Chapter 41
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
I read her journal for hours, deciphering it one shape at a time. I read about my infancy, my early childhood. I was a baby born under a round moon, a baby with eyes like well water. The first time I walked, it was to a window. The first time I formed a sentence, it was a question—“Where wall?”
The first time I snuck out, I was five. She watched through the window as I met Theo at the corner, and the two of us ran off toward the wall. She didn’t sleep until I returned, but pretended to snore when I did.
She knew every time I left the house at night. Every time. She watched, she waited, she pretended to sleep.
She never once stopped me. Never a sharp eye, never a word. Because, as she wrote one day when I was eight, Stopping you would be stopping the rain. Impossible.
The deeper into the pages I read, the clearer it became: the entire journal was about me. Every day she had written in it—a few lines, usually—about something I had done or said.
Everything delighted her. Everything was fascinating.
Each entry was addressed to me, as though she was watching me as she wrote, as though she was penning a letter I would someday read.
She wasn’t wrong, in the end.
On my ninth birthday, she wrote, I baked you a wheaten cake, and you gave me the first piece. For me, you said, who you love best.
I set the journal down in my lap. I had forgotten about that cake. I had forgotten about that day.
She whom I loved best. Yes, yes, it was true.
How had I forgotten? How had I fucking forgotten?
It was like she and I had lived different lives. Together, yes, but as though a skein lay between us. She saw what I did not, and I saw…
I saw a bread-baker.
My eyes stung. My chest went so tight, I pressed a fist there. And finally, finally, I cried. I cried for her, the mother I’d had and not known. Better than all mothers.
I cried for Theo, for Elisabet, for my sometimes-father and for Isa. I cried for the people of the Dip I’d known all my life—the men and women and children I saw every day, who gave me life despite the barrenness of it. I cried for the guard who were on the wall that night.
Eventually I slept, curled and fetal. I slept hard and deep until I heard the sound of footsteps outside my cell. I jerked awake as the roots began to part near my feet and a wooden tray was passed across the earth.
The roots settled back into place, but I had no expectation of escaping.
Normally I’d have scrabbled for the opening.
But I was too dulled, too injured, too tired, too hungry.
The smell of soup and meat and roasted vegetables was drugging, and I pulled the tray toward me so fast the precious soup sloshed over the rim.
I knew I would remain in this cell until I was either released or dead. And perhaps, on some level I had barely acknowledged, I knew Rhiannon was keeping me alive for a reason. That I simply needed to sleep, to eat, to wait.
This meal confirmed it.
A goblet of mead sat on the tray, and I grabbed it up and sank my face into it. It was sweet and spicy in my nostrils, and I moaned when it touched my tongue.
There was no spice like starvation.
I tried to savor the soup and meat and vegetables, but within minutes I had cleaned the plate and emptied the goblet. The tray sat empty, and I pushed it back toward the door of my cell.
I picked up the journal and continued reading.
By the time I was ten years old I had been bullied for my size so many times, I had become almost feral in the face of cruelty.
My mother wrote about the day I punched a boy’s crotch so hard, he’d walked bow-legged for weeks.
And though she hadn’t said it at the time, she’d written in the journal that she was proud of me.
No one, she wrote, can dominate that child.
But that feralness was counterbalanced by my mother’s endless esteem. To her, I was the sun, and I felt it in how she looked at me, how she laughed when I made jokes and danced for her.
She wrote down all my jokes. Most of them were terrible. She wrote down the riddles I’d heard from Theo and recited to her. As I got older I snuck out more often, and still she’d never ask where I’d gone. But she did stay awake to listen for my return.
We all have secrets, she’d written. And my secret was that I used to do the same as you when I was a girl. My parents found out, and they forbade me from leaving at night. It only made me better at keeping secrets.
I hadn’t known—not about her. That was her secret as a mother. One of them, at least.
I spent the entire day reading, though it was hard to say whether it was day or night without a window. The hours passed, and I sank into the journal as though I was a child and not here in this cell, but at home in the Dip.
Each line was precious. Every word was new and alive to me, as though she had just written it all down yesterday.
By the time another tray of food arrived, I had gotten to the last fourth of the journal. I ate as quickly as I had before, moaning and scarfing the bread and potatoes and meat and wine.
I curled up back into the corner of my cell with my journal on my tucked-up knees and the small crystal held close to the page. As I got closer to the end, I read more voraciously, only breathing in small sips of air.
When I decided to join the guard, she wrote that she hadn’t been surprised. For years I had watched them with a rare light in my eyes. But it was more than that. She had done all she could do, and still I was insatiable. No love she could give me that could overcome two simple facts:
I had been born poor, and I had been born small.
I wonder, she wrote, if the best of us don’t arise unless we’re tried. Which isn’t to say, Eury, that I haven’t wanted the world for you. I would have given you a palace, were it in my power.
But the woman you became today, when you joined the guard—all light and vicious, sharp teeth—is one who creates change. She’s one who knows the taste of dirt when she’s pushed into it, but who still raises her face to the sun.
I had to stop reading for a time. I couldn’t see past the blur in my eyes.
The older I’d gotten, the more I’d thought of my mother as simple. She didn’t have ambitions beyond baking bread, and a kernel of disdain had begun to grow in me. I felt it now, still there in my chest, and I understood why I could not allow myself to grieve her before now.
My grief was a complicated snarl, made worse by this journal. Even when I had felt disdain for her, she had seen me exactly as I was. And she had never once thought less of me.
Eventually I was able to read on. I needed to reach the end.
Since I’d joined the guard, she had seen me less often. The entries were more sporadic, less in-depth. Some were just reflections on my life. Near the end, she delved into memories that seemed to rewind time, as though I was getting younger and not older.
The last entry—the one she had dated just a few days before the attack on the southern district—was a memory from when I was six months old.
I had a dream of my death, she had written. And it put a fear in me. I feared I would never tell you a truth you deserve to know. So I think it’s time to tell you a secret I have waited to share for twenty years.
It began on a night when I woke to a noise from your bassinet, and I found the shutters open and the moonlight pouring over you.
You were awake, and your eyes were open.
They were blue like I had never noticed before—so blue I could not stop staring into them.
So blue they were almost frightening. You didn’t blink, and you didn’t fidget.
You just stared back at me with the moonlight in your eyes. You grabbed my finger with yours.
And as I looked down at you, I understood that you were a child who would survive. You would survive this kingdom, no matter what. That was not a sense I’d had before. It was as though something had irrevocably changed in you.
Beyond your bassinet, I heard a noise in the alley. A shadow moved, and I only caught a glimpse of it before it disappeared. But a chill ran down my arms, and I picked you up and held you close to me.
I smelled your hair, your sweet infant scent, and I could not understand what had changed. It would take me years to understand what had happened that night.
Finally, years later, I glimpsed your father on his return from guarding the wall. He met my eyes, and his were brown.
Eury, you were born with brown eyes. At six months, they changed to blue. And the infant I picked up from that crib was not the same child I’d placed into it.