Chapter 7 A Letter
A LETTER
Kat
Coming up with the plan to get her sister to stay was supposed to be the difficult part, but after a load of coin had been dumped in Kat’s lap with the promise of even more, figuring out what to say turned out to be much harder.
It took multiple pieces of parchment over the course of the day. On the first, Kat had simply written:
Dear Kalypso
And then she promptly crossed it out and crumpled it up.
What am I doing, writing her a trial summons?
Well, it might feel like that if she didn’t get it right. The others began with a more affectionate Dear Kaly, but they were all still too formal. Kat had never gone longer than a day without speaking to her sister, though, so after weeks maybe that was what was needed.
Gods, what if she doesn’t want to hear from me at all?
Maybe…maybe. Yet Kat still wrote letter after letter, some absolving herself and blaming her sister, some groveling so intensely they couldn’t be believed no matter how true they were, some too cheery, some too sorrowful, one that went on for three pages about the virtues of cream in tea, but none exactly right.
More scratches with the quill, more crumpled parchment.
By late afternoon, her sorting work for the day was finished, so she crept through the post to the second story where the bedchambers were.
No one used the window in the upstairs hall because the massive tree hanging over the side entry had long ago blotted out the view, but with a jiggle of its handle, it opened up onto a sturdy overhang.
She readjusted her sewing bag and climbed out onto the roof and into the hidden safety of the tree.
A myriad of blue and purple leaves surrounded Kat as she pulled herself upward onto the sturdiest branch.
The thickness of the leaves and their shadows hid her away.
She stared at the singular piece of blank parchment she brought in an attempt to force herself to get it right.
One of the drayks that routinely traveled to the barracks sat not so patiently at her side, nipping at the quill.
“Yes, I know you want to be done for the day too,” she said. “But humans can’t just lay an egg and get everything inside us out. We have to…” Kat touched her cheek, fingers falling into the divot of her scar. “We have to be brave.”
Lyly
Kat took a hitching inhale. When had she last called her sister that?
Probably that time she fell off the roof of the Davenport Manor.
She thought she was going to die—a bit dramatic since she’d only fractured her leg and hit her head hard enough to gush an impressive amount of blood, but between sobs and her sister’s arms, she’d apologized to Lyly for being so clumsy.
Kalypso had been so warm then. Not that she’d ever been cold to Kat, but that night her sister had been different.
She was always the woman who could begin or end a bar brawl with a single look and the sister who could turn around Kat’s day with a gift of fine stolen thread, but in that moment, she had been more to Kat. She had been like a mother.
At least, what Kat imagined a mother should be like because there was nothing about Kaly that reminded Kat of the woman who bore them.
The words came easy then, a sincere apology, a promise, an affirmation of love. And then because she was afraid more than anything to lose her, a request:
Please stay. I need you.
With a last check that her script would be legible, she gave it to the drayk for delivery and watched him take off into the evening air with a thread’s breadth more courage in her heart.