Chapter 20
Talisa
Two weeks later
Remembrance Day (winter solstice)
“I miss Mama’s memento mori cakes,” Juno said with a sigh as we contemplated the small, round spiced honey-cakes served as our dessert at supper.
“There aren’t any hazelnuts in these,” Mira agreed. “And the spices are all wrong. And it doesn’t feel like Remembrance Day without snow.”
I agreed with all of their complaints.
Here, southeast of the islands and in the continent’s heart, winter was overcast skies and freezing rain. It was gray and muddy and mostly depressing.
Back home, snow always blanketed our roof and covered the herb and vegetable garden by the middle of Twelfth Month.
My best friend Elfrieda and I would be wearing the warm scarves we’d knitted for each other last winter, and our houses would be filled with the scents of mulled wine and our mothers’ special memento mori cakes cooling on the kitchen tables, ready to offer the dead at our household shrine once we returned from the Remembrance Day services at the village temple to the Twelve Gods.
It was winter break, and the dining hall was half-empty because most of the aristocratic students had traveled home for the Remembrance Day holiday.
Most of the commoners had stayed behind because they couldn’t afford the cost of winter passage home or, like my sisters and I, home lay too far away for a mere fortnight’s visit.
To my chagrin, Lukhan FitzMurad had also remained on campus. I wondered why.
Luckily, I’d only seen him from a distance, but he’d been by himself each time. He looked almost lonely without his usual group of hangers-on. Even his big, golden-haired friend Damien Corvellan appeared to have left campus for the holiday.
I felt a pang of pity for him and wasn’t sure why. He’d done his best to make my life utterly miserable since I arrived at the academy, and he’d possibly even tried to hurt me on two different occasions.
“Hazelnuts?” Elio asked in mock horror. “No, no, no, ladies! Real memento mori cakes are made with almonds and ginger.” He grimaced down at his own dessert. “And they certainly don’t have walnuts.” He pushed his plate away. “Unacceptable!”
Mira and Juno both nodded. “Unacceptable,” they echoed, grinning at him.
During the semester, the pressure of classes and the constant bullying by Lukhan and his friends had made it easy to push down most of my homesickness. But once the semester-end exams were over and the break started, we felt a little safer with most of the aristocrats gone.
That was when the strangeness of Twelfth Month with rain and green grass instead of clear blue skies and snow had hit hard.
Elio, whose home lay far to the south of the capital, was dealing with whatever homesickness he was facing during his first winter break away from his family by complaining about the cold, gloomy weather and entertaining us.
Without classes or homework to occupy our time, he encouraged us to accompany him on sightseeing expeditions into the capital.
We spent a week taking the ferry downriver every morning and touring the city’s notable sights—the great Temple of the Divine Mother; the vast, breathtaking imperial palace gardens; the (overdecorated to the point of garishness, in my opinion) public rooms of the palace itself; the shrine of the Seven Sacred Disciples, who had codified the ethical use of magic centuries ago; and the vast, maze-like halls of the Imperial Markets, which were larger than the entire port town of Herrewick back home on Abbonay.
He insisted on paying for everything: the ferry tickets, our midday meals in the city, sweets and pastries, and even small gifts like hair-ribbons and imported shawls made from the wool of mountain goats living among the peaks bordering the Dragon Kingdom.
The shawls were light as a feather but incredibly soft and warm.
When I protested, feeling guilty about the amount of money he was spending on us, he insisted, telling us we were doing him a favor by letting him drag us all over the city.
“I’ve never been away from home this long,” he confessed with a wry smile. “You’re keeping me from taking to my bed in a fit of gloom and despair. The very least I can do is make sure that you’re warm and fed well while we’re tramping around palaces and temples.”
When he put it like that, how could I protest further?
Besides, if it hadn’t been for him, my sisters and I wouldn’t have seen much of the capital, since our constrained finances kept us confined to the academy, where our meals and housing were prepaid.
Still, it was hard to swallow my pride when I knew perfectly well he was presenting his charity as a favor we were doing him.
“What’s wrong with walnuts?” Dante asked now. “That’s how my gran always makes them. Though she’s more generous with the cinnamon. But I’ll take them if you don’t want them.”
Outside, the campus bell rang, reminding us that the Remembrance Day service would start shortly in the academy’s chapel of the Twelve Gods.
I lifted my plate and slid my cakes onto Dante’s tray. “Enjoy,” I told him. “We’re heading to the service.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said, as Mira and Juno gave him their cakes as well.
I nodded and got to my feet.
To my surprise, Elio also scrambled up off the bench. “May I join you?”
“Of course,” I said, a little surprised.
Back home, only people who had lost loved ones or family members over the past year attended the Remembrance Day service.
As we left the dining hall, I said, “Elio, I’m sorry for your loss.”
He shook his head. “Oh, my family hasn’t lost anyone this past year, thank Limnis of the Divine Portal.”
I looked at him in surprise and saw his smooth brown cheeks flush.
“Uh, I just thought—I mean, I know the three of you have had a hard time, with your mother and, uh, everything.” He shrugged and spread his hands.
“I thought you might want someone there, to, uh, you know.” He looked away and added, “But if I’m intruding—”
“No!” Mira, Juno, and I all chorused. I added, “Thank you, Elio. This is going to be… hard.”
