“It would be right.”
“You do what’s right.” She tipped up her head so her lips brushed his. “It’s why I love you.”
“If we were to marry—”
She took one quick, jerky step back. “Marry?”
“Sure that hasn’t changed over the centuries. A man and a woman love, they take vows, make promises. Marriage or handfasting, a tie to bind them to each other.”
“I know what marriage is.”
“And it disturbs you?”
“Not disturbs, and don’t smile at me that way, as if I’m being endearingly stupid. Give me just a minute here.” She looked over the stones, toward the sparkling hills beyond. “Yes, people still marry, if they like. Some live together without the ritual.”
“You and I, Glenna Ward, we’re creatures of ritual.”
She looked back at him, felt her stomach jitter. “Yes, we are.”
“If we were to marry, would you live here with me?”
It was a second jolt. “Here? In this place, in this world?”
“In this place, in this world.”
“But…don’t you want to go back? Need to?”
“I don’t think I can go back. Magically, aye, I think it’s possible,” he said before she could speak. “I don’t think I can go back, to what was. To what was home. Not knowing when they’ll die. Knowing that Cian is here—that other half of me. I don’t think I could go back knowing you would go with me, and pine for what you left here.”
“I said I would go.”
“Without hesitation,” he agreed. “Yet you hesitate at the rite of marriage.”
“You caught me off guard. And you didn’t actually ask me,” she said with some annoyance. “You more posed a hypothesis.”
“If we were to marry,” he said a third time, and the humor in his voice had her fighting her own, “would you live with me here?”
“In Ireland?”
“Aye, here. And in this place. It would be a kind of melding of our worlds,
our needs. I would ask Cian to let us live in the house, to tend it. It needs people, family, the children we’d make together.”
“Leaps and bounds,” she murmured. Then took a moment to settle herself, to search herself. Her time, his place, she thought. Yes, it was a loving compromise, could be—would be—a melding of spirits.
“I’ve always been a confident sort, even as a child. Know what you want, work to get it, then value it once you have it. I’ve tried not to take anything in my life for granted, or not too much. My family, my gift, my lifestyle.”
Reaching out, she brushed her fingers over one of his mother’s roses. Simple beauty. Miraculous life.
“But I’ve learned that I took the world for granted, that it would always be—and that it would roll along, pretty much without my help. I learned otherwise, and that’s given me something else to work for, to value.”
“Is that a way of saying this isn’t the time to speak of marriage and children?”
“No. It’s a way of saying I understand the little things—and the big ones—the normal things, life, become only more important when it’s all on the line. So…Hoyt the Sorcerer.”
She touched her lips to his cheek, then the other. “If we were to marry, I would live here with you, and tend this house with you, and make children with you. And I’d work very hard to value all of it.”
Watching her, he held up a hand, palm to her. When hers met it, their fingers linked, firm and strong. Light spilled out of their clasped hands.