Fool's Assassin - Страница 51

I scooted closer to my mother’s feet. I looked up at her, pleading with her to rescue me.

“It’s an odd game,” she ventured, sensing my unease.

My father made an amused sound. “I suppose it is. I used to play it with Chade. He’d add more and more things to the tray, or he’d add something and take something away, and I had to say what was missing. He was training my eyes.” He gave a small sigh. Elbow on knee, he cupped his jaw in his hand. “I don’t know any real games. I didn’t have much chance to play with other children.” He looked at me and lifted a helpless hand. “I just wanted to …” He sighed away the rest of his words.

“It’s a good game,” my mother said decisively. She stood, and then surprised me by sitting down on the floor next to him. She drew me close to her side and put her arm around me. “Let’s play again,” she said, and I knew she sat by me to give me courage, because she wanted me to play with my father. And so I did. We took turns, my mother and I, as my father added more and more items from a leather bag behind him. At nine items, my mother threw up her hands. I played on, forgetting to fear him, my focus only on the tray.

There came a moment when my father said, not to me but my mother, “That’s all I have.”

I lifted my eyes and looked around. My parents seemed hazy, as if I saw them through a fog or at a great distance. “How many was that?” my mother asked.

“Twenty-seven,” my father said quietly.

“How many could you do, as a child?” my mother asked softly. There was trepidation in her voice.

My father took a breath. “Not twenty-seven,” he admitted. “Not on my first try.”

They looked at each other. Then they returned their focus to me. I blinked and felt myself sway slightly. “I think we are past her time to bed,” my mother announced in an odd voice. My father nodded mutely. Slowly he began to return his items to his bag. With a groan for her aching joints, my mother clambered to her feet. She led me away to my bed, and that night she sat beside me until I fell asleep.

On a day of wide blue skies studded with fat white clouds, with a soft wind blowing the scents of lavender and heather, my mother and I puttered in her garden together. The sun was past noon, the flowers breathing gentle fragrance all around us. We were both on our hands and knees. I was working with my little wooden trowel, carved by my father to fit my hand, loosening the earth around the oldest beds of lavender. My mother had her shears and was pruning the runaway sprawl of lavender plants. She would stop now and then to catch her breath and rub her shoulder and the side of her neck. “Oh, I am so tired of getting old,” she said once. But then she smiled at me and said, “Look at the fat bee on this blossom! I’ve cut the stem and he still won’t get off. Well, he can just ride along for a while.”

She had a large basket to save the trimmings in and this we dragged behind us as we crawled through the lavender bed. It was pleasant, sweet-smelling work, and I was happy. So was she. I know that. She spoke of the odd bits of ribbon she had in her sewing basket, and told me that she was going to show me how to make lavender bottles that would hold the fragrance and could be stored in my clothing chest and hers. “We need to cut the stems long, because we’ll fold the stems over the blossoms, and then we’ll lace the ribbons through the stems to hold it all together. They’ll be pretty, fragrant, and useful. Just like you.”

I laughed and she did, too. Then she halted in her work and took a deeper breath. She rocked back on her heels and smiled at me even as she complained, “I’ve such a stitch in my side,” rubbing her ribs and then moving her hand up to her shoulder. “And my left arm aches so. You would think it would be my right, for that’s the hand that’s doing all the work.” She took hold of the edge of the basket and pushed on it, intending to stand. But the basket overturned and she lost her balance and sprawled into the lavender, crushing the bushes under her. A sweet fragrance rose around her. She rolled herself over on her back, and frowned, small lines crinkling her brow. She reached with her right hand and lifted her left and looked at it in wonder. When she let go of it, it fell back to her side. “Well, this is so silly.” Her voice was mumbly and soft. She paused and took a deeper breath. With her right hand, she patted my leg. “I’m just going to catch my breath for a moment,” she murmured to me, the edges of her words gone rounded. She took a ragged breath and closed her eyes.

Then she died.

