Chapter Thirty-Two Nina #2
“We are all someone’s enemy,” he said now.
“Whether you admit to it or not. I regret what I’ve done every waking minute.
But I don’t regret coming back for you in Kenton Hill, even when you didn’t want me.
I don’t regret killing all those infantrymen to save a town that never accepted me.
And I don’t regret saving you from my father or liberating the man who stole the bluff stores that would have saved my mother’s life.
” His chest seemed to buckle. “I can’t bring myself to leave, Nina.
I spent seven years wondering where you were.
So, even if you love him now, and I have to witness the hate in your eyes when you look at me, I choose to stay.
It’s better to be near you and know you are safe than to be without you at all. ”
He looked at his feet, frowning, as though he had said too much.
He sighed, looking up at me once more, his dark eyes warmer now.
“I only want you to consider the danger in this, the improbability of it. And not because I want you for myself, but because I need to know you’ll still live and breathe when this plan collapses. ”
“I don’t much care for living and breathing while your father sits on his throne,” I said, though I knew it was unfeeling.
He looked saddened. “You deserve more than a life of vendetta.”
“I do.” Hot tears pricked my eyes. I wiped them away angrily. “But wishing for it won’t make it so.”
“And will finding that Seam fix it all?” He stepped closer, eyes beseeching. “Will it bring you peace to see everything the Artisans have built, burned to the ground?”
Pain jolted through me. A reflex.
Theo saw it. “This isn’t you,” he said, softer still, his hand reaching out across the void. “This isn’t your war. You’re not a killer.”
But I was. His father had ensured it, and I’d taken the shape of the animal he’d caged. I straightened my shoulders, felt my eyes dry, my tongue turning to steel. “You think you know me?”
“I do.”
“You used to, when I was softer. I had to be soft—malleable. I was trying to fit into your world, and I’m grateful to you for cushioning me.” I took a breath, and though I wanted to square my shoulders, they slumped. “But I’ll never be that person again. You and I might as well be strangers.”
“If it’s easier to reconcile with yourself that way, then I won’t argue with you,” he said. “But that girl you’re talking about? I loved her more than I’ve ever loved anyone. And to me, she fit into my world perfectly.”
Of course she did. She’d turned to his every whim, went gladly in any direction he pulled her.
“Do you remember the night in the library?” he asked now.
We had lost track of time, sitting on the floor between the stacks.
Not studying, just reading, sharing a book between us.
It rested on our touching knees. We used to compete to see who could finish the page first. But then the sconces flickered out all at once, the wooden doors creaked shut as a distant clock tower chimed, and we realized we had been locked in.
That the door was charmed and didn’t unlock until morning.
We had laughed, sprinted down the aisles, pulled soggy sandwiches from Theo’s bag and eaten them in the elemental science section.
I had read to him a piece of poetry from a moth-eaten anthology, and in the middle of it, he’d kissed me, perhaps more passionately than he ever had.
We’d kept our lips locked as we undressed each other, one article at a time, eyes cinched shut, hearts hurtling, and we’d made love for the very first time.
Slowly, awkwardly, but beautifully, under a ceiling painted to replicate heaven.
I shook my head at Theo, shook away the image. I could see the memory suspended in his eyes, forever golden, impossibly sweet, made brighter with time. He’d polished the recollection until it gleamed.
“Did you ever think of me?” he asked. “After you left? Did you miss me at all?”
I shunt out the hurt, the loss I’d long ago reconciled with. “Yes. At first,” I whispered, lifting my chin, turning for the door. “Then a little less each day. Then not at all.”
I made to leave the room.
“Can you find it within yourself, at least, to not hate me?” came his voice. It floated over my shoulder, a plea. If shame had a shape, it would look an awful lot like him. “I don’t think I can bear that.”
I sighed, felt my hands tremble just slightly. “I can’t hate you, Theo,” I said. “As much as I might try.”
I escaped to the hallway, my shoes scuffing off the carpet as I hurried away. I reopened the compartment in my chest that I’d saved for Theo and shut him in once more, but resolved that perhaps I didn’t need to treat him quite so coldly after today.
After all, Theodore Shop hated himself more than I ever could.
We went from house to house, finding drawers of thick woolen socks, pillows, blankets.
