An Elixir for Wanderlust (The Rune Tithe #3)

CHAPTER 1

Isaid I’d sooner die than go back to Shearwater, but death forced me to return anyway.

It had been nine years since I’d last driven the curving country roads covered in ivy arches and high hedgerows. Old cottages hunkered in their overgrown gardens, kitschy statues of fairies and gnomes peeking out of flower beds. I passed a sign that raised all the hair on my arms.

Shearwater Spring.

Take a magical step through time.

I stopped my caravan, Lunaris, in the church car park. A black canopy of umbrellas loitered on the stairs leading into the funeral service, a queue of people offering condolences and prayers to the family. My family.

I couldn’t bring my umbrella. It was designed like a sunflower. I’d look as though I were cheerful to attend my grandfather’s funeral.

“Right. Just go. Say hi. Pay my respects. Leave. That’s it.”

As if to soothe me, the seat warmer turned on and the old radio sputtered out an acoustic version of a song Grandad used to play on every trip to the seaside.

There’s a place where the sun shines warm all day

and we’re together, oh, together

with all the time in the world

I patted the dashboard. Lunaris couldn’t quite give me a hug, but this was the next best thing.

Before I left, I opened the cupboard under the sink, dug through the back for a bottle of whiskey, poured myself a generous portion, necked it, then braved the weather.

Rain spattered the suit I’d had fitted for the occasion. Grandad deserved my respects, and of all the passive-aggressive comments I’d receive today, I refused to let my clothes be one. Lunaris waved her windshield wipers to say, Goodbye and good luck.

Searching the crowd, I experienced the surreal, temporal crisis of seeing faces both familiar and unrecognizable. I’d come here to say goodbye, but it was saying hello that had me biting my nails.

My cousin Amelia stood a little apart from the others in a serene black suit interrupted by a loudly purple tie.

When I’d left, she’d had the oversized hands and feet of an adolescent puppy and ears that earned her the nickname “Fins.” She’d grown into both.

She was my height, smoking a cigarette on the path leading up to the church.

Back when I’d known her, she’d held that lowly spot in the family hierarchy reserved for the sin of never tolerating anyone’s bullshit. Amelia wasn’t rude or blunt. (That title was mine.) She just had boundaries. A criminal offense in a family like ours.

As my fellow black sheep, she was the best bridge to my re-introduction.

“Hey.”

“Well, you’re not the ghost I expected to see here today,” she said, letting me under her umbrella.

“Figured I should say goodbye.”

“Brave man.” She cocked her head, looking me over. “I like the mustache.”

“Thanks. I like your tie.”

“Aunt Lettie already gave it the look. You know the one.” She performed a perfect imitation of our auntie’s sneer, complete with the up-and-down eyes that catalogued your every sin and faxed them straight to God.

“Can’t wait to hear what she has to say about my mustache, then.”

“You know she won’t miss an opportunity to imply Grandad might have lasted a few years longer if you’d stuck around.”

Grandad and everyone else had only lasted this long because I’d left.

“Cigarette?” She offered me the pack.

“Don’t smoke.”

“Good boy.”

“I’m older than you.”

“By what? Six months?” She scoffed.

My mother, accepting condolences from a stooped gentleman, broke eye contact with him to glare across the lawn at me. My sibling, Fae, followed her gaze. Their face registered shock at the sight of me before they gave a tentative wave.

“That’s my cue.”

Amelia put out her cigarette with a black stiletto. “I’ll join you.”

“For emotional support?”

“For entertainment.”

In my head, I’d practiced a long speech about how much I’d missed them.

(I didn’t. Not in a malicious way, but I’d been on my own so long, I’d forgotten how to miss anyone.) Compliments I could employ to break the ice.

(Not my specialty; even white lies sounded fake in my mouth.) And memories to reminisce over.

(Risky if no one else remembered, or if I’d remembered wrong.)

All I could say when faced with my mother was exactly what I’d said to Amelia. “Hey.”

Her face split into an over-bright, artificial smile, and she threw her arms around me. “Oh, Tal! You’re home. We didn’t know if you’d come. It’s been so long. How long has it been?”

“Since Laurelie died, so nine years,” I said.

She faltered long enough for me to know I’d said something wrong.

I did that. I didn’t know how to pad my answers in soft half-truths.

I forgot we weren’t supposed to talk about death directly, even at a funeral, even when it was so long ago.

Conversations always felt like minefields in which everyone except me had been given a map of where to step, and where not to.

Fae winced.

Mum recovered. “That long already? Time just flies. You’ll come to dinner after the wake, of course?”

“I really shouldn’t stay long,” I said.

“Oh, but it will only be another hour or two. Surely nothing terrible will happen.”

Terrible things followed me and did not offer extensions on curfew, but I said, “Sure, we’ll see.”

She nodded as if that settled it. “Then go in, go in. Sit at the front with us.”

As I passed, Fae grabbed my arm. “Hey. Missed you.”

I struggled with a smile. “Missed you, too.”

I walked through the church doors, into the cocoon of quiet that made all holy places a little creepy. I waited just inside for Amelia, who hugged my family members before joining me.

“That wasn’t so bad,” she said.

“She’s furious with me,” I countered.

