“You are not bringing that to dinner.”

Dee snaps shut the hard case and slides it onto Hammer’s flank. “Yes, I am.”

“Diak’zinae, love of my life,” Anise says. “That is a fucking bazooka.”

“It’s a shoulder-fired recoilless rifle,” Dee says. “And it’s one of the few ways an on-foot individual can pose a threat to an adult dragon.”

Anise rubs her temples. “We’re getting hosted for a dinner party, Dee. You can’t bring a shoulder-mounted—”

“Shoulder-fired recoilless rifle.”

“That to a dinner.”

“She’s bringing napalm,” Dee says. “In her face.”

Anise chews her cuticle. “Okay. You’re not wrong. But is that really the first impression you’re trying to give?”

“Yep,” Dee says. “She’s your friend? Okay. Fine. But she needs to know there are people protecting you who can match her. Just be glad I’m not bringing the mantlet.” She points at the portable wall that Nick and Anise had to talk her down from dragging along.

“If Conna is still the Conna we know, she’s going to think bringing a bazooka to supper is fuckin’ hilarious,” Kell says.

“There you go.” Dee kisses Anise’s forehead. “I’m hilarious.”

Sion’s black horse strolls past, with the ash elf atop it. “I’ll take the lead,” he calls. “We won’t be going far, but my mistress values her privacy. There are some securities in place to prevent accidental discovery.”

Dee’s hand tics to her holster. “What securities?”

“Confounding charms,” Sion says. “Obscured paths. Nothing to put you at hazard.”

Nick’s eyes flare with consternation as he mounts up next to Dee. They’ve tied Hammer and Doink to the front of the trailer. “That’s not how magic works.”

“Oh. My mistake.” Sion tilts his pony north and eases her into a trot. “Perhaps you’d all better follow Nicholas Voraag instead. Up to you.”

“It is so weird seeing that motherfucker on a horse,” Kell remarks.

“It is.” Evan opens the door to the trailer. “But oddly appropriate at the same time. Like I can picture him riding through Cable Square on it.”

Nick frowns at the retreating elf. “Guess we better get on him. You coming, Ani?”

“I’ll be in the trailer this time,” Anise says. “Sorry. Gotta get going on figuring out the not going back thing with the Kamiyons.”

“Aww. Okay.” Nick leans down and kisses their elf. “Tell ‘em they need to get on a regular visitation schedule.”

“Will do, boo.” Anise kisses him back and hops into the trailer.

Dee clicks her tongue, and the harnessed rhinos get moving. They depart the dry plains and make for the hinterlands.

Since Nick’s rhino is tied into team, he doesn’t need his hands to steer. So liberated he’s free to play his six string, and Dee passes a few happy miles being serenaded by her songbird man. They fall back into conversation after he finally shows her that Blackbird song he likes so much, which is quite pretty (but not as pretty as the songs he’s writing in Quillbear, in Dee’s biased opinion). Shooting the shit on their packmates, speculating about Parag and Dalma, and Graila and Warrin, swapping stories about where they grew up and the silly self-destructive shit they got up to when they were kids.

“I tell you what,” Dee says. “Seems like a drag to raise kids without an entire pack to help. I always had someone lookin’ out, so I didn’t get squished by a rhino.”

“That’s how we’ll raise ours, then,” Nick says. “Cause you turned out great.”

“It wasn’t bad. Beats the alternative.” Dee shudders. “Being the only one in charge of a cub. Sounds like a nightmare. I’d probably end up… what’s the word you used? Heli-coptering?”

“Yep.”

“Helicoptering the hell out of them.”

“Nah. You’d be a lighthouse.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“Yes, ma’am. You don’t wanna be a helicopter. Lighthouse all the way.” He scratches his chin. He’s started wearing his stubble longer. He’s no Parag, not a total fuzzface, but Dee mentioned one time how much she loved the prickly feeling of his whiskers between her thighs and he hasn’t been bare-shorn since. “If I’m remembering it right.”

“What were yours?”

“Mine were helicopters, but the kind you charter and fly off to the Poconos.” Nick sighs. “They decided pretty quick I wasn’t worth giving a lift.”

Dee decides not to ask what Poconos means. “So who raised you?”

“Me, I guess.”

“Well.” Dee touches his arm. “You turned out pretty goddamn good too, lover boy.”

