Chapter 18
ELUHEED
Rosa.
The name echoed in Eluheed's mind, the reverberations reaching places that hadn't been disturbed in decades.
Syssi was telling Kian about the windmill her great-grandmother's family had owned, about Yanek and Boris Dorjinsky, the cousins who had married the sisters, and their emigration to America.
Eluheed was sitting in a chair at a cocktail party listening to a woman who might be his great-granddaughter, piecing together a history that he had buried so deep he'd convinced himself it no longer mattered.
It still mattered.
Rosa with the wild spirit and the furious eyes. Rosa, who had walked into his life like a storm and walked out of it like an earthquake, leaving destruction that he deserved and damage that he hadn't known how to repair.
They had met in the market. He had been buying grain, keeping his head down the way he always did in the village, performing the role of the quiet foreigner who kept to himself and caused no trouble.
Rosa had been at the next stall, arguing with a vendor over the price of something with a ferocity that was entirely disproportionate to whatever was being sold.
He had watched, amused, and when she'd turned and caught him looking, she had smiled at him with the reckless warmth of a girl who hadn't yet learned to be cautious around strangers.
That smile.
He should have walked away. He had centuries of discipline behind him, centuries of moving through human communities without forming attachments, centuries of rules that he followed to the letter because he couldn't afford not to.
Don't stay too long.
Don't let anyone close.
Don't fall in love.
But Rosa had demolished his rules. She had been nineteen, practically a spinster, given that most girls had married at sixteen or seventeen back then.
She had been brilliant, restless, and trapped in a village that couldn't contain her spirit.
She spoke four languages at a time when few had learned to read, despite having never traveled farther than the nearest town.
She'd read everything she could get her hands on, she'd asked questions that none of the villagers could answer and hadn't been satisfied when they told her to stop asking, and she'd pursued him with a determination that should have alarmed him but instead disarmed him.
He had been helpless to resist her, perhaps because no one had ever pursued him like that before, and he had been lonely and sad.
Their romance had been intense. It started as meetings in the birch grove, conversations that ranged from philosophy to nonsense, and had naturally progressed to physical intimacy that he had tried to refrain from but had been too weak to refuse.
He had known the risks. He had calculated them the way he calculated everything because his survival depended on those calculations, and he had decided that the risk was acceptable because the alternative of continuing to exist in the vast, echoing loneliness was no longer tolerable.
He had been wrong about the risk.
When Rosa had told him she was carrying his child, she had expected him to marry her.
The expectation was reasonable. In that village, in that era, a man who had gotten a woman with child married her.
It was not negotiable. It was not optional.
It was what decent men did, and Rosa had believed him to be a decent man.
He had wanted to do the right thing. He had wanted to say yes, to build a life with her in that village, to watch his child grow and be present in a way his mission and his true identity had never allowed.
But a wife would notice that he never aged, never got sick, never showed the wear of years that every other man in the village accumulated. It meant a community that would eventually ask questions, or worse, assume he was an abomination or a demon and kill him.
Ignorance and prejudice were dangerous things, and they could turn even peaceful villagers into vengeful monsters.
He had done the only thing he could. He'd told her he couldn't marry her, and when she'd demanded an explanation, he couldn't give her one.
The fury that had followed was magnificent in its destruction.
Rosa had thrown everything in his house that wasn't nailed down, and some things that were.
She had called him names in four languages, each one more creative and devastating than the last, and when she ran out of objects and epithets, she had stood in the wreckage of his house and looked at him with an expression that he had carried in his memory ever since.
It wasn't hatred. Hatred would have been easier to bear. It was the look of someone who had trusted completely and been betrayed just as completely, and the distance between those two states was a chasm that no apology could bridge.
The next day, her engagement to Boris Dorjinsky was announced.
Boris was a cousin of the man who had married Rosa's sister Perla, and he was decent and hardworking and dull in the way that stable, reliable men often were.
He was exactly the kind of husband that Rosa's family would have chosen for her, and exactly the kind of man that Rosa would spend her life resenting.
