By the time Leopold awoke the next morning, they were both encrusted with dew. Winter had gradually given way to the first tremulous feelers of spring, and this was one of the warmer mornings of the last week. Of course it helped that they were mostly out of the mountains. When he stirred, Willow allowed herself to glance westward toward the blue crests. Would she know if something came over those mountains and headed straight for them?

“You didn’t sleep?” Leopold asked. Willow shook her head and rose to a sit. She started picking through the pack of their prepared rations.

“I could get us something—”

“I’d rather not,” she said, unable to shake the memory of the magical creatures in Asche. Those same magical creatures Leopold had been keeping her essence stores topped-up with.

“Bad thoughts,” he asked.

“Yeah, I guess,” Willow said, then turned to him. “I’ve been thinking about what you said while I was sick. After I saw the Watcher.”

“When? While you were catatonic?”

Willow nodded. “Some of it came back to me, lodged itself in my brain probably. About that house in the woods that you wanted so much.”

“We don’t have to—”

“No, I do,” she said, and smiled. “I want to. We’ve earned it, don’t you think?”

Leopold seemed cautious as he agreed.

“I think so. But what about the pneumavores? What about the Watcher?”

“We’ve done all we can for now for the cities. They’ll either evacuate the towns, or they won’t. We can’t shoulder the weight of the world anymore. Eventually they’re going to have to save themselves..”

Leopold nodded. “You aren’t a queen anymore.”

“I never was, not really,” she said. “A symbol more than anything. To the magical creatures, of someone who could save them. To Andrew, of power. To Corinth as well. I’ve been the threat and the savior to so many people. I just want to disappear.”

He shuffled closer and wrapped his arm around her waist.

“We can do that.”

🜛

Willow didn’t have any trouble trading a dozen of her permanent magelights in Bridgewater for the supplies they’d need to homestead. A few iron tool-tips that they’d shaft later, provisions until they could set up something for food. Seeds, at Leopold’s insistence. And a blank book with a clasped wood-and-leather cover. Leopold looked at her strangely when she bought it and a dozen pens as well as ink, but he didn’t say anything.

She promised her parents that they’d visit often and only felt a little bad at the lie. They’d already given her up for dead once, how much more could it hurt a second time? With a small handcart they rolled the supplies down the main road until they were far enough away from the small town, and then Willow opened a portal to the wilderness.

The flatland wilderness was so much more familiar to her than the mountainous forests of Asche, and Leopold had grown up in the vicinity too. They weren’t more than ten miles from the borders of the town, but the sudden transport made it seem like they’d gone thousands of miles. For all the luck that anyone would have in finding them in here, they might as well have.

Leopold dropped the handle of the handcart and took a deep breath. The forest was muted in a way the plains never were. The smell of decaying oak leaves filled the air. Water drops fell from the denuded branches above.

It was perfect.

“Well, how do we do this? You were the woodsman, not me.”

Willow smiled and walked over to a tree, peering about with her second sight. A few of the trees had sprites hidden among the branches, sleeping with the seasons, but Willow found a large-enough patch to hold their homestead easily. She knocked on a trunk and, with barely a thought, severed it clean at the ground and set it down softly in the loam.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“We didn’t really do it like this near Durum,” Willow said. “Obviously. But we don’t need to go at it with axes if we’re like this.”

“Just think of the efficiency boost,” Leopold joked as he ran a hand down the fallen oak. Where his hand passed, the bark and perpendicular branches sheared off as if they’d just met an extremely aggressive plane. In a couple of minutes the tree was entirely bare.

“I never saw this next part. They always took care of it in the sawmill, but…” Willow said, and concentrated. A dozen psychokinetic hands hooked into the tree in a straight line and pried at the same instant. A tremendous crack echoed off the trees as the enormous log split in half, the two pieces still connected by a web of wood fibers.

“Damn, I don’t know how they got the cuts so clean,” she said.

“With tools,” Leopold said. He stripped a branch instantly and shoved it into a chisel toolhead, then threw it to Willow.

“Let’s get cutting, woodsman.”

