Chapter 34
Thirty-Four
Vaneurim’s temple was not so much a temple as I had been envisioning.
It was a cave with the stone around the opening carved to look like pillars that blended into the rock face.
It was dark by the time Eydis and I stood outside it.
My heart burned, and I was frozen for a heartbeat with fear.
Afraid to enter. Afraid to be furious with Fell for keeping such an important secret from me.
Afraid to see Fell, to know by the look in his eyes how little I’d been protecting him.
How much he’d been aching in silence. Aching with a smile on his face.
“I should like to go in alone,” I said, my voice barely a whisper, the wind tugging the clematis vines hanging around the cave’s mouth. A few early blooms fluttered in the breeze, giving the whole moment a ghostly feeling.
Eydis nodded. “Will you be able to find your way back alone?”
It was a fair concern, we’d exited the palace on the northern side and wandered along the beach, taking sand paths between the rocks further from the shore.
“I will stay as long as Fell is staying,” I said.
Eydis nodded again. “Yorunn is witness,” she said, which I didn’t understand at all back then.
I took a slow breath and entered the cave, expecting darkness, but finding after a few steps there was light coming from within.
Torches were set into the walls. Candles anywhere there were ledges—half of them burnt to smoking stumps, but many tall and burning brightly, the wind tousling their flames.
After a few more steps, the cave curved slightly, and I could see Fell.
He lounged in the dim light amid the swirls of incense smoke—sweet grass and cedar. Any anger I had with him for keeping such a big secret fled.
I rushed to him and knelt, entirely unsure if I was about to burst into tears or not. “I have been told of your…” I almost choked. I knew no words for it. “Sorrow. Jura and…” I couldn’t even say it.
The corners of his mouth lifted slightly. “I did not mean to keep secrets only… at first we did not know each other well, and then you were vaneruigk and sad stories are not good for vaneurigk. Especially not ones about birth going poorly. I kept thinking, ah, now I will tell her. But…”
Would I scream? Would I tear my clothing? Would I chew on my own hair? What does the body do when it hears such a horrible tale? When it looks into the eyes of someone so good and easy and gentle who has been made to suffer so much?
He laughed his tragic laugh—the one he saved for just these kinds of moments. “I am faring better than I would have guessed if you had told me I would open another door so soon.”
But then he cried. And because he was crying and I was pregnant, I was also crying.
When the incense had burnt to nothing, and our bodies had released all the tears we had, Fell said, “She chose to go with her mother instead of staying here with me. I think this was right of her. But I do not want her thinking I am trying to replace her.”
There was a sculpture of Vaneurim behind him—the carved woman had been watching us the entire time we sat crying.
My next thought went to her and to my womb with so much force it felt like it was King Arik’s voice, not my own.
This must be a boy, then. It would be easier for Fell to have a son.
So that is what I would hold the door open for.
We made our way back to the palace in the middle of the night.
It had been one of the longest days of my life—the sort of days only mothers can truly understand, so full of tasks of great importance, moments of life-altering pain and shift, that they cannot be articulated entirely.
We were exhausted and didn’t wash or change our clothing, but crawled into Fell’s bedding having only taken off our boots.
I dreamt we were on the shore, lying wrapped around each other.
The sea seeped up onto the sand, soaking our clothes and tugging at Fell when it slunk back to the ocean.
He did nothing to resist its pull, and each time a wave washed onto the beach, it dragged him farther out to sea, farther away from me, until I was entirely alone.