His heart quickened when he saw the familiar fencepost, carved with two crossing feathers and an arrow between by Grimult’s own hand. It had been clumsily done, and he had asked his father if they might exchange it later once he’d grown better with a blade, but his father refused, claiming it a waste of a perfectly good piece of timber.
Looking at it now, Grimult suspected there was more sentiment than his father had first related, as it leaned sharply leftward.
Much of the fencing itself would need mending, and he felt the weight of it, guilt that he had once thought long buried.
He had offered Penryn a return to her family first. She deserved as much time with them as she wished, and they too needed the daughter and sister they had missed.
“I told Mama I would go back,” she reminded him, and he thought that answer enough. Her hand was tight around his, and he waited for the apology that was sure to follow. The quiet promise that he would see his family too. Someday.
“And we will,” she continued. “But you promised me home.” He stared at her, and she raised a hand and touched his cheek lightly. “When this was done, we said. We would get to go home.”
Something in him, a fear he had not dared name, loosened.
He had not expected to find her family. Not so soon. After a search, perhaps, with probing enquiries once they were settled and ready to receive answer. But when he had seen her settled with them before the kitchen fire, sleeping so soundly nestled between her parents...
He realised he had been waiting for her to ask him to accompany her there to live. To make his living on the sea, in a home he did not have.
And leave a farm that he loved so dearly, with his father to tend it all, even in his aging years.
He had no words to express his relief, so instead he pulled her close and breathed short, tight breaths against her hair until he had some form of mastery over himself again.
“Thank you,” he breathed out at last, and when he pulled back, he found there was a glisten of tears in her eyes that he had not meant to induce.
“We will visit my family of course,” she continued, a catch in her throat that meant if she was not careful, she would cry all the more. “But I should like a home I can exit on my own, I think.” There was a blush present on her cheeks, and before he could think better of it, he leaned down and kissed her full on the mouth.
She blinked widely for a moment, and he was pleased that she seemed to have forgotten her previous upset, staring up at him with what he could only call longing.
One that echoed his own, long denied from their lack of privacy.
He was ashamed to admit that he had thought little of that—how stunted and trapped she might feel if she had agreed to live in her ancestral home. While he would deny her nothing and would never begrudge the use of his wings, seeing even a taste of the dark and confined space of the sages’ keep made him recognise her desire for freedom.
To know that she could move about in the open air simply because she wished to do so. That she required no one’s permission, did not have to beg or cajole in order to be granted a freedom so basic to any other.
“A home of your own,” he promised her. “Where you can walk outside whenever it please you.”
And he had sealed that promise with another kiss, simply because he could.
He touched the fencepost that marked the beginning of his family’s land. Even now he could hear the animals on a farther knoll, speaking to one another in raucous bellows and answering bleats.
Penryn reached out and skimmed her fingers across the mark before looking to the field beyond. “Do we go in?” she asked, looking excited at the prospect, her neck already craning so she might catch sight of one of the herd.
Grimult clicked his tongue and shook his head. “Only if you have an offering of food to give them,” he warned, keeping instead so they would walk along the line of fencing.
He would prioritise the mending, he decided. Perhaps even as early as this afternoon if his mother did not insist on keeping him hostage in the kitchen, plying them both with all the food she could manage to prepare.
“If I do not, will they eat me instead?” Penryn asked, so entirely in earnest that a bark of laughter came from him, short and full, and he found himself putting an arm about her shoulder as they walked, just as easily and surely as if she was his sweetheart from down the neighbouring hill.
Not the Lightkeep that had negotiated treaties and put her people before all else.
Just his wife.
Who thought she might be eaten by his herd if she did not offer proper tribute.
She briefly looked offended at his outburst, before she softened, and leaned more fully against his arm. “You do not laugh enough,” she declared. He could say much the same about her. He looked forward to learning more of her, to see her no longer forced into a model of perfect sombre reserve. When she could smile and laugh if the feeling took her, without care for who might be there to witness it.
When they had a home of their own.
“You needn’t fear them,” Grimult assured her. “They might be a bit cross if you do not have a special treat, but the harm would be to your clothing rather than your person.” His mother had to mend many of his garments before he learned how to properly manage the creatures, as they liked to nibble and pull on anything within reach.
He could picture their dwelling here. Far
