Chapter 14 #3
Jesstin pulled Sesto to his feet and embraced him. He ran his hands along his smooth head and kissed it. “My brother.” He smiled at Daire, who lit up like the sun. “Brothers. More like grandfathers now, though, old dogs that you are.”
Sesto snorted. “Pray you look as good as us in your sixties.”
“If I even live that long. Go back to bed. We’ll talk more later.” Jesstin left the room but was back right away. “Ah, where’s that fucking door?”
“The one you came through?” Daire asked.
Jesstin gesticulated at the blank wall, bewildered.
“We never saw it. It was gone when we found you here. For us, it’s always been a wall.” Daire pointed at the arch, beyond which was their front door.
“And now it will stay that way,” Jesstin said and left.
Elloven was dreaming, endlessly. Some pieces felt so indelibly real, like saving Jesstin from Fabrien... destroying Fabrien. The rest were distorted images revealed by fractal light. Tumbling, turning, tunneling through a space between worlds...
But then she woke up. She woke up and all of that disintegrated, and the world became real again. When she tried to move, though, she couldn’t.
Her limbs were as stiff as tree trunks. And why was she so cold? When she felt the panic creep in, she reminded herself there was no reason this couldn’t be a dream—or a continuation of her death or something other than the frightening prospect of being trapped in her own body.
Move, I’m telling you to move, she repeated in her head, but no part of her responded.
A sound from her left startled her enough that she managed to turn her head, though just barely. But now she was concerned for her vision because she couldn’t possibly be seeing what she was seeing, lying in a bed on the other side of the room.
It was an old man who resembled what she imagined Taven’s father, or even grandfather, would look like. But when he opened his eyes, she understood everything the moment required of her.
She was back in the living world and in her old body, the one she’d died in—alive, or something like it. The man was Taven, though remarkably older. And just as she was slowly filling with life, his was leaving him. She could smell it.
“Ellie.” The word warbled from the back of his mottled throat. His eyes, milky from age or illness, didn’t even close all the way when he blinked. “I waited for you.”
With a shaking hand that wouldn’t bend, she peeled back only about an inch of quilt before she gave up. “Taven.” Several difficult moments passed before she found the energy to speak again. “I can see it’s you, but...”
“Thirty-two years, it’s been. Or thirty-three?
Time slips away.” He smiled against his pillow.
How frail he looked. If what he’d said was accurate, he’d be approaching seventy, which should be impossible.
He looked even older. “If this isn’t real, then I must be dead.
I don’t think I am though, not just yet. ”
She tried to come to terms with the weight and meaning of his words, but if she really was alive again, if she’d really been gone three decades, that would not settle on her for some time. Maybe ever. “Where...” She swallowed and choked on the effort. “Are we?”
“No one told you?”
Elloven shook her head on the pillow.
“We’re in Sesto and Daire’s croft. In Rivenholde. They’ve lived here for as many years as you’ve been gone.”
Gone. Like she’d been on an extended holiday. “And how... did I get... here?”
“You don’t remember?”
Again, she shook her head. Her energy was slowly coming back, but it would be a while yet before she could carry on a conversation.
“Jesstin said he was going to bring you home, and the fool did exactly that.” Taven went quiet. “I’m afraid that’s all I know. They don’t tell me as much as they used to.”
“They?” She remembered the spiral, the fight. The rest was filtered through the shards of her hazy dream.
“Sesto and Daire took me in after my wife passed on. My son had already gone to live with his wife’s family in Curia Rosedown.” He turned a coughing fit into his pillow. Where he’d pressed his mouth were the faintest specks of blood. “Jesstin must be with Daire and Sesto.”
Wife? Son? He’d lived an entire life. “Jesstin... I don’t know where...” Elloven rubbed her hands across her face. It felt incredible, and she wanted to do it again but was so cursed tired. What she most wanted was some water.
“Do you remember Mythgarde?”
She nodded. Of course she remembered Mythgarde.
“In the Infinitum, you returned there. Or was it an old man’s dream?”
It had been real. Jesstin rebelling, conspiring with Taven to have her taken away so she couldn’t intervene. His parting words, mouthed but unmistakable: I love you. I will find you. “How?”
He launched into another bloody coughing fit. “Some mysteries are never solved.”
