Eric’s mansion is one corner of the Glen the rot still owns. Ellie pushes the door open and we step into a ruin. Dust lies thick over everything, the windows blown out, glass scattered across the floor in a glittering spray. Books lie face-down where they fell, a chair tipped on its side. The whole place has the stale stink of a room nobody’s loved in a long time.
“I take it my mother and my sisters didn’t come near this place,” I say.
Ellie goes quiet, and she shakes her head. Then she lifts her chin, and there’s something almost defiant in it. “For the record, my lord, I never cared for Eric either. He was a very selfish warlock.”
I laugh at that. “You’re not wrong. And you got stuck dealing with him more than me. That couldn’t have been easy.”
She folds her hands in front of her, careful. “I don’t mean to speak badly on your father.”
“He was never my father.” I cross to the middle of the study and crouch at the cold hearth. I picture flame. Flame answers, leaping up bright in the grate and throwing gold across the deadroom. I straighten and look around at all of it. Then I turn the rest of the magic loose.
The glass lifts off the floor and drifts back up into the empty frames, a slow upward snow of it. The wood knits itself whole, grain drawing back to grain, until the windows stand straight and new. Around me, the books float back onto their shelves and the chair settles upright. The last of the dust thins from the air until it’s gone.
I think about how stupid I was, all those years, hanging the wordfatheron the empty space this man left, and turning it away from the one who earned it. Jacob never once asked me to be anything but his. He showed up to every cold morning of my life and stayed. And the whole time, I was reaching past him toward a beautiful, rotten stranger. I’d decided blood meant something it doesn’t.
“My lord.” Ellie’s voice has gone hushed. “I mean—Aaron.” She clears her throat, and her eyes are tracking my hands. “Eric hasn’t set foot in the Glen since the night he left.”
“Oh, I know exactly where he is.” I glance back at her and let her see me smile.
“You don’t even cast.” She watches the last of the broken wood seal itself smooth. “This magic is stronger than King Amir’s, my lord. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I’m still learning to use it,” I tell her.
The study finishes itself around us, warm and whole. Firelight runs across the spines of a thousand books. Everything restored but the man it belonged to.
“Gather the people,” I say. “It’s time they met their king.”
“At the high tower, my lord?”
“If that’s where they gather, then yes.” I look up at the dark beams overhead. “But I’m not living in it.”
Ellie nods. She dips into a bow, and I frown at her for it. But she’s already out the door before I can fuss.
Once the room’s empty and quiet, I open my hand. The realm peels back across it and goes clear. I’m looking through it all the way across the dark between us to a cabin at Solaris Pride, to a narrow bed in a room she grew up in, to Mara. She’s curled in on herself on top of the blankets, knees pulled to her chest, her tail wrapped tight around her own legs, crying. She can’t see me, and she can’t hear me. I’m a ghost in her room and she doesn’t know it.
Her ears come up. She lifts her head off her arms, pushes up to sitting, and turns to look right at the patch of empty air where I’m standing a whole realm away.
“Aaron?”
I don’t say anything—I can’t. I just look at her, swollen-eyed and wrecked and the most beautiful thing in any world I’ve walked through. I try to hold the tears back, but they come anyway, running down my face in the empty study.
She wraps her arms back around her knees and sobs into them. Every sound of it goes straight into me and stays. When she lifts her face again, it’s steadier.
“I know why you did it,” she says. “Why you left me here. You didn’t want me to give up the things I love.”
I watch every word leave her mouth.
“But will those things ever mean more to me than you do? I doubt that, Aaron. I doubt that so much.” She wipes her face with the back of her wrist. “I know you can hear me. I don’t know how I know it, but I do. I love you.”
I sink down onto the sofa. My legs won’t hold me.
“I love you too,” I tell my open hand. “God, Mara. I love you too.”
Her hand drifts down to the curve of her belly and rests there.
“You never even gave our son a name,” she says.
I wipe my face and keep watching. I can’t make myself do anything else.
