All Hail the Shifter King
Title: Surprise, Part VI
Word Count: 2809
Note: This section concludes what was meant to be my 2014 Holiday Story (just three months late whoo!)! Many thanks to my awesome friends and family that read and gave feedback during the ridiculous amount of time it took to get this thing done. Dedicated with love to Asha and Jennie, as well as any other Rykat shippers. <3 I love this piece for a lot of reasons, and while I'm sure the story as a whole could use some (read: lots of) editing, it's a fun little read for what it is.
They snacked on the fruit she'd packed as they followed a well-worn path away from the river and deep into the trees, their surroundings immediately lost to shadow. Odd, firefly-like insects buzzed in lazy trails around them, flashing shades of green and blue and yellow like tiny flickering lights. After a while she realized she couldn't hear the waterfall at all - or much of anything, really, as the entire area seemed silent save for the insects. Curious, she paused in the middle of the train and looked up at the trees, searching for any brightly-colored plumage or indication of movement, but save for the thinner branches moving in the gentle breeze there was nothing. Ryder, who had skirted around her and was now several feet up the path, paused and looked back at her.
"Something wrong?" he asked.
"I don't know," she replied honestly. "Where is everybody?"
He looked around as if noticing the quiet for the first time, and the corners of his mouth quirked into a faint smile.
"Come on," he said. "We're close, now."
"Just so you know," she said as she returned to his side, matching his casual pace along the path and shooting him a smug grin, "this better be a pretty amazing surprise for everything you've dragged me through."
"It's amazing," he assured, waving a hovering cloud of green glow-flies away from his face. The tiny motes of light dispersed, winked several times, then vanished into the foliage. As Katrina followed their movement she saw angular shapes in the shadows, the stark lines of shaped stone covered in the angular carvings of the Fel'danai tongue.
"People lived here?" she asked.
"No. These are sacred grounds. We only came here to worship."
"We?" She thought back to the names across the walls of the tiny hut. "Your mother came here?"
"Among others."
"So you're... taking me to a ritual garden?" He smiled at this, not meeting her eyes, and Katrina felt a giddy excitement bubble in her chest, the spastic joy that her parents always found so amusing when she was a child. "Really?"
"It would be awfully shitty of me to lie to you about it now."
"That's amazing!" she squealed, clasping her hands together and bouncing on her toes. "What kind is it? A topiary? Or is it one of the stone gardens?" She tapped her hands against her mouth, thinking, and would have tripped over an exposed root in the path if he hadn't taken her arm and pulled her gently toward him and around it. "Nobody's ever documented a tesairen garden before..." She looked up at him, managing her most hopeful expression. "Do you think..."
When he was quiet a moment, obviously thinking about it, she felt her heart sink. Of course he wouldn't say yes. He'd been opposed to her collecting information about the unknown species of the forest since the moment she'd started living in Eli's house - her professional silence, he said, was a trade for her continued protection in a country that was still nowhere near safe for her. It was heartbreaking, really - in six months she'd catalogued more about the rare or thought-to-be-extinct flowers of Rion Fell than had been seen in the last fifty years, almost entirely due to her privileged access to the rainforest and grounds that were normally fiercely protected by the clans. What she knew, and what she'd learned, could easily kickstart her career and get her back on course completing a dissertation, now that she had several possibilities for a new topic to pursue.
"You can gather whatever data you want," he finally told her. "We'll talk about the terms after."
"Really?"
"I don't think I could say to you. Not this time, at least."
"Huh? Why?"
"And keep in mind that these won't be like the gardens you've seen," he mentioned cautiously. They were passing almost fully intact ritual sites now - small stone storage huts, tiny courtyards, altar slabs similar to ones she'd been shown closer to Azinsi. "These are clan grounds, for clan ritual."
"Okay, sure, but why did you say that?"
"Say what?"