They emigrated to America shortly after, and Eluheed had been relieved and devastated in equal measure.
Relieved because the distance eliminated the possibility of his secret being discovered.
Devastated because the woman he loved was carrying his child across an ocean, and he would never know what happened to either of them.
He had stayed in the village for another year after that, because leaving immediately would have raised questions, and then he had moved on, the way he always moved on, packing his few belongings and walking away.
Unlike the other chapters of his long life, though, which had faded with time, the chapter with Rosa had remained vivid and unresolved.
Now Syssi was sitting across from him, telling Kian about her great-grandmother Rosa Dorjinsky, and the ground beneath Eluheed's feet was shifting.
"Is it possible that you are my great-granddaughter? Is that why Elu brought me here?" he had asked, and the words had come out before the part of his brain that vetted statements for potential risk could intervene.
The answer was that she could be. The timeline fit.
If Rosa had carried his child to term, a daughter because the line had to be matrilineal for Syssi to carry the immortal genes, and if that daughter had grown up and had a daughter of her own, the line could lead directly to the woman sitting across from him with her husband's arm around her shoulders and a glass of Moscow Mule in her hand.
Syssi was a seer, just like him, and it wasn't a common trait among immortals. In fact, it was rare.
A remarkable coincidence?
Not likely.
Kian had said that he didn't believe in coincidences and that he could see the Fates' fingerprints all over this.
Eluheed didn't believe in the Fates. He was a devoted follower of Elu, the Two-Faced god, but he agreed with Kian, nonetheless.
Fate didn't leave fingerprints unless she wanted them found.
"I'll think about it," he had told Syssi about the genetic test, and he'd meant it as a deflection, a way to buy time while he processed the implications.
But the truth was simpler than the deflection.
He was afraid.
Not of what it might reveal about his non-human origins, although that concern was legitimate. He was afraid of the answer.
If the test confirmed that Syssi was his descendant, it changed everything. It meant that he had family here on Earth.
And if the test showed that there was no connection, that Rosa's child, if there had been a child, had not led to Syssi, then the hope that had flared in his chest would be extinguished.
Either answer changed him. And he had spent so long being unchanged that the prospect of transformation, even a welcome one, was terrifying.
Tamira took his hand under the table, and the warmth of her fingers gave him strength the way it always did.
She had heard the story of Rosa for the first time tonight, and she hadn't flinched.
She hadn't questioned or judged. She had simply listened and then squeezed his hand, which was her way of saying 'I'm here for you. '
Across the green, the music had changed to something with a faster tempo, and couples had claimed the dance area.
Ruvon was looking at his future wife the way Eluheed imagined he had once looked at Rosa in the birch grove, with the absolute, irrational certainty that this person was the center of everything.
"If Syssi is my descendant," he said, "it means that Rosa had the baby, my child survived and grew up and had children of her own. It means something of me continued."
"That's usually how descendants work," Tamira said.
"You know what I mean."
"I do." She turned to face him, and her eyes held more compassion than he sometimes knew what to do with. "You're wondering whether you left something good behind in the wreckage of your relationship with Rosa."
"Did I?"
"Look at her," Tamira said. "She's kind, intelligent, and she can see the future. She married the leader of the clan and gave him a daughter who might be the most powerful seer ever born. If that's what came from your wreckage, I'd say you did fine."
The tightness in his chest eased. Not all the way. Tamira's words couldn't undo a century of guilt, nor could they answer the question that only a genetic test could resolve, but they made breathing easier.
"I'm going to do the test," he said.
Tamira didn't look surprised. "When?"
"As soon as Bridget is available."
"There's no rush."
"No. But I've spent enough years not knowing. I want to find out."
She leaned her head against his shoulder. "Rosa would be happy, knowing that her line led to Syssi."
He didn't know if that was true. Rosa had been many things, but predictable hadn't been one of them. She might have been happy, or she might have been furious that it had taken him this long to find out.
She might have thrown something at him.