“Can the healers...” She breathed deep and groaned through her exhale. It felt good to empty her lungs, then fill them again, but the effort hadn’t come easy. “Do nothing?”
“I haven’t asked.” He seemed like he would smile but drew his mouth tight instead.
“Why not?”
“I’ve lived my life, Ellie. I’ve known love. Twice. I’ve been a father. A grandfather, though I only have a sketch of little Mona.” He nodded at a small, framed drawing of a young girl, perhaps five or six. “Gen, my son, says in his letters she’s got a spirit about her.”
Elloven wrapped a tremoring hand around her throat. “You named your son Gen?”
“He was a brother to me, even if he didn’t like me much.
” Taven’s laugh was strained. “Didn’t like the way I looked at his sister.
I shouldn’t have ever set my sights on you, Ellie.
I should have let you run free and grow into a woman at your own pace.
I chose the time and place for you, and that was wrong.
I was wrong. Never would I ask for your forgiveness.
I only needed you to know I see the wrongness of what I did to you, and I’d change the past if it were in my power.
I’d never have forced my way into your bed, and had fate still swept you off to Whitechurch, I’d have killed that man myself the moment I learned what he was.
I never would have listened to the voices and put all my faith in them.
And I never... never would have tricked you into the bond.
Of all the things I’ve done...” He reached for a rag lying on the side of his bed and dabbed his mouth.
Only some blood made it onto the cloth, and what remained on his face was dried.
“But history remembers what a man did, not what he wishes he’d done. ”
She didn’t know what to say. Her feelings about his deathbed apology were far more convoluted than she could manage when she was still coming to life, still trying to reconcile the Taven in front of her being the same man she’d grown up with.
His betrayals were still so fresh to her, but he’d had over thirty years to find peace.
But he was dying. If nothing else, that was real, and she had a choice.
“Wait. Let me...” Taven ignored the concern in her eyes when he struggled to sit and then when he hobbled to her bed.
“Taven... No, you’re...”
But there was still enough of the old Taven in there to do as he pleased. He reached for a half-empty cup of water and helped her drink some. Nothing had ever tasted so wonderful. He stopped when she couldn’t swallow anymore and started spitting it back up.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
When he didn’t return to his bed, an old anxiety formed. She was fourteen again and hadn’t yet learned how to balance his sensitive feelings with her own need to feel safe.
But then he placed his unsteady hands on her arm and wrapped his fingers around the flesh still warming and softening, and she understood she had nothing to fear. Not from him. Not anymore.
“I don’t need...”
“Let me do this, before I forget how. Before I forget you.” He closed his eyes with a slow smile.
“No, you never needed me, Ellie. I see that now. But you’ll recover so much faster if I do.
Don’t you want to...” He coughed into his arm.
It was another moment before he continued.
“Stretch your legs? Run and run, like you used to?”
Her eyes welled. “Will it hurt you?”
“You’ve never asked me that before,” he said. “I suppose I never asked you either.”
The kindest thing she could do for him was not to answer, so she closed her eyes and accepted his healing one last time.
She stirred and rolled onto her side. She’d fallen asleep. For how long, she didn’t know, but Taven was back in his own bed, watching her.
“Did it work? Does this old dog still have a trick in him?”
Elloven gasped in wonder as she sat all the way up on her first try.
She was still tired, and her arms and legs felt like jelly, like they’d been carrying heavy weights, but when she twisted, stretched, it felt so wonderfully right, like sliding back into her favorite trousers.
She knew without trying she could stand, too, and probably walk.
Perhaps not gracefully, but that had never been a word she’d used to describe herself.
“I’d say so.” She was back in her own body, and it was real, and she was alive, and it was all so much to process. “Are you...”
“Same as I was.”
Elloven dangled her legs over the bed and wiggled her toes. She would never again take anything so simple for granted.
She tested out her balance next, but there was something else she’d meant to do... and then she remembered.
Taven’s confession. She hadn’t given him a proper response, but she wanted to. Needed to.
“Taven... what you said before...”
“Doesn’t matter, Ellie.” His voice was heavy with emotion. “Doesn’t matter now.”
“No, it does matter. It matters to me.”
“Ellie—”
“I want you to know I have heard your words, and one day, I might actually find from them the peace you feel saying them. And if Jesstin did in fact open a door for the dead to move on, then better days await.” She smiled from her bed. “I do want that for you.”