"The whole 'not this time' thing. Why did..." She trailed as they turned a long corner around a stand of trees and a magnificent shape rose in the darkness ahead of them. "Wow..." she breathed. "What... is that?"
The archway that spanned the wide path wasn't anything like the thin, precariously-balanced shapes she'd seen in some of the other ritual grounds. This one was a massive crescent of thick stone, several feet thick and at least fifteen feet above the ground at its peak, and despite the obvious age in the stone there was no indication that it had structurally deteriorated at all. The carvings were still fresh and crisp, gleaming in the light of the glowing red bugs that swarmed it. Stepping closer she reached out and touched the stone, pressed the tips of her fingers into the trenches of the glyphs, the insects parting around her hand.
"What does it say?"
"Ukai-Makina," he said. "The Gardens of Makina." Just as she was about to walk through the archway, he grabbed her wrist and hauled her back beside him, laughing. "Hold on," he told her, and fished a handful of what looked like wooden buttons out of his pocket. He dropped half of them into her hand - small discs about the size of a quarter, they were surprisingly heavy for their size and bore carefully painted glyphs on each side. "Nobody enters the gardens without an offering," he told her, and gestured to a stone dish on a small pedestal beside him, almost like a bird bath. There was nothing in it save a small pool of water and a pair of dead leaves. "Go for it."
"Do I have to... um..." She gestured at the bowl. "Say something?" He chuckled at this, tossing his tokens in - they clattered against the stone with a sound like windchimes, so sharp and clear it was almost painful.
"If you want to," he said, stepping back a few paces. "Up to you."
She paused, clutching the wooden pieces in her hands like a child would a precious treasure, the way she would bring home injured rabbits or wounded butterflies or the occasional perfect rose she found on her summer adventures. Her heart was pounding with anxious excitement, the coiled anticipation one might feel as a rollercoaster crests the top of the first hill, waiting for the ground to fall out beneath them. She felt, for some reason, that what she said now would be so terribly important, but she couldn't think of a single thing that felt right or proper. For all the magic she'd seen and strange occurrences she'd been a part of, she still couldn't bring herself to speak aloud to whatever spirits were listening, especially with the ease Rebekah did on a daily basis.
"Thank you," she said finally, releasing the tokens to the same chiming chorus against the stone, and brushed her hands against her shorts as she joined Ryder beneath the arch.
"All good?" he asked. She nodded, and he took her by the hand - not his usual tactic of clamping his fingers around her wrist, but actually holding her hand like a normal person would. She was so stunned by it she forgot to move when he started to walk away - it brought him to a halt, and he glanced back at her, confused. "Something wrong?"
"No... no, sorry, I'm fine," she said, and followed after him. She expected him to let her hand go but he held on, not tightly but with a comfort that seemed entirely uncharacteristic for him.
The path continued a short way before opening into a large patch of barren ground, about thirty feet across and almost perfectly circular. It was ringed with a low stone wall, broken only where the path entered it, the surface wrapped in thorny vines so thick the stone was barely visible beneath. Where the path from the waterfall was cast in shadow from the thick canopy, here the ring was in darkness so thick that the twinkling bugs were the only source of light save the gentle glow of Ryder's coin beneath his shirt. When he released her hand she felt a moment of claustrophobia, the darkness suddenly suffocating, and just as she was about to grab for him she felt his fingers brush her neck, hook in the strap of her camera. He must have felt her tremble because he paused, the unearthly glow surfacing in his eyes for the first time in months, and he cupped her face in his hands, rubbed his thumbs comfortingly across her cheeks.
"It's okay," he said quietly. "Trust me."
He lifted the camera away from her and she saw the screen light up as he walked away, heard the whir and beep as he flipped it to video mode and set it on the stone wall. The blinking red recording light looked like just another of the flies hovering around. She focused on it, giving it her undivided attention, anything to quell the racing of her heart and the near-childish panic that clawed at her insides.
