“I know, Alpin. Please shut up.” He collapsed then against the table beside Forbes and just succeeded in not passing out completely.
Awhile later, he lifted his head again, crawled over, and gathered Janet to him, kissed her. She moaned.
He tried lifting her, first up on one knee, then climbing to both feet. His back burned along the line where he’d been cut, but he could tell already that he was healing.
He placed her on the stool where she’d been sitting, then hauled the table upright so that she could rest against it. She watched him, returning to herself slowly. “Tàm,” was all she said.
Leaning close, he whispered, “Yes,” and shushed her.
She nodded, and lay her head against the table. The contact seemed to make her flinch. He knew there was something wrong with her that wasn’t obvious, as if she’d been stabbed and it had left no mark. Something inside her had plagued her since his return, and he knew where.
He slid one hand up her side until the aberration thrummed beneath his palm like a deeply embedded stone he could feel. Then he slipped his other hand around her side, against her back. What energies he controlled, he still didn’t comprehend, but he felt a heat burning between his palms. It pulverized the malformation between them—a back-and-forth flow. He kept this up for as long as he could, but it exhausted him finally, and he sank down on the floor. This time he didn’t resurface.
Upon waking, he found that he lay on Forbes’s bedding beside Janet. She was watching him, and he couldn’t help smiling as he remembered how often he’d lain beside her and watched while she slept.
He sat up in a panic then, but the body of Ađalbrandr still hung over the waterwheel axle. It hadn’t reanimated. Sighing, he lay back down.
They kissed and whispered intimacies to each other. He reminded her how he’d thought she was really a selkie bathing in the Teviot and he must give her back her magic skin. She described how he used to tilt his head to the side when she said something that caught him off guard. They spoke of Morven, the Lusk brothers, her father, finally of Forbes, who’d protected her from the Yvags.
“He protected you for years,” he admitted. “Even sacrificed himself to keep them from wearing you.”
She shivered at the thought. “Are they coming back?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I hope not.”
She rolled onto her side, then leaned up. Her eyes unfocused and he could tell that she was listening to her body, a look of wonder on her face. “It’s gone,” she said. “Oh, Tàm. How?”
He sat up beside her. His back ached somewhat, but did not burn this time. He reached around and rubbed one hand against his back. The black armor, where it had been sliced in two, was whole as well. He hugged her to him. The changeling pool—its peculiar oiliness, how it felt in his lungs, the million spangles in the water that wasn’t water. Somehow, it had suffused him, and given him miraculous healing power—enough to heal Janet.
Waldroup crept back in: “Mind, they can still cut off your head an’ ye won’t heal from that.”
“I’ll deal with that when it happens,” he said.
“Deal with what?” Janet asked.
He shrugged, and got to his feet. “These. The pieces of their plan.”
He collected Ađalbrandr’s ördstone and the strange inverted pyramid box.
Waldroup said, “Solution’s in the grindstones, innit, Tommy?”
He nodded, climbed the four stairs, and dropped both items through the hole in the center of the grindstones. Then, taking his bow and quiver—just in case more Yvags had been sent after him—he went back, lifted Janet to her feet. Together they walked outside.
At the end of the sluice, Janet sat on the small knoll beside it. Thomas hauled up the gate, and river water poured into the narrow channel. The mill wheel began to turn, slowly, steadily, picking up speed. The grindstones would be revolving now, the two Yvag objects trapped in the hole between them. With any luck, both would be ground to bits.
He walked over to his wife. “I suppose I should gather Forbes’s body to deliver to the abbey for burial. That would be best, no?”
She nodded.
He’d taken but two steps along the sluice when there came a loud crackling noise and the millhouse itself suddenly threw off beams of green and blue fire. They emerged from the windows, and pushed through joints in the stonework.
As if connected to the display, a jagged streak of blue lightning burst inside his head. He stumbled into the grass, heard Janet cry out his name. Then the lightning spun him away. Distantly, he heard himself proclaim:
“I blends with we in the warp of battle
Never with they, wounded by iron
Who breathe not our air
And would curse our world their way.
Noble shed souls,
Race of healers, in the well of forever.
Warriors, we fall together.”
When he came to his senses again, he was lying with his head in Janet’s lap. She stroked his hair. He wasn’t certain she was even conscious of what she was doing. She was staring tearfully past him. He rolled over.
The mill was gone. Only the stone foundations, part of a side wall, and the mill wheel itself, canted on its sheared axle, remained.
“What did you do, Tàm?” she asked. There was awe in her voice.
He had no words for the magic he’d released, nor how he’d chanced to release it. Even Waldroup’s ghost had nothing to say for once.
They held on to each other on the knoll with a fierceness that said no one would ever pry them apart again.
That was how the Lusk brothers found the two of them when they arrived at midday.
