Page 15 of Fierce Highland Guardian

We sat a while on the wet grass with the one blanket between us and the thermos going round, not saying much, because there are hours that don’t want words laid over them. The bond ran quiet under my ribs, and when his shoulder came against mineI didn’t move away, and when I turned my face into the warm cinnamon-and-woodsmoke of him—the scent I’d caught in a storm and spent a week failing to name—and felt his breath go still and careful in his chest, that was as much as either of us needed the morning to hold. There’ll be time for the rest. That’s the whole miracle of it, the thing I kept turning over as the light came up gold: there’stimenow. His and mine both, unspooling out ahead of us where a week ago there’d been a countdown neither of us would name.

I could have chased the old woman down the path. I could have gone south, too, to the small, dry life with my name on it and a single hard drive of proof I’d never open.

Here is the arithmetic I actually did, standing on that headland with a dragon’s borrowed thermos going cold in my hands: notwhat could this cost me.I’d done that sum my whole life and always got the same coward’s answer. This time I asked a different question, the one I’d been too careful to ask for a decade.What will I regret?

And it wasn’t the dragon. It wasn’t the danger, or the crest I’d seen inside that notebook, or the war I could feel coming for us across a lot of gray water. What I’d regret—the only thing—was going home and being safe and small and never once learning what I might have been brave enough to become.

So I stayed. Not because it was safe. Because for the first time in a decade something mattered more than safe.

“I’m going to help you,” I told him, and it came out steadier than I felt. “Not just here. That page had a mark on it older than your Locke, and I know how to chase a thing older than a man for a living. There are other stones. He as good as said so. Somebody should be finding them before he does, and I happen to be very, very good at finding what’s buried.” I looked out at the water. “We share the coast. We share the Stone. And we share whatever that broken ring turns out to be. Deal?”

“You understand what you’re offering to carry.”

“I read the whole wall, Craig.” I bumped his shoulder with mine. “I always read the whole wall.”

He didn’t sayI love you.Neither did I. What he did was take my scraped hand in his big, warm one and hold it like a thing given rather than a thing taken, and that said the entire matter, in the only language either of us had ever trusted.

The sun came up gold over the North Sea, and the two of us stood on the cliffs at Dunnottar and watched it—a woman who’d spent her life measuring dead things, and the last living thing that remembered them, and somewhere out past the light a broken iron ring and three stolen stones and every reason to think this was only the beginning.

We didn’t talk about the rest of it in daylight. But that evening, when the work of the day was done and the Stone lay quiet below us, he took me down a passage I hadn’t seen.

The guardian’s rooms were not what you’d expect of a man who’d slept three centuries in a cave. Warm. Book-drowned. A fire he didn’t strictly need and clearly loved. I stood in the middle of it with a thermos going cold in my hands and the whole day catching up at once, and I realized I didn’t know how to do this—the after. I’m very good at leaving. I have never once been good at staying long enough for the part where someone looks at you like you’re worth the trouble.

“You’re doing arithmetic again,” he said, from closer than I’d tracked. “I can feel it. The bond carries the noise of you.”

“It’s a lot of noise.”

“It’s the best sound I’ve heard in three hundred years.” He set his hand against my jaw—the same slow, asking motion as the cliff, cold knuckles, everything in him held still and waiting. “Tell me to stop and I’ll go bank the fire and we’ll never speak of it.”

I thought about all the times I’d made myself smaller so I’d be easier to want. All the timestoo muchgot said to me inthat patient, disappointed voice until I believed it was the truest thing about me.

“Don’t stop,” I said. “That’s the whole point of me tonight. I’m done being less.”

He kissed me like a man who’d waited long enough to have opinions about it—and I felt the restraint in it, the deliberate care of something enormous handling something it was afraid to break. That undid me faster than roughness would have. I fisted my hand in the front of that ridiculous wrong-century coat and pulled, and the care cracked, and the kiss stopped being polite. He backed me into the door, and I let him, and the wood was cool against my shoulders and the whole rest of me was not cool at all.

The bond flared where our skin met—a bright warm line running from somewhere under my ribs straight into the middle of him, so I felt my own wantingandhis, doubled, unhideable, no way for either of us to shrink it into something more manageable. His hands found the hem of my sweater and stopped there, a question; I answered it, and then there was less between us and more of him, all that furnace heat coming off bare skin, cinnamon and old woodsmoke and the faint ozone-scorch that was pure dragon, and I put my mouth to the pulse at his throat just to feel him lose the thread of whatever he’d been about to say.

He lost it. His breath went ragged against my hair. “Fiona.” Wrecked. Reverent. Like the name was a thing he’d been carving into stone for three hundred years and had finally got to say out loud to the person it belonged to.

“You’re sure,” he managed, forehead to mine, both of us breathing like we’d run somewhere. His hands had gone still on the bare skin of my back, holding, not moving, giving me the lead. “I’ve been alone a long while. I’ll not survive being half-wanted. It’s the whole of it or none—I haven’t the armor left for less.”

“Craig.” I pulled back far enough to make him meet my eyes—the silver of them gone dark and molten, blown wide in the firelight. “I came back down a collapsing grave for you this morning. I amcatastrophicallypast half.”

Whatever he’d been holding for three centuries, he set it down.

He lifted me like I weighed nothing—I felt the strength he never used on purpose, leashed careful even now—and the fire threw both our shadows huge across the book-lined wall as he carried me away from the door. Every place he touched, the bond lit it and gave it back to him doubled, so that tenderness became a current running in a closed loop between us, his to mine to his, nowhere for it to leak out and cool. I stopped being able to tell my pulse from the slow red pulse of the Stone somewhere far below, keeping its patient time under the whole coast. I stopped being able to tell where I ended.

There was no proving any of what came after. No photograph, no scale card, nothing I could carry into a room and set on a table and defend. Just his hands, careful and then not careful, learning me like a text no survey had ever caught. Just his mouth and my name in it, over and over, like the one word he’d been saving. Just a woman who’d spent a decade making herself easy to leave being, for once, thoroughly and unarguablystayed with— wanted at full volume, every too-much thing about her met and matched and asked for by name. I gave him everything I’d been taught to keep small, and felt it expressed through the bond, and felt him give it back.

The fire burned down and neither of us tended it. We didn’t need it—there was heat enough. Later, tangled and wrecked and warm, the sweat cooling and his heartbeat slowing under my ear, I counted it out of old habit and then, on purpose, stopped counting.

“Still doing arithmetic?” he murmured, half-asleep, wholly unguarded, the most undefended I’d ever felt him through the bond—no wall, no law, no three hundred years of bracing for the blade. Just a man, warm, and staying.

“No,” I said, and found it was true. “For once— no.”

Here’s the last thing they don’t teach you in archaeology. You spend your life brushing dirt off the truth a grain at a time, patient, careful, certain the thing you’re uncovering is always something that died a long time ago. And then one grey morning on a cliff at the edge of the world you brush away the last of it and find the truth was you, the whole time, waiting to be let up into the light.

Some discoveries change history.

Others change the person who digs them up.