"Just stand still," she heard him say, this time somewhere to her left. The clearing was almost silent but she still hadn't heard him move, and from the corner of her eye she saw a sudden flash of golden sparks. "It's a little startling at first."
Another cascade of sparks and the entire wall suddenly came to life beneath the twisted net of vines, a sheet of golden light swirling across the surface, chasing the structure from one end to the other and back again. It happened so quickly that she was momentarily flash-blinded, her eyes stinging from the burst of light, and as she rubbed at her face she heard the very distinct buzz of insects - not just the hum of one floating too close to her ears, but of thousands taking to the air. Peeking hesitantly from between her fingers, she gasped at the sight of thousands, if not tens of thousands of the tiny glow-bugs hovering above and around her - like a curtain of Christmas lights, they spun in thick lines around the branches of the trees that edged the clearing, floated lazily in the air like richly-colored clouds. Her fear of the dark turned abruptly to wonderment, and she reached up toward the nearest swarm, the magic of her talisman causing the tiny creatures to part like water around her.
"This is amazing," she breathed. "How did you..."
A rustling at her feet brought her attention to the ground, where she found what looked like snakes coiling across the ground all around her. Thinking her talisman had finally given up the ghost, she was about to make a run for it when she saw the thick thorns on the "snakes" - they weren't snakes at all but vines, or at the very least some sort of plant, moving like a living creature around her. It was the vines from the wall, she realized, the stone left entirely bare save her camera casually recording the entire scene.
"Are you doing this?" she asked Ryder. He was leaning against the wall near the camera, watching her with a soft smile, and shook his head at her question. "What? Then how -"
"Just stand still," he said. "You'll get it."
"But -"
"Trust me," he repeated.
She listened, standing perfectly still despite wanting to crouch and touch the writhing tendrils encircling her. Some of the thorns were the length of her fingers, so wickedly sharp they cut thin trenches in the packed earth, and as she watched one particular limb trace a path toward her she noticed that the thorns flexed forward and back - from standing up to laying flat against the thick body - like the feathers of a bird. And slowly, the limb rose off the ground, displaying a bulb larger than her fist at the end of it that reared back like the head of a snake, surrounded by a mane of overlapping thorns like the crooked teeth of a monster.
Then, with a soft, gentle sigh, the bulb split in several directions and the deep green-black shell peeled back to reveal a blood red core that glowed from within, like a flame wrapped inside a red glass shell. She couldn't help herself - she reached toward it and brushed her fingers against the silken surface, feeling the strange heat that radiated from it, and at her touch the pod unfurled in a dramatic spiral, erupting into a brilliant rose the size of her head that fluttered and hissed softly. The tightly curled petals at the inner heart of it were a blazing yellow, so bright it made her eyes sting, and each ring that twisted outward darkened until the rose was as black as the surrounding night. It leaned into her touch like a small animal craving affection, the long vine-like limb twisting in loops around her bare legs, the flattened thorns a ridged and cool contrast to the heat of the body.
"Look at you," she whispered, tilting her head up and back as the "serpent" slid along her torso and wrapped around the back of her neck, the rose "head" circling around to face her again. "Aren't you the most beautiful thing?" She cupped it in her hands, marveling at the resistance in the petals, how they felt more like skin than a flower, and suddenly...
Suddenly it occurred to her what she was looking at, what she was holding, and her breath seizing in her throat had nothing to do with how the vine momentarily squeezed around her neck before relaxing.
"Ryder?" she managed to squeak, her voice hitching painfully.
"Hmm?" He'd moved close to her, again without her noticing, and she felt him ease some of the coils from her torso. "They get a little cuddly sometimes," he said, chuckling. "They don't mind being moved, though, so long as you're..." He trailed off when he caught her eyes, and his expression became troubled. "What's wrong?"
"These... they're..." She took a deep breath and felt herself shudder, felt tears on her cheeks. "These are..."
