“It’s for her,” I say.
Grulk doesn’t move. Doesn’t perform a reaction. He absorbs it with the kind of attention he gives when he’s genuinely listening, which looks almost nothing like the rest of Grulk.
He’s quiet for long enough that I play the opening bars again, not for him, just because my hands need somewhere to go. Then I stop.
“Tell me what it is,” Grulk says. “The song. What is it for?”
I set the guitar across my knees.
“You know what she made me,” I say. “The dulcimer.”
“Yes. Wider neck.”
“She covered the entire soundboard withvelaraflowers.” I run my thumb along the low E string without sounding it, the way you touch something you’re trying to think clearly about. “On my first visit, I mentioned it because she had a photograph that reminded me of the hillsides back home. I drew a fewvelaraon a napkin. She took that description and burned the design into the wood and painted it the color I said they were—darker toward the center, lighter at the edges—and she covered theentire soundboard and didn’t charge me for it. When I tried to pay her, she said, ‘No. You didn’t ask for it,’ like that settled the question.”
Grulk has gone very still. Not generally a HammerFall trait.
“She didn’t know,” I say. “She wasn’t doing it for any reason except that her hands took her there. She just followed her craft instincts and made me something that couldn’t have been made for anyone else.”
“Kragen.” His voice is quiet.
“I know.”
“That’s the perfect gift.” His voice carries wonder; his eyes are rounder than usual.
“I know.”
He sits with it for a moment. When Grulk sits with something you can feel it—the volume of him going internal, the usual forward momentum pausing while the information settles. “And the song.”
“Is the answer. Or it’s supposed to be.” I pick up the guitar again, not to play, just to have something in my hands. “It came from listening to her. Everything I know about her—her grandmother, a life-changing injury, the workshop, the way she looks at the property on a Sunday morning. It’s all in there. It could only have been made for her.”
“Then give it to her.”
“And say what? Here’s the song I wrote because I owe you one?” I shake my head. “The moment she knows the framework, she’ll filter everything through it. Every visit, every coffee, the drum gathering, everything I said to her in her grandmother’s house. It will all look different through that frame.”
Grulk studies me for a long moment. He’s thinking. I can tell because he’s not talking.
“In my clan,” he says finally, “if a female gave a male the perfect gift and he spent months learning her well enough to meet it, that would be a beautiful thing. A male taking a female seriously enough to listen all the way down.” He spreads his hands. “Tell her. Tell her what it means. Tell her the song is the answer. Women want to know when they’ve moved someone to extraordinary lengths.”
“She’s not afraid of the obligation,” I say. “She doesn’t know about it. She thinks I kept visiting because I wanted to.”
“And did you?”
The question lands without warning, aimed perfectly.
“Yes,” I say. “But I can’t separate it anymore. The wanting came first. The obligation arrived after. Now they’re so tangled I can’t show her one without the other being in the frame.”
Grulk nods slowly. “Tell her anyway,” he says. “Trust that she will understand what it means.”
I set the guitar on the stage and walk to the bar. We sit with it for a moment, the two of us. The room sounding silent with the absence of music. Then Grulk finishes his Grim Dark and sets the glass in the sink.
“She’s StillWater,” he says at the door. “She understands what it means to take something seriously.”
He lets himself out.
The bar is quiet again.
I pour myself a Grim Dark and sit with it going warm in my hand. The afternoon light has moved again. The bright shape on the wall has stretched and thinned and is nearly gone.
