Page 21 of Crown of Ashes and Awe

"Creatures who are foreordained to be two parts of a whole."

"Creatures?" She shrugged. "I dislike the term. But yes. Fated mates."

"You think it is more than just lore for entertaining children?"

"I do." She half-raised her hand to gesture at Sweetie.

It took a heartbeat or two for me to understand her meaning. Then I took in the size of the man compared to the small woman walking beside me. Though I was taller than many women who had wandered through my gully, she was by far the shortest. Her head only reached my shoulder. I tried to keep my imagination from conjuring intimate images, but I failed and tried to shake them out of my head. "You and Sweetie?"

She hissed, obviously not wanting the big man to hear, and we slowed to let the distance grow between us and him.

I whispered, "Heartbound? The two of you?"

She smiled slyly. "He doesn't realize it yet, but yes. Sometimes, the heartbound recognize each other at first touch. Some at first sight. Some don't realize for a while. But we're drawn to each other. I feel an overwhelming peace when my skin touches his. Sometimes I feel a sizzle of energy. I don’t know what he feels, but he cannot stand to part with me, yet he doesn't realize what it means. One day, he will."

"Can't stand to be parted? I read that once you’re heartbound, one cannot live without the other."

"Oh, they live. They just don't want to." She gestured at Tearloch's back. "He was heartbound. Yora was killed in a terrible accident. Sweetie had to knock him unconscious to keep him fromfaybowse. We had to watch him closely for a while. Never left him alone. And eventually, he learned to survive.”

My heart hurt for him, made me want to reach out to him, to offer my sympathy at the very least. As for empathy, I couldn’t imagine loving someone so completely that you couldn’t live without them. But I supposed that’s how deeply they all felt about each other, including Huxor.

Then a sharper pain stabbed my chest when I thought about finding the evil brother first. Was that the sort of pain I’d be inflicting on the “family?”

Minkin kept her voice low. "You asked about the gloves. Well, he wears them to make certain he never finds himself heartbound again."

I was confused. "I thought there was only one such match for every creature."

"Ibelieve that is true. Itfeelstrue enough. But he means to take no chances. With Yora, he said he knew it when he saw her. She had white hair like your own, you see. That is why it pains him to look at you."

My chest suffered another invisible blow, but this time the pain was my own. I was somehow disappointed that Tearloch’s expression when he looked at me, pleasant or not, had nothing to do with me at all.

Simply put, I was jealous of some white-haired woman I'd never met, whom I would never meet.

"Thank you for explaining,” I said.

Just then, we came to the top of a rise and stopped. A sprawling city waited for us on the next horizon.

With her gaze on that horizon, Minkin whispered, "Be whole, Asper. Be whole...and be careful...for as long as you can."

Be whole.

It was the most common phrase to wish someone well when parting. A chance to be kind to strangers in passing. A wish against bad fortune.

Be whole.Keep your head. A gentle reminder to hold fast to life itself. Now, it meant something new to me. It meant finding others with whom I can create my own family. So we might be whole together. Belong to someone and let them belong to me.

It was an undertaking that couldn’t be accomplished in a matter of days…

* * *

It was torture.The city kept its distance even as we plodded on. Sweetie said we would arrive before dark, but I wasn’t so sure. The sun looked like it would win the race to the western horizon before we would reach that city basking in the sun to the south.

After we reached a busy crossroads, we had to stay to the right side of the byway due to constant traffic headed in the opposite direction, and I asked Minkin if she might know where those people were headed.

She pointed her thumb to the northwest. “Ristat, I would think.”

“But why?”

Sweetie answered for her. “All of Hestia’s on the move. No one wants to sit by and wait for death, do they?”

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