92. Look At What He Kept
look at what he kept
—EDEN
They give us an hour before anyone knocks. I know it’s Therael’s doing—I can feel him at the bottom of the stairs, holding the whole eager, buzzing weight of our family at bay.
“Let them have this,” he murmurs.
Vaelína figures out nursing the way she seems to figure out everything so far: instantly, greedily, with both fists.
She takes after both of her fathers, what can I say.
The first pull startles a laugh out of me, and then the strangest warmth spreads through my chest. This is what the níva was always for.
Not the boys, for all their devout thievery. Her.
“She’s stealing your breakfast,” I whisper to Ashán.
“She can have anything of mine she wants,” he rasps, watching her as if she’s rearranged the stars. “Including that… mostly including that.”
“Ashán,” Sage groans.
“I said mostly.”
Sage has wound one orange curl of her hair around the tip of his claw. He hasn’t moved in ten minutes, like the curl might be load-bearing.
When she finally unlatches, níva-drunk and blinking her wide mismatched eyes at the ceiling, I take pity on the house full of held breath below us.
“Let them up,” I murmur. “Therael first.”
The floorboards outside the room sigh beneath a careful step.
I feel it before he’s fully through the doorway.
The ache in him is ancient. Carried so carefully, I wonder if anyone besides another empath has ever noticed it.
The leaves of his halo have dimmed to a soft yellow.
One of his sleeves is still stained from my birth, and his collar is hanging open so low I catch a peek of something emerald moving beneath his robe.
His eyes fall to Vaelína, and his breath catches.
“You can come closer,” I whisper.
“Are you certain?”
I shift against the pillows and hold one hand out to him. “Therael. Come meet your granddaughter.”
His arms make the shape before he reaches us.
There’s no fumbling or hesitation, elbow curved, palm ready to cradle a skull the size of a peach.
The practiced arms of a man who has rehearsed this many times.
Ashán watches him with the wary intensity of a beast allowing another hand near its young.
Sage is no better. His wing curls forward until it nearly blocks Therael’s path.
“Sage,” I murmur.
“I know.” His wing doesn’t move.
Therael wisely makes no comment. He stops beside the bed, looking down into the open petals.
Vaelína blinks up at him—one violet eye, one endless black—and her tiny nose wrinkles.
Then a chunky green hand slips free from the cradle, her fingers curling around the end of Therael’s.
His face buckles as a deep pink rose blooms at his throat.
Then another. Then dozens, spilling over his shoulders, winding through his hair, and down his arms. Vaelína makes a pleased little sound.
Therael laughs, and I think it may be the first time I’ve ever actually heard him make such a sound.
“Well,” he whispers. “You certainly know how to make an entrance, ?mi.”
Her shadow uncurls from beneath one petal. It stretches toward him, sliding beneath the neckline of his robe.
Therael sighs. “Arteus…”
“Curiousss little cherub, isss’t she,” a low, raspy voice hisses.
“Who—who was that?”
Sage’s wing snaps fully rigid. Shadows gather at Ashán’s knuckles as their body angles between the bed and the sound in one smooth step.
Therael blinks once before the corners of his mouth twitch. “It’s alright.” The collar of his robe stirs, and emerald head emerges, broader than my two hands together. It’s scales shimmer from deep green to bright jade in the lamplight, golden eyes with razor-slit pupils never leaving Vaelína.
“Therael,” I murmur. “I love you. But are we certain a giant snake belongs this close to the baby?”
“I’m exsssellent with hatchlingssss,” he hisses. His mouth curves into a sly grin. “Jussst asssk Therael.”
Therael’s jaw tightens by a fraction of an inch. “He is… very gentle… with children… specifically.”
“That’sss what I ssssaid.”
“It is not what you said.”
“It isss what I meant, which isss the ssssame thing between old friendsss.”
Sage’s eyes narrow. “Why does it feel like we’re only hearing half of this conversation?”
“Because you are, sapling,” Therael and Arteus say together. They share a look of deep, ancient irritation at having done so.
“Sapling?” Sage repeats.
Vaelína’s shadow stretches up and boops the enormous serpent directly on the snout.
Ashán’s shadows surge. Sage’s wing sweeps forward. Therael’s free hand lifts—Arteus doesn’t move at all. He blinks slowly. His eyes cross faintly, considering the tiny curl of darkness resting on his nose.
“Bold for a cabbage,” he hisses with unmistakable approval. “Ssshe will do.”
The shadow gives his snout a small, satisfied pat and withdraws.
“She just—” Sage’s voice comes out strangled. “She touched it. He could have—”
Arteus’s hood flares. “He would sssooner ssswallow hisss own tail,” he says, with such flat finality that even the shadows at Ashán’s knuckles dissolve. His head turns back to the cradle, and something in those razor pupils goes soft. “Hatchlingsss are sssacred. Thisss one essspecially.”