"Adder's Roses, yes."
"I..." She stared up at him, willing him to understand, silently pleading with him to please not say they were just roses - the carvings in the hut that now seemed a world away could be just words, and the magics that still amazed her could be just "normal", and hell, she could be just a stupid human for all she cared, but she just wanted him to understand the importance of this, the significance, the enormity. "They're real," she finally managed, her voice little more than a restrained sob. He smiled at her - not a smirk, not a teasing grin, not a sneer tied to the silent questioning of her intelligence - and cupped his hand beneath the "chin" of the closest bloom. There were dozens of them, now, either rising up around them, coiling around their legs, or simply moving about the ground in a carpet of long, overlapping bodies. The fragrance of them was intoxicating.
"You seemed so certain of it, you know," he said, closing his eyes briefly as the rose caressed the side of his face. "You'd never seen them but you were so certain that they were like this." A long loop of vine squeezed around his arm, one of the thorns drawing a thin scratch before he gently removed it and set it back on the ground - it immediately encircled his leg like a creature annoyed at being rejected. "I wanted you to know that you were right."
She just stared at him, utterly speechless, caught somewhere between shock and joy and an absolute waterfall of tears, then threw her arms around him, nearly toppling him over the rose-snakes on the ground around him.
"Thank you," she sobbed, laughing and crying at the same time. "I can't believe you did this."
"What?" He pulled back a little so he could shoot her a quizzical look. "Why can't you believe it?"
"Because people don't do things like this for me."
"Things like what?"
"Nice things, Ryder."
"I've kept you alive for six months, doesn't that count?" he asked, teasing.
"You know what I mean."
"Mmm." He knotted his hands in the small of her back, keeping her close to him, and leaned over to brush his lips against her cheek. "Merry Christmas, then, Katrina Shan." She smiled through her tears, teased her hand through the unruly waves of his hair, and without thinking leaned up on her toes and kissed him.
"Merry Christmas, Ryder Athari," she whispered against his lips, and felt him smile.
Word Count: 2809
Note: This section concludes what was meant to be my 2014 Holiday Story (just three months late whoo!)! Many thanks to my awesome friends and family that read and gave feedback during the ridiculous amount of time it took to get this thing done. Dedicated with love to Asha and Jennie, as well as any other Rykat shippers. <3 I love this piece for a lot of reasons, and while I'm sure the story as a whole could use some (read: lots of) editing, it's a fun little read for what it is.
They snacked on the fruit she'd packed as they followed a well-worn path away from the river and deep into the trees, their surroundings immediately lost to shadow. Odd, firefly-like insects buzzed in lazy trails around them, flashing shades of green and blue and yellow like tiny flickering lights. After a while she realized she couldn't hear the waterfall at all - or much of anything, really, as the entire area seemed silent save for the insects. Curious, she paused in the middle of the train and looked up at the trees, searching for any brightly-colored plumage or indication of movement, but save for the thinner branches moving in the gentle breeze there was nothing. Ryder, who had skirted around her and was now several feet up the path, paused and looked back at her.
"Something wrong?" he asked.
"I don't know," she replied honestly. "Where is everybody?"
He looked around as if noticing the quiet for the first time, and the corners of his mouth quirked into a faint smile.
"Come on," he said. "We're close, now."
"Just so you know," she said as she returned to his side, matching his casual pace along the path and shooting him a smug grin, "this better be a pretty amazing surprise for everything you've dragged me through."
"It's amazing," he assured, waving a hovering cloud of green glow-flies away from his face. The tiny motes of light dispersed, winked several times, then vanished into the foliage. As Katrina followed their movement she saw angular shapes in the shadows, the stark lines of shaped stone covered in the angular carvings of the Fel'danai tongue.
"People lived here?" she asked.
"No. These are sacred grounds. We only came here to worship."
"We?" She thought back to the names across the walls of the tiny hut. "Your mother came here?"
