Chapter 17 #2
“Until I didn’t want it anymore. You see, Prudence, we are always responsible for those we tame.
And I…” Rhiannon swallowed around the lump in her throat and lowered her eyes.
She couldn’t say what she needed to say if Prudence kept looking at her with all that tenderness.
She didn’t deserve any of it, tenderness above all.
Still, she pressed her lips to Prudence’s palm and continued in a whisper.
“As these tales go, beware what you wish for, it might come true. It sure did for me. She wasn’t the princess I thought I was rescuing, and I wasn’t the savior she thought she deserved. Me being a witch certainly wasn’t something that she embraced.”
Pru bit her lip, and Rhiannon again wondered what thoughts were running through that brilliant mind.
“She saw me in action, you see. I was a bit of a show-off. Not to everyone, obviously, but I was a big believer in showing one’s true nature to one’s chosen mate.
And I thought she was mine. Let’s just say neither her nor the guy I maimed, nor my mother or aunt or Christian, who all had to clean my mess, were particularly happy with me.
After that, the only way forward was off the island. ”
Rhiannon’s fingers trembled and she looked down on her hands. Slender, capable, callused hands of a restorer. The memory of blood on them, the memory of the screams. She shook her head and forced herself to go on.
“Years weren’t kind to us. And it didn’t matter that I enacted the suppressing spell and never used my power after leaving Crow’s Nest. Some things festered.”
“She made you do it? Forsake your gift?” Pru’s eyes were dark, accusing.
It was sweet, all things considered. Rhiannon wanted to hug her.
Rhiannon also wanted to crawl in bed and roll into a ball and cry for days.
Instead, she kissed her slender wrist, the skin soft and warm under her lips, sustaining her, giving her strength to confess the unthinkable.
“Our relationship was complicated. She had been traumatized by years of heartbreak, years of failure—”
“Failure doesn’t excuse refusing acceptance of one’s wife’s gift. Love doesn’t forsake parts of your spouse. Love takes it all in and cherishes every single thing.”
Rhiannon licked her lips, her mouth suddenly dry.
“She hated Crow’s Nest, she hated everything about it, every reminder of it and I…
I just wanted her. At any price. And this one was small, since I hated the craft by then anyway.
” She took a deep breath, trying to shake the hold of memories.
“I enacted the barrier spell. Goddess, I’d have given her my blood if that would’ve brought her peace.
It wasn’t enough. We became a tug-of-war where nobody won.
And then she was dead and there was no more battlefield left to fight for. I’m sorry. I’m so damn sorry.”
Rhiannon, lips still on Pru’s skin, had no idea what, in particular, she was apologizing for.
There was so much, and so much more to tell, the apologies getting all jumbled in one mass of guilt in Rhiannon’s mind.
Pru reached for her hand gently and then enveloped her in an embrace that seemed to go on forever.
“Are you blaming yourself, Rhiannon? Is that why you are still denying the craft even though she’s gone?”
Rhiannon closed her eyes, the words trembling on the very tip of her tongue. She gulped them back. She couldn’t… She couldn’t…
“I have been carrying a box of her diaries with me for a year and have finally gotten enough courage to open them. Some are old and rather mangled by weather exposure, water, spilled alcohol, so it’s somewhat fitting that nobody but me would be able to read them.”
Rhiannon looked in the direction of her home office and thought of the big and small things she had never wanted to know about Margaux.
“Are you restoring them as punishment? Why read them at all?”
“Someone has to. After all the years and all the blame, all the misery, it feels like someone has to give voice to everything she carried.”
Pru’s scoff was salve on a wound.
“I have a feeling you’ve heard most of that anyway.”
Rhiannon smiled and chose silence. How to explain the depth of this guilt? The sheer helplessness to change something that seems to be entirely in your power, yet no matter what you do, nothing is working.
Prudence just kept looking at her, and Rhiannon sighed. Why did she even bring up the diaries? Margaux had taken enough from her.
“She had been miserable long before we met, Prudence. She had been married before Jerome, and that fell apart. Then she saw the old man as her ticket to some sort of stability and enough money to never worry about anything ever again, but that brought her nothing but more misery. And on the island, she never found her peace. I chose to skip the diaries of her Parisian years, since they were mostly about art and her first marriage, which didn’t have anything to do with me anyway.
