Chapter Eleven #2
Please disregard anything untoward I may have implied. I do not truly believe you capable of such things – I just want my daughter back. I want her safe. I still cannot cross the border into Stormsby, but I await your swift reply.
Caitlín
“She’s sent other letters.”
“Yes.”
“Many.”
“Yes.”
“Sorcha, I need more than that.”
My cousin lifted watery blue eyes to meet mine.
“She’s been writing to you for months. For as long as I’ve been here. I’ve been meeting Ginny at the gate every day to make certain you didn’t receive her letters.”
Though part of me had already pieced this much together, the air still deflated from me in one long breath.
I released the letter to massage my brow, and when it immediately sprang back into a blank, unassuming roll of parchment, Sorcha’s sigh of relief was audible.
Glancing up from the shade of my hand, I fixed her with a weary stare.
“I don’t understand why you did this. Why didn’t you tell me she never sent you?”
“I knew you’d send me home.”
“I would have,” I said at once, almost snapped. It was the truth. My mother’s coven had little love for Magnus and me as it was. Under no circumstances would I have harboured their runaway witchling if I’d had the slightest idea she wasn’t meant to be here.
“I know you would,” she shot back, a slight heat to match my own. “But coming here was my choice. Mine. It wasn’t a decision that my mother got to make for me.”
She watched me for a moment, something hardening in her soft eyes.
“Magnus wrote her when your mother grew ill, did you know that? Her one and only sibling was dying, and she didn’t come.
” She gave a humourless snort, the sound so unlike her usual bubbling laughter that it made my throat ache.
“My whole life, she’d told me stories of two sisters; the one she grew up with, the one who taught her how to listen for the call of the earth in her own veins.
Taught her to bring forth flowers beneath her feet with every step so she might always walk on a cloud of daisies. ”
A weak smile flickered over her features, as though she were recalling her own vivid childhood rather than her mother’s. But the smile dropped, and when she steeled her jaw, she suddenly looked decades older.
“And then there was the sister who betrayed the coven. I believed that story growing up. That I didn’t have an aunt or cousins because of your mother’s choices. That she turned her back on her own people, her own nature, to chase some hedonistic perversion of the Dagda’s gift.”
Of course she had. Of course she’d believed it.
It stung to hear it said aloud, but I knew what my mother’s people had thought of us and the way we lived alongside our magic. That’s why it had surprised me so when Sorcha turned up on my doorstep. In my desperation, I hadn’t questioned my aunt’s gesture of good faith. Clearly I should have.
“When I eventually found out about her Soul Song,” Sorcha went on, that steely set of her features seeping into her sweet voice and giving it strength.
“I began to wonder how both things could be true. How could the firecovens be a perversion of magic, if the Dagda saw fit to bond your firewitch father to one of our own? My mother didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t have the answers.
In truth, I think it was hard for her to even consider that she might have been wrong.
Not after she’d made that final decision never to make amends. ”
I tried not to scoff, but my breath came out harsh and disbelieving all the same. Sorcha’s eyes whipped to mine, and I was surprised to find them soft with understanding.
“She was so wrong, Roz. She missed out, and she deprived us – all of us – of a true family. That’s why I came.
I was already so angry with her, heartbroken for her when she ignored Magnus’s letter.
So when he left, and you wrote to her again, I didn’t wait for her to make another poor choice. I just came.”
Sorcha lifted her round chin, her soft features as fierce and as bright as though she had her own living Flame fuelling her from within.
“I’m glad I did it,” she said. “And I would do it a hundred times over just to know you in some small way.”
At that, my resolve snapped and I reached for her with a sharp tut, drawing her into my arms and pressing a kiss into her hair, inhaling her soft, floral scent.
“I’m glad you did too, you wilful little sprite.”
My words were tellingly hoarse and her laughter, in turn, a little watery.
We stood there for a long time, breathing through the threat of tears together before I finally pulled back and took her face in my two hands.
