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Kit learned early that love was a thing you do. That words can carry lies, deception and untruths. Actions are where truth lies. Love is a thing you show by actions.
You carried sacks. You fixed broken hinges. You stood still while Jade corrected your footwork for the third time in as many minutes, her hand firm at your elbow, her brow furrowing the constellation of stars you wished you could trace under the light of night.
“Again,” Jade says.
Kit resets her stance, sweat cooling at the back of her neck. The barn smelled like dust and hay and late summer, and Jade’s blade flashes in the sunlight with every parry.
“You’re dropping your shoulder,” Jade says, already moving.
“I am not,” Kit retorts, denying what she knows must be true if Jade says it.
Jade disarms her in three neat motions, her sword hitting the packed dirt with a soft thud. Kit stares at it for only a single, defeated beat before taking in the look of Jade’s wide, proud grin, crooked front tooth and all.
“Eventually,” Jade says, breathless and pleased, “you’ll learn.”
Kit wipes her face with her sleeve. “Eventually you’ll stop enjoying this.” Secretly, she never wanted Jade to stop enjoying this. She wanted to be the cause of every such smile, of every such pant bead of sweat and…
Jade tilts her head, considering. “No,” she said gently. “I don’t think I will.”
That was how it always was between them. Easy. Warm. Dangerous in its simplicity.
They didn’t talk about the future until the night the night before it arrived.
It was late. Stars lighting up the dark, late summer sky. The world was layered with a blanket of quiet—the kind that presses in close, as if waiting for the last whispered secret.
“I’m leaving,” Kit says at last, turned away from her best friend so as not to see the moment of her betrayal painted across her visage.
For a moment, the quiet falls again and Kit isn’t sure if Jade had heard her. But Jade is prone to stew. To sit with an emotion, to hone it hard against stone until it’s sharp and able to cut deep. To then hold it back from Kit, to leave her unsure of how they stand. Finally, Jade responds in an almost monotone voice. “For how long?”
“Long enough.” Kit swallows hard, lump lodging painfully in her throat. “I want to come back with something. Enough to ask. Properly.”
Jade turns then, sharp and bright. “You don’t need—”
“I know,” Kit says quickly. “I know. But I need to.”
Jade studies her face like she was memorizing it against her impending loss. Finally, she nodded. “As you wish.”
Kit kisses her then, soft and sure, and carried that kiss with her across miles of road and weeks of sea.
***
“You didn’t tell me this was a KISSING story! Gross!” The young voice groans and mimes throwing up.
“There’s plenty of swashbuckling and gore to go with the kissing, don’t worry,” interrupts a new voice, the figure standing propped against the door jamb. “That is, of course, if our dear narrator were to tell the story correctly. I do believe she might be misleading you a bit.”
Caught in her small, minuscule, totally in significant white lie, the narrator rolls her eyes at her wife and continues the story
***
The ship went down in a storm that didn’t care about promises.
Jade’s last thoughts as the water churning around her started to invade her lungs were, absurdly, “Kit is going to kill me for this”.
***
“Wait!” The child’s voice interrupts again. “I thought it was Kit who left, not Jade!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the narrator scoffs. “I’ve been telling you the truth of the story. The story of Jade the stable-hand and Kit the merchants daughter!”
The young child narrows their eyes, realizing the subterfuge, but allows the narrator to continue.
***
Jade does not remember dying.
She remembers waking in pain, over and over again, in places that smelled of stone and rot and the wrong type of magic. Not the smell of freshly plucked flowers or hot cross buns that she associates with the warmth of Elora’s magic, but something bitter, of fruit left too long to sit in the hot sun. Jade learns how much a person could endure before their thoughts became small, sharp things. She learns how hope could be folded down to almost nothing and still survive.
Meanwhile, back in the land of Tir Asleen, Kit has learned of the sinking of her to-be lover’s ship. Despondent and caring no longer for a future she cannot imagine to exist, Kit loses track of who she is meant to be. Forgets to run away when she is promised to wed Prince Graydon Hasturdink.
By the time the Crone has kidnapped her in a plot to take over all of both Tir Asleen and Galladorn, Kit’s world has narrowed to breath and heartbeat and that last stubborn ounce of a refusal to give in.
