“I know.” She pulls my hand from her cheek, turns it over, kisses the center of my palm.
The sensation floods upward through my wrist, my arm, my shoulder, lodging behind my chest where the crescent mark burns.
“Because if you do it again, I won’t be angry. I’ll be disappointed. And we both know which one is worse.”
“Considerably.”
She lifts her head. The moonlight is in her hair and on her shoulders and her expression is open in a way that only this space allows.
No armor. No strategy. Just her, looking at me, holding my hand.
“Show me,” she says.
“Show you what?”
“The telekinesis. If it’s mine and it’s yours and the bond connected what was already there, then show me what yours feels like.”
I reach. Gently. The force that has been building since Iron Claw.
I find it under my sternum and direct it outward, into the dream space, and the grass around our feet ripples outward in a circle, pressed flat by something that isn’t wind.
Her breath catches.
I push. The ripple spreads.
Stones in the grass lift. Three of them, small, rising to eye level between us, rotating slowly.
The moonlight catches their surfaces.
I hold them there. The effort is different from the involuntary discharges.
Controlled. Clean. In this space, with her hand in mine, the force answers me.
“There you are,” she says quietly. Looking at the stones. At me. At the place where the two meet.
“That’s what I’ve been feeling. From the other side.”
The stones settle. The grass springs back.
She steps into me. Her forehead drops to my shoulder.
My arms close around her.
I hold her there, and our rhythms match.
“The convening is tomorrow,” she says against my shoulder.
“I know.”
“After that, when we get home, we train this together.”
“I’m counting on it.”
She lifts her head. Looks at me.
In the dream-light her eyes are darker than they should be and the gold in them catches the moon.
She rises on her toes and presses her mouth to mine.
