Chapter Thirty-Five
CHAPTER
Thirty-Five
Thea slowly became aware of voices. Too many voices, fussing and bickering.
She was too exhausted to listen, letting them wash over her like bubbling waves.
She was melting in an ocean of stars. Now and then, one permeated the ebb and flow of her consciousness.
‘This is too many pillows,’ one said darkly, followed not long after by a ragged sigh and, ‘How many blankets does one person need?’
Somewhere inside her own head, she smiled.
Light dotted the inside of her eyelids. Prising them open felt like chiselling stone. Hard and laborious and ache-inducing. Through the flutter of her eyelashes, she glimpsed Jasper stirring something at her stove; Jasper feeding Cinnamon; Jasper wetting her parched lips with a little water.
‘If you’ll just let me feed her this cake—’
‘Absolutely not. She needs to rest and recover. She has expended a colossal amount of energy—’
‘I know, I was there. That’s why this cake—’
‘Stop arguing,’ Thea croaked.
‘Thea? Are you awake?’
‘Don’t try to talk too soon—’
‘For goddess’ sake, stop fussing, Jasper!’
Thea opened her eyes just as Zofka finished snapping at Jasper. The pair of them were glowering at each other from either side of the bed. Talibah locked eyes with Thea, her amber eyes warm with amusement. ‘Welcome back,’ Talibah said. ‘It’s been a few days. How are you feeling?’
Jasper and Zofka immediately turned to Thea.
‘Thea!’ Zofka exhaled, pushing back her rambunctious ringlets, which were in greater disarray than usual. ‘We were so worried.’ She waved a slice of cake in her direction. ‘I baked some restorative cake for you, but someone’ – she shot another glare at Jasper – ‘wouldn’t let me feed you it.’
‘She was unconscious; she would have choked,’ Jasper ground out. He gazed down at Thea, his voice softening. ‘Are you all right? I – we – have all been concerned.’
‘Some of us have been fussing like a deranged mother hen,’ Zofka muttered, drawing another murderous glance from Jasper.
Thea sat up, resting back against her pillows. ‘This is exactly the right amount of pillows.’
Relief shot across Jasper’s face. ‘And your memories?’
‘All present, as far as I know.’ Thea glanced at her bedside table.
There, sat a portrait of Violet. Her delicate face was framed by Jasper’s raven hair and set with the same dark blue eyes.
Thea used to tease that she’d given birth to a copy of him.
Looking at her lost daughter’s face hurt.
A deep, merciless hurt that would always be a part of her – and she would never wish that to be different – but she no longer felt as if she was drowning.
When she looked back to Jasper, he was watching her keenly. Searching for his wife. Her heart quickened in response. Reassuring Thea that it was there and present. ‘We have much to discuss,’ he said softly.
‘Not before breakfast,’ Zofka interrupted. ‘Witches before britches.’
‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ Talibah said, exchanging a look with Thea. ‘Anyone can be a witch, anyone can wear britches—’
‘I didn’t have time to think it through, but you get the spirit of it,’ Zofka said indignantly, shooing Jasper away. ‘Thea needs to eat and drink and get changed before you two have your big reunion, or she’s just going to pass out again.’
Jasper reluctantly tore his attention away from Thea. ‘You have one hour.’ It sounded more like a threat than a promise. Seizing his coat, he paused at the door. ‘And then not even a legion of weathervane dragons could keep me away.’
When Zofka was worried, she baked. When she was stressed, she baked. When she was seething with fury, she baked. And apparently, during the past two and a half days since Thea had collapsed in Jasper’s arms, she had baked a lot.
‘Where did you even manage to do all this baking?’ Thea wondered as Zofka crammed in yet another dish to their picnic, spread out across her bed.
Talibah gave her an agonised look. ‘Zofka and Gretel are staying with me for the time being, until their remodel is finished.’
Thea smothered her laugh.
A trio of gingerbread people danced over the bed, dodging between plates of vanilla cake, generously smothered in buttercream, mugs of hot chocolate steaming on a tray, slices of thick, yellow butter sliding across toast, bowls of plush berries, and pastries shaped like stars and moons, dusted with warming spices and sugar.
After drinking two glasses of water, Thea nibbled at the slice of cake Zofka had been waving in her direction since she woke up.
She had little appetite since her grief had returned with a vengeance, along with her memories, but she was ready to start living again.
