“You only just missed Dancer,” Sevro says.
“I thought it reeked of self-righteousness.” Victra goes to sip her juice and jumps in surprise. Baldur still stands at her side, smiling a bit too earnestly. “Oh, you’re still here. Begone, creature.” She kisses her fingers and then presses them to Baldur’s cheek, pushing him away. He goes, drifting on air back to my envious son.
Afterwards, as the children go off into the vineyard to play, we retire to the back grotto. My family, those by blood and by choice, surround me. For the first time in over a year, I feel peace settling into me. My wife puts her feet in my lap and instructs me to rub them.
“I think Pax is in love with you, Victra,” Mustang laughs as Daxo pours her a glass of wine. His hands dwarf the bottle. A taller man than I am, he has difficulty sitting in his chair and keeps accidentally kicking my shins under the table. Kieran and his wife, Dio, hold hands on a bench by the fire. When I was younger, I remember thinking how much she looked like Eo. But now, as time passes, the shadow of my wife’s face fades and I see only the woman who is the center of my brother’s being. She lurches forward suddenly, away from a shower of embers as Niobe dumps another log on the flames. Thraxa sits off in the corner, furtively lighting a burner.
“Well, Pax could have worse an idol than his godmother,” Victra says, eyeing her husband, who is picking his teeth with a splinter of wood he’s pried from the outdoor table. She pushes him with her foot. “That’s grotesque. Stop.”
“Sorry.”
“Yet you’re not stopping.”
“Bit of gristle, my love.” He turns like he’s throwing the splinter away, but keeps picking. “Got it,” he says gloomily. Instead of throwing the salvaged gristle to the side, he chews on it and swallows. “Beef.”
“Beef?” Mustang looks back at the table. “We had chicken and lamb.”
Sevro frowns. “Odd. Kieran, when did we last have beef?”
“At the Howler dinner, three days ago.” Noses wrinkle around the table.
Sevro chuckles to himself. “Then it was well aged.”
Daxo shakes his head and continues sketching angels for Diana, who sits on his lap admiring the man’s work. He’s no fool with a razor, but his true art is made with a stylus. Victra looks helplessly at Mustang over her juice, despairing of her husband. “Proof, my dear, that love is blind.”
“Mickey can fix that face if you’re tired of looking at it,” I say.
“Good luck. You’d have to pry the decadent sprite away from his laboratory,” Daxo says. The bald man considers Diana’s addition of a cruelly barbed trident to the angel he’s drawn. “Not to mention his admirers. He brought quite the menagerie to the Opera last September. It was a bit like a Hieronymus Bosch painting come alive. One of them was even an actress. Can you imagine?” he asks Mustang. “Your father would have chewed through his cheek to see lowColors sitting in the Elorian.”
“He’s not the only one,” Victra says. “Too much new money these days. Quicksilver’s friends.” She shivers.
“Well, money doesn’t buy culture, does it?” Daxo replies.
“Not at all, my goodman. Not at all.”
As the night deepens, the orange fingers of the slow sunset thread their way through the trees. I let go of the strain in my shoulders and sink deeper into my cup, listening to my friends chatter and joke while little blue bugs flicker and stab violent light into the late summer twilight. The trees rustle beyond the terrace; the shouts of children come from the grounds as they play night games. The blistering sand seas of Mercury seem so far away now. The stench of war so remote in my mind they are little more than shards of half-forgotten dreams.
This is how life should be.
This peace. This laughter.
But even now I feel it slipping through my fingers like that faraway sand. I sense the House Augustus Lionguards out in the darkness of the forest, watching the sky, the shadows, helping us stay inside the fantasy a moment longer. Mustang catches my eye and nods toward the door.
Forcing myself to part ways from my friends as the Telemanuses give a rousing, drunken rendition of their family’s song, “The Fox of Summerfall,” I follow several minutes after Mustang disappears into the main house. The manor halls here are older even than those of the Citadel of Light. History is the mortar of the place. Relics from older ages adorn walls, festoon shelves. Octavia called this place home as a child. Her essence lingers in the rafters and the attic and the gardens, as do those of her ancestors and child. It is where Lysander would have played long before his path crossed mine. I feel the imprint the Lunes have left on the home. At first I thought it strange living in the house of my greatest enemy, but in all humanity, who knew the burdens Mustang and I face as well as Octavia? In life, I loathed her. In death, I understand her.
The scent of my wife reaches me before the sight of her. Our room is warm and the door shudders shut behind me on a rusted metal latch. A bottle of wine is open on the table beside the fireplace, where eagles and crescent moons of House Lune are carved into the stone corbels. Mustang’s slippers lie discarded on the floor. The ring of her father and my House Mars ring rest on the table beside her datapad, which flashes away with new messages.
She’s spooled herself into a chair on our veranda like a bit of golden yarn, reading the dog-eared book of Shelley’s poetry Roque gave her years ago during their summer of opera and art in Agea, after the Institute. She doesn’t look up as I approach. I stand behind her, considering better of speaking, and slide a hand through her hair. I knead my thumbs into the muscles of her neck and back. Her proud shoulders relent against my fingers and she turns her book over in her lap. Sharing a life threads more than flesh and blood together. It weaves her memories in and around and through mine.
The more I know of her, the more I share of her, the more I love her in a way the boy I used to be never knew how to love. Eo was a flame, dancing against the wind. I tried to catch her. Tried to hold her. But she was never meant to be held.
My wife is not as fickle as a flame. She is an ocean. I knew from the first that I cannot own her, cannot tame her, but I am the only storm that moves her depths and stirs her tides. And that is more than enough.
I lower my lips to her neck and taste the alcohol and sandalwood of her perfume. I breathe slow and easy, feeling the lightness of love and the wordless unspooling of the sea of space that kept us apart. Impossible, it seems, that we were ever so distant. That there was ever a time where she existed and I was not with her. Everything that she is, every scent, taste, touch, makes me know I am home. She reaches up, dragging her slender fingers through my hair. “I missed you,” I say.