Tasa comes up beside me and takes my arm. Zan’s gaze drops down to where we’re connected, but I can’t read his expression.
“I can teach trades to anyone who comes here to start over!” Tasa says excitedly. “I’ve learned enough of them, after all. And Kovan is working on a book especially for sages.” She squeezes my arm. “For when we’ve passed. And whoever follows us can keep adding to it.”
Beginning with instructions for how to bake bread.
But not ending there.
“Come on, we’ll show you,” Tasa prompts. “And feed you. And then ask you again about your scales, but I promise we’ll continue supplying you with the best bread even if you say no—”
“My love, if you’re trying to convince him we’renottrying to extort him, this is not the way,” I interrupt with amusement.
Zan snorts agreement.
Tasa stomps her foot in irritation. “How are you so much better at talking to people when I’m the one who’s had to do it my whole life?”
I give her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Your words count when it matters, love.”
She smiles up at me, blushing just a little, and as ever, it makes me want to hold onto her and never let her go.
But I’m just in time to see something in Zan’s gaze as he watches our easy affection—perhaps the casualness of it?—before it’s gone.
“If you need a moment...” he says, glancing away—
Toward the temple.
Toward Yora.
“Oh! Thank you,” Tasa says brightly. “You can go on in ahead of us, we’ll be right there. Help yourself to anything.”
Zan freezes again.
And Tasa proves me right by speaking again before he can, “Of course you’re welcome in our home, Zan.”
Zan stares at her.
Then he looks at me and says, “There are more scales in the grass.”
As if I hadn’t noticed them.
But this is, if not explicit permission, then at least an opening.
A start.
One I can build on.
Zan turns toward the door, where the pot that used to be inside of our bedroom has begun to sprout, past the planters Tasa made for me with materials she’d carried up the mountain the day we met.
My work there isn’t done yet.
Gardening, I’ve found, is an even more appropriate scope for a sage of resolve than bread-baking.
As Zan almost reverently enters the home Tasa built for us, she turns to me with a wide smile.
Taking a moment just for us, to connect; tobe—who we are, to ourselves and to each other, and not what other people see.
I hold out my arms, and Tasa steps into them confidently, joyfully, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world for two such different people to embrace each other in all that we are.
When she kisses me, the world doesn’t fade; my heart soars, and my mind is crystal-clear:
