Chapter 3 #2
All of that Elloven could understand if her mother were living alone with her poor spirits, but how had Taven let it get so bad?
He wanted me to see it this way, she realized. He’d known, probably for longer than she had, that she’d planned to send Fabrien and his friends the nightmare, that she’d be coming home. He’d had plenty of time to tidy up and cover the shame of the past years. But he hadn’t.
“You’ll find her in bed,” Taven said, coming up so softly behind her, she yelped. His hands rolled over both of her shoulders with a grip that was far from comforting. “She rarely leaves, not since Gen’s accident. Perhaps you’ll inspire her in ways I could not.”
Gennady’s death was no accident, and neither had been leaving Nightwood in such stale disarray.
Elloven twisted away from him. Her exhaustion tamped the fire in her, but she’d had plenty of long hours in the carriage to think about his assertion to marry her.
He hadn’t even bothered to pose it as a question.
Taven slipped a hand through one of hers and dipped into a theatrical bow.
“No.” Her heart sank. “Taven, no.”
“My lady, would you not do this humble gentleman the honor?” Taven remained on his knees, like he was addressing his liege lord. He’d always sprung the request on her when he sensed her withdrawing. Dance with me, he used to say, and we’ll leave the world behind.
“I said no. It’s late. It’s been an awfully long—”
“Just one,” he said, insistent, turning his begging eyes upward. “Just one, and I’ll retire a content man.”
“Is contentment so easy for you?”
“El.”
She sighed, and he took that as acceptance, bolting upward and sweeping her into his arms. She stared over his bicep, limp, as he swanned with her across the worn rug.
She wouldn’t marry him. She couldn’t even stomach being in the same house with him, but she was drained.
When she was rested, the right words would arrive.
“All at once the sea was calm, the lassie came to say,” Taven sang, affecting a Southerlands brogue that was so bloody terrible, it almost broke her sour mood. “Rejoice, rejoice, the lassie cried, for the Guardians are with us this day.”
“You’ve gotten worse. Wouldn’t have thought it was possible,” she murmured, scolding herself for letting her wall down, letting him come anywhere near penetrating it. She wasn’t the same woman she’d been when he’d last seen her, but there she was, acting like it anyway.
“Whiskey, rum, and mead, and drum, the men were led astray.” He spun her out and back in. “But the sea was calm, and the sky lacked qualms, for the Guardians are with us this dayyyyy.”
“Taven.”
“This dayyyy!”
“That’s enough,” she said more firmly. “I don’t want Mother to worry.”
Taven abruptly stopped. “I’ll join you. She’s—”
“No. I’ll see my mother alone.” Elloven turned her head sideways over one shoulder.
She had to say it and get it out of the way, because after tonight, she’d draw the boundaries she should have drawn years ago.
He already knew what she did to men who crossed them.
“Thank you for coming for me, but now that I’m home, things will be different.
I’m different.” She restrained a cringe as she offered a hand behind her, a concession to keep him from following her, which he took. “We’ll speak in the morning.”
“Ellie—”
“Good night, Taven.” She released him and broke free, holding the hand he’d held out away from her body.
His reticence was only a temporary pardon.
He hadn’t brought her home to appease Esmeray, and he hadn’t done it from the goodness of his heart.
There was a balance due, but it wouldn’t come in the currency he expected.
“Good night, Ellie. My love,” he called after her. The gentle turn of his voice, his careful balance of tenderness and power, sent shivers tearing down her spine.
Elloven’s mother’s door was cracked. An orange light seeped through the gap. She gave the splintered wood a light nudge and entered a room grotesquely full of candles, most of them nearly melted through, and for a moment, it took her back to her long, sleepless nights at the Reliquary.
“Mama?” Her voice broke. All her careful systems of self-protection had frayed hours ago, but Elloven was once more the little girl who had watched her mother spin magic by the fire and tell the tallest tales of her lost girlhood in the Seven Sisters.
The dreamy memories were almost enough to cover the pain circling their lives, even then.
A mountain of blankets shifted, crunched. Her mother’s messy blonde curls, piled and smooshed, appeared before she did. “Ellie? Is that you?”
“It’s me. I’m home.” Elloven stepped inside and locked the door behind her. Taven would be quietly eavesdropping, thinking himself too clever for her to know, but she’d be damned if she let him in.
She unlaced her boots first, then peeled away her outer layers until she was in her shift.
The warm, musty room was ripe with the aromas of a life that had been mostly undisturbed for years.
Despite the obscene amount of dying light, the place was dim and cloying, like the farthest point in a cave the sun still reached.
The stench of liquor had her fighting a gag.
