It occurs to me that I have forgotten to mention that Haplo had been asking those very questions of us that day.
“Grundle, you are mean-spirited and ungrateful!” Alake cried, and burst into tears.
I hadn’t meant to make her cry. I felt about as low as a dragon-snake’s belly. Going over to her, I patted her hand.
“I’m sorry,” I said awkwardly.
“I asked him why he wanted to know such things,” Alake continued, between sobs, “and he said that we should always be prepared for the worst and though this new homeland might look like a perfect place, it might be dangerous . . .” She stopped to wipe her nose.
I said I understood, which I did. What Haplo said made sense. What he said always made sense. And that made this nagging, rotten feeling of distrust and suspicion inside me all the harder to bear. I apologized again, and teased Alake until she cheered up and dried her eyes.
But dwarves are always truthful, and I couldn’t help but tell her, “The only reason I said those things is that . . . well . . . it’s just that . . . Haplo doesn’t love you, Alake.”
I cringed, waiting for another storm. To my surprise, however, Alake was quite calm. She even smiled, sadly, but it was a smile.
“Oh, I know that, Grundle. How could I expect him to love me? He must have thousands of women longing for him.”
I thought I should encourage this line of thinking.
“Yes, and maybe he’s got a wife somewhere—”
“He doesn’t,” Alake said quickly, too quickly. She looked down at her hands. “I asked him. He said he’d never found the right one, yet. I’d love to be the right one for him, Grundle. But I know I’m not worthy now. Perhaps someday I will be, if I keep trying.”
She looked up at me, her eyes shining with her tears, and she was so lovely and seemed older and more mature than I’d ever known her and she glowed with a kind of inner light.
I said, then and there, that if love could do that for her then it must not be bad, no matter what happened. Besides, maybe when we reach home, Haplo will leave, go back to wherever it is he came from. After all, what could he possibly want with us? But I kept this thought to myself.
We hugged each other and had a good cry and I didn’t say anything else awful about Haplo. Devon heard us and came in and Alake broke down and told him and he said he thought love was the most wonderful, beautiful thing in the whole world and we talked about Sabia and then they both made me confess that I wasn’t a stranger to love myself and I broke down and told them about Hartmut and we all laughed and all cried and couldn’t wait to get home.
Which made what happened when we got there all the more terrible.
I’ve been putting off writing this. I wasn’t certain I could do it, for one thing. It makes me so terribly sad. But I’ve told everything and I can’t very well go on with this story and leave out the most important part.
Being saved from the dragons and returning safely to our homelands would constitute a happy ending in most tavern tales I’ve heard. But the ending wasn’t happy. And I have a feeling it isn’t the end, yet, either.
The moment our submersible left the dragon-snakes’ lair, we were besieged by—what else—a bunch of pesky dolphins. They wanted to know everything, all about what had happened, how we’d escaped. We’d barely told them before they swam off, eager to be the first to spread the news. There never was a more gossip-loving fish.
At least our parents would hear the good news and have time to recover from their initial shock at learning we were still alive and well. We started arguing among ourselves, trying to decide which of us got to go home first, but that was soon settled. The dolphins returned with a message saying that we were to meet our parents together on Elmas, the elven seamoon.