Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Amy had watched Brannik break a male in half.
She had watched him snap restraints that ten guards believed could hold him, and watched him move through a compound full of armed warriors like some ancient god of war.
He’d told her how to fly a stolen ship while hanging on to the last dregs of his own consciousness.
She had seen him hold three hundred pounds of muscle utterly still while males beat him and called it patience.
She’d thought there was nothing left in the galaxy that could surpass that.
She was wrong.
Because the male beside her, the warrior who’d promised an hour ago to stand between her and the rest of the world, turned into a little boy in the space of a single breath, and it threatened to break her.
“Mother.” His voice was a ruin. He came off the bench without his usual grace, half-falling. One huge hand caught the table edge, and the pale stone groaned under his grip. “Mother.”
Serei crossed the room like she couldn’t feel the floor.
Her hands went up to cup his face and she couldn’t reach it, because he was so much taller than her now.
She had to draw him down and he went, his enormous body collapsing, his knees hitting the stone floor so she could hold his head.
And she held it, her thin luminous fingers spread over his cheeks and his jaw and the swept-back horns that hadn’t been there when she left, and she was shaking, both of them shaking.
“You have his face,” she whispered, tears running silver-bright down her face. “You have Garmek’s face. You were only a boy, and now—” A sound came out of her that Amy felt in her own chest, a cracked and helpless sound. “They told me you were dead. My son. They told me you were dead.”
“I looked for you.” His shoulders heaved and his hands had come up to cover hers, to press them harder against his face, as if she might vanish again if he let go for a second.
“For twenty-five years. I looked everywhere. I thought… I thought you left because—” His voice broke. “I thought you didn’t want—”
“Never.” She pressed her brow to his. “Never, never, my heart. Not one day. Not one hour.”
Amy’s throat had closed. Her eyes burned.
She pressed her lips together hard and looked away from the two of them because it felt like theft to watch.
Like standing at a window looking into somewhere she had no right to be.
She began, as quietly as she knew how, to ease back from the bench.
To slip towards the outside and give them this.
They needed it. They’d needed it for twenty-five years, and she was a stranger with wet eyes and no place in it.
A hand closed around her wrist.
She hadn’t seen him reach for her. He was still on his knees with his forehead against his mother’s, still shaking, but one of his hands had reached out and caught her wrist and would not let go.
He didn’t look at her. He didn’t have to.
The grip said everything. Stay. He said it the way he said the important things, without words, with his whole self.
Stay.
So she stayed. She sank back down onto the bench beside him, and she put her free hand over the huge one wrapped around her wrist, and she stayed.
She let him hold onto both of them at once, the mother he’d lost and the woman he’d found, as if he were afraid they would disappear if he loosened his hold on either.
Serei’s silver eyes lifted to her over Brannik’s bowed head, wet and wondering. Something passed between the two women, quick and complete. Serei looked at the hand her son had wrapped around Amy’s wrist, then back at Amy, and something in her expression softened.
Amy’s tears spilled over at last and she couldn’t stop them and she didn’t try.
They brought the tea after all.
It came in small cups of pale fired clay, steam curling up bittersweet and green, and this time Brannik took his without a word of protest because he needed to hold something that wasn’t going to break.
He sat on the long bench now, upright again, the vast walls of his composure hauled back into place stone by stone.
But he kept her tucked hard against his side, one arm heavy around her, his thumb moving in a small ceaseless circle against her wrist as if to keep proving to himself that she was warm and real.
She let him. She would have let him do anything just then.
Serei sat across from them, both her hands wrapped around her own untouched cup, and she looked at her son like a woman drinking after a long drought.
“You want to know why I left,” she said.
“I want to know everything.” His voice had steadied but the rawness ran under it still. “Start there.”
She was quiet for a moment, ordering her thoughts. Ishala and the others had retreated to the far end of the long room, giving them what space a shared hall could give. But she caught the way they listened, and how the word Grorn left every one of them tense as drawn wire.
“There were signs,” Serei said at last. “Small ones. A trader asking the wrong questions in the wrong market. A ship that lingered. Then a second. I knew the shape of it. We all know the shape of it, because we have run from that shape for a thousand years.” Her jaw tightened.
“The Grorn had found a trace of Aurelian activity in the region where I lived. Where you lived, and your father.”
“They were hunting you.”
“They were hunting any of us. And they were getting close, and I—” Her hands tightened on the cup.
“I made a choice I have hated every day since. I thought if I left and drew their eyes away from Tuor they would follow me and not look at the world I’d left behind.
I thought I would lead them a long way off, and lose them, and come back.
” Her voice thinned. “I left in the night because I didn’t think I could look you in the eye and leave anyway.
I told myself it was better that way, that a clean small parting would be easier than…
I told myself I’d only be gone a season. ”
“You never came back,” he said. It wasn’t an accusation. It was worse than that. It was the flat exhausted sound of a wound twenty-five years deep that had never closed.
“I drew too much attention.” She looked at him steadily.
She gave him the truth and didn’t soften it, and Amy respected her enormously for it.