He nodded soberly. “I know.” Then the corners of his mobile mouth twitched upward. “I brought plenty of clean handkerchiefs.”
∞∞∞
The chapel of the Twelve Gods was a free-standing shrine, fronted with marble columns, located between the academy infirmary and the Fifth-Year Quad.
I’d passed it dozens of times since arriving at the academy without ever going inside.
The stone facade was severe from the outside, but the moment I entered, warmth and fragrance rolled over me like a wave from the cedar-scented incense and jasmine lamp-oil.
Golden light glowed on the polished skin of the marble statues of the Twelve Gods and the Trickster lining the perimeter of the chapel.
Opposite the door, housed in a niche larger than all the rest and draped in a rich gown of embroidered sapphire-blue velvet, the Divine Mother held out her arms in welcome.
The Service of Remembrance had already drawn perhaps thirty students along with a sprinkling of academy staff members.
Everyone sat on the rows of long benches set up in the center of the chapel, speaking in hushed voices.
Elio’s shoulder brushed mine as we slid into an empty pew near the middle of the nave.
The priest, a mage-instructor who taught upper-division Earth magic classes, stood at the front. He read the traditional Remembrance Day prayers for those who had passed through Limnis’s portal during the year’s turning. The chapel’s high timber ceiling absorbed his words and gave back silence.
Then he invited students forward to name their dead. We formed a line that stretched halfway around the chapel.
The line inched forward as one by one, students approached the Divine Mother and accepted a lit candle from the priest. Then they spoke the names of those they’d lost since the last solstice before placing their candle in the votive stand before the statue.
A grandmother. A father. Someone’s infant sibling, born too early.
Each name was like a pebble dropped into still water, sending rings spreading out through the chapel’s serene atmosphere. I kept my hands folded against my waist and stared at the votive candles burning at the Divine Mother’s feet until the flames blurred and swam.
“Mama,” Juno whispered beside me, not yet her turn to speak it aloud. Just trying it out, maybe. Seeing if the word still fit the shape of this grief.
I reached over and took her hand.
When it was time for us to step forward and accept our candles, we all went together.
A multi-tiered votive stand was placed at the feet of the Divine Mother’s statue. Next to it stood a large box of pale beeswax tapers.
Elio stood close behind us, his tall presence at my back unexpectedly comforting.
When our turn came, the priest handed us a candle each and spoke the charm to light them. Elio politely waved off the proffered candle.
The priest said, “Speak the names of your loved ones, and give the light into the Mother’s keeping.”
Mira went first. She cleared her throat twice. “Divine Mother, keep Mama in your loving embrace, Isabeau of—” She choked and stopped. Started again. “Of-of Bernswick. Isabeau of Bernswick.”
Juno’s mouth was trembling. She angrily wiped at her eyes with her free hand and pressed her lips together in a gesture that looked eerily like Mama. “M-mama,” she said in a choked voice. “I-Isabeau o-of B-Bernswick.”
Then her composure fell apart with a sob she’d clearly been trying to swallow all throughout the brief service. Her candle tilted dangerously in her hand until Mira caught it and helped Juno slide it into a vacant spot on the votive stand.
I should have been the steady one. I’d told myself all day that I would be. As the oldest sister, it was my job to comfort and shield the twins. Besides, I’d already cried in private, in the dark of my dormitory room, more times than I could count.
I told myself I could get through this moment, because I had no tears left.
But gazing up at the intense compassion carved on the Divine Mother’s face, and with my sisters crying on either side of me, the world had cracked open again right at my feet.
“Isabeau of Bernswick,” I said. My voice broke on the final syllable. “Our mother.”
I reached out to plant my candle on the sand and couldn’t move.
I just stood there, clutching the candle, watching the flame and thinking about her elegant, long-fingered hands and how she’d hold mine when she was teaching me to measure a tincture.
I had thought I was past the worst of my mourning. Wasn’t grief something you survived and then carried like a ball of ice that melted away the longer you held it?
Now I learned that grief kept its strength… and its sharp claws. It ambushed you in incense-filled chapels on cold solstice afternoons. The pain that rolled through me now was every bit as new and raw as it had been that horrible day in Chatelaine Lirelle’s office.
My tears came in a steady blur that turned the candle flames into smears of gold. Mira leaned into me from the left and Juno from the right, and circled my waist with their arms, while they sobbed openly and I wept quietly.
The Divine Mother watched us all with her stone eyes that held nothing and everything.
Soon enough, the priest cleared his throat. I noticed the impatient sighs and shuffling from the people lined up behind us. We must have stood there longer than I realized.
Juno’s sobs softened into embarrassed sniffling, and Mira straightened and pressed the back of her wrist against her eyes.
And I was still holding my candle.
“Take all the time you need,” the priest said in a gentle tone.
The taper wobbled between my fingers as I tried to fit it through the narrow ring of the votive stand. The small flame guttered as drops of melted wax ran like tears and dropped onto the stone floor.
In another moment I was going to either drop it or put it out entirely, and I didn’t know why that seemed so terrible, but it did. As if when this flame went out, something else would go with it.