Varga
Weeks had passed since I had last raised my claws against anyone in anger, and still I found new things each day to be astonished by.
This morning it was the sight of Borin, mid-lament, his forehead an inch from the stone wall of the great hall, frozen there by nothing more than the sound of Iona's voice.
“Borin. Look at me.”
He turned, slow and reluctant, one hand still pressed flat against the wall as though he needed its permission to stop.
“Bad Borin,” he mumbled. “Borin dropped the good plate. The one with the blue flowers.”
“It is a plate, Borin. Not a person.” She crossed the hall toward him, her skirts brushing against the flagstones, and crouched until she was near enough his height to look him properly in his one good eye. “No one is punishing you for a plate.”
“Master used to.”
I said nothing from where I stood in the doorway, because it was true, and there was no defending it. I had punished him for far less than a broken plate, in years I preferred not to count anymore.
“I am not your Master,” Iona said, and something in her voice softened the word into something gentler than a correction. "You may call me whatever pleases you, but I will never ask you to bash your head against my walls for my satisfaction."
Borin's chin trembled. “Mistress is kind to Borin.”
“I try to be.” She reached up and patted the least deformed side of his skull, the way she had taken to doing since the second week, and I watched the tension drain out of him as though her hand carried some small sorcery of its own.
Perhaps it did. I no longer trusted myself to know the difference between magic and simple kindness.
I had gone hundreds of years without encountering much of either.
“Go and fetch your tonic before the midday bell,” I said, and he startled, having apparently forgotten I stood there at all. “The new batch sits stronger than the last. It should ease the ringing in your skull, if nothing else does.”
“Yes, Master.” He bowed, twice, out of old habit more than necessity now, and shuffled off toward the kitchens, humming something tuneless under his breath.
It had taken me the better part of two months to perfect a tonic that did not merely numb him, but mended what could still be mended. His body, like everything else within these walls, had begun answering to time again in ways it had not for centuries.
The castle's stones held less cold in the mornings. The garden, long since strangled by weeds and neglect, had begun, against all sense, to put out new growth in patches where nothing should have survived the season. Even Borin's wounds closed faster now, though they still closed crooked.
Iona rose from her crouch and looked across the hall to where I stood, and she smiled.
It was not a large smile. It rarely was, with her, a small private thing that touched her eyes before it ever reached her mouth. But my breath caught all the same, the way it had every single time these past weeks, and I still had not grown accustomed to it. I doubted I ever would.
“You spoil him,” she said.
“He deserves spoiling. I owe him centuries of it.”
“Perhaps you owe us both.” She said it lightly, but there was a truth beneath it that neither of us needed to examine further, not on a morning as fine as this one.
We walked the courtyard together after, as had become our habit, past the stables where the horses no longer flinched at my shadow crossing theirs, and out toward what remained of the garden.
She had taken to it with a determination I found endlessly, quietly amusing, pulling weeds with her bare hands and declaring war on a hedge that had not been trimmed since before her grandmother's grandmother was born.
I offered to cut it back with my claws once, and she had swatted my hand away and told me some things ought to be done properly, with proper tools. I had not argued. I had simply gone and found her the shears.
The sun sat low by the time we finished, gold catching in the dust of the flower beds, and she brushed the dirt from her knees and looked up at the darkening sky with something like contentment on her face.
I had seen fear on that face. I had seen resignation, and grief, and a numbness that had frightened me more than any of it.
I had not, until recently, seen contentment, and I found I would do a great many things to keep seeing it.
Borin had laid the evening table by the time we returned inside, three settings out of old habit, though he ate in the kitchens now more often than not, insisting he preferred it, though I suspected he simply liked giving us the hall to ourselves.
Iona teased him about it and he grew flustered and fled before she could press further.
We ate slowly. She told me of Dornovia, small things she remembered, the smell of her mother's bread, a song her nursemaid used to sing that she could recall only in fragments.
I told her what I could of Morana, offering the memories carefully, the way a man offers something fragile that he fears might break again in the giving.
Neither of us spoke of what still stood between us, unresolved. There would be time enough for that.
By the time the candles burned low, the moon had risen fully over the courtyard, silver and quiet, nothing like the light that had once split my mirror open and cracked my life in two. Just moonlight. Just night, settling gently over a castle that no longer felt like a tomb.
“Walk with me a while longer?” she asked.
I did not need to answer. I simply rose, and offered her my hand, and she took it.