Chapter 11 #2
Jesstin blew out. “How... How do you know all of this?”
“I was so hungry to learn as a child that my father spent money we didn’t have on a private scholar from Oldcastle.
He’d come twice a week and teach me everything the village academy thought too ‘advanced’ for little girls.
But I couldn’t get enough of Thomas’s unending knowledge.
He had so much in his head, I just wanted to”—she mimed using a pick against his skull—“mine it out and take it all for myself.”
“I had no idea,” Jesstin said in wonder. He could listen to her talk about spirals and nature all night. “That’s incredible.”
“These spirals, not all of them can be explained or predicted neatly with math, but this equation, when you understand it, you can plainly see it when you observe nature in growth. You see, there’s a repeating sequence.
This forms the same pattern that you see as a spiral when you look closely at a leaf. ”
“I can’t fathom it,” Jesstin said. He thought of how badly he’d wanted to study in Oldcastle, but it was Elloven who should have gone.
There was nothing confusing in the way she’d described her math and spirals, but he couldn’t wrap his mind around it.
He hadn’t been great with scholastics, no matter how much he’d applied himself.
She was built with a scholar’s brain but lacked sufficient opportunities to use it.
“El, if you still feel this hunger to learn more, there are women at the universities now.”
She got quiet. Her nods faded. “Do you know what I’ve realized?”
Jesstin waited for her to share.
“I don’t hear any animals here. No crickets. No birds. Do you?”
“Well...” He stopped and gave it more thought. “I’ve never actually seen any animals in the Infinitum at all, only heard them.”
“That’s what I mean. I can’t hear them anymore.”
“Not since we’ve entered the spiral, no.”
“Fewer people too.”
“It’s not very inviting, is it?”
“I can’t shake the sense we’re not meant to be here at all, like when you aim a north end of a magnet to a north end of another magnet.
It gets close, but it can’t quite connect.
Or... Or maybe a better analogy is how your body fights to push out a splinter.
It doesn’t belong, and our biology knows this. ”
“Were you just waiting for the right time to show off your incredible intellect?”
She laughed. “Says more about you if you’re only now seeing it.”
“I saw it,” he said before leaning in for a kiss. “I like that you’re so surprising to me. Few things are.”
“Oh, you’re surprised to find I possess intellectual acuity? A diminutive little woman like myself?” Her mouth fell open in exaggerated offense. He kissed her expression away, then the one she replaced it with. “Trying to shut me up? You like your women quiet, eh?”
“Never.” Jesstin rubbed his nose against hers. “I like them just as you are.”
“Mm. Good, safe answer there.” She settled back into his arms.
Their playfulness passed into an easy silence he’d come to look forward to.
What a gift it was to simply exist with someone without the need to fill every moment with words.
To just be together. He’d stopped obsessing over losing her.
It would come. He knew that. But as long as she was there and he was with her, he would hoard all the little moments like the treasures they were.
After a few minutes, Elloven moved out of his arms. “Jess, there’s something I need to say. I’ll just say it once, so if it upsets you, you’ll never have to hear it again.”
“You won’t upset me,” he said to assure her, but he knew better than to make such a proclamation without the facts. “If you do, we’ll get through it.”
Elloven nodded and sat up. “If we survive this... I want to be with you. Really be with you, in an honest way.” When she glanced down at him, her eyes were full of the openness he was so determined to protect.
“I know how you feel about relationships, and I’ll respect it if you decide ‘this’ isn’t for you, but I need you to know where I stand, so there’s no confusion.
If this is all it will ever be, I’ll learn to accept it.
But I’ve never told anyone what I wanted, never asked for anything for myself, and I need to now.
I’ll take whatever you feel you can offer, and I won’t expect anything more. ”
Her vulnerability became his. His chest ached for them both.
He wanted the same thing, more than he’d ever wanted anything.
But if he couldn’t yet be fully honest about Gennady, then he couldn’t make false promises either.
“El, I don’t think we should make any important decisions until we’re out of here. ”
“Of course.” Her nod was vigorous and heartbreaking. “Of course, you’re right.”
Jesstin pulled up beside her. “I love you.” He kissed the corner of her mouth. “I love you so much. I’m not confused about that. But we are literally straddling life and death. You don’t even know how you’ll feel when this is over.”
