Guardians of the Light, please help them accept me, listen to me. If they can’t, if they won’t, Ephemera will end up more shattered than it is now.
The woman who looked back at her from the mirror had eyes filled with nerves instead of much-needed confidence. The woman in the mirror was tired of being an outsider who couldn’t count on her own kind to stand with her in the battle that was coming. Even though she still believed in her heart that she would have to face the Eater alone, it would be a relief to know her family didn’t have to shoulder the weight of being the only ones supporting her.
Which was why she had chosen these clothes for this meeting—as a reminder that her family did support her. Her mother had given her the blouse as a gift for her thirty-first birthday. Lee had purchased the fine green material, and Lynnea had made the skirt and jacket. Jeb, still a little uncertain of his place in the family beyond being Nadia’s new husband, had given her the bar pin, which had belonged to his mother. Yes, the outfit was lovely, but it was the love and acceptance it represented that she had donned with each piece of clothing, like a shield that would protect her heart from whatever was to come.
As she turned away from the mirror, she was drawn to the water-color that hung on the wall next to her bed. Titled Moonlight Lover, the view was of the break in the trees near Sebastian’s cottage, where a person could stand and see the moon shining over the lake. The dark-haired woman in the painting wore a gown that was as romantic as it was impractical, and looked as substantial as moonbeams. Standing behind her, with his arms wrapped protectively around her, was the lover. His face was shadowed, teasing the imagination to provide the details, but the body suggested a virile man in his prime.
There was something about the way he stood, with the woman leaning against his chest as they watched the moon and water, that made her think he was a man who had journeyed far and now held the treasure he had been searching for.
Sebastian, the romantic among them, had painted it for her. He had captured the yearning for romance that she thought she kept well hidden. But in the same way that the secrets of the heart couldn’t be hidden from a Landscaper, could romantic yearnings be hidden from an incubus?
It worried her sometimes when, in the dark of a lonely night, she conjured the image of a fantasy lover. When that shadowy lover began to feel almost real enough to touch, was she still alone in her fantasy or had an incubus joined her by reaching through the twilight of waking dreams? Or was something else trying to reach her through that yearning? Sometimes it almost felt as if she could extend her hand across countless landscapes, and touch—
Bang, bang, bang. “Glorianna?”
Muffling a shriek that would announce her abrupt return to the present—and give Lee the satisfaction of knowing he’d startled her—Glorianna pressed her hand against her chest to push her jumping heart back into place. There was nothing quite like a brother when it came to shattering a sensual fantasy. She hoped to return the favor someday.
Annoyed with herself for procrastinating and annoyed with him, since he wouldn’t have been banging on her bedroom door if they weren’t already late and that meant he knew she was procrastinating, she hurried across the room and opened the door.
All her annoyance disappeared, because all she could do was stare.
He was wearing his best black trousers and jacket, with a white shirt, a patterned green silk vest, and a black necktie. He’d worn those clothes for the weddings—Sebastian and Lynnea, and then, a week later, their mother and Jeb. Except for those two occasions, she couldn’t remember the last time he had dressed so well.
“My handsome brother,” she said, intending a light compliment. But seeing him standing there, polished up because he was as nervous about this meeting as she, was a sharp reminder that his life would have been so much easier if she hadn’t been his sister.
Or if he had refused to acknowledge her after she had been declared rogue.
So she couldn’t keep her voice light, couldn’t wave aside how much his loyalty had meant to her over the past sixteen years.
“Don’t get maudlin,” Lee said, grabbing her arm and pulling her out of the room.
“I am not getting maudlin,” she said, insulted because she was so close to feeling that way. “I was just trying to be pleasant.”
“Uh-huh.” He kept pulling her along, slowing down when they reached the stairs to give her a chance to lift her skirt so she wouldn’t trip and send both of them tumbling.
“Will you stop pulling at me?” Glorianna snapped when they reached the bottom of the stairs.
“No.” He pulled her out of the house and around to the side. “We’ll use my island to reach the rest of Sanctuary. It will take too long to use a boat. You spent so much time primping, we’re late as it is.” He gave her a calculating look. “Or did you get distracted by something else?”
Heat flooded her face, and Lee, being an odious sibling, laughed.
“Sebastian will be pleased that you like his gift,” he said.
“I wasn’t mooning over a painting,” she replied, clenching her teeth.
“Did I say mooning? I never said mooning.” He stopped at the edge of where his island rested over hers, visible since there was no reason to hide it.
Lee’s little island was anchored in Sanctuary. She had originally created it as a private place for herself, but it had resonated with Lee from the moment he’d set foot on it, and the connection was so strong that he could impose the island over any other landscape. Unseen unless he chose otherwise, the island provided safe ground if he found himself in a dangerous landscape.
“So,” he continued, “do you want to sit around with the other Landscapers indulging in sterile, suffocatingly polite talk or just ask Ephemera to conjure up a big mud wallow?”
“What?” She stared at him. “Did you knot that necktie too tight? I don’t think there’s any blood getting to your brain.”
“There’s a custom in one of the landscapes—not one of yours but one I visited with another Bridge a couple of years ago. When two people—usually women since men tend to deal with things in other ways—start hurling insults at each other, and the disturbance starts dragging other people in to take sides, the village leaders have the two women—people—escorted to a wallow at the edge of town that was created just for that purpose. The two…contestants, let’s call them…are assisted into the wallow—”
“Shoved, you mean.”
Lee shrugged. “And they go at it. Every insult is accompanied by a handful of mud that is slung at the other contestant.”
“Mudslinging in the literal sense.”
He nodded. “So they scream and rant and rave and sling mud at each other until they’re too tired to continue.”
“Must be humiliating, to say things meant to be kept private.”
“But they don’t keep it private. They’ve been saying the same things to people behind the other person’s back. This gets it all out in the open, and beyond showing everyone else how petty the argument truly is, it’s also highly entertaining.”
“Does it do any good?”
“Sometimes I think it really does clear things up between people who care about each other but stumbled somewhere along the way.”
Glorianna cocked her head. “Like siblings?”
Lee grinned. “From what I gathered, some of them start a ruckus just to go play in the mud.”
She laughed. “Too bad you didn’t know about this custom when we were younger.”
He laughed with her, then he turned serious. “You’re not like other Landscapers, Glorianna Belladonna. You never were. You’re a heart-walker as well as a Landscaper. Never forget that.”