We went back and forth from the factory, emptying the supplies and leaving again, until my feet burned with the cold and I’d lost feeling in my fingers.
Theo asked twice if I wanted to retire for the day, but I shook my head and ignored his sighs.
It felt better to do something, anything.
It was when I was still and quiet that my thoughts began to diverge into darker circles.
In a schoolroom I found containers of bandages, a sling, ointment. I pilfered the teacher’s desk and found a half-empty bottle of brandy. I shoved the items into a child’s satchel, still hanging by its hook on the wall. The name above it read BETH.
More evidence of life disrupted: a half-full mug of tea; a word on the chalkboard, three letters short; a small chair overturned, a knitted cardigan still slung on its back.
I felt for a moment as though I was seven years old again in a Scurry schoolroom, paper flowers stuck to the windows in a poor attempt at cheer.
On the far wall was the emblem of Belavere Trench, precisely where it had hung in Scurry. Beneath it were plaques with names, one for every graduating year. And at their center was one that read IN REMEMbrANCE OF THE FOUNDERS OF TRENT.
Here were names I didn’t recognize. Sully, Wynnum, Galileo.
And then, near the bottom, Joan.
My fingers traced over the etching of her name. The wood wasn’t so old; the grain hadn’t discolored, nor had the letter edges dulled.
There it was—that bristle of knowing. Intuition, perhaps. It staked me there.
I took the plaque from the wall and added it to the satchel. I felt the ghosts of the schoolroom shiver in my wake.
I returned near dusk to find John and Patrick hammering nails into a huge mill. John moved the final planks with his mind, sending them careening down the snowy bank and into the water, where they connected lengths of wooden troughs already carved and waiting.
Sweat had broken over Patrick’s neck and back, soaking his shirt through.
The sleeves were rolled away from his forearms. He bent over and heaved huge pieces of pipe and whole troughs onto his shoulder, carried them into place and dropped them.
For a moment, I stayed hidden and watched.
I watched the muscles of his back ripple, watched his chest flex as he dropped another piece into the snow.
Soon, it seemed the construction was complete.
The river pushed the mill, the water heaped into its troughs and overflowed, fed into the pipework that disappeared over the snow and into the factory.
I left the cover of trees. “Genius,” I called out, and Patrick turned before I’d even finished the word, inexplicably attuned to me.
“It’ll do,” John called from the river, his legs half-submerged in the frigid water. It didn’t seem to bother him.
Patrick wiped his brow as he came up the bank, his suspenders hanging by his hips.
“You should be inside,” he said by way of greeting. “There’s weather comin’.”
“You aren’t inside.”
“I ain’t a lady,” he said, stopping before me, whorls of steam lifting off his skin. He seemed to recognize the intensity in my eyes. “What is it?”
“I need to find Edith,” I said. “Would you come with me?”
Edith was to be found in the factory, sorting the goods Theo and I had brought in. Theodore was emptying a sack onto a metal workbench while she picked out the canned goods, the medicines.
Polly came stumbling out of her office, eyes near-deranged. She blinked in rapid succession as though trying to draw shapes from her surroundings. John came into the warmth behind me and Patrick.
“Edith,” I said, pulling the plaque out of the satchel, not revealing it yet. “Edith, what do you know about the three daughters?”
She didn’t look up from her ministration, but I thought her hands stumbled over the clothes she was sorting. “The three daughters?” she mused, then shrugged. “As much as anyone else I’d guess. My ma used to tell me to make wishes on ’em.”
“Mine as well,” I said, a weight falling heavily into my stomach. “And what did she tell you about the founders of Trent?”
She stopped then, looked over her shoulder at me, seemed to realize for the first time the people convened around her, listening. She eyed the plaque in my hand furtively. “What’ve you got there?”
I gave it to her, let her eyes fall to the names. “The three daughters were born of the name Trent?” I asked.
Edith shrugged. “So they say.”
“So who says?”
“People here got a long memory,” she sighed.
“The first Stewards—they came from this parish, see? That’s what the old folk think.
Their grandmas and grandaddies taught them the same, that Trent were Idia’s birthplace.
” She handed the plaque back to Nina. “But the Book of Belavere don’t agree.
It don’t think there’s more’n one daughter of God, neither. ”
“And what do you believe?”