"Among others."
"So you're... taking me to a ritual garden?" He smiled at this, not meeting her eyes, and Katrina felt a giddy excitement bubble in her chest, the spastic joy that her parents always found so amusing when she was a child. "Really?"
"It would be awfully shitty of me to lie to you about it now."
"That's amazing!" she squealed, clasping her hands together and bouncing on her toes. "What kind is it? A topiary? Or is it one of the stone gardens?" She tapped her hands against her mouth, thinking, and would have tripped over an exposed root in the path if he hadn't taken her arm and pulled her gently toward him and around it. "Nobody's ever documented a tesairen garden before..." She looked up at him, managing her most hopeful expression. "Do you think..."
When he was quiet a moment, obviously thinking about it, she felt her heart sink. Of course he wouldn't say yes. He'd been opposed to her collecting information about the unknown species of the forest since the moment she'd started living in Eli's house - her professional silence, he said, was a trade for her continued protection in a country that was still nowhere near safe for her. It was heartbreaking, really - in six months she'd catalogued more about the rare or thought-to-be-extinct flowers of Rion Fell than had been seen in the last fifty years, almost entirely due to her privileged access to the rainforest and grounds that were normally fiercely protected by the clans. What she knew, and what she'd learned, could easily kickstart her career and get her back on course completing a dissertation, now that she had several possibilities for a new topic to pursue.
"You can gather whatever data you want," he finally told her. "We'll talk about the terms after."
"Really?"
"I don't think I could say to you. Not this time, at least."
"Huh? Why?"
"And keep in mind that these won't be like the gardens you've seen," he mentioned cautiously. They were passing almost fully intact ritual sites now - small stone storage huts, tiny courtyards, altar slabs similar to ones she'd been shown closer to Azinsi. "These are clan grounds, for clan ritual."
"Okay, sure, but why did you say that?"
"Say what?"
"The whole 'not this time' thing. Why did..." She trailed as they turned a long corner around a stand of trees and a magnificent shape rose in the darkness ahead of them. "Wow..." she breathed. "What... is that?"
The archway that spanned the wide path wasn't anything like the thin, precariously-balanced shapes she'd seen in some of the other ritual grounds. This one was a massive crescent of thick stone, several feet thick and at least fifteen feet above the ground at its peak, and despite the obvious age in the stone there was no indication that it had structurally deteriorated at all. The carvings were still fresh and crisp, gleaming in the light of the glowing red bugs that swarmed it. Stepping closer she reached out and touched the stone, pressed the tips of her fingers into the trenches of the glyphs, the insects parting around her hand.
"What does it say?"
"Ukai-Makina," he said. "The Gardens of Makina." Just as she was about to walk through the archway, he grabbed her wrist and hauled her back beside him, laughing. "Hold on," he told her, and fished a handful of what looked like wooden buttons out of his pocket. He dropped half of them into her hand - small discs about the size of a quarter, they were surprisingly heavy for their size and bore carefully painted glyphs on each side. "Nobody enters the gardens without an offering," he told her, and gestured to a stone dish on a small pedestal beside him, almost like a bird bath. There was nothing in it save a small pool of water and a pair of dead leaves. "Go for it."
"Do I have to... um..." She gestured at the bowl. "Say something?" He chuckled at this, tossing his tokens in - they clattered against the stone with a sound like windchimes, so sharp and clear it was almost painful.
"If you want to," he said, stepping back a few paces. "Up to you."
She paused, clutching the wooden pieces in her hands like a child would a precious treasure, the way she would bring home injured rabbits or wounded butterflies or the occasional perfect rose she found on her summer adventures. Her heart was pounding with anxious excitement, the coiled anticipation one might feel as a rollercoaster crests the top of the first hill, waiting for the ground to fall out beneath them. She felt, for some reason, that what she said now would be so terribly important, but she couldn't think of a single thing that felt right or proper. For all the magic she'd seen and strange occurrences she'd been a part of, she still couldn't bring herself to speak aloud to whatever spirits were listening, especially with the ease Rebekah did on a daily basis.
