Chapter 18 Silva #4
She smiled viciously, Silva of the Daytime a long-ago memory, wishing she had dagger-like teeth to brandish.
“Or maybe, the school curriculum here is so out of date and lagging that the parents who were raised with it wouldn’t realize it if it were?
As it is, from the way Esta and Finnea talk, basic genetics were never so much as whispered about in the classroom when you were all in school.
You all probably think a Punnett square is for playing tic-tac-toe.
If our daughter being able to speak in full sentences is a disaster for you, that gives me a good indication of how much you’ll be able to contribute to her education. ”
Tannar himself had been raised in this very community, with the same Elvish education she was disparaging. She watched his neck heat, a fiery bloom move up his face, satisfied when it reddened his ears. He’d slammed out of the house, and Silva hadn’t cared where it was that he went for the night.
As it was, he only knew the half of it.
She took Aelin to play one or two days a week with the handful of other children at the club, but none of the Elvish toddlers her age spoke more than a handful of words.
She was eerily advanced, speaking like a tiny adult, with the coordination of a ballet dancer.
Her little darling would regularly create intricate tea parties with the collection of dolls in the playroom, trying to instruct the other little Elvish girls where to sit, how to act, which baby was theirs, getting visibly frustrated when they wouldn’t listen, pushing things off the table in a fit of temper after.
When one of the other little girls, nearly two years older than her had pushed her down, Silva watched Aelin sulk in the corner with calculating eyes, watching the other girl’s every move, eventually setting a trap for her near the reading corner.
Aelin moved quietly, taking the thickest books from the shelf and stacking them high at the edge of a table.
Silva watched as she pushed them carefully over the table’s edge, just far enough that they were unstable, but not enough to tip, before she sought the girl out.
When the other child was wailing, buried beneath the stack of hardback storybooks that had been jostled at just the right moment, Aelin was back on the other side of the playroom, playing with a doll, her eyes wide and innocent.
She did stare at the other children. She stared at everyone, long and unblinking.
Silva would never admit it, but Tannar was right — she didn’t act like the other Elvish children.
She was afraid of strangers. She took her cues entirely from Silva, only warming to people Silva demonstrably liked, which, here in their town, was no one.
As an infant, Aelin was wary of Silva’s own mother and grandmother at first, closely watching Silva’s interactions with an intensity she shouldn’t have possessed, until they were deemed safe.
Now she loved her Nana and Nani. Tannar’s mother, by contrast, was tolerated carefully, Aelin regularly looking back to Silva when she was sweet, as if to ensure her performance was being watched.
She didn’t want her little girl to grow up performing in the puppet play, constantly hiding who she was and tying her strings.
Silva had begun to research, possessing her own unvoiced concern.
They took him. They sent me back a changeling.
One of theirs. She’d had a mad, panicked moment, one she didn’t like to admit even to herself, one of those days at the club, watching her daughter silently stare at the other children present, that she had been given a changeling in Spring, when her baby had vanished from her body, that giggling little figure running through the trees . . .
“Once I went to see a bad lady,” Aelin had told the goblin minder in the playroom one afternoon, conversationally. “With mommy. She had so many flowers! She made me hide in the trees.”
Three of the other Elvish mothers present had been sitting there as well, their heads swinging to Silva.
She had laughed weakly, feeling mildly vindicated that she had been right all along.
Her little wing had been listening the whole time, paying attention since she was still just a little flutter beneath Silva’s breast. Could they have taken her? What could you do if they did?
But that was madness. Not everything is about the fae. And even if it were, Silva decided, it didn’t matter. She would love the baby she had. Are you going to be like Tate’s mother and reject her? No. You’re going to be like the mother in the story who carries her changeling on her back.
There were other explanations, hereditary explanations concerning the way the brain processed information, ones that even included some of her tiny daughter’s behavior.
She had once watched Tate yell at Rukh for playing music in the pub too loudly, breaking his concentration .
. . when the music in question was from the restaurant across the street, and the task on which he was concentrating was attempting to scrub out a microscopic speck of dirt only he could see from the Pixie’s ice well.
She’d watched him disassemble an unplugged vacuum cleaner because it made an annoying sound, one he insisted he could hear.
Lurielle had once commented that Tate’s tendency to stare without blinking was unnerving.
Silva remembered the conversation they’d had about croquet, in which his grandfather had been excited that I was finally good at something normal.
If her daughter behaved differently from the other children, Silva was certain she’d come by it honestly, whether it was fae behavior or not.
Besides that, there were plenty more things Tannar didn’t even know about.
Aelin sat under trees, babbling and laughing as if she were having a grand conversation, running to Silva with tears in her eyes one afternoon, telling her that one of the trees had told her a mean story to frighten her.
“I-I don’t think you should talk to that tree anymore,” Silva stammered in concern. How does one scold a tree for inappropriate behavior? “Especially if it’s not nice to you.”
Aelin carried the cat with her from room to room at home, telling Tannar, on one of the rare evenings he was home with them, completely innocently, that she had named the cat Moonbeam, which the cat had approved, that it had come from the wintertime, and, perhaps most problematically, this was her daddy’s cat.
It had traveled all the way to their house by following her smell, she’d finished, entirely pleased with herself.
Tannar had stared at Silva across the room, saying nothing, and she had known that it was time to start snipping her strings.
Every puppet play came to an end, and she was nothing if not professional.
In the end, it was Tate himself who facilitated her escape.
We can stay in the apartment while you find a job, she wrote in one of her little journals, beginning to make her plans.
The apartment above the Pixie wasn’t exactly the most appropriate place for a child, but his old girl was surprisingly well insulated, and it was rare that noise from below filtered up.
She had no access to the pub anyway, the security panel on the door having been changed once Thessa had taken over management of the bar.
He was there, in every corner, every nook and cranny of the place, in the perfect Silva-inspired living room he’d made just for her, in the shower they had shared every day, in the bedroom where those early mornings had felt like something sacred . . .
But it had been four years. Longer without him than she’d even known him.
Time had not healed her, not really. But it had quieted the ache. The hole he’d left within her still hurt, but her daughter had begun to help heal the edges of it.
She had read each and every letter he’d written her, had ripped herself open anew, her heart re-shattering .
. . and then she’d become angry. Furious that he’d not been able to tell her the same things he’d been able to put on paper, that he’d not been able to tell her the truth of his heart, leaving her twisting in uncertainty throughout their entire relationship.
. . . And then her anger had faded, and she’d only felt heartbroken all over again.
Heartbroken and deeply sad for both of them.
Sad for the desperate, insecure elf she’d been, sad for whatever had happened to him that prevented him from being able to let her in.
Sad that he would never know the impish little girl who was a tiny piece of him, and that Aelin would never know him in turn.
But the never-ending tears that had fallen in a continuous stream, soaking her pillow each night, had dried up at last, leaving her heart parched and cracked and a bit hardened.
She would love him forever, but Silva had nearly managed to convince herself that some things weren’t meant to last forever.
Some things were too delicate and lovely to last, like the fragile wings of a butterfly.
She had been in love once, and it had been real and imperfect, and she would never love anyone the same way again . . . other than her little girl.
And that was enough.
Life had gone on without him, and she’d filled the gaps within her as best she could. She would love him forever, but time marched on, and somewhere along the way, she had learned to march with it.
They could live in the apartment he’d left her . . . but she would have only a few years to work before Aelin needed to start school, and the tiny hamlet of Greenbridge Glen had no schools. She let out a slow breath, moving down to the next line in her notebook.
We can go home to Cevanore.