44. Forty-Four - Confessions
Forty-Four - Confessions
Ana
It’s Kirra’s last night in the village and I look across the steaming pool at her. “Do all vampires love water?”
Her smile is sweet, not mocking, and she pushes Leaf into the bath with a gentle hand before she says, “I’ve never asked.”
She was the one who had suggested the gathering at the bathhouse and I hadn’t felt inclined to cry off. Not when Mina was so excited to have been invited.
My little sister helps Sabine make a pot of dark red tea while Celese lifts Leaf back out of the water. The elf woman has kept her shoulders below the water this whole time, but when she lifts our gnome friend up, I see the bite marks—not from a vampire—and one glance at Sabine… at the blush that paints her cheeks, I think one of them finally took the proverbial plunge.
“Oh!” Mina gasps and looks at us with wide eyes. “What if it was holy water?”
“That is a superstition,” Kirra says. She has been so patient with my sister while she has been here, I don’t know how I can properly thank her for it. “The Goddess loves us all. Nothing blessed by her name can harm me any more than it could harm you.”
“Not even a sword?”
I can tell she is trying not to laugh. “Would it hurt you?”
“Oh…” Mina does laugh, at herself, and then she brings me a cup of the dark red hibiscus tea. “Well now, I feel silly.”
“Blame it on the heat.” Kirra says, taking the cup offered by Sabine with thanks.
Mina slips into the water along with Celese and sets herself to a slow spin. “Do you really have to go back?”
“The Queen expects me. And if I don’t return, she might send someone to come looking.”
“Oh, stay! Maybe she’ll send a valiant knight who can rescue me from a dragon.”
Laughing, I say, “Our mother is not as bad as a dragon.”
“True,” Mina dips lower in the water. “At least with a dragon, it would be over quickly.”
Celese snorts and Sabine hushes her, but I can’t be mad at either of them.
“Besides,” Mina says, floating with heavy eyes. “The sooner I find someplace else to be, the sooner you’ll actually do what you’ve wanted to for years.”
“What is your mother’s obsession with you?” Kirra asks before lighting a new incense cone.
“I have no idea.”
Eyes still closed, Mina sighs. “She wanted dad to die in the war.”
The others fall into an uncomfortable silence and I shrug. “She’s not wrong.”
“Your mother sounds like a crueler woman than I thought.”
“Oh, she’s not cruel ,” Mina says with a fair amount of derision in her tone. “She’d just like to pretend that four of us don’t exist.”
I glance at Sabine. “What did you put in the tea?”
The faun woman holds up her hands. “This honesty is not my fault.”
“Sorry.” Mina winces a smile, pulling herself out of the water and grabbing a towel. “I’m just tired and saying things I shouldn’t.”
I tell her she doesn’t have to leave, but she goes.
“Is she right?”
“My mother would never admit to any of it,” I say.
It’s Leaf who stops me from adding to that by interjecting with, “Yes. She doesn’t have to admit to it. The whole village knows that she would have preferred if Niamiah had died beneath a troll hammer. We know that she was a nicer woman for the five years she thought she was blessed with a copy of herself. And we know, whether or not you are willing to admit it,” she looks at me with a hard glance, “That when you leave her, there will be hell to pay.”
I swallow and grip the wooden edge more tightly.
Leaf doesn’t notice my discomfort, or she doesn’t care. “We are prepared. We’ve been prepared since the first boy took a shine to you and Scoggins saw the anger in her eyes that someone might take you away.”
I stay silent, because I have no idea what to say to that.
Kirra is the one to speak next. She looks at me with a sort of caution that scares me. “It sounds like you inspire a kind of devotion even the Queen could envy.”
“Oh, there are people who don’t like her,” Leaf says, quickly, and I burst out laughing. The bluntness of it feels like a slap in the face and I’m glad for it.
“Who doesn’t like me?” I ask, feigning offense.
“Bibble for one.”
“Oh, he likes me. He doesn’t like the word ‘no.’”
“Now that he knows there’s no chance with you, he doesn’t like you.”
“Well good riddance.”
She raises her tea in a toast. “And my mother.”
I can’t argue with that, so I don’t.
She lists off three more people in town and I just chuckle at each of them. “I have more than enough friends. I don’t need everyone to like me.” And then I turn to Sabine. “Truly, what did you put in the tea?”
“Nothing!”
Kirra watches me with a little more care and I ignore the way it makes my skin prickle.
She doesn’t say anything else until we are alone, walking back to the manor house.
“You fit very well here,” she says, softly as an owl comes fluttering down to her raised hand from the trees.
“I like to think so.”
“You are a conundrum, Anastacia Eventide… I believe it would be true to say that my brother is safe here because of you. And yet… I do not have the luxury of thinking in short time spans, so I also know that it would be true to say that you are in some ways more of a danger to him, than anyone else.”
“And I think,” I say, mimicking her arguments. “That you know it’s true that nothing you or I say will change their minds.”
“Could I change yours?”
I stop. The house is barely visible now. Much further and Dorrian will be able to hear. “No.”
Looking up at her, and to the owl on her shoulder, I say, “You compared me to your owls once, so I’ll compare myself to them too… you know they’re fragile creatures and that you are destined to outlive them, and yet, you love them too much to give them up.”
“I am selfish.”
“Can you blame the three of us for being selfish also?”
She hooks her arm in mine, but she doesn’t answer me.
And later, when I’m snuggled down between Penny and Viggo, I wonder if she is as aware of the flaw in my analogy as I am.
Because her owls don’t know the grief they will leave her with. She’s not selfish.
But I am.