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Watching her face, I understood exactly why ‘twas Rowena who answered me. Every woman at that table had come to this place and stayed. She was the only one who had come to it intending to leave.

“It cannot be undone,” she said quietly, surely. “He did not choose it, any more than you chose the color of your eyes. It will not fade and it will not lessen, and if you go, he will feel you gone for the rest of his life.”

She held my gaze without softening. “And he will carry your bags to the stones himself and put you through with his own hands, if you tell him he cannot go with you—because oh, aye, he would give up his world to follow you. You know that as well as I do.”

I did know it. God help me, I knew it.

My eyes filled with tears.

At the far end of the table Jean had gone on talking to Ammal about something else entirely, her hands buried to the wrist in her bowl.

“—one-and-forty years,” she was saying, “and the great daft creature has never yet put a tool back where he found it, nor banked a fire that survived till morning. I gave up in the first decade. I bank it after he’s abed and let him believe he managed it.”

Ammal laughed into her loaf.

“But I’ll tell ye what he’s never made me do.” Jean scraped dough from her knuckles with a thumbnail. “Wonder where he was. Not once, in one-and-forty years. I’ve always kenned. Ye simply do.”

She did not look at me. I am not certain she was speaking to me at all.

There is a knowing.

Last night I had lain in the dark with my eyes shut and could have pointed to precisely where he stood by the hearth.

In the springs, I’d felt…his longing, mayhap? I had confused it with mine.

And weeks before either, outside a crumbling croft with a hatchet in my son’s hands and my belly out to here, I had turned and looked at an empty hill. Before he’d even returned to our lives.

I had told myself ‘twas the wind changing, because at the time there was nothing else in the world to tell myself.

“Oh,” I managed softly.

Issa’s entire face lit up, while Rowena only nodded once, and returned to her bread.

I did not say the rest of it aloud. If I had, Issa would have been unbearable for a week, and it would have been a lovely thing. But it had taken me nine months and two worlds to arrive at it, and I found I wanted the male it belonged to to hear it first.

The kitchen carried on around me. Offie laughing at something Nessy said about her father’s snoring. Jean arguing quietly with Issa about how long a loaf had sat. Beyond the door Ewan shrieked with the joy of a boy being chased, Brannok bellowed in outrage, and Kaldun said something too soft to carry that set them both howling.

Edan slept on. Ammal reached across and tucked his blanket back over his feet.

No one had asked me for anything. No one was keeping track of debts. There was flour to my elbows and heat at my back, and my sons were safe in a room full of women who knew my name and had known this thing about me before I did.

If I stayed⁠—

When.

When I stayed.

I was staying here. Here. This was…this was home now. Because of these women and my sons and Maardok.

My Mate.

“I have to go,” I announced, and began scraping dough from my fingers with considerably more urgency than the dough deserved.

Issa blinked. “Now?”

“Now.”

Whatever was on my face made her set down her loaf.