Epilogue
—EDEN
Two Months later—
The afternoon sun is bright. Andrik and Lumi’s snow-draped cabin looks like something out of a storybook, every eave glittering like it’s been dipped in sugar. I tug Vaelína’s hat down over her ears. She blinks up at me with one violet eye and one black.
“You ready to see Uncle Grumpy again, sweetpea?” I murmur to her. “He’s very large. Try not to stare this time.”
“I heard that,” comes Lumi’s laugh from the doorway behind me, Eirlys balanced on her hip. “He’s a marshmallow. A nine-foot marshmallow.”
“A marshmallow who once threatened to remove Sage’s spine through his nose,” I say.
“That was one time, and Sage started it.”
We step out onto the wide porch and breathe in the fresh air, my sister beside me, the sun warming our skin. The impossible ordinariness of it is all I could have ever asked for.
A cheerful giggle drifts up from the snow-lined path and draws our attention.
Walking toward the cabin is a woman whose mere presence seems to make the winter chill back off a few degrees.
She has a stunning, heart-shaped face framed by a halo of rich, voluminous chestnut hair.
Her warm eyes crinkle with kindness. But it’s her outfit that makes me smile.
Defying the dreary winter neutrals, she’s wearing an oversized, cozy lilac sweater patterned with bright neon-green alien heads, paired with a sweeping chartreuse skirt. She’s like a little fairy.
“Am I interrupting?” she calls.
“No!” Lumi yells back. “I’m so glad you could make it. You get to meet my sister and niece.”
She climbs the porch steps in a swish of fabric, and up close she’s even lovelier.
“Oh, it’s an absolute honor,” she says, setting her bag down on the bench. She bends at the waist, hands on her knees, to beam at Vaelína. “I’m Miss Honey. But please, call me Posey.”
“It’s so nice to meet you,” I say, shifting Vaelína so she can see Posey. “I’m Eden.”
“Eden. What a beautiful name for a beautiful mama.” She wiggles her fingers, the neon alien heads on her sleeve dancing with the movement, catching Vaelína’s attention. “And who is this little angel?”
“This is Vaelína,” I murmur, a soft smile tugging at my lips as my daughter lets out a tiny coo.
“Vaelína,” she repeats, softening the syllables until they sound like music. “Oh, look at those eyes. One violet, one black? You are going to spend your whole life having people fall into them, aren’t you?”
Vaelína gives her a gummy, drooling smile.
“She’s got your whole heart already, hasn’t she?” Posey says, watching Vaelína track the bobbing aliens on her sleeve. “Just a couple months old and already running the household, I’d bet.”
“You’d win that bet.” I look over at Lumi. “How did you two meet?”
“Oh, Posey and I go way back,” Lumi says, settling onto one of the chairs with Eirlys.
“We went to school together, back before—” She pauses.
“Well, back before everything. She’s one of the only people from then who I—” She clears her throat.
“Anyway. She teaches just down the way. Little ones, mostly.”
“Preschoolers,” Posey confirms, beaming. “Three- and four-year-olds. Tiny chaos goblins, every one of them, and I adore them hopelessly.”
“And when Eirlys came along,” Lumi continues, reaching down to tuck the quilt tighter around the baby.
“I started… worrying. You know how it is out here. There’s no one.
No other babies, no pediatrician you can exactly take a Rhavari infant to—” she says dryly, and I huff a laugh because Elena is our on-call pediatrician.
“And I just kept thinking, how do I even know if she’s growing the way she’s supposed to?
If she’s hitting the marks she should? So I asked the one person I know who’s spent her whole life around children. ”
“And of course I said absolutely, and I have been meddling ever since.” Posey reaches over and lets Eirlys grab one of her fingers, the baby gumming happily at her knuckle. “She’s perfect, by the way. A little advanced even.”
“Here,” Posey says, turning her warm smile on me. “Let me take a peek at her too, while I’m here. No charge for sisters.” She wiggles her fingers at Vaelína again. “Two for one.”
“She’d love that,” I say, passing Vaelína gently into Posey’s waiting arms.
Posey settles her against the crook of one elbow with the easy competence of someone who’s held a thousand babies, already coaxing another gummy smile from her.
