Chapter Nine Adela
I wake up on the floor of the main room of my own house to the worried faces of the two people who love me most in the world.
“Who died?” I grumble.
“Spinner’s tits,” Dad swears, and hugs me so tightly I feel my ribs creak.
“We were worried you had!” Cecelia pushes flyaway hairs off my forehead.
I moan and sit up, stiffly. My head hurts, and I reach up to find my hair still tightly bound in the ceremonial matching braids. I’m also still wearing the bone jewelry and the first layer of the matching robes.
“What happened?”
Dad begins to bluster, turning an alarming shade of red.
Cecelia, calm as ever, turns to him. “Oscar, would you make Adela some tea?”
A helper to his core, he stands up reluctantly. “Of course. Good idea. Tea.” He gives me a kiss on the forehead and goes to the kitchen. There is a long, silent pause where Cecelia and I glance warily at each other, and then he begins to bang around.
I open my mouth to ask again, but Cecelia holds up a hand. “Let me say this quickly before he returns.”
“Quickly” is an anathema to Cecelia. She’s a detail-obsessed historian and a natural storyteller. If she’s allowed, she can stretch a tale out from ten minutes of actual activity to an hour-long laugh-out-loud, emotional, heartfelt epic. But I stay silent.
“We were going through the ceremony. It was obviously fantastic. You were fantastic. The matches you made! I swear their high priestess was going to shit her robes with joy. And then you went in with Kian. Something happened while you were in there, like a pulse of vitality flowed over us and into the rest of the valley. We all felt it. I assume that was him matching with the phoenix?”
I nod. It must have been. She pauses, and I know she has a million questions. But she sets her jaw and continues.
“After that, things got strange. There was sort of a hush that followed, and then an explosion.”
“An explosion?” I move to get up. I need to get to the matching hut. See what’s left of it.
She holds up her hands. “No, not literal. It was another pulse, I guess. Like the other, except massive. And with this strange golden light. Honestly, it was beautiful and terrifying. But the creatures got strange after that. They sort of swarmed the matching hut and started posturing as if to attack, especially the jackalopes. You know how territorial they are around there, with all their warrens. Then Enkidus came out of the forest and snatched a gryphon right out of the sky. We’re not sure which one. ”
Another dragon attack. Another dead creature.
“Thankfully she took off for the farthest mountains after. Hopefully the feast will keep her away for a while.” Cecelia looks off in the direction of the mountains, a haunted look in her eyes.
She sort of shakes away whatever memory is plaguing her and continues. “The rest of the creatures scattered and Kian came out, wearing the phoenix skull and carrying you in his arms.”
A primitive, dirty-minded part of me is turned on by that. Goddess, he must be strong.
We hear the kettle whistle. Dad is still banging around the kitchen, but now we have mere minutes until it’s finished steeping.
“Your turn,” Cecelia says. “Quickly.”
“I…” The details are hazy. “The night was hard. The skulls were loud.”
Cecelia grimaces. She knows how much I hate the creatures’ voices in my head.
“And exuberant in their matching. It was like they had been waiting and were all cheering on the most powerful. And then Kian came in, and I thought I’d never be able to hear another one of my own thoughts ever again.
They… We—” I search for the word, wanting to be precise for Cecelia even as I wince at the memory.
“It was a riot of noise. Painful. And then he saw the edge of the phoenix skull. They paired.”
“But that’s good?” Cecelia says, making it a question. She can tell I’m not sure it’s good.
“It is. I think,” I agree with a shrug. “Maybe. We’ll find out, I suppose.”
I pause. Do I tell Cecelia? How I felt nauseous and aflame and called? Even now, I can feel two pulls, insistent. One is the direction of the matching hut. The other across the courtyard where the order is staying.
But no.
She’ll just give me the look that they all give me. The one where I know I’ve done something wrong, said something wrong, been somehow wrong. And yet, the desire to tell bubbles up inside me until I can’t hold it back. I tell her.
Her eyes, brown and kind and curious, grow wider as she takes it all in.
“And then he kissed me.”
“On the mouth?!” She squeaks, half delighted, half appalled. The clanging in the kitchen pauses. She yells to Dad. “Could Adela also get some cheese? And maybe olives? And salami if you have any? She’s peckish.”