“You can tell me you don’t want this without telling me how I feel,” she retorted.
“I’m really fucking this up,” he said, sighing.
“You have it backward. I won’t commit to anything because of how I feel for you.
You mean too much to me to get this wrong, and I need to know I can still be the man you need me to be when this is all over.
If you’re honest with yourself, you need to know that too. ”
“Fair enough,” she said softly. “I only needed to tell you where I stand.”
“I know.” He tucked her hair back and kissed the hollow of her cheek.
Elloven smiled at her lap. “I asked you not to question me. I need to remember that goes both ways.”
Jesstin had been holding onto something for a while, and until that moment, when he felt he had less to offer than she deserved, he wasn’t even sure he’d share it. “El, you asked me before if I could see or speak with Gennady.”
She quickly pivoted his way. “You can?”
He paused, then nodded. “Not here. Not in the Infinitum. But out there... yes.”
Elloven flattened a palm to her chest. “You can speak with Gen?”
“He’s, uh...” This was why he’d hesitated before. But she deserved some piece of her brother. “That day in Mythgarde, when Esme came to see me, I was going to tell her no. I didn’t want any trouble. It was Gen who changed my mind.”
Elloven went deadly quiet.
“He comes and goes. Sometimes to needle me.” He chuckled. “But he loved you above everyone, and he was adamant I help you, do what he should have been there to do.” He swallowed. “I did it for him. And then, as I got to know you, I did it for you.”
“And, ah...” She cleared her throat. “Why can’t you see him here, if he’s dead?”
“Because he’s not here.”
“Why?”
“He never crossed over.”
She swung a hard look his way. “Why, Jesstin?”
He couldn’t meet her eyes. “I used to wonder why I could only see certain people and not all, then my mom, when I saw her in the market, told me you could be there or here but not both.”
“He must have told you who killed him. Why they killed him.”
“The dead can’t tell us the secrets of the living.” It was a weak answer, even if it was true. But it wasn’t the whole truth, and he knew this moment would eventually come full circle, and he’d have to face it.
“Well, somebody knows,” she said quietly. “Somebody knows.” She settled back against the pillow and pulled the small blanket over her. “Thank you for finally telling me the truth.”
He wanted her to scream, fight, curse—anything. Anything else.
“Can I hold you? Elloven?”
She didn’t answer, which was an answer in itself, but right as he accepted the well-deserved brush-off, her hand reached back for his and pulled it around her.
They hadn’t spoken all day. Elloven knew the silence was hers and that she’d be the one who’d need to break it, but she didn’t know where to begin.
It wasn’t the revelation that Jesstin had been talking to her brother all along, though that hurt.
There were so many things he could have told her about the past years, memories she’d never get with Gennady—little stories and anecdotes that might seem incidental to him but were so much more to her.
The real reason she’d said nothing was because she couldn’t put aside the notion he was lying about something even more important.
She’d listened to him pretend to sleep for most of the night. His little sighs. She’d been feigning as well, because the same instinct that told her Jesstin was her future, her fate, was turning her down a different path.
Elloven didn’t know what to do about it. It broke her heart to even contemplate it.
They came upon another river. This one flowed west, unlike the eastward one from before, and it was Jesstin who voiced the questions she’d been thinking.
Which direction should a river flow if it was in a spiral?
Could a river even exist in one? Is this even a damn spiral at all?
If she could read his cursed map, she might understand what he couldn’t.
When he reached into the dirt and pulled out the half-buried sign that read Desidero, they both took a step back.
“That can’t be.” Jesstin turned it over in his hands. “I can’t explain why, but it can’t be.”
Elloven could, but she had no heart for it. The science she understood didn’t apply to the netherworld anyway. “Let’s keep going.”
“This doesn’t alarm you?”
“Many things alarm me, but a river running in two different directions and relocating itself from one end of a magical world to the other is, strangely, not one of them.” She shifted her satchel and kept on.
“El, wait!”
Her shoulders pinched tight in anticipation of him finally addressing her attitude, but he didn’t, and it was, to use his word, alarming. The only thing that would keep pigheaded Jesstin from pushing was if he already knew why she was upset with him.