“I went looking for you. And then I fell down a hole and was nearly tossed off a wooden bridge and they took Xander ...” Despite not wanting to cry, I started to. Quietly. I didn’t want to wake the others.
She maneuvered herself so that she stood on her hind legs in my lap and put her front paws around my neck. Like she was hugging me.
That made me cry worse.
I felt the touch of her rough, slightly sticky tongue as she brushed it against my tears, like she was trying to clean my face.
“Thank you,” I said. I wiped my tears away and told myself to calm down. I couldn’t keep watch if my eyes were blurred.
She sat back down in my lap, looking up at me.
“Luna, did the goddess send you to me?”
Yes.
I thought of how I had acquired her—it had been because I’d helped that elderly woman during my marriage processional. Maybe that had been the goddess in disguise, giving me a test. One that I had passed.
“Are you a reward for me?”
No.
“Then why did the goddess give you to me?”
But she couldn’t answer that question. She jumped off my lap onto the ground. She turned in a circle and then lay down and curled up like a cat, resting her head on her tail.
I heard movement behind me and turned slightly to see Suri coming over.
“You should be asleep after what you’ve gone through today,” I said as she settled in next to me.
“I’m used to enduring a lot of pain,” she said. “I can’t sleep when Io’s upset like this. She’s so worried about her brother.”
When Suri said that, when I heard the tone of her voice, it was like the scroll coming to life in front of my eyes, all the lines connecting to each other so that I could finally see the full picture. And I felt like a complete fool for not having realized it earlier.
“You’re in love with her, aren’t you?” I asked carefully, not sure how she would react.
I saw the misery in her eyes. She nodded.
“Oh, Suri. I would hug you but I’m afraid you’d punch me.”
That made her smile slightly.
I sensed that she didn’t want to discuss this further. I floundered for a moment, trying to come up with something else to talk about and finally asked, “Are you going to stop talking to us? If you do, that’s fine. Talk, don’t talk, it doesn’t matter to us. You’re our sister, no matter what.”
She shrugged. “I haven’t started screaming yet.” I remembered in the goddess’s cave how Suri had said she didn’t speak because she was afraid she would start screaming and not be able to stop.
“What happened?”
“People who worship the goddess of discord are ... not good.”
“They hurt you,” I said.
“In so many different ways. It made me wary of most men. Which is why I loved the temple. It was the first place that I ever felt at home. The first place I ever felt loved. The first place I belonged.”
I wanted to ask her to give me the names of everyone who had harmed her so that I could hunt them down. They deserved to suffer.
But neither one of us should be dwelling on the past right now. It was something we could talk about further after Troas was saved. If Suri wanted to. So instead I said, “When you were performing magic, you were speaking.”
“Yes. It’s the only way it works.”
