The first Shraevenaese I ever met, the folk of the mountain plateaus, come down to greet us as we ride through. It is here that the last of our taggers-on leave us for home…the fighting folk that Negrat brought to the capital, such a very long way. Ragna holds especial interest for the headmen and their shamans, who whisk her away for curiosity, not to air their concerns (for truly, what do such self-sufficient men and women need?). But I’m the one the children follow…the stranger with wings. I remember how to say hello to them—emfa! emfa!—and they laugh and want to see me fly.
I return to camp festooned with flowers, pale as honey and blue as a summer sea. I’m still wearing them, inhaling their perfume, when Negrat settles down beside me that evening.
“Are you staying, then?” I ask.
“Here?” He smiles. “It would be a fitting end to my adventure…if this was a story. But life does not end anything neatly, you will have perceived.”
“Oh yes,” I say, chuckling. “I have so perceived.”
“I will stay home for a while…long enough to badger my successor,” Negrat says. “And then I will make my way back to the capital.”
“To badger my successor,” I say, nodding. “Life might not have neat endings, but patterns it does very well.”
He laughs and pats my knee. “Ah! I have trained you well, Godkin woman! You will make your people crazy with confusion, just as you must. We must all start from confusion, to learn anything at all.”
“From honest confusion, anyway,” I say, trying for a sage tone. “For if you deny your confusion, you can never repair your ignorance.”
Negrat claps his hands, delighted. “I have taught you all that I know! I am content.”
I grin and together we look at the stars as they become visible: swiftly to my sharp eyesight, and perhaps even more swiftly to his less-than-normal gaze. I am not at all surprised that after he has gone, I find a baby’s bed blossom where his tail was so lately warming the stone. I wonder where he found it, but only for a moment. He has his ways…so will I.
Even an old griffin can learn new tricks.
* * *
The border is unmarked but we both know it. Ragna reins in her mount and Honeydipped comes to a halt alongside and together we gaze at gray and yellow stone beneath a bright sun.
“Shall we stop for noonmeal?” I say.
Ragna nods and we separate to return to our respective countrymen and give the order: we’ll stop for an hour or so. My men pitch my tent and set up the basics in it; a meal is served, slices of that good hard cheese from Black Vines on crisp crackers baked with sesame seeds, spiced meat rolled into cabbage leaves. We drink pale wine together and it is a quiet meal…I expect no less.
Ragna glances at the egg, which is considered one of the “basics” that goes into my tent whenever we stop. I’ve put the baby’s bed blossom in the box with it, and unsurprisingly (to me, anyway) it hasn’t wilted yet.
“When do you think?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “But it’s gotten hard. Soon, I am hoping.”
She smiles. “You will have to send me a portrait.”
I nod. And find I have no words for the end of this journey. The enigmatic hillswoman I found on the border, who became my esquire…my translator…my friend and my confidant. And now my peer in an arena I never expected to enter. What do I say? What is there to say?
Ragna squints, lifting her head. “An hour?”
I nod.
Her whiskers lift a little. “A nap?”
“If you wish?” I say, perplexed, for I hadn’t thought her tired.
But then we lie together on my bunk and she tucks herself against my chest and I understand. I rest my beak above her head and my arm over her shoulders. She lifts her chin just enough to settle the side of her face against the inside of my other arm…and we relive the many nights we have spent just so. Indulging in the “merely” asexual embrace that she taught me means so much. Because “I love you” comes in more forms than the ways I’d assumed, and if I leave Shraeven with one, quiet, personal revelation…it’s that.
At the end of the hour she rises, thick fur shimmering. Stretches and looks down at me.
“I’ll have your whisker,” I say.
“I’ll have your feather,” she says. She looks at me a little longer with those sea-green eyes, so uncanny. Then she says, soft, “Thank you, Angharad.”
And then she’s gone.
By the time my tent is packed the queen of Shraeven, her heralds, guards and servants are already too far down the road to be seen by normal eyes, and mine are having trouble of their own. I draw in a deep breath and turn away.
Shall we step over the border together?
I smile, my eyes leaking. I’m not sure we could do it any other way.
* * *
I’m expecting something when we cross over. Visions of empire and war. Trumpets sounding a tantara. The Godson bursting into flame above my head like a symbol of my divine right to rule.
But instead there is nothing…nothing external. Just a feeling, a welter striving behind my solar plexus. Relief, release, regret. Joy and fear and joy.
I don’t cry, and nothing feels different…except everything has changed.
There is work to be done.