Chapter 5 #5
His mouth flattened. “You’ll get more answers there than you will here.”
Not yes. I was beginning to understand that Coren rarely gave more truth than he absolutely had to.
“How long?”
“At the Sanctum?”
“Yes.”
“That depends on you.”
“Do I get to come back?”
Coren looked past me at Edenlo. “Wielders do not belong on this side of the Veil.”
“So once I leave I cannot come back?”
“You will have nothing to come back to.”
I looked down at the driftwood star in my palm.
Maia had known. Not everything. But enough to spend nineteen years hiding it from me.
I always knew. She had found me at the edge of the forest on the starriest night she had ever seen.
Wrapped in plain cloth. No letter. No crest. No explanation.
Only my name. Lyra. And somehow she had always believed I did not belong on this side of the Veil.
If I stayed, I would spend the rest of my life staring west and wondering.
If Edenlo let me have a rest of my life here at all. I closed my fingers around the star.
“All right.”
Coren inclined his head once. Nothing else. No triumph. No reassurance. No promise that I had made the right choice. I appreciated him for that much.
“I need time.”
“You have until morning.”
I looked up sharply. “That’s it?”
“We have a long journey.”
“I just buried my family.”
His gaze held mine. “I know.”
I waited for him to soften the deadline. He didn’t. I should have hated him. Instead, I found the certainty strangely easier to bear than everyone else’s pity.
“Fine.”
Coren turned away. He made it three steps before I spoke. “Coren.” He stopped. “Where exactly is the Arcane Sanctum?”
He looked back at me. “East of the Veil.”
Every part of me went still. The village seemed to disappear.
Maia’s final words returned with perfect clarity.
Not from here. My gaze moved west before I could stop it.
Toward the ridge. Toward the invisible divide I had spent nineteen years being warned never to approach.
Then back to the man waiting in the ruins of my home.
“You mean across it.”
“Yes.”
My heart began beating harder. No one from Edenlo crossed the Veil.
No one sane went near it. Children were taught the western paths before they were old enough to travel them alone for one reason: so they knew where to stop.
I had grown up beneath warnings about what existed beyond it.
Magic. Elemental kingdoms. People born with power in their blood.
A world that had nothing to do with ours.
Except apparently it had everything to do with me. Coren studied my face.
“Is that a problem?”
I thought of Maia looking toward the window while dying. West. I thought of silver-blue light tearing through darkness. I thought of the hunger that had turned toward me from somewhere I could not see. I thought of thirty-two graves beneath the trees.
“No.”
Coren gave another small nod.
“Dawn, then.”
He walked away. People moved aside for him.
I remained in the center of the square. No one knew what to say.
That felt appropriate. There was nothing left to say.
I turned toward Tomas. He looked like he wanted to come closer.
He didn’t. I turned toward Fenric. His mouth opened.
Then closed. Ferin stood beside me with both hands resting over the head of his walking stick.
Elder Rina wiped at her face. Merra would not look at me at all.
I understood then that leaving a place did not begin when your feet crossed its boundary. Sometimes you left while standing exactly where you had always stood. Sometimes home ended before you did.
I walked away from them.
No one followed.
The path to Maia’s cottage had never felt long before.
That afternoon it seemed endless. The door still stuck at the bottom when I pushed it open.
I almost laughed. Maia had been threatening to plane it down since spring.
I had told her she would say the same thing next spring. There would be no next spring.
The cottage smelled like her.
That was the cruelest thing waiting inside.
Sage drying above the hearth. Lavender. The bitter root tea she drank every morning despite complaining about the taste.
Smoke from the fire that had gone cold days ago.
The faint beeswax scent of the salve she rubbed into her hands after winter split the skin around her knuckles.
Her shawl hung over the back of a chair.
Her cup sat beside the basin. A bundle of rosemary lay on the table where she had left it before the festival.
For one impossible second, the world convinced me she was merely outside. I could almost hear the door opening behind me. Lyra, did you remember the feverfew? I turned. Nothing. The doorway was empty.
My bag hung from the peg beside it. I took it down.
