Page 109 of Heart's Escape

“Look, if anything, I should be worried about you,” Rowan says. “You know Alindra’s family raises horses, right?”

I make a murmuring sort of agreement sound.

“They’re probably going to expect you to, like, ride those horses,” Rowan says, with a shiver in his voice.

I sigh, then run my fingers through my hair. My missing arm sends a strange little spasm through my shoulder.

“Look,” I say. “It’s just— I’ve never been the one to leave, you know? And, I mean, if you need me—”

My voice pinches, and the words fall flat in the darkness. They sound so stupid now that I’ve said them.

“Thanks,” Rowan replies. “I do need you, Phae. I’m always gonna need you. But, look, I’m not a kid anymore. And if I need you, like really need some brotherly advice or something, I do know how to send a letter.”

I turn toward him. Starlight tangles in the steam rising from his mouth. Not a kid anymore indeed. It’s been years upon years since Rowan was a kid, but somehow, I still tend to forget.

“Thanks,” I say. “I guess you’ll be okay for a few months, right?”

Rowan turns to face me. In the darkness, his missing eye makes him look like he’s winking. “I mean, what am I gonna do?” he says. “Rescue a lady? Fight a dragon? Tear a hole in reality? Shit, I’ve already done all that.”

I smile, and Rowan turns back to the stars.

“The world’s changing, Phae,” he says. “But that’s not always such a bad thing.”

I sigh. My eyes trail the edge of the cliff, then tumble up into the stars as they gleam down at us from their cold, unchanging homes.

“I’ll write,” I promise.

“Me too,” Rowan says, and then he makes that sound again, like he’s trying to swallow his laugh. “You be sure to tell me how all the riding goes over there. Horse, and otherwise.”

I grab the square of parchment from Aloserin and smack him again.

Epilogue ~ Phaedron

THE WORLD IS CHANGING

“Shhhh,” I whisper frantically as little Lyari scrunches up her face. “Mommy’s sleeping!”

Lyari ignores me, of course. There’s no reasoning with a baby. I cast a few illusion butterflies, silver and gold, to flutter over her crib, but Lyari just balls her hands into fists and makes a few of the little hiccuping sounds that usually come before a full-fledged wail.

“Shhhh,” I whisper again, as I reach for the carrier strap and start to pull it over my shoulder. “You want to go for a walk? Want to go see Uncle Rowan?”

Lyari’s little brow furrows as she stares at me. I bend down to pick her up, then rest the soft weight of her head against my neck as I pat her bottom to make sure her diaper’s still dry. It is. She makes a grunting sound against my neck.

“That’s right,” I whisper. “Uncle Rowan has that effect on people.”

It takes me a few minutes to get Lyari settled into the carrier wrapped around my chest, but I do believe I’m getting better at it. Finally, I pull the door open, send a silent kiss toward the curtain pulled across the bed where Alindra is hopefully still sleeping, and walk out into the late morning sunshine.

The town of the World’s Beginning spreads before us like a banquet set on a verdant green tablecloth. It’s dominated by the Dragon’s Rest Inn, which is still the only decent place to get a meal in this town, but new buildings in various stages of construction loom on either side of the narrow street that some idiot had wanted to name after Rowan. Rowan said he’d never been so insulted in his life, so now we just refer to that little strip of hardened dirt as Main Street. Very creative.

Lyari makes a gurgling sound, and I turn away from the World’s Beginning. I’m not quite ready for the onslaught of attention my daughter garners when we come anywhere near the people who spent decades living in the Lands Below. Lyari is the first baby some of them can even remember, and, well, sometimes all that adoration can be a little much.

Instead, I turn to the narrow path that leads to our shared well and then carves up the slope through a grove of aspen trees. We built our cabin on top of Alindra’s tent platform, with its glorious view of the valley and the portal to the Lands Below, although perhapsbuiltis a bit too ambitious, as the cabin is still missing certain little luxuries. Like shelves and interior doors.

Alindra’s family wasn’t thrilled about our decision to return to the Iron Mountains, and I’m pretty sure her brother thinks all the time she spent as a captive in the palace of the Kingdom of the Summer gave her some sort of brain damage. But, as it turns out, I wasn’t the only one who found the months we spent at her family’s ranch a bit of a challenge. Sure, Alindra could at least follow their conversations about horse things like canters and confirmations, but she told me it felt strange to be back in that world, like trying to wear a pair of shoes you’d outgrown years ago. And one night, as we pressed our hands to the tiny swell of her belly to see if we could feel the life inside her move, she started crying.

“I can’t,” she told me, between sobs she tried to muffle in her pillow. “I can’t have our child this close to King Grathgore.”

So we came back here, to the wide valley in the dragon’s Iron Mountains that had suddenly become the crossroads between the Lands Below and the Worlds Above, and we started building our own home as soon as the ground thawed. Ithronel and Aloserin came back a few weeks later, Aloserin pulled by his position in King Galan’s Royal Guard and Ithronel by feelings that I suspect were similar to Alindra’s. And Lyari was born here, under a full moon and the watchful eye of the mountains, leagues and leagues away from King Grathgore’s waning Kingdom of the Summer.

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