27. THE THIRD SMALL FIRE
Chapter twenty-seven
THE THIRD SMALL FIRE
LEON
My daughter is born in the spring, in the moonstone hall, because her mother refused to have her anywhere else.
"It is the oldest room in this kingdom," Portia says, when the physicians object, and she says it in the voice she used on Kael, and the physicians stop objecting. "Two enormous old things woke up on that floor. She can be the third."
So we carry cushions and lamps and half a linen closet down past the wine cellars, and the household of a European throne spends an afternoon converting a thousand-year-old ritual chamber into a birthing room, and Suzanne supervises it, of course she supervises it, standing on the pale stone directing traffic like a woman who has been waiting her whole life for something worth being this specific about.
It takes fourteen hours. I am no use for any of them.
I hold her hand. I say her name. I let the bond carry what I cannot say, and she grips my fingers hard enough to bruise and does not make a sound for most of it, because she is who she is, and then near the end she does make a sound, and it is the worst thing I have ever heard, and I would have torn the palace down brick by brick to make it stop.
And then, under an open roof, in the room where I first became the thing I am, my daughter arrives.
She comes out furious.
That is the first thing anyone learns about her and it will be true for the rest of her life.
She is red and outraged and loud, screaming at the sky through the oculus as if she has been personally insulted by the entire arrangement, and the hatchling, who has been asleep in its basket for six hours and has not stirred once, comes fully awake in a single instant and makes a noise nobody in the room has ever heard it make before.
They find each other before either of them can see.
I do not know how. I have asked Portia's father and he does not know.
I have asked grandma Suzanne and she says, "Well, obviously," and refuses to elaborate.
But the hatchling goes straight up out of that basket and across the moonstone floor, and my daughter, who is four minutes old, stops screaming the instant it touches her, and the two of them settle together on Portia's chest like two halves of something that has been apart for a while and does not intend to be again.
The egg protected her all the way through. Through Havoc, through a stolen crate, through a decoy in a ship's hold and a lie told over a handful of ash.
It is still protecting her. It has simply changed shape.
"Look at that," Portia says. She is grey with exhaustion and her hair is stuck to her face and she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. "Fire to fire. It's the oldest blessing my family has."
"Is that what it is?"
"That's what it is."
We name her Emilia.
For the queen who raised me and who I never got to remember properly, and Katherine cries when we tell her, and Keith does not cry but has to leave the room, which is the same thing in a different language.
Suzanne says nothing at all for a moment. Then she says, "He would have liked that," and goes to see about the flowers, and does not come back for an hour.
The letter comes out of the drawer that night.
Not mine. Suzanne's. She read hers alone in the room she was born in, exactly as she said she would, and she was angry with a dead man for several hours, exactly as she said she would be, and then she stood behind me in a throne room the next morning and a delegation of nobles who had been sharpening something for weeks took one look at her and put it away.
But she has been carrying it. For eleven months, in her handbag, folded twice, and I know because Barbara photographed it once by accident and had the sense to delete the picture and the lack of sense to mention it.
She gives it to me on the balcony above the garden, with the baby asleep against my shoulder and the hatchling coiled around my ankle like a very smug cat.
"There is a paragraph in here that is not for me," she says. "It has your name on it. He knew I would carry the thing about for a year before I worked out I was supposed to pass it on, and he was right, and I have never been so annoyed in my life."
The paragraph is short. His hand is terrible by then, and I have to hold it up to the light.
Tell the boy the search was not penance.
I want him to have that. I did not go looking for him because I felt guilty, though God knows I did.
I went because I could not stop. Eleven months of black water and I would have done eleven more, and I did not tell a living soul, and I have never been able to explain why not, except that I think a man who has done a wrong thing wants very badly for the good thing to be his alone.
It was not enough. It does not balance. Nothing balances.
But tell him I looked. Every day. Tell him the water was very cold and I looked anyway.
And tell him I am sorry I did not write to my sister, and that if he ever finds himself with a letter he cannot bring himself to send, he should send it, and he should send it that same afternoon, because the drawer is not a safe place. The drawer is where the years go.
I read it three times.
Then I fold it up and give it back to Suzanne, and she puts it in her handbag, and we stand on the balcony for a while and neither of us says anything.
Below us, the garden is dark. Primrose and old stone. The dry fountain. The gravel path where a grieving man walked out one night to outwalk a bad dream and smelled smoke and ash and something older than the language they crowned his great-uncle in.
"He was a very foolish man," Suzanne says eventually.
"He was."
"And I miss him extremely."
"I know."
She reaches over and puts one finger against Emilia's sleeping fist, and my daughter's hand closes around it in her sleep the way babies do, without meaning anything by it at all.
"Well," says the princess of Poland. "That's that, then."
Portia comes out to us after a while, moving slowly, wrapped in a blanket she has stolen from someone. She stands on my other side and leans into me, freely, on purpose, the way she has done since a croft in the hills and has never once stopped doing since.
The moon comes up over the garden.
And I think, holding my daughter, with my grandmother on one side and my wife on the other and a dragon asleep on my foot, about the boy on the deck of a yacht who wanted orange juice.
The days the sea had me. It took my name and my mother's face and every year I should have had with all of these people, and it gave me back with nothing, half a boy, no past, a story someone else had already started writing.
And I have spent this year finding out that the sea did not actually take those years from me.
It took them from a princess in Westchester with a fourteen-page list. From a hard man in New York who could not say the word son.
From a woman who kept ships in every port for twelve years.
From two boys who let a cousin sleep on their floor and never knew.
From a king who went into black water for eleven months and never told a soul.
They carried it. All of them. And I got to come back to a house where every single person had been holding something for me the entire time, and not one of them ever asked for it back.
Not yet, Portia used to say. Every time. In the garden, in the dark, in a country that was trying to kill us.
I lean my head against hers and my daughter breathes against my collarbone and the moon climbs.
It's yet now.
Dearest Readers,
And so we come to the end of it. A boy the sea stole, a woman who waited nine years to say one word, and a king who searched black water for eleven months and never told a soul.
Here is the thing I have been asking you all along, loves, and now I will ask it plainly. Ferb wrote his letters and left them in a drawer. Suzanne carried hers in her handbag for a year. Connor stopped looking at his own kitchen table and never picked it back up.
What is in your drawer?
Who have you not written to?
Send it. Send it this same afternoon. The drawer is where the years go.
Thank you for coming all this way with me. Leon and Portia and their small furious Emilia are safe now, and I am going to let them rest.
But the New York Pack is very large, and Candice is still unmarried, and Barbara has been photographing this family for a decade for reasons she has never explained to anyone.
I wouldn't put the book down just yet.
With all my love,Your author.