“Of course,” he hollers back, and resumes moving around.
“So he removed your mask?”
I nod.
I’ve never seen her more horrified.
“And that’s it. I don’t remember anything more.”
She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t say anything at all. She simply gives my hand a squeeze and stands up as if to leave. “I need to do some research. We will figure this out.”
I am just about to ask her to stay, to continue to hold my hand and maybe tell me everything will be fine and surely nothing will come of it, when the vision takes me.
We spiral and spin, our feathers brushing together and drifting apart as we dance beneath the evening rain. The air is heavy; we ought to huddle together beneath the canopy, nestled on a thick branch.
But our joy is too immense to fit below even the biggest tree’s branches. After decades of searching—through lifetimes—we have found each other at last. Neither of us will continue to suffer the endless loneliness of death.
And so, we fly, twisting together, then apart, splattered by cold droplets of an angry sky. Far off in the distance, thunder rolls and lightning blooms. The storm’s heart is moving toward us, but we have time before we must take shelter. We continue our celebrations.
I come to moments later. Or at least, I assume it’s mere moments. Cecelia is still standing over me, and I can hear Dad in the kitchen.
“Did you…,” Cecelia starts, her voice shaky. “Did you just have a vision?”
I nod almost imperceptibly. But she sees it. She sees everything where I’m concerned.
“You’re pai—” she begins, a whisper.
Dad comes in with a tray. He pauses in the doorway, looking between us quickly, and I wonder if my face holds the same amount of shock and horror as Cecelia’s or if my guilt overrides those feelings.
“All well, girls?” The same thing he’s asked since we were six and simultaneously fell out of the tree we were climbing. We both came home howling with bruised knees and bruised egos.
“Yep!” I reach for the tray. “This is perfect!”
It’s a little too perky of a response considering I’m still lying on the floor. He looks between us and, with a nearly invisible shrug, brings the tray over and settles it in my lap. Cecelia remains standing, staring until he turns and asks what she’d like to eat.
“No, nothing, thank you,” she replies. “I have some research to do. I’ll check back in later.”
“Okay,” I say with a mouth full of crusty bread. I give her a big, fake grin that I can tell she sees through completely. But she nods and leaves.
“You’re sure you’re okay, goosey?” Dad asks.
“Perfect,” I reply, ignoring the twin pulls in my sternum and pushing away the worries of what they could mean, of what the vision could mean.
I am here. With Dad. Eating snacks and being a keeper, and if there’s something wrong with me, well, what else is new?
There has always been something deeply, fundamentally wrong with me.
I ignore it and take a bite of cheese.
A few days later, I’m asked to head out to the pegasus cliffs to fix a fence. Maxia’s grown clumsy in her old age, and no one wants her to stumble over the edge of the crumbling rock. She may end up flinging herself into the abyss before her ancient wings fully unfurl.
I’ve just left the barns when Etana finds me. She’s been following me around for days, watching me closely, but shying away anytime I approach too directly.
Yesterday, I found her in the town square, eating Petra’s holly bush and waiting for me to finish my turn cooking the order’s breakfast. She followed me all through chores to midday meditations, then stood outside the house, moving from room to room to room as I cleaned.
The children love it, to have a typically elusive unicorn so close. They toss her apples and carrots and handfuls of grass and dare each other to climb upon her back or stroke her silky nose.
She’s been tolerant, but thankfully none of them has gotten too close. They run away squealing whenever she turns her curious, but intimidating, horned head in their direction.
I went to bed last night with her peering up at my window, then woke to find her gone at last. Relieved, I collected my tools, hitched up a mule, and loaded up a wagon with the necessary lumber for my repairs, blissfully unencumbered by a pregnant unicorn with a newly developed attachment disorder.
We head out to the cliffs, skirting the edge of the small creek that winds through the valley and the hills where the jackalopes most often play. I keep an eye on the sky for Enkidus, but no one has seen her since she ate the gryphon.
As we approach the matching hut, Etana gets aggravated and begins to circle, pacing before me and the trudging mule.
“Stop that,” I say sternly as the mule tries to sidestep and the wagon dips into a rut, then slides a bit toward the creek. The mule’s ears are flattened agains his head, and his teeth are showing slightly as he champs on his bit. “You’re making him anxious.”
Etana snorts.