Nick smiles at her. They lapse into comfortable silence for a while and watch the evergreens brush past.

“If Ani is staying with us,” Nick asks, eventually, “does that open up the Imprinting Conversation again?”

Dee’s been waiting for this question. She’s been wrestling with it herself. She touches Anise and expects the same tingling biological sense of completeness that she gets with Nick, and when it doesn’t come, it shocks her sometimes. Her lovely little golden woman.

If Anise could imprint, it would barely be a question. Dee has learned firsthand with Nick how love builds and blooms after the bond is forged. It’s been the most beautiful experience of her life. And Anise—she’s prudent and dedicated and gorgeous. Even without the bond in place, Dee’s fallen for her. She’d be the perfect mate.

Except she can’t mate back.

“I just.” Dee’s tongue pushes on her tusk. “This is dumb, but we got really lucky once, you and me. Really lucky. Do we think we’d get lucky twice? Cause I can’t…”

She falls into silence and gazes out across the trees. Nick gives her time.

“I can’t lose my love again,” she says. “When I lost my sister, it tore me open. All this love with nowhere to put it. Now I’m kind of a pussy about it. Losing another.”

“You’re not a pussy, babe.” Nick laughs gently. “It’s intimidating. It is. Even with someone like Anise. I won’t give you shit about it if the answer is no.”

“Okay.” Dee fidgets with her reins, picking at the filaments of leather that stick from their cut. “But I don’t know if it’s no. You know? She’s a Voraag now. And I love her.”

“I do, too.” Nick rubs her knee. “Maybe once we stop, let’s talk to Kell about it. Right? She’s got experience with this sort of thing. And she seems happy as a clam with her non-imprinted mates.”

“Good idea,” Dee says. “That expression still confuses the shit outta me, for the record.”

They follow the ash elf through the hinterland, up through the forest floor and onto the stony ridges, where their breaths come out in wispy clouds. Dee and Nick unpack their cold-weather gear and bundle themselves against the chill as they rise. Sion breaks left into a stony pass that Dee could swear up and down was not there until he took his turn.

“You have got to tell me how this is working,” Nick calls up. “Magic like this. Tied to places and objects instead of songs. This goes against every rule I know.”

“This world is a song, Nicholas Voraag, to those with the ears to hear it,” Sion replies.

“Okay, that’s pretty, but it isn’t really an answer.”

“I don’t have one.” Sion shifts in his saddle, and Dee takes some small satisfaction from it. This elf may be a better magician, but her man is an infinitely surer rider. “This is Conna’s work. You may ask her your questions; she’s a patient teacher. Perhaps she’d teach you.”

“My Voraag doesn’t need that kind of magic, Benefice.” Dee tries to keep the antipathy out of her voice. “Nothing a dragon needs to teach him.”

Sion doesn’t reply to this beyond a dismissive shrug.

Dee glances at Nick, suddenly worried she may have overstepped. But he gives her a brief nod and a squeeze on her hand.

They arrive at a pass narrow enough the trailer won’t fit through it. Perched atop the low canyon passageway are two goblins in dusty gray overcoats, designed to blend in with the mountainside, watching them with alert amber eyes. One of them has a rifle laying across his lap.

Sion calls up to them in snakelike Kyssaki. The one without the rifle raises a walkie-talkie to her lips and has a brief conversation. “We’ll go on foot from here,” Sion says. “These gentlefolk will carry whatever you need carried from the trailer.”

Dee knocks on the trailer door and passes the message along. Anise and the Kamiyons emerge blinking into the light. A troop of goblins are already emerging from the mountain pass, but nothing needs to get hauled except the bottle of red that they brought as a host gift.

And Dee’s recoilless rifle. A goblin opens the case and scowls at the weapon. “You bring a dragon gun,” he says in Packtongue.

“Yes.”

“You leave it behind,” he says.

Dee hefts the hard case by the handle. “No.”

He has a brief exchange with Sion that ends in a grouchy acquiescence. Legendary and company begin their hike up the mountain.

Dee eventually allows someone to hold her bigass gun. She eases back from the vanguard and falls into step with Kell, who’s got Thekla clinging piggyback to her like a spider monkey.

“I’m sorry, baby,” the goblin guitarist is saying. “I should have brought sensible shoes. I’m a goof.”

