When he was finished, she lifted her head from his shoulder. “You are much braver than I am,” she said. “I am ashamed of myself.”
He didn’t know what to say. “I think we take our courage from each other.”
She nodded and closed her eyes. “I want to sleep awhile, Pen. I haven’t slept in three days. Would it be all right if I did?”
He covered her with blankets, kissed her on the forehead, and waited for her to fall asleep. It only took a few minutes. He stood looking down at her afterwards, thinking that finding her alive was the most precious gift he had ever received and he must find a way to protect it. He had lost her once; he would not do so again.
His resolve on that point would be tested at some time, he knew. What would he do when that happened? Would he give up his life for her as Bandit had for him? Did he love her enough to do that? There was no way to know until he was faced with the choice. He could tell himself anything, make any promise he wished, but promises were only words until more than words were required.
He paused at the doorway and stared into space. He knew how much she would depend on him. She would need him to be there for her. But that worked both ways. Because of how he felt about her, he depended on her to be there for him, too. He might be only a boy and she even younger than Khyber, but that didn’t change the truth of things.
They would need to be strong for each other if they were to keep each other safe.
He closed the door softly behind him as he went out.
FIVE
The day’s heat still clung to the foothills below the Ravenshorn, sultry and thick in the waning of the afternoon light, when Rue Meridian said in a surprised voice, “That looks like an airship coming toward us.”
Bek Ohmsford turned and caught sight of the black dot out on the western horizon, backlit by the deep glow of the setting sun. Even though he wasn’t sure what he was looking at, he took her at her word. Her eyes had always been better than his.
He glanced at her admiringly. He couldn’t help himself. He still loved her as much now as he had when he had met her some twenty years earlier. He had been just an impressionable boy back then, and she, older by several years and a good deal of life experience, a woman. Circumstances and events had contrived to make falling in love the inevitable result of their meeting, and all these years later that surprised him still.
She remained strong and beautiful, undiminished in any way by time’s passing, a rare and impossibly wondrous treasure. Blessed with dark red hair and bright green eyes, a tall rangy body, and a personality that was famously mercurial, she constantly surprised him with her contradictions. Born a Rover girl, she had flown airships with her brother, fought on the Prekkendorran, journeyed to the then unknown continent of Parkasia, and returned to marry and stay with a man whose world was so different from hers that he could not begin to measure the gap between them. She might have chosen another way, something closer to the life she had abandoned for him, but she had not done so, nor voiced a moment’s regret. As wild and free as her life had been, it seemed impossible to him that she had given it up, but she had done so in a heartbeat.