Anton shivered. It was rare that Jude was able to fluster him the way Anton so easily and so often ruffled him. He planned to savor it.

“And you think you’re charming enough to get away with it.”

Anton aimed an insouciant little smile at him, tilting his face up toward Jude. “I am charming enough to get away with it.”

“Are you sure?”

Anton nodded.

Jude leaned in, and Anton’s eyes fluttered closed.

But before their lips could meet, Jude drew back. “You should learn a little patience.”

Anton’s eyes blinked open, his mouth pressing into a frown. “And you should be nicer to me, or I might leave you for Tuva.”

“I feared this day would come,” Jude said with a sigh. “It’s his berry tarts, isn’t it?”

As if on cue, Anton’s stomach grumbled.

Jude laughed. “I guess so.”

Jude took his hand and led Anton back through the orchard, toward the sound of the river and the cottage that sat on its banks. They had imposed themselves on Tuva once again and made the Lost Rose’s former safe house their home for the winter. Between their journey to Charis with Ephyra and the trip up to Anvari to visit Lady Iskara, they hadn’t had time to figure out where to point themselves before winter had made any kind of travel impossible. Luckily, Tuva hadn’t minded the extra mouths to feed, and though spring was quickly arriving, still they lingered.

“There was a bit of news,” Anton said as they passed the barren fields and crunched up the gravel path to the cottage. “Nothing urgent. Evander wrote again from Endarrion. He says things are improving—the newly elected council just convened their first session. And of course he asked again if we would come for the Moon Festival.”

“What did you say?”

“I said we would discuss it,” Anton replied.

It still felt odd to Jude, the idea that they could simply go wherever they pleased, that their obligations began and ended with the little garden plot outside of their cottage and the occasional letter from one of the only five people who knew they were here.

It wouldn’t last forever. There were still remnants of the Witnesses causing trouble throughout the Six Prophetic Cities. There was this new form of Grace, which they had inadvertently created, and people who needed to be trained and taught how to control that power. There was the goddess, appearing in cities at random, seemingly to repair the damage the god had inflicted. There was a whole world, destabilized and crawling its way back from the brink of destruction.

But there were also people—people like Lady Iskara, like Evander, like King Hassan and Khepri, like Ephyra, wherever she was—who were trying to help the world heal. And for a moment, for now, it felt like Jude and Anton could take time to rest.