Chapter 46 #3
My new mantle of Warden sat strangely on my shoulders.
I refused even to take the name. I was Mara to all my Roses and allowed Madam only on the direst of occasions.
This made me feel like even more of a child next to Arora and Joseline, and though they were kind to me, like stern but well-meaning aunts, I never stopped searching for doubt in their eyes.
Was I strong enough and wise enough to oversee the Order alongside them?
Was I far enough removed from the Warden to be trusted?
And now that the root of the Order’s binding magic rested in me, would I someday turn, just as she had, and endanger them all?
I wondered constantly what they really thought of me.
At times, I wondered what I really thought of myself.
In those first fumbling days, when both my mind and my body were exhausted, only two things were absolutely clear to me. One was that I had never been more thankful for my sisters.
The other was that I loved Gareth Fontaine more than I ever thought myself capable of loving another person.
Now, standing in the ruins of Big Deep, I watched him direct a crew of workers who were dismantling what was left of the house. Everything salvageable was to be sent away for use in the rebuilding efforts. The rest would be burned, and the land itself, stripped bare, would remain in Gareth’s name.
But apparently the workers had found something in the rubble that they weren’t sure how to categorize. I didn’t let myself listen to their conversation, though I easily could have, and waited for Gareth to come to me.
He did so with a frown on his face, gazing in bewilderment at a charred item in his hand. Then he looked up at me, scratched the back of his neck, his mouth twisting, and sat down heavily on a slab of stone.
I joined him. “What is it?”
“My mother’s medals,” he said after a moment. He held up the piece of ruined wood. Only a few ribboned brass medals remained, though there was room for at least twenty.
Gareth twisted one of them gently around his finger.
“She had many more, but I suppose they’re gone now.
She was so proud of them, polished them every day.
” He stared at them for a long time and then said, with a sad little laugh, “I can’t decide if I want to burn the godsdamned things with all the rest of it or hang them on my wall. ”
Suddenly his face crumpled and he started to cry. “It’s stupid, isn’t it?” he said, gesturing at himself. “I hated the woman.”
I opened my arms to him. “Not stupid. Come here.”
He set down the medals and then grabbed me and held on to me desperately, his face buried in my neck. I stroked his hair. Soon my collar was wet; it was strange that this evoked fondness in me, and yet it did. The feeling of his tears was like some secret, precious tenderness.
“I didn’t expect to care when she died,” he mumbled into my shirt.
“I didn’t expect to care about the house either.
I didn’t expect any of this. What a warped thing to feel.
The last thing I saw of her was her eyes, wide and terrified as she fell.
” He paused. “Do you think that if she’d lived, she ever would have apologized to me? For any of it?”
I considered the question. Both my parents had apologized to me; they’d even done so on the day I’d been taken from Ivyhill, my mother sobbing out her remorse as I’d climbed into the Warden’s carriage.
Even the Warden herself had apologized from time to time.
It wasn’t that their regret was pointless, exactly.
I was glad of it. But I was also beginning to realize that I didn’t need it.
All I needed was right there in my arms, and in the stacks upon stacks of letters from my sisters that I kept at my bedside. I received new ones, and sent my own letters in response, almost every day.
“Maybe she would have,” I said at last. “Would that have made you feel any better?”
“No. Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”
I pulled back from him and smiled. “Here sits the brilliant professor, utterly stymied.”
“Oh, don’t poke fun at me. I’m too fragile for that.” His eyes, though, tired and bleary as they were, held a glimmer of humor. “Feel sorry for me instead, please. I need to be coddled for a while.”
Delighted to see him smile, faint as it was, I was glad to play along. “Describe for me what coddling means to you.”
“I’m not sure I should, not here,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the workers. “The more obscene language they could handle, but the soft bits I’m not so sure about.”
“The soft bits?” I raised an eyebrow at him.
“Not those soft bits.” He lifted my hand to his lips and kissed it. “I meant how lovely you are, and how much I adore you, and how looking at you, even through glasses that desperately need cleaning—”
I grinned softly. “I wasn’t going to mention it.”
“—looking at you makes everything better.”
For a moment all I could do was that very thing—look at him. Reacquaint myself with the lines of his face, the green of his eyes, that impudent, smitten smile. I leaned in and kissed him softly, then stood, holding out my hand to him.
“On your feet, Professor,” I said. “Let’s go home.”