“Thank you for everything,” said Drago as they stood again in front of the portal.

“You’re welcome,” responded Aidan as they stepped through, “but I think this once is enough.” And then the portal closed, leaving Flame and Aidan standing in their own living room. Flame Song dropped onto the couch in sudden exhaustion. Aidan plopped on a cushion by her feet and leaned his head on her knee.

“It’s over,” he said.

“Thank heaven,” responded Flame. “I can hardly believe it’s only been a few weeks. It feels like years since we left.”

“So much had happened,” said Aidan. “And though I might do it over if I had the choice to make again, there’s a few things I could do without.”

“Like…?” asked Flame.

He sighed. “Like, well… when your opposite caught me, she…” he hesitated, wanting to tell her and yet not wanting to. “I… I don’t know how to say this....”

“Knowing what I know about her I can guess. Your double said she would use you like a new toy, and try to break you like one too. But you didn’t break did you?”

“No. She managed to bend me a bit though. I…” he hesitated again. He felt she deserved to know exactly what had happened, but he somehow couldn’t find the words.

She stroked his hair gently, reassuringly, and said softly, “It’s all right. Whatever it is, it’s all right.”

Gradually the story came out. How she had seduced him, used his hunger against him. When he finished he said, “There’s been a lot of wrong done and a lot of forgiveness asked lately, but I need to ask again, can you ever forgive me?”

She continued to stroke his hair as she answered, “If you can forgive me.”

“Of course,” he said softly. Then he told her the rest of the story, about his resolve and how he had tested it in part while locked up with Celia and his twin. He told her too about the conversations they’d had, and how he and his twin and come to be friends of a sort. She in turn told her story.

“So that’s what he meant,” said Aidan when she reached the point where his double had attacked her and Drago. “You know I never did get my daggers back.”

She smiled and continued, telling about the fire and how she’d become sick and been delayed on her way to rescue him, and she told him the whole story of what had passed between her and the other Aidan, though it was hard going and she stopped often. At last she concluded, “I found that somehow I had come to love him.” She looked down at her husband whose hair she was still stroking. “Not the same way I love you, not nearly, but I do still love him. Maybe I’ve been human too long, that I can love twice. I’ve told you before that a firecat can give her heart but once. And yet I do love you both.”

Aidan sighed and lifted his head. “I don’t know. It still hurts a little bit, thinking of you with him… but I can’t love you any less because of it.”

“I am sorry. And you are first in my heart, now and always, no matter what.”

“Then nothing else matters,” he said.

There was a long comfortable silence. Both of them just sat there enjoying the peacefulness of the moment. They had reaffirmed their love, and though both might be scarred, both would be able to find healing in each other.

“This whole thing sounds like some wild bard’s tale,” said Flame after a while, “but I can’t deicide if it’s a comedy, a tragedy, or a romance.”

“If it’s a romance, it’s the strangest one I ever heard of. My vote would be for comedy. With all of us chasing each other back and forth, mistaking each other every which way, and a dozen different tricks and surprises. And besides, it ended with all of us still alive. In a proper tragedy everyone is dead at the end.”

Flame Song laughed. “True.”

Aidan sighed again and said, “It really does feel like it’s been forever. I feel like I’m a different person now than the person who was sitting here when that portal interrupted us.”

Flame Song nodded. “Yes, I know what you mean.”

Aidan turned so that he was kneeling in front of her, facing her, and picked up her hand. He kissed it gently, first on the back and then on the palm, and said, “Perhaps we could finish what we were doing when we were so rudely interrupted?”

Flame had closed her eyes at his touch. He could hear her heart begin to beat faster and she answered, “Yes. Yes I think we could.” And when Aidan’s slow and gentle kisses worked their way up her arm, reached the place where the blood rushed close under the soft skin of her neck, and he found the two little marks there that he had not made he hesitated only a moment before he kissed her there too.