Chapter 46 #2
Sofi. I hadn’t known her healer’s name was Sofi.
Realizing that put a knot in my throat. Even after everything my sisters and I had been through together over the last several months, even with how utterly we loved one another, there was still that distance of years between us.
Letters and monthly visits were no substitute for growing up together under the same roof.
I felt that loss keenly with every breath.
I tightened my arm around Gemma’s, pulling her a little closer to me. “Then why do you cry almost every day?” I asked.
She glanced at me. “It will make me sound silly.”
“And what if it does? I certainly don’t mind silliness. In fact, I could probably use more of it.”
“I think I know just the librarian for that,” she said with a sly little grin.
I stifled a smile, my cheeks warming. “Don’t distract me. Tell me.”
“Well, then,” she said carefully. “Don’t misunderstand me, I love Ivyhill, and I’m happy to manage the estate in Farrin’s stead.
The work she does in Fairhaven is important, and she’s brilliant at it.
I think she and Ryder mean to live there permanently.
And Ivyhill has become something of a waystation for people traveling back north to their homes.
We’ve opened up a permanent hospital there, did I tell you? ”
“You didn’t. Gemma, that’s wonderful.”
“It is. But…” She sighed, looking up at the sky for a moment, and then at the Mist, tame and quiet, shimmering over the nearby treetops.
“Mother comes and goes often,” she said, “now that she doesn’t have to stay hidden at Wardwell.
When she isn’t helping Alastrina and Caiathos search for Jaetris and Zelphenia, she helps at the hospital, and she’s tremendous at it.
And Father’s quite involved with the rebuilding efforts in the heartlands.
They’re both doing good things, and it’s not as though they’re constantly there. ”
She took a deep breath, let it out slowly. From inside the aviary came a quiet flutter of wings and the soft trill of a dove.
“It’s just that I don’t think I can stay there forever,” Gemma said quietly. “Maybe if they weren’t ever there, or if they were dead, or…not that I want them to be dead. I certainly don’t. I love them,” she added, then looked at me earnestly. “I do love them.”
“I know you do. But…” I hesitated. It seemed like an awful thing to say, and yet I needed her to hear it, and I needed to say it. I’d been turning over the feeling of this thing for days, ever since talking with Farrin. “After everything that happened, it would be all right if you didn’t.”
“That’s just it. Everything that happened.
” Gemma dabbed her eyes with her gloved fingers.
“I love that house so dearly it hurts me sometimes. I stand there and look around at it and see memories everywhere—the good ones and the bad. And lately it seems to me that there’s more bad than good.
And the best ones…” She gave me a watery smile.
“They all involve you and Farrin. And neither of you are there, so why should I be?”
She sniffled, looked up into the trees, and blinked hard.
“And if I have to see Mother and Father waltzing around the house all gooey-eyed one more time, I’ll scream.
How can you be happy that two people have found each other again and at the same time almost hate them for it?
How can you love a person so much it makes you cry and also wish you’d never have to see them ever again?
” She looked at me hopelessly. “Does that make any sort of sense?”
“It does,” I replied, “though it being sensical doesn’t make it feel any better.”
“Do you love them?”
“I do,” I said truthfully, “but if I had to live with them, I’m not sure how much longer I would.”
She laughed and hugged me, her pinned-up curls smelling like honeysuckle and meadow grass, even in the dead of winter. When she pulled back from me, she was no longer crying. We continued toward the aviary, arm in arm.
“Where will you go?” I asked her. “You and Talan, if you won’t stay at Ivyhill.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. Maybe we won’t stay anywhere. We’ve become rather adept at traveling together. And anyway, it doesn’t matter where we go. Home is wherever we are, together.” Then she gasped, her eyes shining, and released me to duck into the aviary. “Oh, hello, you beauty!”
She held out her hand to a snowy owl—the familiar of one of our newest recruits—who after a moment started gently nibbling her fingers. I watched them, still reeling from her words. She had said them so simply, and yet to me they seemed extraordinary.