I crawled into the heather alongside her and touched her face. I leaned down and put my head on her chest. I heard the last beat of her heart. Then her breath sighed out and all went still inside her. Around us, the wind blew softly and her bees busied themselves in the blossoms. Her body was still warm and she still smelled like my mother. I put my arms around her and closed my eyes. I rested my head on her breast and wondered what would become of me now that the woman who had loved me so was gone.

The day was just cooling when my father came looking for us. He had been to the sheep fields, I knew, for he carried on his arm a big bouquet of the little white roses that grew along the path. He came to the wooden gate in the low stone wall that surrounded the garden, looked in at us, and knew. He knew she was dead before he opened the gate. Still he ran to us, as if he could run back to a time when it wasn’t already too late. He dropped to his knees by her body and set his hands to her. He breathed hard and flung his heart into her, searching her flesh for some sign of life. He dragged me with him, and I knew what he knew. She was irrevocably gone.

He gathered us both up to him, threw back his head, and howled. His jaws stretched wide, his face turned up to the sky, and the ridges of muscle in his neck stood out.

He made no sound. Yet the grief that poured through him and up to the sky soaked me and choked me. I drowned in his sorrow. I put my hands against his chest and tried to lever away from him, but could not. From impossibly far away, I felt my sister. She battered at him, demanding to know what was wrong. There were others, ones I had never met, shouting into his mind, offering to send soldiers, to lend strength, to do anything for him that could possibly be done. But he could not even verbalize his pain.

It’s my mother! my sister suddenly grasped. And, Leave him alone. Leave us alone! she commanded them all, and they receded like a tide.

But still his grief roared on, a storm that battered me with tempest winds that I could not escape. I squirmed wildly, knowing that I was fighting for my sanity and possibly my life. I do not think he even knew he held me trapped between his thundering heart and my mother’s cooling body. I wriggled out from under his arm and fell back to the earth and lay there, gasping like a fish out of water.

The slight distance I had gained from him was not enough. I was plunged into a maelstrom of memories. A kiss stolen on a stairway. The first time she had touched his hand and it was no accident. I saw my mother running down a beach of black sand and stone. I recognized the ocean that I had never seen. Her red skirts and blue scarves flapped in the wind and she was laughing over her shoulder as my father chased her. His heart had pounded with joy at the thought that he might catch her, might playfully hold her in his arms, for just a moment. They were children, I suddenly saw, children at play, only a handful of years older than I was now. They had never grown older, neither one of them, not really. All their lives she had remained that girl to him, that wondrous girl just a few years older than he was, but so worldly wise, so female to all that was so male in his life.

“Molly!” he cried out, the word suddenly breaking from him. But he had no breath to shout it; he gasped it out. He crumpled over her body, weeping. His voice came in a whisper. “I’m all alone. I’m all alone. Molly. You can’t be gone. I can’t be this alone.”

I didn’t speak to him. I did not remind him that he still had me, for that was not what he was talking about. He still had Nettle, too, and Chade and Dutiful and Thick. But I knew his heart then; could not help but know it as the feelings gushed out of him like blood from a killing wound. His grief mirrored mine exactly. There would never again be anyone like her. Never anyone who would love us so completely, with so little reason. I gave myself over to his grief. I sprawled on my back on the earth and watched the sky darken and the summer stars begin to appear in the deep-blue sky.

A kitchenmaid found us there, shrieked in horror, and then ran back to the house to fetch help. The servants came back with lanterns, half-afraid of the master in his wild grief. But they had no need to be cautious. All strength had gone out of him. He could not even rise from his knees, not even when they tugged her body from his arms to carry her back to the house.

It was only when they reached for me that he roused himself. “No,” he said, and in that moment he claimed me as his. “No. She is mine now. Cub, come here, to me. I will take you in.”

I set my teeth to his touch as he picked me up. I kept my body stiff and straight as I always did whenever he held me and looked away from his face. I could not bear him, could not bear his feelings. But the truth was on me and I had to speak it. I caught my breath and whispered by his ear the poem from my dream. “When the bee to the earth does fall, the butterfly comes back to change all.”