The sky darkens, and the warmth on the back of my neck disappears. My awareness prickles. A strange tension spreads across my skin. I turn toward the snow-lined path.
Two figures are coming up it. They move with a synchronized, high-energy bounce that feels entirely out of place in Andrik’s quiet forest. They look like they stepped out of a haunted court performance.
The first has a mop of inky black hair falling out from beneath a slouched, checkered jester’s cap that sits elegantly on his head.
His pale face is painted in the classic lines of a smiling jester.
Sharp crimson triangles flare up his eyes, a tiny gold star sitting nestled beneath the left one, and a grin that makes him look perpetually mischievous.
A long, tarnished gold key dangles from his left ear, brushing his shoulder.
The rest of him is just as much a contradiction.
Beautiful and wrong in the same breath. His doublet is split clean down the middle, one half deep crimson and the other black as his hair, the old fabric patterned in faded harlequin diamonds where the gold thread has worn to almost nothing.
A long slash gapes beneath his left pec down across his stomach, baring a strip of defined muscle, and another tears open from shoulder to elbow, where a cuff of tarnished gold wraps around his bicep, thin chains swaying from it with every step.
A ruff frames his throat, crimson, black, and slightly crushed, like something pulled from a costume trunk a few centuries too late.
Tall laced boots climb his calves, the toes curling into soft points adorned with tiny bells.
A chain-link belt of the same dull gold rides low on his hips.
He should look ridiculous. He doesn’t.
Beside him, his counterpart has a shock of snow-white hair peeking out from a matching purple-and-black cap.
His face is painted in the traditional sad makeup, with delicate, downturned violet lines and a painted, somber pout that makes him look devastatingly melancholy.
Beneath his right eye, a small crescent moon rests at the end of one violet line, like a tear that never fell.
Mirroring his partner, an identical tarnished gold key earring hangs from his right ear.
His doublet is the inverted twin to the other’s, split between deep purple and midnight black.
A jagged slash tears open across his ribs, exposing a pale expanse of muscle.
Another rip down his left forearm exposes a matching band of gold that binds his bicep.
Around his neck, a matching ruff of purple and black sits slightly crooked, giving him the appearance of a beautiful, discarded heirloom.
The same heavy belt rides low on his hips, swaying in perfect unison with his partner.
The two of them just stand at the edge of the yard, taking us in—the porch, the babies, the wary cluster of women. The smiling jester’s gaze slides across all of us, brightly assessing us, until it reaches Posey.
And stops.
The perpetual grin falters around the edges, like the face beneath forgot how to hold it up. Both of them have gone rigid, their painted eyes fixed on the woman holding my baby.
The eerie quiet shatters. The tiny bells that tip the curled toes of their boots erupt in an ecstatic jingle.
The white-haired one makes a small, choked sound. And the smiling one lifts his hand slowly, dazed, like he’s moving underwater. He turns it palm-up, and gold light gathers in his cupped fingers, swirling like liquid sunshine. It pulses, and a burst of wildflowers blooms.
He stares at them like he has no idea how they got there.
—TAVI
I know what this is. I have known the word for it since before the cage and the king who put us there—Vaelùmè. (Soulbond)
I’ve heard it in a hundred tongues. I have watched it happen to other people and felt nothing but professional interest, the way you’d note the weather in a country you’ll never visit.
But nobody ever mentioned the part where your lungs completely stop working, or that the cruel, rigid lines carved into your cheeks would finally stop pulling.
The scent of her reaches me, and it hits me square in the chest. Wildflowers, oranges, and something warm and golden underneath—summer, a whole season I’ve never once been allowed to stand inside.
Jovi, I force out inside our mind. Do you feel—
Yes. What do we do? he asks.
Look at her. Look at the way the sun hits her hair. Why is she holding a baby? Why am I holding weeds? Why can’t I feel my legs?
Tavi, my chest hurts. Is she a witch? Do you think it’s a curse? Why are your boots jingling so loudly?
I have no idea, but I can’t make them stop. The tiny golden bells on my toes are throwing an absolute festival in the snow. They’re screaming: look at us, look at us, look at us.
She’s a human, I whisper. Jovi, she doesn’t have any magic. She’s small. Do humans like weeds? Why did my magic make weeds?
