"I'm telling you because I love you.
You don't have to say it back.
Maybe someday you will," I said, and once it was actually out of my mouth I lost every ounce of nerve I'd been running on and just let the silence sit there between us.
"You absolute idiot, why would you say something like that to me right now?"
she demanded, breaking the silence herself. I should have run the second I heard the question mark. In my experience, Abigail asked rhetorical questions right before things turned physical.
"Because it's true," I said, standing there like a deer that's already decided running is pointless.
"I lo, I mean, like you, as a friend.
Or maybe a brother," she stammered, and I could not believe my own ears.
Abigail, stammering. I must have died somewhere back at the farmhouse door and gone straight to whatever afterlife rewards fools. Her fury had drained out of her, leaving something closer to a blush behind, and I found myself wondering, not for the first time, whether dark skin blushed the same way, or just went a shade lighter, the way hers had.
"I know that already," I said, smiling despite myself.
"And you said all of that to me anyway?"
she asked.
"Yes," I said, with more confidence than I actually felt.
"I'm in love with Hans," she added, looking at me with the exact same eyes she'd made the time we accidentally hurt a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest.
"I know that too," I said, unbothered.
"How?!"
she asked, genuinely thrown. I think she'd been quietly convinced her feelings were some locked box nobody could see into.
"You look at him differently than you look at anyone else.
Not even his own mother looks at him like that.
And frankly, he's not that good looking, and he's not even that great at anything besides sulking," I said.
"Then why say what you said, knowing that?"
she pressed.
"Because I want to start taking chances the way my parents did.
You're part of that. I loved you before I understood what loving someone even meant. You don't owe me anything back.
I can wait.
Hans is bound to mess this up eventually, he messes everything up eventually," I said.
That was when something happened that I still can't fully explain. She walked around the kitchen counter, closed the distance between us, and pressed a kiss to my forehead. She was close enough that I caught the rose oil she used in her hair, close enough to see the hazel flecks buried in her eyes.
Her lips curved as she pulled back, and the words that came out of them were somehow both a promise and a threat wrapped around each other.
"If you don't come back," she said, "I will find you, and I will kill you myself."
I should turn back. I shouldn't be doing this. This is insane.
That thought kept looping through my head like a dungeon monster that refuses to stay dead.
The normal route from Hallowmere to Fenholt, on the western face of the iron mountains, ran through the Livornian forest, threaded between Endor's Pass and the mountain spine itself: a brutal seven-day walk that few travelers survived intact. With Aki, I flew it straight, cutting through the sky over forest and mountain alike, and turned seven days of misery into twelve hours on wyvern-back.
Even knowing that, some cowardly piece of me wanted nothing more than to turn around, crawl back into my own warm bed, wake up and go hunting with Hans, then go tell Abi I loved her all over again while she beat some sense into me for it. Just to be back inside the only life I actually understood.
Aki must have felt the tension knotting up my whole body, though he was clearly too busy enjoying the flight to care. To be fair to him, it was extraordinary: wind tearing at my hair and clothes, the whole world tilting and rushing beneath us, exhilarating enough that for whole stretches I nearly forgot Hallowmere and everything in it was shrinking into a smudge behind me, about to vanish over the horizon for good.
I tried filling the silence in my head with a picture of my father. Gramps had described him once as handsome, brave, a young man with more adventure in him than sense. For a few merciful minutes I actually forgot Gramps was gone, and then the grief came back in a wave with the weight of a landslide behind it.
Yoshi must have picked up on it somehow, because he unwound himself from around Aki's head, where he liked to feel the wind directly, and burrowed his furry little face against my chest instead. He used to fit easily inside my tunic when he was smaller. These days he was big enough that I worried about him popping every button clean off, and Abigail wasn't there to sew them back on if he did.
I missed her hands, strong as a grown man's, knocking the wind out of me during one of her affectionate beatings. I was starting to wonder if I had some kind of masochistic streak. She really was too violent for a girl her age, and I loved her for it anyway.
My thoughts broke off when Aki shuddered beneath me. For one horrible second I thought something was badly wrong with him, before I understood he was just trying to tell me he'd spotted something. I squinted against the wind and made out the shape of a town: a stronghold on a hill, wooden rooftops scattered around its base like fallen leaves.
It matched my father's old description of Fenholt, the mining town at the western foot of the iron mountains, where he'd gone chasing dungeon riches.
Aki was too large to land inside the town itself, so after a wholly unreasonable two hours spent convincing him people would panic at the sight of him, followed by another hour of consoling him and swearing I'd come straight back, I finally walked in on my own two feet.