Gareth had told me something very like that as he’d held me on the shore of the lake.
Then we’ll build a new home together.
We’ll fill it with happiness.
At the time, I’d been so delirious with pain and sadness that the words had seemed lovely but distant, like a star to wish upon.
Now though, with Gemma’s declaration hanging triumphantly in the air, Gareth’s words took on a new shape in my mind.
I looked back at the priory, its red-brick walls towering over the snow. Could such a place truly ever be a home? I had lived there for years, slept and eaten and loved and mourned there, but a home?
I listened to the distant chatter of my Roses.
If I closed my eyes and let my focus drift without direction, I could almost imagine that this was not a base of operations for soldiers but merely a house—rambling and drafty and old, with strong walls and snug nooks and centuries of stories inside it.
Hushed and dour, Gemma had called it—but it wasn’t anymore.
Our home.
I opened my eyes, my nose tingling. I sniffed hard and wiped a hand across my face.
At my elbow, a white-gold light flickered gently. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Ankaret.” I found her sitting on a bench near the aviary wall, gazing up adoringly at the perches full of birds above her.
She was small, sparrow-sized, and nearly translucent, and it had taken days for even an ember of her to reappear after what she’d done for me at the lake, but she had kept her promise; she had come back to us.
“I thought you were in Fairhaven with Farrin.”
“She was, and she will be again. But she fears she no longer has the stomach for governing.” Ankaret sighed, making a face. “I no longer have the stomach for it. It is difficult to speak properly when she—I am this new. She will get better at it.” Then she glanced up at me. “You will too.”
“Better at what?”
“Becoming your new self.”
The thought made me suddenly weary. I leaned against the wall and asked a question I’d been too terrified to voice to anyone.
“Do you think we’ll ever manage to free all the Roses?
Is such a thing even possible without ruining everything?
” I thought of the Warden’s face, my throat clenching up. “Without death?”
“There is still much to do,” Ankaret said slowly.
“We must negotiate a lasting peace between the realms. If there is ever to be no more Middlemist, or Knotwood, or Crescent, we must determine an alternative that will require no one’s service to maintain it.
Or,” she conceded, “it is possible we will need to completely separate Edyn from the Old Country, if we cannot forge a peace. And we can do none of this without Jaetris and Zelphenia. We must find them, help them grow strong again.”
I nodded, gazing glumly at the priory. “There is so much left to do.”
“There is. But already there is less than there was. And look.”
She held up her small white hand. On her palm, in a tiny pile of ash, a new shivering flame sparked to life. She pressed it against her heart as if to imbue herself with it, and right there before my eyes she started glowing a little bit brighter.
“Every day we grow stronger,” she said, smiling up at me. “And on the days when that is not enough, we will find our strength in each other and wait for morning to come again.”
“You say that as if it’s so simple,” I told her quietly.
“Words are simple. Courage is not. But you, dear Mara, are abundant with it. Know that, and let the knowing comfort you.”
Gemma came up beside me and slid her hand into mine. “She is wonderful, isn’t she?” she said to Ankaret, beaming up at me. “My brave sister.”
I held her to me in silence until the feeling of tears passed. Ankaret flickered softly on her perch. We watched the snow begin to fall.
***
When I arrived at Big Deep, I was thinking longingly of nighttime and its quietness, and of Gareth in my bed.
The days were long now, and tiring, with messages coming and going constantly from the capital, from Vauzanne and Aidurra, from Ivyhill.
Researchers from the university were studying the Mist and its health and documenting their observations with painstaking thoroughness.
Gareth, stationed at Rosewarren, worked with them day and night.
They needed to be managed, their work analyzed and compared to similar studies being done at the Knotwood and the Crescent of Storms. We had to know for certain that there was no more danger, that the Mist was stable.
There were meetings upon meetings, both intimate and grand, of the royal councils and Olden delegations, scholars and mediators, military commanders from all three continents, my mother and Alastrina and Caiathos.
I was present at most of them, when my duties permitted, and felt uncomfortable at every single one.