or made to submit to a tattoo like the one you and I wear that prevents them from talking about it.”
“I promise,” Cela said earnestly. “I’ll keep your secret. Believe me, no one knows better than I do how cruel the laws of Griffin Island can be.”
Her hands were on the windowsill, and for a moment Tyr’s fingers lingered close to hers, but not touching. Not daring to touch. Clearing his throat, he pulled his hand away.
“Do you want to get dressed and see what humans have for breakfast?” he asked.
“Oh, what do humans have for breakfast? Is it strange?”
“You might think so,” he murmured.
A few minutes later, she came into the kitchen with the kids, still shifted, romping along behind her. Ayra was toddling with her stubby wings outspread, while Aven pounced on anything that caught his eye, tiny tail twitching.
Tyr was rummaging in the kitchen. He stopped dead at the sight of them, a look of wonder and delight spreading over his face.
“Sorry, they stay shifted most of the time since they learned how to do it. But at least it makes them somewhat easier to take care of. They’re more independent and precocious when they’re in their shift forms.” She pointed. “That’s Aven, and this is Ayra.”
“Aven,” Tyr repeated. He crouched to bring him closer to the kids’ level. “Ayra. Hi, you beautiful little shifters.”
The kids hesitated at the sight of him. They were still unsure about new people. Then Tyr reached for a piece of cardboard, last night’s spaghetti box, and began twitching italong the floor. That did it for Aven, who rushed to pounce on it and rolled over with it, making tiny, sputtering growls. His sister was instantly overwhelmed with jealousy and toddled over, waving her wings and chirping frantically.
“They’re adorable,” Tyr said. His face and his entire being had gone soft with an expression that warmed Cela’s heart and made heat grow in her lower belly. She tried to wrestle herself back to practical matters.
“I hope you think so after you’ve tripped over them every five seconds all morning. Do mothers here have some way to enclose their babies so they can play without being in danger, like we did back on the island?”
“A playpen. Yes, we have those. In fact, it’s possible there’s something like that in the attic. There’s a lot of junk up there that came with the house.”
Cela couldn’t miss that he had said “we” when talking about humans. Did he think of himself as part of this world instead of the one he came from? she wondered.
And could I learn to do that?
“Where is this breakfast you mentioned?” she asked to distract herself from the mix of hope and wistful longing growing in her.
“Ah. So I was going to demonstrate human breakfast cereals for you—we have all the sugar, artificial colors, and marshmallows that you could want. But I forgot there’s no milk.”
“What is the milk for?” She’d had it only a few times in her life. There wasn’t a lot of milk back on Griffin Island, where they mostly ate fish along with vegetables and grains they could grow locally.
“It makes the cereal less ... uh, everything that it is. Since there’s no milk, I guess we’re having eggs and toast.”
Cela perked up. “Oh, I love eggs! They’re one of my favorites. I forgot it was spring.” These were a seasonal treat,but she hadn’t realized it was possible to get seabird eggs this far inland. Or, no, of course they had birds here; she’d heard them singing in the orchard.
“Oh, you’ll love this,” Tyr said. He opened a cabinet and took out a large, flat pan. “You can get eggs all year ‘round here.”
“No! But how?”
“Once you’ve settled in a bit,” Tyr said, “we might have to get some backyard chickens.”
After she had stuffed herself with delicious eggs and slices of bread (another luxury on the island, and one she had always loved), Tyr asked what she wanted to do next.
