Her mother’s fingers snapped into a fist.
“The callowell fell into the grass and I watched its wings twitch as its life drained away. It was like a clock winding down. And then it was gone. There was just emptiness. And the worst of it was, right then, I felt nothing. It made me mad so I killed it. With billions of voices all around me, what difference did it make that one of them was gone? I turned back to the castle and I felt all those people moving within its walls and I thought, what difference would it make if any of them were gone?”
“That’s when I ran away. I got as far away as I could and the voices quieted enough for me to think. I had heard about people like me, people so full of Affinity they were barely human. I decided it would never happen again. I’d never hurt anything again. I’d throw myself off Lanton Cliffs and be done with it. But I was running so fast and I was so afraid that I got lost in the forest and I found myself out near the border and that’s … that’s when I saw your father.”
Her mother’s chin tipped up, pointing into the sky. A faint glow washed over her.
“I’d been told that all that lay on the other side were ghosts and so at first I was afraid. But then he took a step across the border and I could feel him, all of him, rush into me at once. I took his hand and he brought me across and it all just fell away. The terror. The voices. I didn’t think I could be any happier, but then we had you, and I was.
One happiness piled on top of the other for years, until I thought they’d stretch all the way to the moon. But then one night, you and I went outside to chase fireflies and when we got back … there was Aamon.
Hopkins.”
Her face darkened.
“I said I wasn’t the princess anymore and that the Magisterium could rot for all I cared, but in the end … I couldn’t just run away. I thought I’d be able to fight it, that I could go and come back, but I had been away so long and then I found Mom and Dad and … I didn’t remember what it was like. Affinity. It’s like …”
“A flood,” Glenn said.
“Yes. You swim for a while, but sooner or later you get weak and go under.”
The two of them were quiet, sitting close, the world thrumming around them. A war raging beyond their reach.
“I wish …” Glenn began, searching for the words. “I wish you had told me. I wish you had done anything other than disappear.”
“I wish that too,” her mother said, almost too low to hear. Her eyes lightly fell closed and her head dipped forward.
Glenn took her arm. “Are you okay?”
“Just … tired.”
Glenn laid the back of her hand along her mother’s temple. Her skin was waxen and cold.
“Come on,” Glenn said. “Let’s get you inside.”
Glenn managed to get her standing, but it was only for a moment before all the strength went out of her and she stumbled forward into Glenn’s arms. Glenn clasped her hands tight around her mother’s back then lifted her up and eased her across the grass. When they got inside, Glenn laid her down onto the bed. She was asleep before Glenn could even get the blankets over her.
Even unconscious, her brow was furrowed and she tossed and
turned, mumbling to herself. A sheen of sweat shone in the candlelight.
Glenn imagined the last ten years and all those deaths turning inside her, never allowing her to rest.
“She doesn’t look the way I remember,” Kevin said.
Kevin was in the doorway behind Glenn. She didn’t have to turn.
She could feel him standing there. The way Cort remembers, she thought to say, but pulled it back. Glenn lifted the blanket up to cover her mother’s trembling shoulders.
“She doesn’t look the way I remember, either,” Glenn said.
The floor creaked as Kevin took a step closer. “I shouldn’t have lied to you,” he said. “That night at the inn, with Farrick … Opal didn’t tell me who the Magistra was. I didn’t know until Aamon told me.”
“Would it have mattered?”
“Yes,” Kevin said quietly. “Maybe that’s wrong, but it would have. Doesn’t it matter to you?”
Does it? Glenn wondered. Could the woman her mother had been for a few years make up for what she had become? For all the people she had hurt and killed? Glenn tried to hold the image of her mother from when she was a girl and the monstrous thing she had become in Glenn’s head at the same time, but the effort left her reeling.
Kevin followed as she left the house and went out into the yard.
Once they made it down the slate path, she could see the dark rush of the river going by. Glenn could feel its chill and the swarm of life moving in it. Glenn untied the laces on her boots and slipped them off so she could feel the damp grass and the earth below. In the distance the air shuddered with the booms and flares of fighting. Throughout the woods, terrified animals sprinted away, their small hearts pounding.
The nightshade was fading. Glenn clenched her hand into a fist and held the voices at bay.
“Is he still there?”
“Who?” Kevin asked.
“Cort.”
Kevin said nothing for a moment, his face clouding as he stared out into the dark.
“I’m still me,” he said. “But there are times when I remember parts of his life better than I remember my own.”
“You remember what he died for.”
“I do.”
Glenn didn’t take her eyes off the sweep of the dark water below.
“I want you to make me a promise,” she said. “If I lose myself, if I become what she did, you’ll stop me.”
“That’s not going to happen. Opal can help you.”
“Promise me,” Glenn insisted.
Kevin relented. “I promise,” he said. “Now come on. We should — ”
Glenn pulled Kevin into her arms and found his lips with hers.
One of his hands pressed against her lower back and drew her body close while the other rose up until his fingers were tangled in her hair.
Their breath passed hot and fast between them. They had been this close before, but now that the nightshade was nearly gone, there was no barrier between them at all. No thoughts, no fears, just tides of warmth radiating off of him and enveloping her. He flowed into her and she into him.
29
When they parted, there was only a sliver of space between them filled with the white steam of their breath. Glenn brushed her fingertips along the stubble on the side of his head.
“That night on the train platform,” Glenn said. “I guess I just wanted to have something that didn’t change. You know?”
Kevin leaned in so his forehead touched hers. “Yeah,” he said, his voice husky.
“But you never really did,” Glenn said. “Did you?”
Their eyes met.
“You were stalwart.”
Glenn kissed him again and then her arms fell from his shoulders as she took a step away.
“Glenn.” Kevin reached out to her, but Glenn faded backward and slipped up into the air. “What are you …”
“Take them and go,” she said as she rose into the trees. “I’ll buy what time I can. Just remember what you promised!”
“Glenn!” Kevin shouted. But it was too late. She was gone.
Kevin’s cries faded as Glenn climbed above the trees, lost in the whipping wind and the sounds of battle that seemed closer all the time.
The air was thick with smoke and the million jumbled impressions of the armies and their victims, a maze of feelings all competing for her attention. Glenn had never felt anything like it. Her head spun and she pushed herself higher to get away from it.
She swept the clouds aside and there were the stars, the glittering violence of their explosions turned beautiful and still with distance and time. Glenn traced their patterns, leaping from one to the other, seeing the constellations rise in the pathways. All of the confusion of the place below — the struggle between meaningless distinctions — seemed foreign up in the speckled black, inconsequential.