🜛

They’d spent many, many nights camping out under the stars since they’d been reunited, but there was something incredibly decadent about sleeping with a roof over their heads. Especially when it was one they’d built themselves.

It took three days to finish the one-room cabin, and most of that time was spent trying to figure out the right balance of magic and manual labor to both speed up the process and not mangle it through too much power. The third night, they slept on the bare earth of the cabin floor together, a roof of split shingles over their heads.

Everything else felt like minor details. They needed a fireplace, and Willow quickly made work of a protruding boulder to dry-fit a hearth together at one end of the cabin. Chopping wood, a task she knew took up many hours of her compatriots’ time back in Bridgewater, took barely any for her at all. The longest part of it was choosing a suitable tree and rechecking it for hibernating sprites.

Then it was on to furnishings. Willow carved a small desk and chair, Leopold constructed a bed to size for the sheets they’d purchased in town. The mattress was a canvas bag stuffed with wool, which beat lying on the ground. Their fourth night they slept in a bed for the first time that wasn’t too small for the both of them. They made love.

The fifth day, Willow started on her book. Leopold tried to look, but only once. Willow shut the cover the moment she sensed him approach and turned to look at him.

“I just wondered what you were writing.”

“It’s for you,” she said. “I don’t want you to see it until its finished.”

“A story?”

“Of sorts,” Willow said and smiled. “A bit about myself, a bit about you.”

“I’m excited,” he said, then turned to continue digging a trench to reroute a nearby stream closer to their house.

Willow’s smile broke and she turned to her book once again.

🜛

Winter bled away into spring and soon enough birdsong filled the air. The little cabin’s door wouldn’t close properly, the fireplace made it drafty, but it was their home. For the first time they had a place all to their own, and Willow wanted to keep it. If everyone else got to be happy like this, why not her? Why not them?

That’s when the injustice of it all crashed down on her. That she hadn’t asked for any of this—it had been thrust upon her. She hadn’t asked to be disabled by Andrew’s insane disease, she hadn’t asked to be taken in by Carl. The Celestial Kingdom, all of it. She’d been running for so long from fire to fire that she’d never stopped and just lived. It was a cruel irony that she was trying to save everyone else’s lives but her own.

Leopold knew something was wrong. When he thought she wasn’t looking, he’d get this look on his face. Like he was worried about her. When she went off into the trees in search of food, he watched her for too long, as if trying to memorize the path she’d taken. He was afraid she was going to leave him.

It was hard to push down the rage, but she tried her best. She tried to be happy, tried to smile and laugh and love and all the things she deserved. But there was so much blame built up inside her, so much anger, that she knew she didn’t want to leave. She wanted to stay here in this cabin with Leopold just to spite the world that had robbed her.

So they stayed. Spring grew hotter and morphed into summer. Leaves unfurled from the trees above to shade their tiny home, and they lived halcyon days. Some they spent fishing. It was obvious to Willow how hard Leopold was trying to hold back plucking the fish that spurned his bait straight out of the water and onto the bank. But he kept at it until one unlucky specimen bit the hook, and they had trout for dinner that night. There weren’t very many magical creatures about besides the sprites, but it wasn’t as if Willow was using magic anymore.

Neither of them were.

They hung up the tools they’d used to shape the house and fashioned new ones to live in it. A shovel was cleaned and molded to make a frying pan, an auger smoothed into a spatula. The one room was enough for them, the time for building was finished. Now was the time to live their lives together.

🜛

Leopold was trying his hand at building a weir in the rerouted river, but so far all he’d managed to do was get muddy and wet. Willow watched him until he was spitting mad at the troublesome staves and then finally waded in to help him. The current was stronger than she’d expected and she almost lost her footing before Leopold grabbed her.

Then, the stave he’d been holding onto gave way and they both splashed into the river. They surfaced and Willow cackled with laughter, Leopold reached for her and pulled them both to the muddy bank. They laughed until it hurt to breathe, then laid out in the sun, hand in hand.

And that’s when Willow realized she had become happy. That’s when she knew it was time to take the finished book from its hiding place.