Before me stood a man and a boy unmasked, their grins truly as wide as their faces, one of the man’s hands clutching a lantern above him, the other resting on the boy’s shoulders. Beside them was Nissa, her face almost as happy, even though her eyes were puffy and tired.
“We don’t need masks anymore!” screamed the boy. “The men in the commune started wandering around the village, telling people they didn’t feel so sad anymore. That they didn’t feel rejected by their goddesses. They didn’t feel anything about their goddesses at all! They took off their masks, and no one vanished!”
“And the castle doesn’t shake when we look at it!” added Nissa.
Of course. The rules of the village. Gone by the lord’s remaining power.
The man lifted his hand from the boy’s shoulder and extended it outward. I thought for a moment that he intended to hug me, but then Jurij brushed past me, and I spun to see Father and Elfriede behind me as well. Jurij and the man embraced, and the man sprinkled the top of Jurij’s curls with his kisses while fingering the bandages on Jurij’s face. A bit of the sparkle faded from his eyes. The eyes in which no flames were burning.
“Luuk!” Jurij picked the boy up and embraced him before setting him back on the ground. He mussed Nissa’s hair. They were laughing, all four of them.
Elfriede pushed past me and hugged the man as well, kissing both of his cheeks. “Goodfather, it’s a pleasure to finally see you.”
My heart had been so distracted; I’d taken too long to see what was right before me. I smiled, and the feeling was foreign to me, something from a dream I had long, long ago.
I stepped backward, wondering if I was still dreaming, if I could fall back asleep and pick a different dream, or if this was the one I’d always wanted. Father and Master Tailor shook hands. Elfriede scooped up the children in her arms and kissed both Luuk and Nissa on the cheek.
Jurij’s eyes fluttered from one to the other, and at last they rested on me. Those eyes seemed to understand that I was the one responsible for what they’d seen.
Eyes without flames. Each man’s eyes had lost the flames that bound them.
And I felt a strange stirring in my heart over the next few days as I walked the village and saw, one by one, the masked boys and men encounter the laughing, smiling faces of their peers. To see the others so free inspired them to grab a hold of their masks, throw down their coverings, and smash them.
***
“My father and mother are separating,” said Jurij. We lay together among the violet lilies atop my favorite picnic hill.
We could just make out the cottage at the edge of the woods from where we were sitting. The door opened and Elfriede stepped outside, one hand clutching a bucket and the other tucking a strand of fallen curls into the kerchief she wore on her head. She looked no larger than a mouse from where we were seated. She stared up at us for a moment, and I wondered what she thought, seeing her hated sister sitting on the hill with her husband while she worked, knowing her man wasn’t there to take the task from her. I wondered if he was really her man anymore, even if he still was her husband. Then she walked away, disappearing around the back of the home with her bucket to collect water.
Jurij didn’t run to her. He barely looked at her. He didn’t even mention her name.
I ran my fingers over the smooth and silky petals of a bloom. There were no thorns to cut me. “I’m sorry.” For his parents, for his goddess—for everything.
Jurij shrugged. “I’m not. It’s not as if they hate each other. In fact, I think a different bond has formed between them, now that they’re not bound by a love neither truly wanted. And Mother will still help Father daily with the sewing.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Mistress Tailor not one for woodcarving?” I asked, now knowing full well where Mistress Tailor intended to live.
Jurij laughed. “No. Auntie may love her, but she’s not blind with her passion. She knows her craft would suffer if Mother encroached upon it. Auntie likes to put too many ‘wild and useless’ details into her carvings, after all.”
I was not shaken when Alvilda made her confession; she was a woman in love with another woman, and Mistress Tailor had loved her all of this time, too. Women had always had a choice to love, after all—since I gave them that freedom. Still, even if a part of her always dreamed of the day in which Mistress Tailor would be hers to love freely, surely Alvilda regretted the loss of her lonely life just a little. Mistress Tailor seemed to irritate her almost as much as she made her happy. I was sure Mistress Tailor would also find a hardheaded partner just as vexing as the eager-to-please one she left behind.
“What about the kids?” I tried to imagine Alvilda as a mother, and I wasn’t sure the role suited her. Still, she made a rather fun aunt, and I could see her discouraging the kids from working.
Jurij was oblivious to the mischievous slant of my inner thoughts. “They’ll live with both of them, spending their nights at one’s home and then the other’s as they wish.”