“Girl, it’s nothing,” Kell hikes Thekla further up her back. “One of us needed to look all cute and fancy.”

“I was gonna ask to borrow Kell for a sec.” Dee eyes Thekla’s ruby-red heels. “But maybe you need a mount, huh?”

“I gotcha, chief,” Kell says. “Yo, Ev.”

Evan looks over his shoulder. “Yeah?”

Kell plucks Thekla from her back and holds her out to Evan. “Hold this wife for a second.”

Thekla squirms. “Oh my god don’t drop me.”

“When have I ever dropped you?” Evan chuckles as he takes the goblin bridal-style into his arms. “I never drop you.”

Thekla winds her arms around his neck. “Yeah, cause I always tell you not to.”

Kell joins Dee and the orcs drop further back down the line. Nick is taking up the rear with the rifle goblin.

“Can we get some privacy?” Dee asks.

“No Inklish,” the goblin replies.

Whatever. Close enough. “So, uh. Kell.” Dee clears her throat. “Me and Nicky wanted to talk to you about, uh. The mate bond.”

“Oh.” Kell’s gray eyes widen. “Is this some birds-and-bees shit?”

“Nothing like that,” Nick says. “It’s just… I hope this isn’t weird to talk to you about. But we’ve been going back and forth about Ani.”

Understanding dawns on Kell’s face. “And you need someone who knows about imprinting on non-orcs.”

Dee nods. “You did that with Evan and Thekla, right?”

“Sure did.” A note of pride straightens Kell’s spine as she grins. “My lil’ wives.”

“How did you decide to?” Nick asks. “Did you hesitate? About the one-way thing?”

Kell laughs. “Funny story. It was actually a mistake.”

Nick and Dee share a look of consternation.

“But like.” Kell hastily follows up. “It was the best mistake of my life. Bar none. I didn’t think I was gonna imprint on anyone, ever. Certainly not before marriage and kids and shit. Like it’s not really something New Layth orcs do. Too old-fashioned and hazardous, is the perception.”

Dee’s brow furrows.

“Look, this isn’t me poo-pooing the imprint,” Kell says. “I mean, I’m imprinted and it fucking rocks. I was created to be with my mates. Born with their names inscribed on my heart. I believe all that sacred stuff. Honest, I do.” Her attention drifts from them, up ahead to the human and the goblin. That telltale glow suffuses her, shines through her eyes. “But Ev and Thekla, they wake up every morning and they choose me all over again. They’re as bonded to me as I am to them, but they forged that bond all by themselves, and they keep forging it. Every day.” Dee’s never heard Kell’s voice this honeyed and heartfelt. “And that’s maybe the most romantic fucking thing in the world.”

Dee fidgets. “Do you ever worry they’ll leave?”

Kell’s gaze slides back from her mates. “Sure, sometimes. I also worry about, like, what if Yellowstone erupts and blows America in half, and what if I beef on the sidewalk so hard my tusks fall out.” She shrugs. “You worry sometimes about the people you love. Even if there’s no reason to. Worrying is part of the whole thing. And the whole thing is what I wouldn’t trade.”

“What’s Yellowstone?” Dee mutters into Nick’s ear, but he’s already moving on:

“Would you have done it again?” he asks. “If it wasn’t a mistake?”

Kell raises a pierced eyebrow. “Would you have, Nick?”

“Yes.” Nick answers without hesitation. “A million times over.”

Kell grins. “There you go, dude.”

“I’m just sort of scared, is all.” Dee surprises herself with her honesty. Her younger-sister emotional instincts are coming back, she realizes. She’s subconsciously slotted Kellax Kamiyon into that big sibling space. “It’s scary.”

“All the really huge things are. And there’s nothing huger than love.” Kell blinks. “Shit, dude. You guys need to stop getting me misty-eyed about this crap or I’mma start bugging Evan to gimme a kid.”

“Thanks, Kell,” Dee says. “Really.”

“No problem, girl. You guys want my vote, for what it’s worth?”

Nick nods. “It’s worth a lot.”

“I say mate up,” Kell says. “Elf MILFs don’t grow on trees. I assume. I mean, I’m not the one with an elf girlfriend. You guys would probably know better.” She steps past a protruding rock. “But, like, she has a bellybutton. So I’m making an educated guess.”