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They left the relative warmth of the barn for the surrounding fields, where she was surprised to realize things were actually growing. A small selection of plants, the Song whispering something about hardy winter crops, and Numair walked through the tidy rows, magic slipping from him into the ground, bolstering it all.
We could help, the Song said.
It was such an unexpected offer that she stopped walking. You don’t even like him.
I like them.
She’d felt as much, the Song taking from this place the measure of peace she hadn’t quite managed to grasp for herself yet.
Ahead, Numair realized she’d stopped and turned back, eyebrow lifted in silent question.
She bit her lip. You won’t hurt him.
The Song rippled through her like a sigh. You wouldn’t let me if I tried.
She closed the distance to Numair. “I think I can help. If you want.”
“How?”
It came together in her mind with the quickness of a lightning flash. She knelt on the cold ground and he mimicked her. “Like with the hibiscus plant,” she said, “but reversed.”
Understanding swept across his face and he put his hand on the ground. She placed hers on top of it.
“What now?”
“Do what you were before, and I’ll do the rest.”
Magic trickled out of his fingertips, burrowing into the earth, and the Song joined it. She felt its power twine with his, amplifying the magic he’d been carefully allotting and dispersing. A trickle became a flood, seeping through the ground and spreading out.
As it stretched into the earth, she felt it all—every worm and bug that crawled in the soil, every root stretching down deep into the ground to anchor the plants above. She felt the pulse of the earth as if it were a beating heart comprised of dirt and rocks and plants and water. And in that moment, the Song having pushed Numair’s power to the boundaries of the fields, entwined with his and wrapped around everything she felt, she knew that if she wanted, she could squeeze that heart and crush it.
Carefully, she drew the Song back. It came willingly enough, for once, until there was no magic between her and Numair, only her hand covering his. She met his gaze and his lips parted.
The sound of a small, trampling animal came toward them. “Uncle Numair!” Tomlin tried to halt his forward momentum, failed, and crashed into Numair, who pulled his hand from hers to right the boy. “Lorna—I mean Mom—says the two of you need to stop mooning at each other and come inside for dinner.”
His message delivered, he took off at top speed across the field again. Numair laughed quietly. “I suppose we’ve been summoned. It’s best not to test her patience.”
They walked while Clare puzzled over the first thing the boy had said. “Lorna’s his mother?”
“She is now. His parents died last fall. She simultaneously complains about being too old to raise an eight-year-old while contradictorily saying it keeps her on her toes and makes life interesting.”
She frowned. “Then why does he call you his uncle? Shouldn’t he be calling you cousin?”
“Apparently, he’s always wanted an uncle. Using the logic of children, he determined that if Lorna could be his new mother despite not actually being his mother, there was nothing preventing me from filling the role of uncle. We decided he had a point.”
Dinner went by fairly easily, if only because the three children wreaked enough havoc to keep their respective parents from focusing too much attention on Clare. Which was a relief, even if after a bit Clare started to feel awkward when the two girls would repeat, like clockwork every few minutes, that they missed Daddy and wanted to go home. This inevitably made Nissa’s eyes water until Numair, after quietly asking if Clare was okay on her own for a bit, dragged them squealing into the common room to play some kind of children’s game.
Nissa watched him playing with them and then promptly burst into tears, at which point Lorna’s apparent irritation got the better of her. “If he makes you so miserable, why don’t you just leave him?”
“Don’t,” Nissa snapped. “Don’t start with that again. He is a good man and a good father.”
“If he’s so wonderful, then what are his wife and his children doing back in my house for the second time this month?”
“If you don’t want us here?—”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it.”
Clare, as unobtrusively as possible, slid her seat back and stood. For a moment she had no idea what to do with herself. Joining Numair in the common room was unthinkable. The children were there, and she did not want their undivided attention. They were not quite as frightening as they’d been when she’d first seen them, but they were still something she preferred to not directly engage with. Much like the argument unfolding between Nissa and Lorna, which had all the cadences of one repeated often and to the same end result.