I took a breath, but faltered over my words at the sudden dawning in her eyes. She spoke before I could.
“You’re going to make me leave,” she said, voice cracking.
“Not because of this,” I said at once. “Don’t get me wrong, I wish you’d told me from the start, and I need you to promise me you won’t pull anything like this again–”
“You’re going to make me leave,” she said again, crying now.
“Sorcha.” I released her face and took her hands in my own.
My voice was thinning dangerously, and I had to swallow against a hard and painful lump before I went on.
“I should have gotten you out of Stormsby the moment the Kingsmen arrived. I might have a chance now. Your mother is here, just on the other side of that border, ready to bring you back east. To bring you to safety.”
“And what about you?” Sorcha just about managed to force out the words, her breath tight and shaking. “What about your safety?”
I paused, unsure how honest I should be – how to edge around the truth.
“I can’t leave The Mage and Rose.”
But Sorcha saw right through me. Her pained stare turned shrewd; all too perceptive as she pored over my face and something dawned on hers. My Flame gave a nervous little shiver before it ducked beneath my heart.
“You mean you can’t leave the Captain,” she said slowly.
It wasn’t a question. She spoke with total assurance and though I didn’t respond, that was damning in itself.
We hadn’t had the time for idle chit-chat of late; she had never asked me to explain what she’d walked in on the morning after Yule, just like I hadn’t asked her at what point Brennan had become her living shadow.
But for as much as we’d left unsaid, it clearly didn’t go unnoticed.
My cousin blew out a long breath, wiped the heel of her hand beneath her gleaming eyes and steeled herself.
“Roz,” she began. “Do you know how I found out about your parents’ Soul Song?”
I tried to shake my head, but the muscles in my shoulders had abruptly tensed at her leap from Caelan to my parents’ bond.
“Your mother wrote to mine, and despite everything she’d ever told me about my aunt and the evil firecoven – my mother kept those letters.
For years. I found them snooping around her room, and I can’t blame her for holding on to them.
She kept them because they were beautiful.
Because her sister found something most of us could only ever dream of, and even to read of it was more than she might ever know. ”
Something must have crossed over my face despite my frozen nerves, because Sorcha squeezed my hands and said softly; “Did your mother tell you about it? How it felt?”
My throat was dry, and the ‘Yes’ I forced up was tellingly hoarse.
Sorcha nodded thoughtfully, and once again it struck me that she appeared much older than her nineteen years with that gentle, sage look on her face.
“In her letters, she said that she brought life to everything she touched. She couldn’t stop the flowers from blooming at her fingertips. It sounds rather annoying actually.”
I laughed, alarmed at how watery the sound came out.
“It does, doesn’t it?”
I glanced away, trying to subtly catch a stray tear with my sleeve as it rolled down my cheek, but when I turned Sorcha was still regarding me with that knowing expression.
“It’s not the Soul Song,” I said firmly.
“Why not?”
“Because it can’t be.”
“Why?”
“Because. He’s human, and that’s – it’s unheard of.”
“Unheard of isn’t the same as impossible.”
I shook my head, tears beading under my lashes when my eyes closed of their own bidding.
I didn’t want to talk about this.
It hurt; physically hurt. My throat ached with the welling of tears, and my Flame had made a plaintive retreat, leaving my chest bitterly cold.
I didn’t want to think of my parents, or that one fragile hope I still nursed for Caelan.
The tiny, cherished, sliver of hope that might just shatter like glass if I held it too tight.
I shook my head again, and though I couldn’t say another word, it seemed to be enough for Sorcha because she squeezed my hands, coaxing me into opening my eyes and meeting hers. The wisdom there had dimmed, and she was once more the scared, wide-eyed faun facing the dark forest alone.
“I don’t want to leave you,” she whispered.
We moved into an instinctual embrace, my arms tight around her back and hers locked around mine as though she could cling hard enough that she’d latch her arms behind me, and I’d be forced to let her stay.