Chapter Twenty-Four Vina #2
“It was my grandmother’s name,” said Hari. “Well, spelled differently. In a different script too. But I thought it would be right—to, uh, let you be yourself.” He sat, and clasped his own mug, knuckles white. “So,” he said. “How we found you.”
“Maleficium told Hari what the witch had done,” said Galath. “I understood you could both return.”
“I used my connections,” Hari said. “From my life in London, and the cunning folk I knew there. And—less savory folk.” His smile was lopsided.
“I worked in molly-houses, coffeehouses, taverns—anywhere I could get work. I met people who could do anything if you had the coin or the power. That was no good to me then, but your fathe—Galath had the funds. We asked for people to look for incarnate children, or strange children. Children who rose from ink or were carried to them by spirits. Tale-riddled children.”
Galath spoke again.
“I do not believe you were born from mortal parents and brought to us. I suspect the Isle returned you to us—breathed life into you from a tale, as it does with the fae and their ilk, leaving you to be discovered and reared. We were not the people who found you, but we paid, and I threatened, and eventually you were brought to us. I knew you when I saw you.”
“You were looking for me?”
Hari opened his mouth, but Galath spoke first.
“We were looking for the witch,” said Galath.
Why did that hurt?
“She’s your family, for good or ill,” said Vina faintly. “I understand. Did you look for Simran? After you found me?”
“We looked,” said Hari heavily.
“What happened to her?”
Galath and Hari shared a look.
“Please,” said Vina. “Please, tell me?”
“The archivists have her,” said Galath. “I attempted to retrieve her, but it wasn’t possible.
” He rolled his sleeve up, baring a mark she’d seen and never thought on, all her life—a deep gouge, blackened at the edges, like an ink stain.
“I could not fight their ink. And I did not desire to be captured and trapped.” He rolled down his sleeve.
“My long life has, at least, granted me patience in these matters.”
She took a steadying breath. Another.
“You used to read me my tale as a bedtime story,” she said. “So many versions of it. Don’t you think that’s strange? Cruel?”
“We wanted you to know yourself,” Hari said. “Honestly—I thought—we both thought, that you’d remember when you were small. We prepared for it. But time passed, and you were simply yourself. Happy.”
“I hoped the witch had indeed managed to break her tale,” murmured Galath. “That you were entirely free, unburdened even by your past life.”
“No,” said Vina. Her tea was starting to cool. Her eyes were stinging.
“Vina,” said Hari. “What do you want to do?”
“Save Simran,” she said. Her last moment with Simran was fresh in her mind, painful as a wound—and also twenty years ago. Twenty years. “Or—make sure we’re ready, when Simran comes to us.”
Galath and Hari looked at each other again.
“We don’t know if she’s Simran anymore,” said Hari, when he looked back at her, gaze apologetic.
“Simran will come to us,” said Vina. “Now I remember, she will too. If she hasn’t already.”
“You don’t know what this lifetime has made of her,” Galath said.
“I’m still Vina,” she said. “But it’s like I’ve had a long sleep, where I didn’t know who I was. The sleep is—with me. It’s shaped me. But I’m still me. Simran will be the same.”
“She hasn’t been raised by people who care about her, Vina,” Hari said gently.
It still shocked her to look at him and see the laughter lines around his eyes, the gray at his temples and think both Papa and Hari simultaneously—like two reflections clashing in faceted glass.
“And the archivists have powers we don’t. They may have—changed her.”
Vina felt a shudder run through her, as she remembered the ink in the archives. The way it had burned.
“I need to find her,” insisted Vina. “And we need to finish her work. We need to free the Isle.”
“Of course that hadn’t occurred to us,” said Galath, deadpan.
“What your fathe—what Galath means to say is that we’ve been doing everything we can, without risking your safety,” said Hari.
“I have allies in London who may be willing to help us, and old friends among the cunning folk of the city, too, who send us information. But we don’t know what to do, beyond that.
The archivists are too quick. New incarnates, Elsewhere incarnates, are found and killed before we can discover them.
The Eternal Prince rides, and the Queen sends her knights to swarm every village and town, placing more eyes on incarnates old and new. ”
“We haven’t had the Queen’s spies here,” said Vina.
“No,” Galath said. “We’ve kept them at bay.”
Vina thought of the old hexafoils scarred into the town’s houses, old, older than her by far.
And the newer marks too—the witch circles set into the outer walls, and the charms tied to the quaint lavender growing at the path that led from the brick road to the town itself.
She thought of Galath’s absences, and his polished axe, always embedded in a wood stump in the garden—except when it was not—and how he never brought in wood for the fire. She decided not to ask any questions.
“We need to save Simran,” Vina said again, firmer this time.
“And we need to destroy the archives. That will end this. The power the archivists have, to control tales, the way those tales move incarnates like puppets—all of that lies in the archives,” said Vina.
“I saw it. I felt it. And Simran knew it too. The archives must die.”
Hari was looking at her, and she could see him weighing his words carefully.
His expression was familiar. She’d seen it the first time she climbed a tree and stood on the highest branches in victory; when she’d raised her first sword; when she’d packed her bag and left home all on her own for the first time.
I don’t want to stop you, his expression said. But I love you, and I am afraid.
“And will you survive it,” Hari said, voice faintly unsteady, “if they do?”
Vina thought of those lifetime-ago tales that took the shape of birds and flowers. She thought of how Simran had found a way to rewrite their tale—just enough to give them a chance.
She thought of Soren. Of Bess, whom she’d never known. Of all the incarnates who yearned to escape the chains that held them.
“I think it’s a risk worth taking,” Vina said quietly.
Hari and Galath exchanged a look.
“To London, then,” said Hari, a determined smile on his face. “Let’s save the Isle.”