So I am halfway through her years on Dragons, and even here she was apparently being blackmailed and never left to just be. ”
“Blackmailed?” There was a loud, incredulous note in Prudence’s voice.
“I don’t know if I can quite interpret it like that, but she was being pressured by someone. To what end, I don’t know.”
“It’s so like you, you know?”
“Like me?”
“To still feel pity. To still feel empathy for someone who essentially pushed you to lock away the part of yourself that made you who you are.”
Prudence’s voice was kind, tenderness permeating every word, and Rhiannon felt tears sting the backs of her eyes.
She lifted her face and kissed Pru, who sighed, understanding her gambit and yet giving her the grace she definitely didn’t deserve by kissing her back.
And Rhiannon’s heart, already battered and bruised, simply turned over, opened, and lay in the ruins of her guilt and her ache.
Why her? Why now? And why this late? When I am the empty husk of my former self, cursed and with blood on my hands?
Rhiannon straddled Pru’s lap and Pru undid the sash of her bathrobe, and then it was all slow caresses and tender kisses. To her throat, to her breasts, to her chest, everywhere Pru’s mouth could reach.
Rhiannon clutched that blonde head, her fingers in those silky waves, and let her tears to finally come.
As Pru’s fingers found her, pierced her, took her, undid her, Rhiannon buried herself in the moment, in this place, in this feeling of tender mouth and those strong hands and in the one who simply allowed her to surrender, to open, to give and give and give till she was empty.
“You’re still alive.” Ceridwen threw her a look over her shoulder and continued to pot something, her hands covered in dirt.
“You’re still a pain.” Rhiannon parried without much malice and sat close to her sister on the workbench.
It was a tossup who was more surprised by this visit, judging by the set of Ceridwen’s shoulders and the tentative way her fingers moved over a task she could do in her sleep. And Rhiannon even in her more honest moments couldn’t quite pinpoint why she was here. She owed nothing to no one.
Well, there was the first lie, and she tried to tell fewer of those—at least to herself—these days. She did owe Ceridwen this one thing.
“I came to say thank you. For the herbs and for making sure Prudence had food and her things.”
Ceridwen’s hands faltered over the tiny clay pot. Still, when she spoke, there was no tell.
“I’ve known her for longer than I’ve known you. Which is a very strange thing to say to your own sister.”
Rhiannon narrowed her eyes but didn’t speak. She could tell her sister was not finished. This was about to turn into one of those famous Ceridwen Crowhart lectures. She gritted her teeth and lifted her chin just a fraction of a degree, which she guessed was enough for Ceridwen to go on.
“Your thanks should be to her, when all is said and done.”
Rhiannon’s patience had had enough of being patronized. And the slight proprietary way Ceridwen talked about Prudence was beginning to grate. Teaching her was one thing. This? This, whatever this was, was another.
“I did thank her. And I apologized to her. What do you want me to do?”
“Ah.” Ceridwen set aside the finished pot and reached for another one. Rhiannon could almost hear the pulse in her temples. She’d need medicine for the headache that she had apparently been brewing since she set foot in the flower shop.
“Ah, what?” she gritted out, her sister as always getting the upper hand easily. Rhiannon hated herself for falling into these traps every single time.
“Ah nothing. You must’ve had reason to apologize.”
“What does that even mean?” Rhiannon threw her hair back and stood up. She couldn’t sit still. Ceridwen was too close. Hitting too precisely at the spot that smarted. Her own guilt. Her own atrocious behavior. And her own heart that seemed incapable of leaving well enough alone.
“That if you had been honest with her about your marriage—”
Rhiannon saw red. Saw herself hurling the goddamn pots at the wall. Like the glass, like the pieces of it she collected with her bare hands, one by one. It was the rage that sobered her instantly. What was becoming of her?
She took a breath, a tiny shallow one, aware of Ceridwen watching her every move. Every heartbeat. Aware of those eyes, just a touch lighter than hers, assessing her. Well, pettiness was one hell of a motivator. She’d analyze later the sudden appearance of a conscience.
“You mean my widowhood, Ceridwen.”
