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“If I am weak for wanting you, then let me embrace that weakness and make it my strength,” he said, his gaze fixed on the west. “And if you must haunt me, then let me haunt you in return.” Jack began to play.
“You and I have faced many things alone,” Jack murmured. “Between the mainland and the isle, the east and the west, we’ve carried our troubles in solitude. As if it were weakness to share one’s burdens with another. But I am with you now. I am yours, and I want you to lay your burdens down on me, Adaira.”
“I don’t need autumn, or winter, or spring,” Adaira said, letting the words bloom. “I want you eternally. Will you take the blood vow with me, Jack?”
She let them all go because he was her home, her shelter. Her endless fire, burning through the dark.
“May you be strong and courageous,” he said. “May your enemies kneel before you. May you find the answers you seek. May you be victorious and spirits-blessed, and may peace follow as your shadow.”
“Give your fear a name,” Jack said, remembering that Adaira had once said this very thing to Torin. “Once it is named, it is understood, and it loses its power over you.”
He marveled at how his own heart could exist outside his body. “You don’t know what you do to me,” he whispered. “By you alone I could be undone.”
“I hope our child inherits all of your traits and only a few of mine.” “Half of me and half of you,” Sidra insisted. “Until they become their own person.”
“That is where your brother is. He is the fire and the light of the isle. As long as the stars shine, he will always be with you.”
“Even if I lived a thousand years in the fire,” Jack said, “I would not forget you. I would not allow myself to.”
I want to write a ballad with you, not in notes but in our choices, in the simplicity and routine of our life together. In waking up at your side every sunrise and falling asleep entwined with you every sunset. In kneeling beside you in the kail yard and leading a clan and overseeing trade and eating at our parents’ tables. In making mistakes, because I know that I’ll make them, and then restitution, because I’m better than I once ever hoped to be when I’m with you.”
