“If, after your own Returning,” I said, my back still to the shivering figure, “you can find it in your heart to forgive me, you, the last of the men whose blood runs with his own power, will free all men bound by my curse.”
I clamped my mouth shut and marched forward. Through the door, past the torn and bloody piles of clothing, beyond the cheering women. I had played at leader, I had played at queen, and this is what my foolishness got me. I slipped away unnoticed into the secret cavern in the woods. I didn’t look once behind me. My last act was to leave Elgar in the hollow of a tree I passed, waiting for Jaron to find it many, many lifetimes later.
Even without Elgar to guide me, the pool acted as before, but in reverse, its terrible purpose fulfilled. If the blade wasn’t key to traveling, then I didn’t know what was. I didn’t know where the power came from, and it was just as much a mystery to me as the healing powers of the men. Had the suffering of women called me? Whatever the reason, I had answered pain with pain. I set in motion all of the misery that the men and women of my village suffered for generations. I had saved the women from torment, but the price was the free will of all men and the liar’s choice of women.
All of that time I’d spent hating the laws of the first goddess—hating the very idea of goddesses—when I had made them all.
So lost was I in my thoughts that it took me a moment to realize the glowing cavern was lit up in red, not violet. I didn’t test my theory, but I suspected it was a sign I was no longer welcome, that the past was forever closed to me. The beating orb at the bottom of the pool even seemed to cease, the silence seemingly pushing me away. So I left.
When I exited the woods, I expected to see the altered village on the horizon. I almost wanted to see it, to know that I couldn’t go home, to have no choice but to devote myself to shielding the boy with a heart from the brunt of the pain I had caused him. It was a choice I wanted, a choice I should have had. But my feet carried me back to where I would live among those who suffered for my foolish tongue.
I headed toward my childhood home, not sure if my feet should instead take me straight back to the commune. But I was eager to at least see their faces. I didn’t deserve comforting, and my heart hardened knowing that I would likely find little comfort awaiting me regardless. Little did they know, though, what real reason they had to hate me.
I halted a few steps from the front door. A chill brushed the back of my exposed neck and down throughout my soaked body.
The castle had returned.
My heart soared, my stomach hardened. But the ground didn’t shake. They had worked, the words forming my final command. I’d given him permission to dispose of my power.
I pulled on the door in front of me.
“Noll?”
Jurij spoke my name. He stood next to the fireplace, his hand in Elfriede’s, a stark scar across his cheek, his left eye wrapped in a bandage. Wounds from my kiss, as though the castle and the lord had never vanished.
Tears littered Elfriede’s cheeks, her eyes neither on Jurij nor me but on the bed in the corner. Arrow sat alert by her side.
There sat my father, his arms thrown tightly across my mother.
My heart stopped. Have I lost her a second—no, a third time?
But her eyes were wide open, her pale oak face almost glowing.
“Noll?” she croaked hoarsely. “Come here, darling!”
I obeyed freely.
Tears shed down my cheeks, and I felt the moisture with my fingertips like it was something entirely new. I’d forgotten the feeling. I hadn’t cried fully since the day before my seventeenth birthday.
We hugged and laughed and cried, my family and I, long into the evening that was already half-gone.
***
“From what Gideon and Elfriede tell me, there’s a strange gap in their memories that lasts about a month.” Mother tilted her head to face me. “All they can agree upon is that there was suddenly a monstrous shake of the earth. Everything that happened since the wedding is in dispute. No one can remember clearly.”
Including Elfriede’s last words to me that day, I wonder?
Father slept soundly in the bed beside Mother. A few paces away, Elfriede and Jurij slept in the bed I once shared with my sister, Arrow comfortably nestled at their feet. Elfriede’s breathing filled the air, as light and dainty as her speaking. The bed she shared with her husband, complete with a new headboard from Alvilda, no longer had room for me. There was no place for me in that house. But there I sat, at a chair pulled up next to the bed, my hand clutching Mother’s.
“A strange thing.” Mother picked up my hand and bounced it against her lap. “But there are stranger. Me sitting here, alive and well, for one. Aren’t you tired?” she asked, her voice a whisper.