most recent husband stepped forward, but he didn’t give a display of passion like the others. He wrapped his arm around her shoulder and walked toward the spring. His fingers toyed with the strings and ties that kept her armor on, slowly undoing them.
“Let’s get you cleaned up,” he said with a casual note she didn’t quite believe.
“You don’t want to proclaim your love for me and cause a scene? Everyone else has.” She tried to hide her smile as he looked down at her.
“I’ll make sure you know how much I missed you tonight when you’re on your back,” he whispered hotly in her ear. “After I’ve fed you a proper fucking meal since you’ve been on rations for months.”
She took her armor off slowly, letting Zayden and Bryn help. Luykas and Mat stripped fast to join them, half jumping in.
“How was it?” Mat asked as he waded through the water. “How was the campaign?”
“It was…” Mave was grinning as she thought about it. “We hit hard at night, taking the Elvasi by surprise every time. We partied after victories. We hunted for food when rations got short.” Repeating all of this to her males made it sound like the campaign was hard, but there was something so alive about it that made Mave miss it already. “We were unstoppable. The last fight was the hardest, though.”
“Tell us everything,” Zayden growled, coming closer. Soon, all four of her husbands were nearly on top of her, forming a semi-circle that kept her pinned to one side of the hot spring.
She launched into the story of the last fight of the campaign—the anticipation, the assault, the blood, the length of the battle. It had begun at the darkest point of a moonless night, raged past dawn into midday. By the end of the day, they were eating gryphon for dinner and had more steel than they could carry as spoils of war to bring home.
Her males listened with an attentiveness that reminded her of some of the children she had met. They took in every word, every small detail.
“We had to rotate people who could carry everything,” she finished, laughing. “We took all of their swords and daggers to be brought home and reforged into weapons we can use. The iron shortage was something Nevyn thought about the entire time we were gone. Every time space was freed up, we put more spoils into the carts. We had to dull the edges to keep the horses from accidentally hurting themselves, but I promise you, every Andinna here will have their own blade by the end of summer. If Gentrin can work that fast.”
“He has a number of Andinna and a couple of the Hornbuckles forging competently enough they can work alone. We’ve built a second smithy just for them to keep production up,” Luykas explained, smiling. “I’m sorry I missed it. I wish I could have gone.” He closed his eyes, and she could tell he imagined himself in those fields.
“You all had work to do here,” she reminded him with a smile. “Now, let me get cleaned, then we’ll go home, and you can tell me everything I’ve missed.”
They helped her with weeks of dust and dirt from the road, which had gotten into places Mave preferred it wouldn’t have. There was no judgment from her males. As a family of warriors, they all knew the reality of being on the road, roaming battle to battle with little time to attend to personal needs. Rinsing off in streams only went so far.
As they made their way down the trail to their home, Mave in a fresh pair of breeches and a soft silk wrap for a top, she was surprised to see Senri land in front of her, a smile on her mother’s face that lit up the world like the sun. She kept a hand over her stomach, where a noticeable baby bump stood out. She wore a simple dress, something Mave wasn’t used to seeing.
“You are not going to hide away the first day you get back!” Senri called out, laughing. “You are going to go into the village and get drunk.”
“Am I?” Mave laughed as she walked up to her mother and hugged her. They weren’t biologically related. Senri hadn’t carried Mave in her womb and brought her into the world, but she had done something equally important. She was the female who met Mave and gave her a home where she could just be. She gave