The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

10.1 — The First Dark Stain

Vaelira let the silence hold for a long moment after she finished, the balcony's ambient gold long since faded into the deeper gray-blue of full evening, none of the women gathered there quite ready to be the first to speak.

"That," she said finally, "was the first dark stain on his heart. Not the fury — the fury passed, the way fury always does, once it's spent whatever it needed to spend. It was the part after. Knowing he couldn't give her back an unwounded life. Knowing that no matter how completely he answered what had been done to her, some part of what she'd suffered would simply never be undone, only ended.

"He came back to us — to me, to the wider Between — quieter than he'd left. None of us knew why, for a long while. He's never been someone who opens a wound for an audience, even one that loves him. I only know this much of it in detail because—"

She stopped, and there was, for the first time all evening, something almost hesitant in her.

10.2 — How She Knows What Even Ilyrisse Doesn't

"The Garden of a Thousand Souls was my gift to him," she said. "Which means I have always had a way in, if I ever chose to use it. I rarely do — it feels, most days, like reading a private letter that was never meant for me. But some centuries ago, I went looking, out of the same idle curiosity that got me into most things worth knowing, and I found her there. Still in the warm half, still choosing, of her own will, never to leave it — the way some souls in that garden do, when the light is the only thing that's ever made the ache in them bearable.

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"She's the one who told me the rest. Not out of grievance, and not out of grief either, not anymore. She talks about him the way any proud mother talks about a son who visits when he can. Because he does visit her, you know — not often, not on any schedule, but he goes, when the ache in him gets loud enough to need answering, and sits with her, and lets her be exactly what she always wanted to be to him, without the lie standing between them anymore."

She looked around the balcony once, at each of them in turn — at Ilyrisse's stillness, at Flora's damp eyes, at Vesalia's careful, unreadable quiet, at Elowen's hand pressed flat over her own mouth, at Wren, who had not moved from the doorway the entire telling but whose arms had long since uncrossed.

"He has a mother in that garden," Vaelira said, quietly, "that none of you have ever met, and that even you" — she tipped her head back, meeting Ilyrisse's eyes upside-down from where she still lay curled in her lap — "never knew existed, until tonight."

Ilyrisse said nothing for a long moment. Her hand, resting at Vaelira's shoulder, tightened once, gently, before it stilled again.

"Thank you," she said finally, "for telling us."

"Don't thank me yet," Vaelira said, and something of her old, lazy humor crept back into her voice, softening the weight of everything that had come before it. "I still expect to be paid properly for it. Wine was only the deposit."

Somewhere behind them, the last of the evening's light finally gave out entirely over the endless gray horizon, and the six of them sat together a while longer in the dark, in the particular quiet that follows a story that has cost something to tell.

End of Chapter 14.