"Thank you," she said finally, releasing the tokens to the same chiming chorus against the stone, and brushed her hands against her shorts as she joined Ryder beneath the arch.
"All good?" he asked. She nodded, and he took her by the hand - not his usual tactic of clamping his fingers around her wrist, but actually holding her hand like a normal person would. She was so stunned by it she forgot to move when he started to walk away - it brought him to a halt, and he glanced back at her, confused. "Something wrong?"
"No... no, sorry, I'm fine," she said, and followed after him. She expected him to let her hand go but he held on, not tightly but with a comfort that seemed entirely uncharacteristic for him.
The path continued a short way before opening into a large patch of barren ground, about thirty feet across and almost perfectly circular. It was ringed with a low stone wall, broken only where the path entered it, the surface wrapped in thorny vines so thick the stone was barely visible beneath. Where the path from the waterfall was cast in shadow from the thick canopy, here the ring was in darkness so thick that the twinkling bugs were the only source of light save the gentle glow of Ryder's coin beneath his shirt. When he released her hand she felt a moment of claustrophobia, the darkness suddenly suffocating, and just as she was about to grab for him she felt his fingers brush her neck, hook in the strap of her camera. He must have felt her tremble because he paused, the unearthly glow surfacing in his eyes for the first time in months, and he cupped her face in his hands, rubbed his thumbs comfortingly across her cheeks.
"It's okay," he said quietly. "Trust me."
He lifted the camera away from her and she saw the screen light up as he walked away, heard the whir and beep as he flipped it to video mode and set it on the stone wall. The blinking red recording light looked like just another of the flies hovering around. She focused on it, giving it her undivided attention, anything to quell the racing of her heart and the near-childish panic that clawed at her insides.
"Just stand still," she heard him say, this time somewhere to her left. The clearing was almost silent but she still hadn't heard him move, and from the corner of her eye she saw a sudden flash of golden sparks. "It's a little startling at first."
Another cascade of sparks and the entire wall suddenly came to life beneath the twisted net of vines, a sheet of golden light swirling across the surface, chasing the structure from one end to the other and back again. It happened so quickly that she was momentarily flash-blinded, her eyes stinging from the burst of light, and as she rubbed at her face she heard the very distinct buzz of insects - not just the hum of one floating too close to her ears, but of thousands taking to the air. Peeking hesitantly from between her fingers, she gasped at the sight of thousands, if not tens of thousands of the tiny glow-bugs hovering above and around her - like a curtain of Christmas lights, they spun in thick lines around the branches of the trees that edged the clearing, floated lazily in the air like richly-colored clouds. Her fear of the dark turned abruptly to wonderment, and she reached up toward the nearest swarm, the magic of her talisman causing the tiny creatures to part like water around her.
"This is amazing," she breathed. "How did you..."
A rustling at her feet brought her attention to the ground, where she found what looked like snakes coiling across the ground all around her. Thinking her talisman had finally given up the ghost, she was about to make a run for it when she saw the thick thorns on the "snakes" - they weren't snakes at all but vines, or at the very least some sort of plant, moving like a living creature around her. It was the vines from the wall, she realized, the stone left entirely bare save her camera casually recording the entire scene.
"Are you doing this?" she asked Ryder. He was leaning against the wall near the camera, watching her with a soft smile, and shook his head at her question. "What? Then how -"
"Just stand still," he said. "You'll get it."
"But -"
"Trust me," he repeated.
She listened, standing perfectly still despite wanting to crouch and touch the writhing tendrils encircling her. Some of the thorns were the length of her fingers, so wickedly sharp they cut thin trenches in the packed earth, and as she watched one particular limb trace a path toward her she noticed that the thorns flexed forward and back - from standing up to laying flat against the thick body - like the feathers of a bird. And slowly, the limb rose off the ground, displaying a bulb larger than her fist at the end of it that reared back like the head of a snake, surrounded by a mane of overlapping thorns like the crooked teeth of a monster.