“I was better at hiding than they expected and worse at losing them than I hoped. They chased me farther than I ever meant to run. And while I ran—” Her eyes closed. “Your father came after me.”
Brannik went very still against her side.
“I didn’t know,” Serei said. “I didn’t know for months.
I only learned about it when he found me.
Garmek, who had never left his own world in his life, who barely spoke to anyone who wasn’t kin, somehow crossed the same half of the galaxy you crossed.
And he found me, because—” Her voice cracked and she pressed on anyway.
“Because he was Tuori, and once a Tuori loves, there is no letting go. You know this. You are his son. I see it in the way you hold that girl’s shoulder like the world is trying to take her. ”
His thumb stopped its circling, and she heard him swallow.
“He found you,” he said.
“He found me. And the two of us together found this place.” She gestured at the pale stone walls, the silver-threaded light, and the green hidden valley beyond.
“The old enclave. The first refuge. I had heard of it my whole life the way you hear of a place in a lullaby. But it was real. We came here. We were safe here.” Her breath shook.
“And we made a plan. To be sure, entirely sure, that we’d truly lost them, we agreed to wait one season more.
And then Garmek would go back for you himself, and bring you here, and we would all—” She stopped. Her hands had begun to tremble.
“But you didn’t lose them,” Brannik said quietly.
“We were so close.” She wasn’t looking at him now. She was looking at something twenty-five years gone. “One more season. That was all. And they found the valley.”
The room had gone silent. Even the far end of the hall had gone silent. Every Aurelian in the place had stopped moving.
“Your father held the mountain door.” Serei’s voice dropped to almost nothing, and yet it filled the whole room.
“There is only one true way in—the road you walked, the road that reads our blood. He held it. Alone. He held it long enough for the enclave to raise the inner defenses. Long enough for a scout ship to break away and lead the rest of them off into the deep dark and be lost. Long enough that they never found the valley itself, and so we are still here, all of us, every child in this settlement alive because of what your father did at that door.” She lifted her wet silver eyes to her son.
“He saved every one of us. And he did not come back down the road.”
Amy’s own tears were falling. Beside her Brannik had gone rigid as stone, his jaw working, his throat working. Twenty-five years of a boy’s why did he leave me rearranging itself, moment by moment, into something so much heavier and so much kinder—he didn’t leave you. He died reaching for you.
“Afterwards,” Serei went on, because she was clearly going to finish it, having carried it so long, “afterwards, when we were certain no more would come, when the sky stayed empty long enough that we dared believe it, I reached out. Once. To Tuor. To Garmek’s kin.
To ask them to send you to me at last, whatever the cost, whatever it took.
” Her mouth twisted, bitter and grieving.
“They told me that you were dead. That Brannik had died of a fever, the first winter after your father left.”
“Fever.” His voice was raw. “There was no fever.”
“I know that now.” She reached across the table and laid her thin luminous hand over his enormous scarred one.
Her fingers looked like nothing against his, like they couldn’t possibly matter, and they mattered more than anything in the room.
“I don’t know whether they lied because they blamed me for Garmek’s death, because they couldn’t bear to surrender his son to an Aurelian, or simply because cruelty was easier than mercy.
It doesn’t matter. I believed them. I had lost my mate at that door, and then they told me I had lost my son too, and I—” She stopped, her voice shaking.
“I mourned you both. Every day. I never stopped. I lit the small light for you at every turning of the year, twenty-five times, for a boy I thought was in the ground on a world I could never go back to.” Her voice gave way.
“And here you are. Grown so tall. With your father’s face and my eyes and the horns he would have been so… Oh, he would have been so proud—”
And Brannik, the indestructible warrior, gripped his mother’s hand and bowed his great horned head over their joined hands and wept—silent and shaking, twenty-five years of tears—and his mother came around the table and held as much as she could of her enormous son.
Amy sat beside them with her own tears running freely and her chest filled with a complicated mixture of joy and sorrow.
Because he finally had the answers to the questions that had driven him across the whole turning galaxy, and they were not the answers he’d feared as a boy.
His mother hadn’t stopped wanting him. His father hadn’t abandoned him.
They had loved him and they had wanted him and he would carry that now instead of believing that she left because of him.
He had lost his father, but not because his father didn’t love him. He had a mother. He had a whole valley of people with his eyes. He had, at last, a place that was his.
But despite that joy, a small cold current pulled at her, even though she hated herself for it, the same current that had pulled at her on the road that morning, the thing she’d been trying to say when the valley opened up and swallowed the words.
He came all this way for this. He has it now. A home. A family. His own kind, who understand what he is in ways I never can.
She looked at the arm still wrapped hard around her shoulder even now, even as he wept into his mother’s embrace. He hadn’t let go of her. Not once. Not through any of it. He’d held on to her the entire time like she was the other half of what he’d been searching for.
So what happens now, she thought, blinking hard, holding on to that arm with both her hands, when the thing that has driven him his whole life has finally been found? What if I was only ever the woman who kept him warm on the way to it?