I look over at her as she hums softly while she bundles the fabric and ties the ends, holding everything inside. “She’s your mother. She wants to take care of you.”
Elore comes over and places the food in front of me, giving me a warm smile.
“And take care of you, it seems,” Slade says fondly.
“Thank you,” I tell her.
I reach for the bundle, but her hand comes out and grabs hold of mine, and she sits in the seat to my right. Her gaze hooks into mine, and the two of us just look at each other. I feel shy at first with the way she’s studying me so openly, but after a moment, I find myself calming. There are so many similarities I recognize between her face and Slade’s. Her grass-green gaze flicks over me, and I wonder what she sees. I wonder what shethinks.
She doesn’t say anything of course, but as she looks at me, I can almost hear a hundred words from her effusive eyes. It makes me wonder what these eyes looked like when she used her diviner power; what those secret scrawls held.
When her hand comes up to cup my cheek, I go still. Elore gives me the softest, kindest smile that I have ever seen. And despite her youthful face, it’s somotherly. Maternal. Like she somehow sees the little girl inside of me and she’s come to comfort her. It makes my eyes want to well up right here in her kitchen.
Her soft palm gently rubs my cheek, and then she drops her touch away and looks past me to her son. She nods at him, and he nods back to her like they’re communicating in their own silent language. Then he murmurs, “I know.”
I glance between them, and this time, my eyes do start to well up, because I think I just got approval from Slade’s mother. I didn’t even realize just how much I needed that until this moment.
When we leave, I walk out first so that Slade and Elore can say their goodbyes in private. After he comes out a few moments later, I reach down and grip his hand, and he grips mine right back.
Then, hand in hand, we walk to the rip in the world.
CHAPTER 43
AUREN
The rip seems to drawme forward just like before.
Light and dark congeals at the center, and a mimicry of stars glitter within its clouded depths. We stand before it, and even despite the cold of the cave, there is the faintest stream of warmth hinting from an unfelt breeze.
I walk closer to it, only stopping when Slade’s hand comes down to my arm. “It has a very strong draw,” I say.
“It’s Annwyn. The two of us will always feel that call to home. But no one has come through since we arrived here—which I think must mean that this is the only side that has an entry point anymore or that the magic is too unstable. It’s dangerous. Which is why I had to dissuade some of the people not to try to go back through it.”
“You said it nearly killed one person who tried to go back.”
He nods. “The rip was even more unstable then, but it could also have to do with them being Orean. I dissuaded anyone else from trying.”
“Why would they evenwantto go back?” I ask curiously. “I thought they hated it there?”
“They did, to a point. But they’d been in Annwyn for hundreds of years. It had become familiar to them. Adjusting to Orea was not easy, especially since knowing they could never leave this remote, difficult place. Knowing that all their loved ones would’ve long since passed. For some of them, loved ones were left behind with my father.”
With the guilt I hear in his voice, sadness gnaws at me like the brittle teeth on an infected creature, chewing a hole right in my chest.
“Why are we here?”
Instead of answering directly, he instead says, “We’d been here in Orea for several weeks when the rip started to fail.”
My eyes snap to him.
“The noise...it was like a thunderstorm churning up an angry sea, and the wind was right there with it. It woke everybody up. I could tell right away that the magic was collapsing.”
I immediately think of all the villagers, of the implications of what would happen if the ripdidfail.
“What did you do?”
“Shoved so much magic at it that I passed out,” he says with a dry chuckle.
“Great Divine.”
