He did not tell her that he had met their daughter in the desert, wandering beneath the same ribbon of starlight as himself; Acton was not sure he intended to. He wanted something of Apolonia to keep for himself, to hold in his heart like a secret, only the bright, good kind.
But oh, they laughed the same way, his girls with their bright eyes and their golden skin and their twin grips on his heart. The ache he felt at hearing the similarity, like a concentric ring of ripples on a lake, or the second tolling of the same bell, was not a kind of pain he’d felt before. The buckskin did not want to wonder what it meant.
So he pushed it away with the same skill he’d always had, for putting off the kind of thoughts that went below the surface and waited somewhere in the dark heart of him. Much easier, much better, to walk along with her, shoulder and hip and tail and muzzle all touching and un-touching like they are one thing made of two parts.
Acton reveled like a housecat in the warmth of it all.
One ear flicked sideways to catch her words, followed quickly with a cat’s self-satisfied grin. “I’m a reformed man, Bexley,” he said, even as the amber-eyed glance he shot her promised wicked things. “In fact it’s a good thing you live here and not in Denocte. You’d be bored to pieces of me.”
There was a laugh in his words, but as he thought back over his recent months in the smoke-and-starlight of the Night Court (rebuilding, discovering, helping ward off oversize thunder-turkeys with a queen and a god) he couldn’t help but think it might be true.
The moth don't care if the flame burns low
'Cause moth believes in an afterglow
@
