“I saw him in my head. He takes after his father.”
“Sire that would be, and he does.”
“I want to see everyone. I want to hear the music and help make it. I want to see what happens next.”
She drank some wine. “What happens next. That’s a thing.”
“Celebrations across Talamh. I’ll need you to come with me to the Capital within a week. They’ll want to see you. Fete you some.”
“Fete.”
He actually reached over to take her hand. “I know you’re no fonder of that than I, but it matters, Breen, to everyone. The songs and stories they’ll write, of this, of you. Of the end of Odran. We have the chance and choice to live in peace now.”
He rose, walked a few feet, walked back, and sat again.
“You stepped off the cliff.”
“It was a choice, the right choice. The only choice.”
“Aisling says you knew, you saw on the first night of the festival. Finian saw it, or some of it, with you. But you said nothing.”
“What could I say, Keegan? To Marco, Nan, you, anyone. I understood, deep in me, it was always going to come to that. No matter what anyone did or tried to do, it would come down to that moment, and that choice.”
“We might have lured him in.”
“No. And if I’d made a different choice, I’d never really have a life anyway. No future without the fear of him, no courage.” She rubbed her wrist. “I’d never have risked having a child that he might come for, or try for.”
“You did what needed doing, but for me you’re after why I don’t explain before I do what needs doing.”
She drank again. “You have a point. Can I say, and can you trust, I honestly and simply knew I had to do it this way?”
He sat in silence a moment. “Aye, that’s fair enough.”
“And I think because I did, you were there to catch me.”
“I like that part of it. So it’s settled between us.”
“I suppose it is, except… What comes next, Keegan? I need to know what you want, expect. If we just go on as we are, which is fine if— No, you know, it’s just not. I want more.”
“More what? More than what?”
“More than just going along. I want promises and plans and pledges and what goes with them.”
He stared at her. “Didn’t I give you the ear things, and in front of everyone with eyes? Didn’t you take them?”
“Yes, and thanks again, but—”
“Thanks be damned, you took them, you’re wearing them, so it’s settled.”
“What’s settled?”
“You don’t give such a thing—the sapphire, for certain—to wear that way to someone you’re… romancing or bedding or whatever you’d call it, not with eyes witnessing, unless it’s a pledge between the two.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“I brought them back for you—the pledging stones—and gave them in that way because I thought: No, I’ll not wait until after, as she keeps talking about the after.” He rapped a fist on the table hard enough to make the glasses shudder. “We’ll pledge in the sunlight and before, as that’s faith. It’s fecking faith that we’d sit just as we are now, together. In the after.”
She picked up her wine again, drank slowly. Then set the glass carefully down again.