Page 66 of Autumn Queens & Shadows

“You’re not him.” Thora Krigborn was nothing like her father. She could pass a dandelion without blowing it just in case someone needed that wish more than her. Her rage was also just as soft as the rest of her, but when need be, she sent it to war for the sake of those she loved. But that was it. How could anyone ever think she was her father’s daughter? Sometimes, it hurt to think how much violence it had taken this girl to be as soft as she was.

“You don’t know what I am.”

“You are not Silas Krigborn, and I need you to say that back to me.”

She shook her head. “You don’t know what I am capable of.”

“No one knows what you’re capable of. But I am someone—someone you trusted with a lot of knowledge.”

“A mistake,” she dismissively said, uncapping a bottle of wine and filling two cups. She pushed one before me. “Don’t you think? You only told me something of yours because you wanted something of mine. You never intended to tell me anything. It was purely a transaction which you realised a little too late just how to your disadvantage it was.”

“On the contrary,” I said, pushing the glass back to her. “I told you everything of mine because I wanted everything of yours.”

“You weren’t supposed to do that,” she said, resting her tired, lying eyes on the cup I’d put in front of her. “You weren’t supposed to get better without me.”

“I got better because of you.” Her eyes rose back to me then, still lying and all. “If I wanted to come back, I had to. There was never something wrong with you, Thora. To hurt is human. To hurt as intensely as you do is no fault of nature, only of man. I played a part in making you feel as if there truly was something wrong with you. When I found that day you in that forest, I suddenly felt tired of feeling insane alone, so I never told you that there was nothing wrong with you to begin with. I wanted to keep you, Thora. If I kept you, I would have ruined you like I ruined everything. I was so close to committing to it. But each time you begged me for help, it reminded me of myself. Except I didn’t beg for help, I begged for desolation. But when you are desperate enough to beg at all, help and ruination do not seem so far off one another. You wouldn’t have even noticed me slowly kill you from the inside out. It is what I did best. I was the master of it.”

She just looked at me. Utterly lost. Her heart was so loud and mad that I could hear it all the way across from her.

“It is just grape juice. I don’t really drink either,” she said, rubbing a hand down her arm and standing towards the bathroom.

It had really been just that.

I didn’t blame her for wanting to see, to test me. I didn’t blame her at all. The way I was before I left…I was not an easy person to trust. Somehow, she had trusted me then still.

My brother sat back on a sun chair facing the daisy gardens, watching the kids surround Snow who had laid on the grass, snoring away. Rain was weaving daisies in her hair and Sam had one of her hands in his, trying his best to massage it.

“How is married life treating you, little brother?” Kil asked, offering me a glass of his daughter’s famous lemonade which I was about to refuse when Rain turned to show me a big, hopeful grin.

I took a sip, trying not to wince, and gave her a thumbs up. “Could be worse.”

“Then you’re having a great time. Fantastic, even. As someone married to a Skygard sister, might I give you some advice? If she tells you to shut up, just do it,” he said, grinning in his wife’s direction.

“I don’t know if you’re really that happy or just love being miserable.”

“Are you kidding me?” he asked, chugging the rest of his bitter lemonade down, wincing and coughing hard at the taste. “She needs to get up, she wants me to help. She needs a bath, she wants me to bathe her. Her feet hurt, she wants me to massage them. She can’t reach for something, she wants me to do it for her. On top of that, she’s having my child. Best nine months of my life.”

“Then give her what she wants.” Strange how ten years ago, it had been him who’d wanted more children.

Slowly, he turned to me, took a sip from his lemonade, and said, “No.”

“That’s a good way to ruin what you two have.”

“That’s a fantastic way to lose the love of my life and the mother of my children.”

Snow laughed as Rain ran circles around her, singing some song in Calgnan while she clutched the odious cloth doll she loved.

“Where the hell did she get that thing?”

My brother hesitated a little, meaning that he was debating if the next words he’d say would somehow irritate me. “Driada had made it. When I cleaned out her room, I found that, some baby clothes, and a few sets of sheets with different patterns of flowers embroidered in it.”

We’d never talked about her after that night at her grave. Never stepped in her room again. Never mentioned her name again. She was dead, and that was it. There was nothing more to it. Only pain. I know my mother wouldn’t wish for her name to invoke pain in others, so I tried my best to not mention it. Not even to myself. “You cleaned out her room?”

“I found Sam there one day. He asked me about her, and I found out that day that I couldn't just let dust pile up on her memory. I either had to forget her, or remember the best of her.”

I took the lemonade from his hand and drank until the bitterness of it softened the burning at the pit of my stomach. “Back with the sappy shit?”

“Thora said that to me when she found me there the next day, staring at the white sheets covering her furniture, not knowing what to do.” He drank straight from the lemonade pitcher, coughing and sputtering. “I thought she’d resented me that day after she begged me to save her and I didn’t. She hadn’t, though.”