I was not terribly good at reading people. It took a while to learn their tells, particularly with people like my mum, who did her best to always be bright and chipper. Even nine years later, her tells were the same.

In front of the altar was the coffin. Closed, mercifully closed, and covered with lilies and alstroemeria.

A portrait had been placed in the center, but it was from a long time ago, when Grandad had been around my age, and it occurred to me that I didn’t know what he looked like now, before he’d died, which made the closed casket seem less a mercy in spite of my fear of seeing his corpse.

“Ah, my eyes must be going, but Marlowe, isn’t that our Taliesin?”

“It’s not your eyes, love.”

I looked over to see my aunt waving to me. “Oh, Taliesin! Tal! Come sit with your aunt Lettie.”

“Notice they didn’t invite me, their own daughter, but I’ll be coming anyway,” said Amelia.

I was grateful. Aunt Lettie was the sort who could never get warm and insisted everyone bake in a house heated several degrees above comfortable, or she’d catch her death.

I never knew if she always looked angry because she was, or because she painted her eyebrows that way.

Today she wore a black fur coat so large that, with her slim legs sticking out the bottom, she looked like an ostrich.

Uncle Marlowe had adopted the same posture he adopted in the armchair from which he watched nature documentaries, so that he seemed transported into the pew from his sitting room. Slouched back, hands laced around his belly, and a slight pout to his lip.

“How are you keeping now?” he asked.

“Given the circumstances, dreadful,” I said.

“Hell, join the club.”

“Marlowe!” Aunt Lettie gave his arm a slap for cursing in church. “So you’ve heard about your grandfather.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Such a surprise. Oh, he was old, of course, but he seemed well enough. Your mum has been so busy with the funeral arrangements, bless her heart. I don’t know what we’d do without her.

In my grief, I was no help, of course. Found him, we did.

Collapsed in the house. It would have done her such good if you’d been here.

I understand, of course, but would it kill you to visit more? ”

Amelia made eye contact as if to say, I told you so. I’d always liked Marlowe and tolerated Lettie, who could make you feel guilty for failing to blow out all the candles on your own birthday cake.

Marlowe interrupted Lettie’s ramble. “Still have that amulet I gave you?”

I flicked the coin hanging from my left ear. “Of course.”

He nodded with gruff satisfaction. “Good.”

The pews filled, and eventually a priest took to the pulpit to start the eulogy.

“We are all here today to say goodbye to Edwin Ashborne, but goodbyes even at his age are bittersweet, so let us remember him, first. Edwin was generous, a pillar of kindness within our community who could never be too put upon to help a stranger—but of course, nothing could quite match his devotion to his family.”

He began to list the names of those surviving family members, and I had the harrowing thought he might not mention me. After all, I’d been gone for nine years. Did I really count as family any longer?

He mentioned how Grandad loved his games of backgammon with Marlowe, and Amelia made Sunday roasts better than he did. Down the line of grandchildren he went, my heart bracing for the absence of my own name.

The priest said, “And lastly, Taliesin Ashborne, to whom Edwin devoted nine years trying to make this place home again; he hoped one day it would be.”

A few people whispered. Some even turned in their seats to search the crowd for the long-estranged grandchild.

I bowed my head and didn’t meet their eyes.

Instead of relief that my name had not been forgotten, I felt a bitter ache. I could never call anyplace home. Not for long. And especially not here.

Once the eulogy ended, a few family members gave their own tearful speeches and goodbyes.

It ended with a song—the same one Lunaris played to comfort me.

As pallbearers rose to carry the casket out to the graveyard, we filed out in a somber procession after them. A cold drizzle wept through my suit.

At the freshly dug grave, the pallbearers set the casket onto the device that would lower it down.

It reminded me of a gurney. The priest said a prayer as the casket slowly sank beneath the earth, and that’s when everyone began to cry.

My family and other mourners dropped flowers and mementos into the hole.

I hadn’t brought anything, and once again felt the gulf between me and this place, these people, more keenly than I felt any grief.

I wanted to feel sad. I was theoretically sad. But none of it felt particularly real, and the more I felt guilty for my inability to shed a single tear, the closer I got to crying out of frustration more than anything. I’d said goodbye a long, long time ago. It had been harder the first time.

While I stood there stiffly, a witch with an osprey familiar came up next to me and laid a heavy hand on my shoulder.

As a general rule, I didn’t like being touched. There were exceptions, but this stranger was not one. He had watery blue eyes and the broad build of a rugby player who’d gotten old.

“He talked about you nonstop. He would have been happy you came,” he said.

“Do I know you?”

The osprey shuffled to the shoulder closest to me, and I didn’t appreciate the proximity to its hooked beak. The man said, “There will be time for introductions later, but I thought I’d give you this to pay your respects.”

From his other hand he extended a single white lily. I took it more to disengage from him than out of gratitude.

The open grave had an awful gravity to it. I stood at its edge and wondered what I should say, if anything. There was simultaneously too much, and nothing at all worth saying. He couldn’t hear me now, nor take the last nine years back.

I dropped the lily and said the one word I said over and over in my life on the road. “Goodbye.”

As I headed back to Lunaris so I could drive to the wake, I caught a flickering shadow out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned to search the trees, there was nothing there.