Then I stood there because I had no idea how to pack nineteen years into something I could carry.
Clothes. I needed clothes. That seemed absurdly important.
I crossed to my room and pulled open the chest at the foot of my bed.
Two tunics. Trousers. Stockings. Underclothes.
The heavier wool sweater Maia had knitted badly and refused to admit was uneven.
I put that in first. My hands began shaking.
I added the moon charm I had removed before the festival and left on my bedside table.
Irelia’s sun charm remained tied around my wrist. Day and night. Both mine now.
I sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped beneath me.
My room looked exactly as it had before the attack.
That felt wrong. Everything should have been destroyed.
The walls should have cracked. The roof should have fallen in.
The room should have known that the girl who slept here three nights ago no longer existed.
Instead, my blanket remained tangled at the foot of the bed because I had been too lazy to straighten it.
A dried sprig of lavender was wedged into the window frame.
One of Irelia’s earrings sat on the shelf where she had forgotten it weeks ago.
I picked it up.
Then I broke.
There was no one left to hear me, so I let myself.
I folded over the bag and cried until breathing hurt.
I cried for Irelia. For Maia. For Nara. For the thirty-two names beneath the Mothertree.
For Tomas stepping away. For every person in the square who had looked at me like the light that saved them had made me monstrous.
I cried because Maia had known more about me and died before telling me enough.
I cried because I was angry at her for it.
That was the worst part. I was furious with a dead woman.
“You should have told me.” My voice disappeared into the empty cottage. No answer.
“You should have told me.” Louder this time. Still nothing. I stood so quickly the bag fell from my lap.
“What was I supposed to do with that?” The silence took it. “You waited until you were dying.”
My voice cracked. “You waited until I couldn’t ask you anything.”
I hated myself for saying it. I said it anyway.
“You knew.”
The cottage remained still.
“You knew I wasn’t from here. You knew I was different. You knew, and you let me spend my whole life thinking—”
Thinking what? That Maia was my mother? She was. Blood had nothing to do with it. Thinking Edenlo was where I belonged? Until three days ago, it had been. I covered my mouth. The anger collapsed beneath grief so quickly my knees nearly did with it.
“I’m sorry.”
Nothing.
I wiped my face. Then I packed. Not much.
Enough. When I finished, dusk had settled outside the windows.
I went into Maia’s room last. Her bed was neatly made.
Of course it was. I opened the small drawer beside it and found nothing except thread, two dried sprigs of mint, an old handkerchief, and three copper coins.
No letter. No explanation. No secret confession written for the day I finally learned the truth.
I searched anyway.
Under the mattress. Inside the wardrobe. Behind the stack of healer’s ledgers. I hated myself a little more with every place I checked. Nothing. Whatever Maia had known, she had either never written it down or had hidden it somewhere I would not find tonight. Eventually I stopped.
The last light of evening had faded from the window.
I sat on her bed and held Ferin’s wooden star in one hand.
The rune beneath my left ribs had not glowed again.
I lifted my tunic. In darkness, I could still see it faintly.
Pale silver-blue lines beneath my skin. Permanent.
I traced one carefully. Nothing happened.
No pain. No light. Just warmth. I wondered what Coren had meant when he said my magic had anchored.
I wondered what he had not said when I told him something beyond the ridge had noticed me.
I wondered what the Arcane Sanctum knew about people like me.
Then another thought came.
People like me.
I had never had a reason to wonder whether such people existed before.
Tomorrow, I would cross the Veil. Tomorrow, I would leave the only world I had ever known.
Tomorrow, I would go east into a land Maia had spent nineteen years keeping me away from.
I lowered my tunic. Outside, Edenlo was quiet.
No festival music. No Irelia climbing through my window because using the door was apparently too ordinary.
No Maia moving through the cottage after midnight because someone had come for medicine. Only silence.
I lay down on Maia’s bed without changing my clothes. Her pillow still smelled faintly of lavender. I pressed my face into it. For the first time since I was a child, I wished desperately for morning not to come. It came anyway.