Chapter 41
Forty-One
Isolde
“Are you sure you’ll be okay?” asks the First Lady a week later. She and the president and their assortment of children are getting ready to leave their riverside enclave (whimsically named New Camelot) for the bustle of the capital, and I’ll be left here alone.
Well, not quite alone.
“I’ll take good care of her,” comes a warm voice from next to me. It’s a voice filled with the kind of certainty and assurance that makes the whole world feel sturdier and sweeter. A voice that could inspire an entire nation.
“You better,” mutters Embry Moore as he expertly loops a scarf around the neck of a jumping, spinning toddler. “Or Mark will kill us. Divorce or no divorce.”
Greer Colchester-Moore gives me a wincing smile over the tiny baby snoozing in her arms. “Embry means that we’re all happy to take care of you.”
Maxen Ashley Colchester—who is very much not dead—leans in to kiss his… wife? Not-so-much-a-widow? on the cheek and then gives the baby a loving nuzzle. “Embry means that Mark makes him nervous.”
“The man made me help him kill a pope ,” the president says, exasperated. “I thought you were Catholic! Surely you see the gravity of this!”
“If it helps, I was the one to actually kill the pope,” I volunteer, taking a stab at levity. It almost works. The others smile at least. Even if I feel the same dissociative jolt whenever I remember that I killed my uncle less than two weeks ago.
Embry grumbles something about pope killing still being a classic Mark Trevena idea, and Greer leans in to kiss my cheek goodbye. “Call me if you need anything at all,” she says, a gracious hostess even when she’s absent. “We’ll be back soon. We never stay away long.”
“Not enough spreader bars at the White House,” whispers Embry.
Greer closes her eyes briefly in a put-upon expression and then opens them. “We are leaving now,” she announces, and Embry flings open the front door while Maxen takes a discreet step backward so he can’t be seen by the Secret Service agents outside.
I wave goodbye as the brood hustles through the cold February air to the waiting Beast.
Maxen watches them climb into the car and then roll down the drive with a pain that feels too private to witness.
When they’re finally out of sight, I close the front door.
“There are few things worse than having happiness within sight but not within reach,” the former president says and gives me a sad smile. His eyes are even greener than Tristan’s. “But that’s fate for you.”
“I don’t believe in fate,” I say automatically.
Surprised amusement flickers in his eyes and pulls at the corners of his smile. “You don’t? Not to be trite, Isolde,” he says warmly, “but I think fate very much believes in you.”
Maxen Colchester mostly keeps to himself while I’m here.
He chops wood and tends to the horses and reads alone in his study.
I don’t bother him, partially because he’s Maxen Colchester, and it would be like bothering St. Michael or St. George or some other holy warrior at rest, but also because I find the solitude almost…
settling. So different from the solitude at Lyonesse after I returned.
With the trees and the half-frozen river and the quiet, I find my thoughts tearfully, softly, achingly, coming to a kind of order.
In my room, a black-and-white folder sits at the bottom of a dresser drawer, along with a holy card and a small chip in a plastic bag. I still wear the honeysuckle ring on my finger.
At night, as I usually do without Mark or Tristan, I dream, although my nightmares have been replaced by something else, a half nightmare, a memory.
I’m standing in the lobby of Lyonesse, the divorce papers in one hand, a bag of clothes in the other.
Tristan stands in front of me, sorrow carving his features.
Stay , he pleads in my dream, just like he did in real life. Don’t give up on what we could be.
We can’t be anything , I say back, again just like in real life. We were made up from the very beginning. Put together like dolls, like he said. This isn’t real—we aren’t real.
He touches me then, a hand sliding into my hair and cupping my head. We said we aren’t real in the dark. But we always were, Isolde.
And then in the dream, something happens that didn’t happen the day I left Lyonesse. Mark steps out of the shadows from behind Tristan, one hand outstretched, as if bidding me to come to him.
Because not only are we real in the dark, but the darkness is real. And I’m in love with it still.
It doesn’t matter that I wake up crying, because usually I’ve fallen asleep crying anyway.
After another week of this, a visitor comes to New Camelot. He has the kind of ivory skin that probably burnishes into gold in the summer, hair like afternoon sunshine, and dark eyes that burn with some kind of secret intensity. A white clerical collar dazzles from the notch of his black shirt.
He’s a priest.
We all eat dinner together in the large but comfortable dining room, a simple meal of steak and mashed potatoes that Maxen makes himself. It’s good, but I think of Mark the entire time I eat it, of his absurdly delicate and perfect cooking, like food from a king’s hall.
After dinner and after making polite farewells to me, the two men stand to go to the study.
“It’s only the usual sins, Father,” I hear Maxen tell him as they go.
Father Jordan Brady’s voice is so melodic that it’s difficult—but not impossible—to catch the dry edges of his response. “So we’ll only need two or three hours in that case.”
The study doors close, and even though I go to bed late, I don’t see either of them leave the room.
The next morning brings with it a blue sky and a mild kiss of sunshine, and after another night of saying goodbye to Lyonesse in my dreams, I’m eager to get out of the house, to enjoy the world without needing a coat, hat, and scarf.
I strike out along a riverside path and walk until I reach a friendly clutch of rocks, surrounded by trees and already slightly warmed by the sun.
“Mind if I join you?”
I turn at the sound of the lovely voice and see Father Brady standing at the edge of the trees. I hadn’t heard him at all—just a couple weeks out from being a saint, and my instincts are already slipping.
“Please,” I say, waving a hand at all the potential stone seats around me. “It’s too lovely of a day not to enjoy it.”