Elloven climbed in beside her mother. Esmeray watched her from the pillow with tears in her eyes.
Her rouge had been spread from cheek to chin, the kohl she wore on her eyes a series of scored marks down the sides of her face, like she’d been ravaged by the forest. She opened her mouth, and another waft of spirits hit Elloven in the face.
From what Taven had said, she also liked the dream leaves, and even occasionally the truffled toadstools that Elloven and Gennady had been warned against as children.
But to hear Taven speak of her, Elloven had expected to find a weak, decaying creature, incapacitated.
What she saw was a woman so full of woe that she’d made use of the world around her to persevere.
“My little flower,” Esmeray whispered. One shaking, gnarled hand reached up to cup her daughter’s cheek.
A sad smile cut through her wrinkles, far more pronounced than they should have been for a woman of her age.
But she’d lost almost everything. Her husband.
Her son. Her status. And until that night, her daughter. “You’re not the same.”
Elloven laid a hand over her mother’s and cried. “None of us are.”
“There’s a terrible truth in that, love.” Esmeray turned her head into the pillow to cough. “I could study you all night, but you’re so tired. I see it in your eyes. You were never one for long days.”
Referring to her escape from a burning Whitechurch as a “long day” was overly euphemistic, even for Esmeray. “I couldn’t explain it to you if I tried.”
Esmeray’s glossy eyes scanned her, a tremor lifting her jaw. “I should have fought Lord Quinlanden harder.”
Elloven sighed. “Let’s not, not tonight—”
“Thank the Guardians for Jesstin. Did you meet any trouble?”
“Not on the road, but there was some rabble in the village. Jesstin dealt with it.”
“I knew he would. He’s a good lad.”
“Why did you send him?”
“Taven wouldn’t have known what to do with the village trouble, would he?” She coughed again. Elloven noted pink stains on the pillow, another heartbreak for later. “We’ll invite Jesstin over for supper one night. That’s what we’ll do; give him a proper thank-you.”
If the kitchen looked anything like the sitting area, Elloven didn’t think they’d be inviting anyone over any time soon.
Her mother had once been a skilled cook, though she’d rarely had occasion to when Elloven had been a girl, because they’d had two chefs in their employ back then.
In her current state, Esmeray would be hard-pressed to toss together a stew.
Elloven added deep cleaning to her list of things to do before leaving again.
She couldn’t allow her mother to wallow in such squalor.
If she could find the gold, she’d hire a proper caretaker.
She thought of Jesstin’s offer to come to Mythgarde, and an even darker thought crossed her mind, that she had her own services to peddle, if she could find the courage.
What men had taken with impunity, she could sell with discretion.
“Mama, I need something from you, and you’ll want to say no, as you always have. I need you to say yes this time though, because I’m lost, and there’s only one place in this realm I can be found.”
Esmeray’s brows formed an angry line. “No, you only think those people can help you, but you wouldn’t ask me this if you knew who they really were. Their aid comes with a cost no soul should pay.”
“Those people are our people.”
“Would that they were not.” Esmeray’s breath rattled on intake.
“I deserve to know why you left and why you won’t let me go to them.” Elloven reached for her mother’s hands under the blankets. “My magic is chaos. Pure, unbridled chaos, and I don’t even know how it works, how far it goes! I’m terrified, terrified to find out the wrong way.”
“Best you never know, for chaos magic is the darkest and most dangerous. Ellie. Hear me, please. If I thought they could help you, love, I would have sent you there myself, years ago.”
“Mama, I can’t stay here forever. Lord Quinlanden will find a way around the problem of my sanctuary.”
“You’re safer here than you’d ever be with our people.”
“Until some sellsword breaks into our home in the night!”
“No,” Esmeray insisted. “No, Elloven.”
Elloven frowned. “Why are you so afraid of them?”
“There are some who are like us,” Esmeray said after a pause.
“Who can still see the lines demarcating good from evil. There are others, too many, who believe them to be one and the same and will use that deliberate misunderstanding to justify monstrous acts. To perform unconscionable acts that could never be undone.”
“Like what?”
“Not tonight. Not...” Esmeray’s eyes closed. Tears rolled down her cheeks. “Let me just hold you, love, like you let me do when you were still a girl and none of this...”
With an uneven sigh, Elloven inched closer. She nuzzled her face next to her mother’s on the pillow, the warmth of her soft, wrinkled hands a heartbreaking comfort after the years of panic and fear and suffering that would always be hers to carry. Hers to resolve.
Within minutes, Esmeray was snoring.
Elloven wished she could join her, but there could be no rest, no peace, until she had a way forward.