Ember and Iron

The bell on the end of my braid rang once when she shifted her weight. A small sound, almost nothing. Tin and copper, no bigger than a thumbnail, something a tinker's apprentice would've tossed in the scrap pile. I've had it forty years. It's the only jewelry I've never taken off.

"Again," Selmaria said.

I rang it again, tilting my head so the braid swung. She laughed, that low bubbling thing gnomes do, like water finding a new crack in stone. Her fingers walked up the links of the braid, past the gold clasp at the center, up to the bell. She pinched it between thumb and forefinger and gave it a proper shake.

"You're a walking music box," she said. "A very large, very hairy music box."

"Hairy's a strong word."

"It's not a strong enough word."

Fair. I'd bathed before coming up, but the fire in the hearth pulled sweat out of a man whether he wanted it or not. The room was small and hot and smelled of beeswax and pine resin and the lavender oil she'd rubbed into her wrists. I could smell that from where I sat, which was everywhere, since she was in my lap.

My lap. Where she'd landed about an hour ago and hadn't left.

She'd come up the stairs with a book tucked under one arm and a complaint about the innkeeper's son, who'd tried to charge her double for a room on account of her being, in his words, *one of the small folk*. She'd paid him in copper, one coin at a time, and made him count it. Then she'd come up here and sat down on the edge of my chair like it was a bench at a crossroads and I was a stranger she felt like talking to.

Except I wasn't a stranger. And she hadn't sat on the edge.

She'd climbed into my lap. Just like that. Turned, gathered her robe, and settled across my thighs like a cat finding the exact center of a sunbeam. One arm went around my neck, casual as anything. The book went on the floor. She hadn't picked it up since.

I'm not a small man. Two hundred and forty pounds on a light day, and most of it's shoulders. A gnome woman in my lap should look swallowed. She doesn't. She looks like she's claimed territory.

Her legs are gathered across my right thigh, ankles crossed, one bare foot peeking out from under the hem of her robe. White silk, red embroidery, gold thread at the cuffs. A priestess's robe, cut for ceremony, and she's wearing it to sit in a dwarf's lap in a rented room while the fire pops and the candles gutter down to stubs.

The robe has slipped. It's been slipping since she sat down. The left shoulder's bare now, all the way down to the crook of her elbow, and the skin there is dark and smooth and catches the firelight like the inside of a walnut shell. I've been trying not to look at it. I've been failing for about forty minutes.

"You're staring," she said.

"I'm admiring."

"You're staring while calling it admiring. That's a dwarf trick."

"It's an honest trick."

She tilted her head. The gold ornaments in her hair caught the light, little crescent moons and stars pinned into an updo that had started the evening elegant and was now doing something closer to a landslide. Black hair, thick, with threads of silver at the temples she doesn't bother to hide. She's older than she looks. Gnomes always are. I'd learned that the hard way and the good way, both, in the years since I met her.

"Honest," she repeated, like she was testing the word for cracks.

"Honest."

"Then tell me honestly what you're thinking."

I thought about lying. I'm good at it. Forty years of soldiering teaches a man to lie fast and clean. But she had her hand on the back of my neck, fingers in the short hair there, and her thumb was moving in slow circles against the base of my skull, and lying felt like a lot of work for no reward.

"I'm thinking," I said, "that you should've let me break the innkeeper's son's nose."

She laughed again. "That's what you're thinking."

"That's part of it."

"And the rest?"

The fire cracked. A log shifted and sent up a spray of sparks that died before they hit the fur blanket on the floor. I'd bought that blanket off a trapper three towns back. Bear fur, thick as my thumb, and she'd pulled it off the bed and spread it in front of the hearth because she said the floorboards were cold. Now she was in my lap and the blanket was empty and the fire was doing all the work.

"The rest," I said, "is that I'm trying to figure out how you got up here without me hearing you."

"I'm quiet."

"You're not quiet. You're small. There's a difference."

She grinned. It's a good grin. Wide and crooked and it uses her whole face, which is saying something, because her face has a lot of surface area to use. Big eyes, dark as wet slate, with laugh lines at the corners that I put there. I'd like to think I put them there. Some of them, anyway.

"Maybe I wanted to surprise you," she said.

"You did."

"Good."

She shifted. Just a little, settling deeper into my arms, and my hands, which had been resting on the arm of the chair, moved without asking me first. One went to her back. The other went under her knees, cradling the bend of them, and she weighed nothing. Maybe sixty pounds soaking wet. I could carry her up a mountain and not breathe hard.

She noticed. Of course she noticed. Her eyes went to my hand on her knees, then back to my face, and something moved behind her expression that I couldn't name and didn't try to.

"There he is," she said.

"Who?"

"The dwarf who picks me up without asking."

"You climbed into my lap without asking."

"Fair."

She didn't move away. She moved closer, if that was possible, her shoulder tucking under my arm, her head finding the shelf of my collarbone like it had been carved for her. The robe slipped another inch. I could see the top of her spine, the small knob of bone at the base of her neck, the gold chain she wore that disappeared into the folds of silk.

"You're warm," she said against my chest.

"I'm a furnace. Always have been."

"I know."

She'd known for six years. Six years of roads and taverns and one bad winter in a mountain pass where we'd shared a bedroll and nothing else, because she'd been sick and I'd been scared and neither of us said a word about it after. Six years of her finding me in whatever town I'd drifted to, or me finding her, or both of us finding each other in places neither of us planned to be.

The bell rang again. She'd found it with her fingers, half-asleep already, playing with it like a child with a toy.

"Sing me something," she murmured.

"I don't sing."

"You hum."

"I hum badly."

"Hum badly, then."

So I did. Some old marching song from the northern holds, no words, just the tune. She breathed against my chest, slow and even, and the fire burned down, and the candles guttered, and the room got smaller and warmer and ours.

And I thought, the way I always thought when she was in my arms, that this was the part I'd remember. Not the battles. Not the roads. This. A gnome priestess asleep in my lap in a rented room, one shoulder bare, a bell ringing softly every time she breathed.

Then she said, without opening her eyes, "I have to leave in the morning."

The humming stopped.

"Where to?"

"South. The temple at Greymouth. They've summoned me."

"For how long?"

She didn't answer. That was an answer.

I looked at the fire. It had burned down to coals, red and soft, and the room was darker than it had been. My hand was still under her knees. Her fingers were still on the bell.

"How long, Sel?"

"Long enough," she said, "that you shouldn't wait."