She let that arrow fly and watched it hit dead center of her sister’s chest, the satisfaction of the perfect aim fading immediately at Ceridwen’s sincere sympathy.
“Rhiannon! Oh Goddess! Oh no… I’m so sorry.”
Rhiannon lifted her hand and kept Ceridwen, who was already getting up to embrace her, in her seat.
“Don’t. Don’t say anything. It was almost a year ago.
” And then seeing the tears spring to her sister’s eyes, she cursed herself for a fool.
“Ceri, please. What is there to say? I was married for twenty years and then I was not. I had filed for divorce two months before she…” Rhiannon trailed off, surprised how easy the words came, the words she had so much trouble uttering in front of Prudence, the words she had entombed in her chest and held there like prisoners of her own sin.
Maybe it was the sheer repetition. Maybe saying them again and again and again was the trick?
“And you hated her anyway. There’s nothing left to say.”
Ceridwen tsked and shook her head.
“We’re Crowharts, there is always something left to say.
We stay silent for decades and then unleash our trauma on everyone around us.
It’s the way of the Crow.” Rhiannon disguised her laughter with a huff and Ceridwen just kept shaking her head.
“I did hate her, you know? I blamed her for you leaving, she was an easy target. Mostly because she was indeed at fault. You were so young, Rhy.”
“She was alone, victimized, and I thought I loved her. There was no changing any of that.”
“You broke my heart.”
“Don’t, Ceri. I broke my own heart and just didn’t know it back then. By the time I figured that out, there were no more pieces left to pick up and it was decades later.”
Ceridwen nodded and ignored Rhiannon’s earlier protestations and came to stand in front of her.
Rhiannon almost smiled at how the same and yet not they were.
Same height, same build, with Ceridwen getting a touch willowier with age.
There was gray in Ceridwen’s mahogany, something Rhiannon would never allow to happen to her auburn.
A few shades of red, a few pounds, and they could be twins.
“Yes, Mother always said we looked more like each other than Seren and Deryn.”
Ceridwen laid a hand on Rhiannon’s arm, and she had to focus all of her energy to share nothing, to hold back. To not spill everything over the tiny plants and the cute clay pots and Ceridwen with her annoyingly honest eyes and careful touch.
Her heart beat in her temples louder now, pulsing, alive by itself, outside of Rhiannon’s will.
“I saw Deryn in LA, you know. She was filming something or other. ‘The talent,’ as they kept calling her, was impressive.” She smiled and moved just enough for Ceridwen’s fingers to fall off her sleeve.
If her sister noticed her little act of obfuscation, she said nothing. Instead, Ceridwen sighed wistfully.
“She keeps asking Seren and me to come see her, she was opening a pop-up spot in Manhattan not too long ago. Seren went.”
“And you didn’t. Still guarding the Nest, Ceri?”
The moment the words were out of her mouth, Rhiannon wished them back. Ceridwen’s smile was rueful.
“Someone has to.”
Well, they were even. One a piece. Slap for slap. In their moments of closeness they still held to their anger, at the world, at each other.
Rhiannon turned to leave, the morning getting away from her as it was. She had people to see, things to do. Trading blows with her sister had never been a worthwhile activity.
“Prudence tells me you’re doing a good job with her.”
She watched Ceridwen load the ammunition in her reply, braced herself for it, and was still not ready when it arrived.
“I wish you would be doing a better job with Prudence.”
Rhiannon immediately knew Ceridwen was not speaking of the craft.
“Is this the segue from you knowing her better than me, knowing her longer? Ask what you want to ask me, Ceridwen. Either have the ovaries to tell me you want her for yourself, or that you think I’m not good enough for her. So which one is it?”
Ceridwen’s sad tiny smile did nothing to calm Rhiannon’s desire to strangle her sister.
“I can’t want her, Rhiannon. She’s not for me, and you know it.”
“Can’t and won’t are not the same.”
“No, they aren’t.”
“What kind of answer is that, Ceridwen?”
Her sister finally turned away from her and went back to her seedlings that instantly reached for her, their little leaves dancing merrily.
“The only one you’re going to get. And as for you not being good for her? Well, are you?”
Ceridwen’s questions rang in Rhiannon’s head along with another vicious headache all the way back to the Atelier.