One way or another

I lay here with HIM beside me. He actually came back. After all this time, after all those nights when I wondered if I would ever see him again, he is here, breathing beside me as though he had never left. He is still bossy and demanding, still that infuriating Wild Forest Man who seems to believe the world ought to bend to his will, but he is back! I swear by the PKs, I had better not be dreaming, because I don’t think my heart could bear waking to find him gone again.

Of course, I asked him why he left, and the man had the absolute audacity to tell me it was because he was all but afraid of my cooking and that I was loud. He is wrong on both accounts. I am a good cook, and I can be absolutely quiet; I simply choose not to be. The nerve of him, returning after all this time only to insult my cooking! I ought to make him regret those words, although I suppose I should be grateful he has returned to give me the opportunity.

Moving my gaze from the fire to where Ember lay, I noticed her ears flickering as she listened to the sounds around us. Catching her attention, I silently signaled for her to lie down and stay. So far, she had listened, and tonight I needed her to continue doing so. There would be time enough for her to investigate this unexpected change in our little world come morning. Oddly, she had accepted Scar’s presence with little fuss, but then again, it seemed all creatures bent to him in one way or another. Perhaps even Ember recognized something in him that I had known all along, though I would sooner bite my tongue than admit that to his face.

Slowly, I turned over to face him, careful not to disturb him as I studied the familiar lines of his face. I watched the steady rise and fall of his chest, the play of firelight across his features, and the quiet stillness that settled over him when he slept. I wanted to memorize every detail, to keep this moment somewhere deep within me where the loneliness of the past days could never steal it away. He had told me that word reached him at the northern trade fort that Kurii were in the Forest, and he had returned for me. For me. Those two words should not have meant as much as they did, yet they settled somewhere beneath my ribs, where all the things I had refused to say aloud had been waiting.

Come morning, we are to go through everything we both possess and decide what will travel north with us. I was given a choice: leave with him willingly, or be taken whether I liked it or not. I may not have cared for the way he presented those options, but I could hardly argue with the reasoning behind them. I cannot fight a Kur on my own, and by the PKs, I have missed him. Perhaps choosing my battles wisely is not always a matter of winning them, but of knowing when there is little sense in fighting at all. Staying here alone, with the Kurii moving through the Forest and my cave offering only one way in or out, would be a death sentence should they discover it. Scar has said he goes to hunt, and so, it seems, a-hunting we shall go.

A yawn escaped me as I shifted closer to him, settling into the warmth of his body. The down-stuffed skin mattress was every bit as comfortable as I had imagined it would be, soft beneath the furs and far more welcoming than the hard ground I had grown accustomed to. Yet I suspected the mattress itself had little to do with the contentment slowly stealing over me. After so many nights of sleeping alone, of listening to every rustle beyond the cave and waking to an emptiness I had tried not to acknowledge, I could finally rest beside the man whose absence had haunted me more than I cared to admit.

How special, I thought as I nestled a little closer, that on the very first night I lay upon this new mattress, he was here with me. I did not know what the coming days would bring, nor how life in the North would change the fragile understanding we had finally reached. There were still things left unsaid between us, questions I had not asked and answers he had not yet given. For tonight, however, I would allow myself this small, precious reprieve. Scar was here. Ember was safe beside the fire, and for the first time in far too long, I did not have to wonder whether the man I loved would ever find his way back to me.