He climbs up to join me, making it look easy and graceful in his dress shoes and black trousers, and then sits a couple feet away with his legs crossed like a schoolboy.
“I suppose you’ll invite me to take confession too?” I ask. I try to have it come off as casual, droll, like Mark would in my shoes, but I’ve never learned how to turn my untouchable reserve into a weapon of charm and persuasion like he has, so it comes out soft and wary instead.
Father Brady doesn’t seem bothered by my wariness. He only closes his eyes and leans back on his hands to tilt his face up to the sun. “I don’t even have my stole with me. You are quite safe from being lured into spontaneous reconciliation.”
I watch him a moment, fascinated. Even his serenity seems to be lined on the inside with a secret fire.
“So…you know Maxen Colchester is alive,” I venture. I know where I want to end up, but I don’t know where to start, and this seems as good a place as any. “That must mean you’re trusted a great deal.”
“There are very few who know the truth,” Father Brady agrees. “But by your logic, you must be trusted a great deal as well.”
“Nimue trusts me, I think.”
“That counts for a lot.”
“Do you know…” I hesitate before pushing forward. “Do you know why I’m here? What I’ve done?”
Father Brady’s eyes are still closed as he nods. “I know what you’ve done, Isolde Trevena.”
God help me that I still love the way Isolde Trevena sounds. Like it was always meant to be that way, like Isolde Laurence was merely a placeholder, a scaffold for the real thing.
“Then you know that there’s no amount of reconciliation that can save me.”
Father Brady does turn his head and look at me now, his dark brown eyes made only a bare shade lighter by the impulsive February sun. “There is no barrier to forgiveness other than accepting it,” he says mildly.
“I murdered the Holy Father.”
“Mortimer Cashel was no father,” replies the priest. “He was no pope. His election came out of deception, bribery, and blackmail. He saw the role as an opportunity for power, not as a responsibility to lend that power to his sickest, coldest, poorest children, the ones who needed it the most. He was an infection that grows everywhere in the world but thrives in opacity most of all, and while there was plenty of that to cloak him in the Church, it could have just as easily been a boardroom or a parliament or a battlefield where he spun his webs.”
“I had a dream once,” I say, not sure why I’m divulging this, because it’s so deeply unimportant, “that my uncle and I lived a very long time ago. He wasn’t a priest at all but a warrior, trying to run my father’s kingdom under my father’s own nose.
I remember waking up and thinking that version of Mortimer Cashel made an uncomfortable amount of sense. ”
“Sounds like an interesting dream.” His expression is curious. Encouraging.
I shift on the rock. I’m wearing thick leggings and an Oxford sweatshirt of Greer’s that she gave me to borrow, and I’m almost too warm, something I haven’t felt in so long.
“Do you think…do you think there’s any kind of hope for me?
To be good? I wanted to for so long, you know, to be utterly clean in spirit, to have a heart that would send smoke up to heaven if it was set on an altar and burned in offering.
But I can’t keep track anymore of what’s good and what’s evil, and I can’t ask God, because he’s stopped listening to my prayers. If he ever did in the first place.”
Father Brady turns his head to watch the river, silent for a moment.
And then he says, “Good and evil have stayed the same, but you have changed. You can no longer unquestioningly accept as good what someone tells you to, and the same with evil. That’s not losing direction.
That’s completion, discernment, adulthood.
You saw through a glass, darkly, and now you see face-to-face. ”
“Maligning unquestioning acceptance is very radical for someone who works for the Catholic Church,” I point out.
He makes a face of mock dismay, and I suddenly realize how young he is, how strikingly and humanly handsome. He is so incandescently inspired by God that it’s easy to forget he’s not a beautiful and terrifying angel come to earth.
“I forgot my theses to nail to the nearest door. But in the meantime, I recommend listening to the still, small voice inside you. It will be a much better judge of good and evil than your uncle.”
He glances at his watch and then smiles warmly at me.
“I’m afraid it’s time for me to go, so let me say what I found you to say. God aches for your loneliness, Isolde. He wants you to know that you’re never truly alone.”
The last part sounds like a platitude, something from a sympathy card. “Because of Jesus?”
Father Brady laughs, a sudden and happy sound that brightens everything around us. “No, but you’d be a great Sunday school student with answers like that. You’re never alone because you have yourself, Isolde. That’s all.”
Levity immediately wiped away, I look down at my feet on the rock. “I feel lonely with myself, Father. I don’t like myself.”
“Then that’s where you start,” he says gently. He gets to his feet. “Perhaps it might be useful to think of when you haven’t felt lonely, when you have liked yourself. When you felt like you knew your own heart, face-to-face, and not through a glass, darkly.”
He touches the top of my head for just a second, a glancing benediction, and then leaves without any further farewell, as if sure we’ll meet again. I watch him go, my brows knitted together, my mind burrowing inside itself.
When had I last felt like I knew my own heart? When had I last liked myself and the world around me?
The answers come quickly, effortlessly, as inevitably as the river washing oceanward at my feet.
Sparring with Tristan. Playing chess with Mark. The sound of Tristan’s voice over rain on glass while Mark stroked my wrist.
Watching Mark in the kitchen, walking with Tristan under the trees of Morois.
Kneeling for Mark. Tristan kneeling for me.
Hearing I love you in two different voices.
Hearing my own voice say I love you back.
I’m on my feet and walking back to the house before I let myself think about it too much. I’m in my room and putting together my bag; I’m pulling the folder with the divorce application out of a drawer and looking at it once more before I throw it in the trash.
I find Maxen Colchester and ask if he’d mind terribly if I borrowed a car.