Then, with a soft, gentle sigh, the bulb split in several directions and the deep green-black shell peeled back to reveal a blood red core that glowed from within, like a flame wrapped inside a red glass shell. She couldn't help herself - she reached toward it and brushed her fingers against the silken surface, feeling the strange heat that radiated from it, and at her touch the pod unfurled in a dramatic spiral, erupting into a brilliant rose the size of her head that fluttered and hissed softly. The tightly curled petals at the inner heart of it were a blazing yellow, so bright it made her eyes sting, and each ring that twisted outward darkened until the rose was as black as the surrounding night. It leaned into her touch like a small animal craving affection, the long vine-like limb twisting in loops around her bare legs, the flattened thorns a ridged and cool contrast to the heat of the body.
"Look at you," she whispered, tilting her head up and back as the "serpent" slid along her torso and wrapped around the back of her neck, the rose "head" circling around to face her again. "Aren't you the most beautiful thing?" She cupped it in her hands, marveling at the resistance in the petals, how they felt more like skin than a flower, and suddenly...
Suddenly it occurred to her what she was looking at, what she was holding, and her breath seizing in her throat had nothing to do with how the vine momentarily squeezed around her neck before relaxing.
"Ryder?" she managed to squeak, her voice hitching painfully.
"Hmm?" He'd moved close to her, again without her noticing, and she felt him ease some of the coils from her torso. "They get a little cuddly sometimes," he said, chuckling. "They don't mind being moved, though, so long as you're..." He trailed off when he caught her eyes, and his expression became troubled. "What's wrong?"
"These... they're..." She took a deep breath and felt herself shudder, felt tears on her cheeks. "These are..."
"Adder's Roses, yes."
"I..." She stared up at him, willing him to understand, silently pleading with him to please not say they were just roses - the carvings in the hut that now seemed a world away could be just words, and the magics that still amazed her could be just "normal", and hell, she could be just a stupid human for all she cared, but she just wanted him to understand the importance of this, the significance, the enormity. "They're real," she finally managed, her voice little more than a restrained sob. He smiled at her - not a smirk, not a teasing grin, not a sneer tied to the silent questioning of her intelligence - and cupped his hand beneath the "chin" of the closest bloom. There were dozens of them, now, either rising up around them, coiling around their legs, or simply moving about the ground in a carpet of long, overlapping bodies. The fragrance of them was intoxicating.
"You seemed so certain of it, you know," he said, closing his eyes briefly as the rose caressed the side of his face. "You'd never seen them but you were so certain that they were like this." A long loop of vine squeezed around his arm, one of the thorns drawing a thin scratch before he gently removed it and set it back on the ground - it immediately encircled his leg like a creature annoyed at being rejected. "I wanted you to know that you were right."
She just stared at him, utterly speechless, caught somewhere between shock and joy and an absolute waterfall of tears, then threw her arms around him, nearly toppling him over the rose-snakes on the ground around him.
"Thank you," she sobbed, laughing and crying at the same time. "I can't believe you did this."
"What?" He pulled back a little so he could shoot her a quizzical look. "Why can't you believe it?"
"Because people don't do things like this for me."
"Things like what?"
"Nice things, Ryder."
"I've kept you alive for six months, doesn't that count?" he asked, teasing.
"You know what I mean."
"Mmm." He knotted his hands in the small of her back, keeping her close to him, and leaned over to brush his lips against her cheek. "Merry Christmas, then, Katrina Shan." She smiled through her tears, teased her hand through the unruly waves of his hair, and without thinking leaned up on her toes and kissed him.
"Merry Christmas, Ryder Athari," she whispered against his lips, and felt him smile.