“That one isn’t in my book,” Josiah says.
“I know, honey.” Her smile spreads wide. “It’s going on your gravestone.”
He turns to me and my mother, smooth as ever, like there isn’t a blade at his back at all. “I really must be going. I had a wonderful time tonight, Aaron. Make sure you have your fun with Eric. It’s what I’d do.” Then he’s gone, a blur off the edge of the lawn, and Layla goes right after him into the dark.
My mother sets her hands on her hips and looks out at the empty place where they were. “Good ol’ Jo. Can’t live with him, can’t live without him.”
She turns her smirk down on Eric where he lies in the grass, gray and gasping. “And what are we going to do with you?”
“Nothing.” I get to my feet. “I know exactly where to put him for now.”
I open a portal in the ground right under him, a black drop with no bottom I can see. Eric barely gets a hand into the grass before he goes through it. I close it over him and seal it shut. My mother lunges a step too late.
“Aaron—what are you doing? We could have used him to find Henry.”
I look at her like she’s lost her mind. Eric isn’t something to be passed around and traded off to find Henry. He’s the man who looked at his own son and decided I wasn’t worth wanting. Whatever happens to him from here is mine to decide and no one else’s—not Amir’s, not hers, not the whole grieving Glen’s—when I’m good and ready and not a moment before. She reads it off my face and doesn’t push it.
“Fine.” She drops her hands off her hips. “If Jo found him in under an hour, I’ll tell you right now, a little faith in that man and finding Henry won’t be any trouble at all.”
That’s the thing that does it. Not Eric, not Hella, not the power sitting heavy in me now, but my mother standing in the dark telling me it’ll be alright. I pull her into me before I can think better of it. She stiffens in surprise, and then it all just comes up out of me at once, and I start to cry.
She wraps both arms around me and holds on. “Shhh. It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.”
It all pours out of me, every year I’ve carried since I was a boy who knew his own father didn’t want him. My mother holds me through it and doesn’t tell me to stop. She just lets me.
I finally let him go.
41
Aaron
A Month Later
Mara’s been on the other side of the dressmaker’s door a long while now, and I can’t make myself look at anything but the spot where she’ll come back through. I stand at the bottom of the steps with my hands in my pockets and let the village move around me, the smell of fresh bread rolling out of the bakery, a cart grinding past, two pups tearing through the crowd with no regard for anybody’s knees. None of it touches me.
And still the Glen reaches me, out past the rooftops and the strung lanterns, at the edge of everything. Its little cottage marks the way in. I don’t have to look at it for the pull to start up, patient, like the realm knows I’ll come back.
I haven’t set foot in it in a month, not since the night I tore the magic out of it, and I’ve been telling myself that’s a kind of peace. My mother and my three sisters know better. Every week the four of them step back through, helping Ellie and her people learn to stand in a realm that doesn’t run on borrowed dark anymore. And every week they come back with the same thing they won’t say to my face.
Tiana wouldn’t quite look at me when she told me the Glen keeps asking for me. My mother said it plainer: the realm wants its leader, and I know good and well who that is. I can’t pretend I don’t. That’s the whole problem. The day I walk back in there I’m not walking back out, because nothing’s changed since the night I left. They don’t want a man who visits. They want a king, and that king is me.
Through the dressmaker’s window, I find her. She’s up on the little riser in something deep gold, turning a slow circle that sets the skirt swinging around her ankles. Martya claps for her. Even Cyra’s mouth is doing the thing that, on her, passes for a smile. Then Mara catches her reflection and her tail gives one happy lash behind her. I could watch her do that all day.
Everything else can wait.
Even Mara’s been after me about the Glen. Gentle, never harder than she thinks I can carry, but she wants me to go back, and she’s not wrong. I just can’t make myself care yet. Not after everything that realm already took from me.
And there’s still Eric. The thought pulls a grin out of me, mean and satisfied. He’s right where I’m keeping him, alive, miserable, forgotten by everyone, the same way he forgot his own children the day he threw us away. I can’t sit on him forever. Sooner or later I’ll drop him back into the Glen to answer for it, and I’m in no hurry to make it painless.
“There he is.”
I don’t have to turn to know it’s Torin. I’d know that voice anywhere. Then I see the second man trailing a step behind him. Tobias. And I have to work to keep my face civil. Torin reaches me and brings his fist up to his chest. I tap mine against it. It’s the one easy thing in this whole night.
“Hey, man,” I say, and it comes out flat. Torin hears it. He doesn’t miss much.
“Hey.” He looks me over once, and he doesn’t like what he sees. “Haven’t seen you in a damn month, Aaron. You’ve been near enough off the map. What gives?”
I don’t answer. I don’t trust my voice with any of it. I look at Tobias instead, and he meets it before he drops his head, every bit of his old arrogance gone.
