The Eclipsed Life of Luna Mischa novel · Chapter 30 of 32

Chapter 30: Over the Cove

I read it three times.

The gold letters were still a little tacky. I could smell the paint.

Behind me, Jago cleared his throat.

"The signwriter's coming back on Monday," he said. "He left the brush. If it's wrong, it comes off. Any name you like. Your own. None at all. I won't mind."

"You'll mind."

"I'll mind quietly. In the cellar. Where nobody can hear me."

I turned round.

He was leaning on the doorframe in his wrongly buttoned shirt, with the red wool still round his wrist.

He was trying very hard to look as if it didn't matter.

For twenty years I'd had another man's name.

It had come with the ring and the lake and the chair at the top table, and I'd never once been asked.

Tonight I was being asked.

"Leave it," I said.

He went still.

"It's my work," I said. "And it's my name, because I chose it. Leave it."

He smiled slowly.

Then he crossed the room in two strides and kissed me against my own new desk, with the harbour lights in the window behind me.

"Home," he said against my mouth. "Now. Before I forget how to walk."

We went up the hill hand in hand, with the red wool joining our wrists.

Below us, the last of the Midsummer fire glowed on the beach.

There were still wolves down there, and somebody was playing a fiddle very badly.

Somebody else was singing a northern song to it, worse.

Every cottage we passed had its windows open for the warm night.

Somebody called down from one of them, "Night, Alpha! Night, Mischa!"

A dozen voices answered up and down the street. "Night! Night!"

"They're all watching," I said.

"They've been watching since you drove down the hill in a biscuit tin."

At the blue door he picked me up.

"Jago."

"It's tradition."

"Whose?"

"Mine. From tonight."

He carried me over the step and kicked the door shut behind us.

The kitchen was dark and smelled of the pasty his aunt had left on the table under a tea towel.

There was a note on it in her big round writing.

For the morning. I'm at my own house, so don't come and get me.

I laughed into his shoulder.

He carried me up the narrow stairs, ducking his head at the turn, and set me down under the sloping ceiling.

The moon was full now. It filled the little square window and lit the whole bed silver.

The jam jar of sea pinks was gone.

In its place on the sill stood a bottle of Burnt Quay with one of the crooked labels.

He stood in front of me in the moonlight.

"You're my mate," he said, as if he'd only just heard it.

"I am."

"My mate. Bonded. In front of everyone."

"With wool," I said.

"With wool." He held up our wrists. "Do we cut it?"

"The old Luna said keep it."

"She did. She'll check."

He started to unknot it, very carefully, with his big fingers, the way he'd turned the sticky note over in the cellar office.

It took him a long time. I didn't help.

When it came free he laid the loop of red wool on the windowsill beside the bottle.

Then he looked at me, and his eyes went gold.

"I've waited nine years to say this to somebody," he said. "And then I stopped thinking I'd ever say it at all."

"Say it."

"I love you, Mischa."

Nobody had said it to me in a long time.

Nobody had ever said it as if the words were brand new.

"I love you," I said. "I think I have since you told me the spider's name."

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