“You’re very hard to kill,” the Crone mutters as they stand above the Cliffs of Insanity.
Kit smiles weakly, urging a bitter resentment into every spoken word. “I’ve been told.”
The Cliffs rise out of the sea like a challenge. A precipice at the edge of the world. The Shattered Sea beyond, stretching out into the barren nothingness of the world.
Wind tears at Kit’s sullied would-be wedding dress, salt stinging her eyes. For they have not felt salt since the night Jade left her and she hid away her tears into a pillow made of straw.
Standing there, at the brink of her death though, Kit’s mind returns to where she’d vowed to never return. Of steady, calloused hands. So sure and strong. Of dust rising and settling on slick, freckled muscles. Of sunlight reflecting off honey-colored eyes.
She does not think of weddings.
She does not think of princes.
She does not think of kingdoms she never wanted responsibility for.
The Crone sits her down and offers her a cup, gnarled fingers shaking with anticipation. A slip in the glamor she’s coated herself in—the rest of her body carrying the facade of a girl her own age.
Kit takes the cup. How easy would it be to just drink? To have it all be over?
A shadow moves behind the Crone.
Black-clad. Masked. Light on their feet in a way that makes Kit’s pulse jump.
Steel rings.
The fight is fast and brutal and oddly graceful. Kit watches through a fog, as if her mind can’t quite comprehend what it is that she’s watching. Something both vital and new, yet familiar. With deft, practiced parries, the stranger drives the Crone back, clever with their footing. Confident.
Finally, the Crone falls. Silence coats the cliffs, the wind itself even falling quiet.
Kit grabs the Crone’s fallen sword before any of the Crone’s lackies could descend and stop her. Though it had been years now, Kit’s hands gripped the hilt like a memory.
The stranger turns and they circle one another.
“A princess like you holds a sword with more familiarity than I would expect,” the stranger says.
Kit snorts. “A pirate like you holds it worse. You won’t take me. I’ve been kidnapped once, but never again.”
“As y—” the masked stranger’s words are cut off as Kit lunges forward. Her mind fights for survival, but her body seems to be fighting a different battle, not as if it’s fighting for its life, but rather to recapture a memory. To find its way back home.
The stranger seems to be doing the same. They grin.
A grin that hits Kit like a blade between the ribs.
She lunges. Desperate. Reckless. Their swords tangle, but Kit wrenches her own blade free first. She catches the stranger off guard easily. Perhaps too easily. She holds the weapon at the stranger’s throat, heart pounding a familiar drum beat.
“Don’t move,” Kit says, voice shaking, a betrayal of her own hopes. Fears.
The stranger freezes. Slowly, deliberately, they lift their hands.
Then they reach up and pull the mask away.
It was true. Like a memory—a ghost. Jade. Her hair wind-tangled, honey brown eyes shining bright. Impossibly…alive.
Kit’s knees almost gave out.
“You—” Kit sputters. Failed. “They said—”
“I know,” Jade says softly. “I came back too late to correct them.”
Kit laughs, a broken sound. She drops her sword, letting it hit the packed dirt with a thud. With trembling hands, she steps forward and cups Jade’s face as if it might disappear if she doesn’t.
“You’re real,” Kit said.
Jade smiles. That same bright smile, that same crooked front tooth. “As you wish.”
They kiss then. Kiss like the world has narrowed down into a single moment. As if the insanity of the cliffs is the only true thing to exist.
Later—much later—when the adrenaline has faded and the ache has settled in, Kit rests her forehead against Jade’s shoulder.
“There’s a prince,” Kit says quietly.
Jade stills. “I know.”
“I didn’t want him. Didn’t even really say yes,” Kit ads. “I just… stopped believing you were coming back.”
Jade kisses her temple. “I’m here now.”
That was enough.
***
Somewhere far away, a voice clears their throat and says something about bedtime, about saving the rest for tomorrow, about Pits of Despair and all the terrible things still to come.
But that is still the first act of their story. Because now, in the third, Kit has Jade’s hand in hers.
And really, that’s the ending that matters.