Page 99 of Odder Still
In a way, I’m proof.
I almost miss Tavish when he knocks his cane into my table and taps around for a chair. He slumps into it, but his face is alight, more so than I’ve seen it since we left Glenrigg. “If this is the wrong table, then I’m going to feel like quite the arse,” he mutters.
“If you were aiming to sit with someone else, then you might justbequite the ass.” I slide my unaltered hand over his, basking in the simple feel of his skin. “A gorgeous, brilliant, genius ass though.”
“Ha.” His unfocused eyes twinkle.
My halved hand still holding Lavender close, I take his fingers in my other hand and relay to him all that I learned through the Trench auroras’ power, along with parts of what I’ve figured out since. Other parts are mine alone. My own pain, which I still need to process.
At the end, Tavish accepts my offer of beer, draining a third of it in one cringing go. “And you think we can stop this by ceasing the use of ignation and ignits and feeding their energy back to the auroras?”
“If wecouldmanage that, yes.” The answer springs lightly to my lips, but it drops like a weight in my heart. “But I think the best we can hope for at this point is to slow it. There is so much ignit power in use, and so much of the other dimension is already eaten away, it would take more than we can manage alone to permanently save all the auroras, maybe more than any number of people can.” I grab back the beer in an attempt to ward off my nausea. It will be hard work, even here. Whatever Ivor might claim, I doubt his debt to me covers things like abandoning his new city’s primary power source. “But no one else will tell people if we don’t, so we have to try.” I’ll also have to get a letter to someone near the Murk—one of the teens Lilias terrorized, perhaps—begging them to check on my pets for me.
“It’s lucky, then, that we’re in a city with one of the highest usages of ignit power,” Tavish says. “It’s a good place to start.”
“To start, yes. But there are so many other cities—countries—powered by ignits. Places like…” I pause, trying to turn the words into something that might convince Tavish better, that might make him come with me. But I stop myself. Tavish will do what he does because he chooses to. He’s chosen me before. If we’re to have any future together, I have to let him choose me again.
“Places like?” he asks, brow lifted.
I set out my heart for him, to take or to politely decline. “Places like the rivers and swamps of Manduka, and places that neither of us have ever been, that would be just as little a home to me as it would be to you. If you’d be willing to take the trip. It wouldn’t be forever—I’d never ask that of you—but perhaps we could give ourselves the chance to both love something new, the way I think we might be able to grow to love each other. And maybe it won’t work. Maybe you’ll come back here and I’ll go to the Murk, and this will become a bittersweet memory, or we’ll move between, and we’ll make that work instead, or the world will collapse into starlight and none of it will matter. But I’d like to try. If you’d like to.” It’s the end of my speech; anything more would be running over his decision, his desires, his well-deserved life.
Tavish chews on his tongue.
Every moment he doesn’t answer, I have to fight away a hoard of suspicions, but I keep battling them. For him. For us.
“I’ve been thinking,” he says, finally, looking pensive and a little wistful, “that perhaps home isn’t a permanent thing, you ken? Whatever this place is becoming, it’s not mine any longer. I will miss it, but it’s time for Maraheem to move on without me. In its absence, perhaps I can do the same.” He squeezes my hand. “What I’m saying is, I’d like to try too.”
I don’t know where he gets that kind of courage from. But also I do. I know because I watched a vibrant world that felt like home fall apart, and it forced me here, to this dimension, to a mangrove in a swamp. To a human who felt just as alone and unwanted as I was. And together we found Tavish.
He leans toward me, until our arms brush. His head drops onto my shoulder.
My heart fills, blooming like a fresh bud after the rain has finally cleared. And I think, maybe all of that loneliness, those decades of solitude, only a grave to watch over me, maybe I was not as alone as I assumed, because all that time was driving me toward this moment. And toward him. I catch his chin and kiss him, tender and devoted, connecting us. “My princeling,” I mutter.
I can feel his smile against my lips.
Together, we sit, and we drink our shared beer and listen to the city being reborn. For all that we helped and all that we hurt, it will carry on. And so will we. Tavish and I, his fears and my sorrows, and the two halves of me that brought us together. A trio of vagrants. A family, despite all those we lost. A home.
That’s the best word for us.
A home.
