I looked around Isla to see Nascha waiting in the threshold of the study, brows raised and knowing smile on her lips as she watched our interaction.
Isla’s good humor faded immediately. As comfortable as she was growing around me, she still didn’t trust another single member of my family. Whenever we were alone, she was like before, teasing and chastising and touching. But when we were around others such as Paxon, Olympia, or grandmother, she grew cold, distant. Now, she pushed off the desk and stepped away from me, dropping my hands as she did. Her penetrating gaze remained firmly upon my grandmother as she offered alittle bow, customary for those from one House to the Matriarch of another.
“Nascha,” Isla spoke her name as though it tasted bad on her tongue.
I wondered, not for the first time, what ill words Raghnall had spoken of my grandmother over the years.
“Isla,” my grandmother intoned with indifference as she stepped into the room. “It’s good to see you’re settling in well here.”
Isla bristled at the implication as my grandmother cast a glance in my direction. My wife raised her chin higher even as her cheeks turned a shade lighter than her hair.
“That’s the point, isn’t it?” she barked, far more bold than she usually was. She was lacking her usual political elegance. Perhaps she really was worried about me.
“Isla,” I interjected, making my voice as soothing as I could to disrupt any altercation between these two women before it could occur. “I swear to return to our room for a nap within the hour but, right now, I need to speak with my grandmother. If you wouldn’t mind?”
“Of course,” Isla answered demurely, regaining her tact, though she spat the last word as if to prove a point, "husband."
Then she breezed past my grandmother and out into the hall, not even glancing once more in the Matriarch’s direction. Nascha watched her go, shaking her head.
“You’re going to have a difficult time reining that one in, hafid,” my grandmother said with a sigh once my wife was gone. “I do hope you know what you were doing, marrying her instead of the others, and forcing Raghnall’s hand to claim her as Heir. The consolidation of power is impressive, of course, it’s greater than anything Sanctuary has ever seen, but the risk–”
“How old are you?”
The words left my lips before I could consider how to phrase them, or if I should even ask them at all. It was rude, I knew. It was always rude to ask a woman her age, especially one as aware of it as Nascha, but we’d surpassed the time for vanity or politics. She wanted answers and now I knew why, but I couldn’t find them for her if she wouldn’t tell me what I needed to know to begin searching.
Nascha hesitated at the question, clearly caught off guard, but her recovery led with a growing smile on her ancient lips.
“You’ve figured it out,” she whispered.
“You’re one hundred and nine years old, grandmother.”
“I am. My mother was one hundred and seventeen when she died. I don’t know how much longer I have. That’s why we have to figure this out now. That’s why I gave you the journal.”
“There’s nothing in it.”
“There must be! Milo, don’t you see? Our family was blessed five hundred years ago by the gods, the true gods. They cursed Eximius with his madness but they gave his female line longevity in return. Something happened to him. Something he did, something he saw, and it’s in the journal. It has to be.”
I just shook my head and sighed.
“The House of Harlowe has books written by Eximius before he went mad,” I reminded her. “We have the journal written by him after. His whole life, every word he’s ever written, is in our possession and there isnothingabout what happened to him, grandmother, or why it did. There’s nothing about the gods, old or new, nothing about the long lives of his female line. Nothing. If there are answers, we aren’t going to get them from him.”
She didn’t believe me. I could see it in her now. The glow in her expression, the parted lips and wide eyes. She was a zealot. My own grandmother who’d lived her whole life fighting against a system that used religion as a method of oppression, that served gods who’d never truly cared for this city in thefirst place, was lost in a fervor of a new kind, one for the old gods. She was convinced already, sold on some theory of divine gifts of lengthened mortality and curses of madness. She was determined to find meaning in something no one ever claimed meant anything and she wasn’t going to take no for an answer. I saw that now and it broke my heart.
Nascha had always been the biggest champion of free thought, critical thinking, and careful investigation. She’d always been rational, intellectual. She’d always set her emotions aside to make the logical choice. Now, she was desperate. She sent Olympia out to spy on her enemies and me to sift through the rantings of a madman for some mention of ancient deities no one else believed in. If I didn’t know any better, I might start to believe she was losing her mind as well. Maybe the insanity was hereditary. Maybe that was the secret of Eximius.
“I have never asked you to blindly follow me, Milo,” Nascha said suddenly.
I looked back into her eyes to find that, in the time I'd realized what had become of her, she’d been noticing the same of me. For the first time, we were on opposite ends of an argument with no bridge between us, and we both knew it.
“Not once have I requested you find your faith and put it in me or the old gods,” she continued, tone firm. “I’ve respected your decision to remain agnostic, to doubt every mention of the divine or fate in favor of logic and chance. But I always thought now, when faced with the impossible happening before your very eyes, you might finally be willing to believe in something outside of your books.”
I frowned. I could hear the disappointment in her voice, the despair. Nascha had been waiting a long time to share this information with me. She’d allowed me to come upon it the way she knew I would have preferred, through study and investigation. And she was right. I was faced with the impossiblehappening before my eyes. The average life expectancy in Sanctuary was seventy four years old. Some lived to their nineties. Some died young.No onemade it past a hundred, and yet the women in my family had every single generation for the last five hundred years.
It was impossible and yet it was the truth.
“I don’t believe in the gods,” I said aloud, almost more to remind myself than to inform her.
“You don’t believe in the Geist,” Nascha corrected, taking a step closer. “And why would you? They’re the cruel beings who created this place and left us here, who force us to compete in brutal trials every year for some reason we can’t even fathom, who steal away our friends and family members when they’re barely old enough to start a life of their own. They’re evil and they’re not gods.”