Those six months between Violet’s death and Jasper taking her memories, she’d been little more than a ghost. Her stomach growled, reminding her that she did indeed need to eat.
‘So?’ Zofka asked, when her impatience finally ran down the clock.
‘So . . . what?’ Thea asked between bites of hot, buttered toast. Really, was there anything better on a winter’s afternoon? Especially washed down with hot chocolate. Cinnamon flopped over, allowing her to pet his stomach.
‘Well, you still sound like the Thea we know,’ Zofka gestured at her.
‘But you have your memories back, you’ve lived this whole other life that we know nothing about and I’m dying to know all about it.
’ She seemed to remember Thea’s great loss and reined herself back in. ‘If you want to share, of course.’
‘You don’t have to tell us anything,’ Talibah amended, sipping her own hot chocolate. ‘Only if you feel like sharing, and that doesn’t need to be today or soon.’
‘And apparently you’re ancient?’ Zofka continued, slipping off her reins, as if she hadn’t heard Talibah. ‘I knew fate-weavers were older beings, but . . .’ She whistled between her teeth. ‘What’s that like?’
‘It feels normal.’ Thea grimaced. ‘Though please don’t call me ancient again.’ She couldn’t believe she’d spent the past year fretting about being thirty-five when she was closer to seven hundred. It was strange, the two lives she’d lived, nestling up together.
‘Sorry,’ Zofka said, without a trace of remorse.
Talibah laughed, throwing a cushion at Zofka.
Sometimes Thea had worried that if she’d found a way to return her memories, it would alter the friendship between the three of them – what if she reverted to being a completely different person?
But she needn’t have concerned herself with that.
She had always been herself; she’d lost her memories, not her personality.
And when it came to the three of them, they were eternal.
She sat back, surrendering her plate. ‘What do you want to know first?’
For once, it was Talibah who indulged her inner curiosity. ‘Everything.’
So, Thea told them everything.
About her childhood in the forested, stormy realm of Orion, where she’d been tormented by her younger sister and misunderstood by her parents.
Where she’d fallen in love with Jasper Stiltskin.
How he’d saved her from Heloise and swept her away to their own little cottage in England, with ivy clambering up the walls and a garden of wildflowers that swayed to the gentle breeze, a world apart from the storm season they’d had to hunker down through every year back home.
How sometimes they travelled this new realm, opening apothecaries in different cities to fund their long lives together.
Paris, Firenze, Prague. Yet they always returned to that first little cottage, leaving their apothecaries safely entrusted to their apprenticed workers; other people who had needed a respite from their own lives for a spell.
How eventually they had borne a beautiful baby girl, a daughter, with Jasper’s dark blue eyes and near-black hair, and they had thought themselves the luckiest people in all the worlds.
Until whispers of suspicion were thrown on them like a net they couldn’t escape.
They’d thought themselves untouchable; there were few fate-weavers living in this realm.
But Violet was young, too young to have learnt how to manage her great power, passed down from her parents, at only twelve years of age.
So, seven and a half years ago, when she was caught playing with fate in the market square and dragged away by overzealous villagers, she couldn’t defend herself from the hatred and flames.
Burning witches was outlawed, but in pockets of rural life, superstitions still ran rampant.
People looked the other way. Freak accidents occurred.
And Thea had been too late. Jasper had arrived in time to haul a hysterical Thea away before she was condemned to that same fate, bundling her onto a ship bound for the continent that night.
‘That’s horribly sad,’ Zofka sniffled between tears, holding onto one of Thea’s hands.
Talibah held the other. ‘I can’t imagine what you’ve been through.’
‘We lived in the townhouse here in Prague for months, but I was a shell of myself,’ Thea admitted. ‘I begged and begged Jasper to take my memories, to remove the pain, and eventually he gave in.’
‘What brought them back?’ Zofka wondered. ‘Why build in the failsafe that your own name would return your memories?’
‘I believe that Jasper wanted me to recover – as much as one can recover from something like this – before I returned to myself,’ Thea said quietly, blotting her eyes with a handkerchief.
‘That I wouldn’t be able to reclaim my memories until I’d recovered enough to be happy being myself again.
’ When she’d lost Violet, she hadn’t seen a way forward and though that path was still shadowed, it was there, it existed.
She was happy being Theodora again. ‘Our contract bound me to this apothecary so that he would stay in my life, watching over me from afar.
‘I knew I was right to root for the two of you all this time.’ Zofka blew into her own handkerchief.