Come to the greenhouse.
- Mother
My footsteps echo as I cross the courtyard. The greenhouse is a silhouette of dark glass and iron ribs, glimmering faintly with trapped moonlight. The door is cracked open.
Warmth hits me instantly as I slip inside, thick, humid, fragrant with overgrown moss and night-blooming flowers. The glow-lamps are dimmed, leaving the vast space lit only by patches of moon leaking through fogged glass panels.
She sits on a stone bench near the centre, illuminated like an apparition.
Mother.
Not biological to any of us, but in every way that matters.
Gore was already fifteen when Helena was brought into our lives. I, five, Bram, four, Tolly was two, she was far too young to be Gore’s mother, only twenty-five herself, she was introduced to us only as Mother, and though we’d had nannies and caretakers since birth, none of us really knew what that meant.
Helena taught us.
She gave us the strength we needed to be brothers not enemies. To have softness, no matter how deep down we hid it. She taught us how to be men.
Her posture is rigid, her hands folded tightly in her lap. Her long wavy dark brown hair, now threaded with a few silver strands, is pulled around her face, curtaining her from the world. When she looks up at me, I see it, the confusion, the fear.
“Mother,” I greet quietly, stepping forward. “You shouldn’t be out here alone.”
A brittle smile touches her ruby lips. “You sound like your father.”
I stiffen. “I am nothing like him.”
“Good,” she whispers.
She motions for me to sit beside her, my feet taking me to do just that. She reaches for my hand, her grip cold, colder than the glass around us, than the stone beneath our feet.
“You left your Pair alone to come here.” It isn’t a question.
I nod once. “She’s sleeping. She needs rest.”
“And you…” My mother studies me with a stare that feels older than she is. “You’re worried.”
“Of course I am,” I say, sharper than I intend. “She’s pregnant. And this place-” My jaw clenches. “If anything happened-”
“I know,” she says softly, squeezing my fingers. “Why do you come?”
Her deep brown eyes, usually gentle, hold an odd shine, haunted, broken, hopeful. And they look so much like my Nellie’s that I feel my breath get stuck in my chest.
“Billy?”
I clear my throat, shaking my head, my brain working on overdrive, I swallow. “I think I might’ve found something.”
Mother never summons me.
Not openly.
Not secretly.
Not at all.
Not since the day my father locked her behind polite walls and declared that her purpose was to remain ‘protected’. A word that meant nothing except hidden. And he hid her so well that some of the newer acolytes don’t even know she exists.
A ghost woman in a golden cage.
