“A man has to make his living somehow, lovely.”

“So if I am understanding correctly, you will starve and die without my kisses?”

Weysh put his forehead to hers. “Precisely.”

“Oh, I would not want that,” she said. Weysh laughed softly, took her chin in his hand, and gently brushed her lips with his, teasing. He did it again, and again, with slightly more pressure each time until finally Yenni grunted in frustration and threw her arms around his neck. She kissed him with such searing passion that by the time she was done his head spun like he’d polished off a whole bottle of cheap wine.

“Wha—” He squinted at her. “Where did you learn to kiss like that?”

“Instinct,” she said.

“Is that right,” he said dryly, but he could hardly fault her for having kissed or even slept with other men in the past. Byen knew he hadn’t exactly been celibate. He tuned out the insecure whispers trying to stoke the embers of his jealousy. It was him she was kissing now. “Well, I don’t care how you learned to kiss like that, as long as you promise to do it again,” he told her.

In response she embraced him and put her head against his chest.

“Yenni,” he said, running his fingers through her braids. “I want to introduce you to my family. As my Given.”

She was silent, too silent. In the quiet the whispers of insecurity grew louder.

“Yenni?”

She looked down at the grass. “If I meet your family then this becomes real.”

Weysh let her go, frowning. “It’s already real, at least to me it is. But if you’d rather not meet them yet, then I won’t force you.”

Yenni stepped back and wrapped her arms around herself, chewing on her bottom lip. “Weh-sheh, when I first met you, you were just like everyone else who has ever told me who to be, how to act, how to live. But now you listen to me, and respect my freedom to choose. Why?”

“Because I love you,” he said. It came out easily, like singing in the bath, like the truest truth in the world. He was no longer in love with the idea of her, but her: Yenni Aja-Nifemi ka Yirba, the Moonrise princess who beat up thugs, mastered complex spells in a matter of weeks, and always spoke her mind.

“I know you can’t say it back yet, but you will,” said Weysh, to himself as much as to her.

Yenni opened her mouth, closed it, then nodded. “Take me to see them.”

28