And there it is again—the thing I felt when he first looked at her. Two mourners. One person.
Arteus’s eyes lift to mine. He knows I felt it. I incline my head, the smallest bow, and say nothing at all. Something flickers behind those golden slits before disappearing just as quickly. He knows exactly what I am now.
“Your chargesss have produced a very fine grandchild, Rael,” Arteus hisses, settling his head back against the god’s collarbone. “The flowering, however…” his tongue flickers toward the roses still winding through Therael’s hair. “... wasssssss a bit much.”
“Arteus.”
“Dozzzensss of them. In front of company, no less.”
“Arteus.”
“I am sssimply sssaying there issss a middle ground between ssstoicisssm and becoming a hedge.”
The knock that comes next is quieter. Like the person on the other side isn’t sure they’re allowed to make noise.
“Come in, Uncle Damien,” I call.
He fills the doorway and freezes there, the same way he froze when I found him at the marsh.
His milky eyes find the bundle in my arms. His hands flex once at his side.
The wanting pours off him, and braiding through is a fear so specific, I know what it is before he says a single word: what if I reach for her and my own skin punishes me for it.
“I just—” He rubs the back of his neck sheepishly. “I wanted to see her. That’s all. I don’t need to—”
“Damien.”
“My skin, Eden,” he says quietly. “It burns—any female but Winnie—you know that. I’m not going to gamble on—” his throat bobs, “—on her.”
I glance down at the tiny clover tucked against my chest.
“What do you think?” I whisper. Vaelína blinks sleepily toward Damien. One tiny green hand reaches into the air.
Ashán smiles. “An empath like her mother.”
Damien stares at that tiny reaching hand like it’s a court summons.
“She doesn’t understand what she’s—”
“She understands better than anyone in this room,” I say softly. “That’s rather the point.”
He crosses the room like a man walking onto an ice lake, his bad leg dragging slightly more than usual.
He lowers himself onto the edge of the nest. I realize with a pang that he doesn’t trust himself to hold her standing.
He arranges his stitched forearms into a cradle.
And then braces. All three of them brace.
I lay Vaelína into his arms. Nothing happens.
No hiss. No smoke. No blistering heat crawling beneath his stitches.
Just a green baby-girl settling into a nest of scars and silver thread, blinking her mismatched eyes in wonder.
“It doesn’t—” He whispers. “It doesn’t burn.”
“No,” I whisper back. “I didn’t think it would.”
“Why doesn’t it burn?”
“Perhaps,” Therael says quietly from the window, “even curses know better than to touch our little blessing.”
Vaelína yawns and grips the seam of his stitched wrist.
“S-she’s holding on to me,” Damien stutters. His thumb traces once over her tiny knuckles, as delicate as a butterfly’s wing. This enormous, silver-stitched man bows his head over the daughter of the reaper he cut twelve times, and his shoulders shake. Once.
“Hey, little one.” His breath stutters. “I owe your father a debt I can never pay. But look at you. Look at what he kept.”
Nobody speaks; even Arteus has gone still against Therael’s collar.
Damien tilts his head, listening to something none of us can hear, and a watery laugh escapes him.
“Jack wants me to tell you she’s prettier than both her fathers.”
“Obviously,” Ashán says.
“And Luci—” His voice catches. Whatever Lucifer is saying takes a long moment to reach Damien’s voice. “... Luci says the wait was worth it.”
“I waited so long, I was so patient—” comes a familiar voice from the stairs.
“You threatened to climb the trellis, Sael?n*,” Andrik’s voice rumbles from somewhere behind her.
“Climb it, PATIENTLY.”
The door bursts open, and my sister is basically climbing on top of me, already crying, hands making the universal grabby gesture.
“Give me—oh my God, look at her—Eden, LOOK at her!”
“I have been, all morning.” I smile.
“Her hair!” Damien passes her to Lumi. “She has your hair, and their eyes—oh no, oh NO—she’s going to be beautiful and wild—hello, hi, little love, I’m your Aunt Lumi, or you can call me Aunt Snowdrop, or—you’ll figure something out, I’m sure. I’m your FAVORITE, we’re not letting the bunny vote—”
Vaelína blinks up at her with curious, wide eyes. Lumi’s gaze snags and her mouth falls open.
“Eden. EDEN. The tiny little wing buds!”
“Aren’t they precious?” I smile.
“There are WING BUDS.” She looks up at Sage and Ashán, tears spilling over, laughing. “Andrik told me about the crib clearance. Looks like you were right.”
“We were right,” they say together, insufferably.
“Widening the crib was the correct call,” Damien adds from the corner.