They aren’t weeds, Tav. They’re flowers, and they smell like summer… like her. Jovi whispers back.
Can we just… grab her? I ponder. She is mielù, after all. (Mine/ours)
At once, we both bolt across the snow toward the porch like two creatures who have never once in their endless lives considered how a thing like that might look.
She flinches back, just one startled step, her arms tightening around the baby.
We stop so fast Jovi topples over.
We scared her. The thought lands in both of us at the same time, and it’s agony. We scared her, we scared her, oh no–
Fix it! Tavi, fix it now! he says as he rights himself, his hat slouched completely over one eye.
I shove my arm forward so hastily that the stems snap in my grip. I thrust them out at her anyway.
“Who are you—” I blurt out.
“—What’s your name?” Jovi asks.
“Do you like—”
“Flowers?”
“Can we keep you?” We finish together.
She’s staring at us, her eyes moving from the broken flowers to our bells and the places where our clothes are ripped. Her lips are parted, and there’s a flush creeping over her cheeks.
She feels it too. She has to feel it. Please let her feel even a sliver of what just—
I do not get to finish that thought. Because something closes around the back of my collar.
It is enormous, and it lifts me clean off my feet, my broken bouquet still thrust out in front of me, my legs pedaling uselessly in the air.
Beside me, the exact same thing happen to Jovi. He dangles a foot off the ground, hauled up by the scruff like a kitten.
I crane my head around. The thing holding me is a mountain. White-fur, antlered, easily nine feet of it, with ice-pale eyes that are looking at me the way a predator looks at a particularly loud, annoying insect it’s deciding whether or not to squash.
And holding Jovi is a green-skinned creature with a deathly stillness about him, his eyes pitch-black.
It smells like cucumbers and murder. Why are they holding us like this? Do humans have giant pets?
I don’t think it’s a pet, Jov. I send back, my voice tight as the leather collar of my doublet digs into my throat, my bells giving one final, pathetic clink in the air.
“You have ten seconds,” the white mountain says. “To explain what you are, who sent you, and why I cannot see a single thread of either of your souls.”
I do the only thing a creature of my particular talents can do, under the circumstances.
I smile—not that it’s ever been optional—and I aim it, bright and crooked right at him.
“Okay, so,” I say. “Funny story.”
Our vaelùmè shifts the baby into the arms of the red-headed woman beside her and stops right where I’m dangling.
She reaches out, her small fingers brushing my leather glove as she takes the flowers, and the moment they touch, a wave of heat rushes up my arms. My bells give a frantic shiver, my magic practically weeping with relief.
“They’re beautiful,” she says, holding the mangled stems against her chest. “I love them.”
Love, Jovi gasps. She said love.
The white mountain holding me turns his head slowly to stare at her like she’s lost her mind. Beside him, the green cucumber creature does the same.
“Posey?” the mountain says.
“What?” She lifts the flowers to her nose and lets out a sound that has Jovi ready to fight the cucumber just to hear it again. “They smell like sunshine. And it’s rude not to say thank you. Now let them go.”
The women on the porch start giggling. The dark-haired one presses her face into the baby’s blanket to muffle herself, and the other one claps a hand over her mouth. Posey joins her friends on the porch.
The mountain’s pale eyes flick to our Posey.
The dark-haired woman shouts something in another language, and I’m dropped into the snow.
A second later, Jovi lands right next to me with a heavy thud.
We crawl forward on our hands and knees, our gold belts dragging beneath us.
We stop at the bottom of the stairs and watch her play with the fuzzy, antlered baby. She was clearly made to be a mother.
Jovi, I whisper. Look at how good she is with the little ones.
I’m looking. She’s so good with them, he agrees.
The baby grabs a fistful of her hair, and she laughs as she tries to pull free. I’ve never found them appealing until now.
We should give her one.
Jovi’s silent for a moment.
…Two, he breathes. Definitely two… at the same time.
Twins, I agree. We could teach them how to walk without making a sound. We could make them bells that only ring when they’re happy.
“You two,” says a warm voice, “are absolutely adorable.” I snap my gaze up. Posey is watching us over the baby’s head, the flowers still cradled to her chest. “Aren’t you just a couple of bells and whistles?”
“Your bells and whistles,” we both reply at the same time.