If her journals burned to ash, they would look the way her mind feels, and be about as useful. The magic is there, but however she tries, she cannot piece together the dust of her memories.

So when glassy shards come to the surface at last, smudged and unclear and shattered into fragments, she polishes them mirror-bright and treasures them more than diamonds.

It's cool in the shadow of the low cave, though the wind is hot and humid. Sarah leans forward, listening, but she can't hear anything. The trick at the river hopefully threw off any pursuit.

"I didn't need your help," a disgruntled voice drifts from behind.

She turns to look at him. His blood stains her hands and clothes, and if he were mortal he'd be dead already instead of glaring at her. "Of course you didn't, Kaim," she agrees dryly. "They were only going to...what was it...chop the devil into little pieces and burn it. That wouldn't have hurt at all."

Kaim reaches for his sword, which cost her a lot of trouble to retrieve and carry here, not that you'd know it from the way he frowns at the dirt on the hilt. "I'd have gotten away just fine without you."

"Oh, well done," she says, "you've got the pride bit down perfectly. Why don't you try for friendship next century? I hear it makes people actually want to help you. And less likely to stab you in your sleep." Because really, after the public humiliation Kaim had handed out, the stabbing that started the rest of the trouble shouldn't have caught him by surprise.

He brushes irritably at the blood-soaked tear in his shirt, but tilts an odd look at her and says, "Well, I suppose we're friends already, then."

Healing all the serious maladies in a small mountain village doesn't take much of her time, and it's a small price to pay for peace. With her youthful face, it only takes about ten years for people to realize she ought to be getting older, and being chased away as a demon every decade or so isn't exactly conducive to study. Tosca is remote and peaceful, and although she's careful to stay far enough away that no one has to see her not aging, the villagers accept her. Some of them even help keep her secret.

Still, even in Tosca, there are times when the battlefields drift a little too close.

"We figured you'd know what to do with him," the village elder says, eyeing the bloody, armored form on the cart uneasily. "We were going to bury him with the other foreign warriors, then he woke up suddenly and hit Dallen, and Nevas accidentally killed him again."

Sarah does not laugh, which ought to earn her some kind of award. "Thank you," she says gravely. "He is a friend of mine, and on my word, he will hurt no one here."

If Kaim does do something regrettable, it'll be her pleasant life here on the line as well as his welcome. But she thinks he'll behave.

She isn't sure why he keeps coming back to Tosca. Sarah knows that he has to consider her life far more boring than his own, no action, no excitement, just the quiet study of magic and the newest children of families she's watched for generations. There's no need to catch up on anything. And yet, it doesn't surprise her anymore to see Kaim waiting in her flowers.

The wind sighs over the cliff as they sit together, and she tells him about little Nev's exploits with the ink and Jina's braids, and he doesn't tell her about the latest war, which was over the same things as the last five anyway.

Maybe that's why.

"Marrying you," he says one day, "I don't want you to think--I can't stay in one place all the time, Sarah."

The wind is soft with spring, and his arm is warm around her. Old Jina down in the village, who says she has been waiting for this her whole life, is weaving a bride-crown for her out of the early flowers. "I know, Kaim," Sarah assures him, and smiles to herself. She loves this village, but she knows that from now on, home will be with him. "You haven't finished seeing the world yet. And I've hardly started. I'm rather looking forward to it, actually."

His faint sigh of relief is a minor earthquake from her position. "You'd come with me? I didn't think you'd want to leave Tosca."

"Anywhere you want to show me, I want to see. Though I have to spend time in the village, too," she adds. "I made a promise." The thought of disease or war overtaking Tosca is physically painful. Even she can't remember just how many generations ago that first promise was accepted, but the villagers have been looking after her as much as she's looked after them.

Kaim nods, and rests his chin on her hair. "It's good to have a place to come home to."

Ordinary illness wouldn't make her stomach roil, because Sarah is immortal and has never had so much as a sore throat. On the third day in a row, she is sure; one hand drifts gently to her womb, and fear and joy both leave her breathless.

For all her time watching families, and her deep interest in the children of Tosca, Sarah has never begun a family of her own. Kaim has had children before, she knows, with mortal wives, and although their graves are long overgrown and abandoned he remembers them all.

She and Kaim had discussed the possibility of children, long, long ago; but it has been so many years that they both began to believe it was somehow impossible. Any child born to them will be mortal. Sarah has studied and hoped otherwise, but the answer was clear.

Even so, it had seemed obvious, in the abstract, that the joy of raising a child far outweighed the inevitable pain of losing one. But now, the knowledge of a new life is like the first breath of an approaching hurricane.

Sarah knows her own heart; she loves with an intensity that scares her, and so she has always before devoted herself to the general and abstract rather than the specific, to a village and to books and the preservation of history rather than to any one mortal, any one child.

This child can never be abstract. This child is hers.

Kaim's hand falls on her shoulder, warm and gentle, and Sarah looks up, smiling through a mist of tears. "We're going to have a baby, Kaim," she whispers.

The echo of pain in his eyes is a glimpse of the future that makes Sarah flinch, but the stunned joy that lifts his eyebrows and brings a wide smile unchecked to his face chases away the fear. Kaim's arms wrap strong around them both as though he could hold them forever.

But forever isn't as long as it used to be.

Diamonds strung together on the fragile threads of her mind, and Sarah holds them close. Nothing useful.

But she knows who she loves.

Author's note: Written for Lassarina in the 2008 Yuletide fic exchange. (I treasure reviews like Sarah does memories, by the way.)

With thanks to my beta-readers, vanillathunder215 and Anna Gaskill, and Orichalxos for the last-minute encouragement!