“We?” I ask.
Val’s brow furrows. “Is there any way to make someone feel love?”
“Love for others is hard to force on anyone,” I start, even as ideas flow, tangling into knots, dissolving into smoke. There’s something there. A kernel at the center. Hugo chirps in my hands. “Right. Especially when someone’s been closed off to feeling anything for so long. It won’t be easy to break through. If we want to reach her, we have to start small. Something visceral.”
Everyone leans in.
“Romantic love,” I say. “It’s personal. Immediate. Easier to fake.”
Val flinches at my side.
Easier to fake. I curse silently.
It’s so easy to fake, I’ve even fooled myself.
No time for my own feelings now, I forge on. “I have an idea. Instead of our usual plays, we can put on a special performance for the queen at the Trade Light festival that shows love in all its messy, hopeful, ridiculous glory. And we bring the entire audience into it. She needs to be part of the play for this to work. We have to remind her what lovefeelslike.”
Val says nothing. But when I look her way, she’s sitting tall again, watching me. Not like I’m a fool, but like she sees something worth believing in.
In my head, the plans twist together.
Over the next two days, we finalize the script and begin rehearsing our roles for the most important performance of our lives. I gather plants and herbs, assembling all the ingredients we’ll need to make this play unforgettable.
Luck is on our side the day of the full moon when I find a patch of Valerian growing wild outside town, in the warm patch behind the smith’s forge. The twins help me carry armloads of the flowering plant back to the cottage, enough for a whole vat of dreaming tea. For this performance to work, the audience will have to join us in a dream-like state, with open minds and hearts.
In the middle of the cottage’s chaotic piles of costumes and props, I catch sight of Val kneeling beside Aili, carefully adjusting the little one’s sash. Aili says something that makes Val smile, soft and genuine, before she leans in to brush a kiss over the girl’s hair. The sight twists something in my chest.
I linger in the doorway longer than I mean to. When Val moves away, I go kneel beside Aili.
“It’s okay to be sad.”
“I’m not sad.” She frowns as if I’ve said something strange.
“Okay. It was only…when we were talking about the queen the other day, you said she’s not grumpy, just sad. Is that how you feel sometimes?”
She shrugs.
“Because it’s okay if you do. We’re all sad sometimes. Even me.”
“Really?”
“Mhmm.” I tuck teal strands of hair behind her ear, smiling when her pout softens. “I know the orphanage wasn't much, but I feel sad about losing it. I'm still sad about losing Frederik. And growing up, I sometimes felt sad that I never had a mother in my life. Is that how you feel?”
She thinks, then, “Maybe.”
For once, she lets me hug her. Her little arms even loop around my neck, hugging me back.
“I’m not as sad anymore, though,” Aili whispers.
It breaks my heart all over again, because I know it’s because of Val.Storms, I wish this wasn’t all an amazing dream I have to wake up from. Selfishly, for me, but also for the kids, I wish this didn’t have an expiration date looming. All our lives are better with Val in them. I’m better with her around, even if I could never be worthy of keeping her.
I hate living on borrowed time and knowing how upset we’ll all be after this is over. No matter how the hearing goes, I’ll be losing someone important and dear to me, and my life after her will be worse for it.
I can’t bear to bring Aili down with me just yet, so I stay kneeling on the floor beside her until she decides she’s done with hugging and leaves me there to stew. Except there’s no time for stewing.
I have to pick myself up and keep going. Always moving forward.
Before we can worry about the hearing, there’s the festival and the play, and before that, I have to focus on the full moon tonight. I can’t have my attention split.
