His eyes remained forward, his steps ghosting over the stone.

“But now, you have returned. And clearly, you are no longer mate mad. The only prevention or cure for such a thing in a stone sky god is finding his true mate. When you mated Suvi and gave her your knot, you sealed your bond, tied your lifespan to her mortal one, and saved yourself from the madness.”

I did not even attempt to hide the way my feet tangled together, making me stumble and nearly fall.

“I have not mated her!” I said loudly, too loudly, my voice bouncing off the walls. There was a defensiveness in my reply that made me wince. Like I needed to prove that, despite my lecherously wandering eye, I hadn’t actually indulged in my wanting. “And I don’t have a knot!”

Aeshyr made a sound in his throat that could have meant anything. Maybe surprise, maybe simple acknowledgement.

“If you haven’t mated her then your current state of mind won’t last. Just being near her will not sustain your sanity for the long-term. Eventually, she will starburn, you will starburn, and you’ll grow a knot and give it to her. Or else you will fall into madness once again.”

Two children passed us as he said that, but they didn’t seem shocked by the talk of rutting and knots and madness. For the first time in the conversation, I realized that Aeshyr was not speaking the tongue of Bohnebregg, but I could fully understand him.

“Are you speaking the stone sky language?” The question was a good distraction from everything else he’d been saying. My head ached with the whirl of his words.

So did my cocks.

“No,” he grunted. “Riverdark.”

“Then how the blazes am I understanding you? It took days and days of endless talking and teaching to get to the most basic level of conversation with Suvi,” I snapped, my frustration mounting. We reached the curtains, then passed through them to the courtyard. The sun beat down and made Aeshyr look even paler than before.

“I assume you have webbing, but it must not be fresh enough to have picked up your mate’s language.”

Webbing. That word tickled something inside my brain. A ripple in the river.

“Here.” Aeshyr put down the Bohnebregg-constructed chest. Metal clinked inside it. His hands free, he pulled one side of his vest away from his pale, sinewy torso and dug inside an inner pocket. The pocket could not have been very large, but somehow his entire hand disappeared inside it and spent far longer rooting around in there than made any sort of sense. Finally, he pulled out something shimmery, crumpled in his fist.

He dropped it into my outstretched palm. Not it, them – two scraps of silken webbing with strands glinting in every colour imaginable. A name bubbled up, then burst without warning or context. Ruhnwebbe.

Instinct told me what I needed to do with the shimmering pieces.

“We... we need to put these in our ears,” I said slowly, as if testing the words, testing my own memory.

“Correct.” Aeshyr hoisted the chest up onto his shoulder again.

“Why do you even have these?” I eyed his vest with suspicion, wondering what else jangled in the impossibly large, unseen pockets.

“I never know when the mortal leadership here will die and I’ll need to begin communicating with a new Mother’s Eye. Besides, I’m a trader. I have all sorts of things on hand.”

“But I have nothing to trade for this.”

Not that I would consider giving the webbing back to him now. The thought of effortlessly communicating with Suvi made my insides feather with want. If he decided to take the webbing back now, he’d have to fight me first.

But Aeshyr made no move to swipe the bits from my hand.

“You can owe me.”

I eyed him closely as I put the pieces of webbing in the pocket of my robe.

“How come they didn’t make you wear a cotton robe to enter the temple?”

He plucked at the frayed edge of his vest with his free hand. “This is cotton. I always wear it when I come here.”

“It looks worn. You need a new one.”

“Works as well as any other.”

I found myself grinning at him. I did not like the fact that I owed him for the webbing, and his flat stare still gave me the distinct discomfort of conversing with a corpse, but I could not deny the way I was warming to him, ever so slightly.

He did not return the expression.

“Do the Warlords of Riverdark smile?” I asked. If I’d ever met another from that world, I could not recall it.

“They do,” Aeshyr answered. “I don’t.”

Without another word, he hurtled upward into the sky with more speed and force than those skeletal wings should have been capable of. The sky turned to stone, he opened his door with a vicious crack, and then he was gone.

Blast. I wouldn’t have minded asking him a few more questions. But it seemed that Aeshyr was finished answering them.

I stared up at the fading remnants of his sky door, stone dissipating into bright blue clarity.

For a long moment, my mind was blank. The river motionless.

And then, the full force of his words crashed over me like a mighty wave.

Suvi was my mate. Mine in every conceivable way. She’d led me out of the darkness, and now she would share her life with me. And I would tie mine to hers.

The relief at that was thick. Palpable. And the relief was not about the fact that mating Suvi presented a permanent cure for the darkness. The mate madness.

The relief was that, even once permanently cured, I would not have to give her up. She was my mate and I would keep her. It was my right and it was the only thing that made sense. I no longer entertained questions about whether I’d be willing to let her go if I no longer needed her as an antidote.

I already knew I was not willing.

Now I understood why.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Suvi

Skallagrim couldn’t have been gone for more than half an hour, but it was the longest he’d been away from me for... well, this entire time. I tried to appreciate how nice it was to have some alone time. True alone time (as long as you ignored the two guards outside the door, which was currently closed.) But after five minutes, then ten, then fifteen, anxiety started to gnaw at me. Everything I knew about Skallagrim had shown me that he was basically a tank in dragonish alien form. I doubted anything could hurt him out there. So I wasn’t worried, exactly. But there was discomfort. Discomfort at not knowing where he’d gotten to. I couldn’t tell whether it was some messed-up codependence I was forming, a toxic attachment based on the fact that he was the only one in this entire world who understood me when I spoke...

Or if I actually missed him.

I wasn’t sure which option said worse things about the state of my mental health, to be honest.

But whatever it was, whatever the reason, the longer he was gone from the room, the more fidgety I got, until I was pacing, warming up for the body-burning, mind-numbing repetitiveness of doing hockey drills. I hadn’t done hockey drills in years, but I fell into the old muscle memory like it was nothing at all. I’d started building up a little bit of muscle again, maybe even more muscle than I’d had before when I spent all day doing mandated research for the military on the ship. I’d regained some weight in my recovery, too, which I was grateful for. Getting back my strength and maintaining the familiar folds and curves of my body made me feel much more like myself. And being in an alien world, that was a precious thing.

I was so far from everyone I’d ever known.

But at least I could recognize myself.

I was just starting to work up a sweat doing some lunges when Skallagrim returned, the door opening then closing with a bang so loud I nearly jumped out of my skin.