“It is. But…” She sighed, looking up at the sky for a moment, and then at the Mist, tame and quiet, shimmering over the nearby treetops.
“Mother comes and goes often,” she said, “now that she doesn’t have to stay hidden at Wardwell. When she isn’t helping Alastrina and Caiathos search for Jaetris and Zelphenia, she helps at the hospital, and she’s tremendous at it. And Father’s quite involved with the rebuilding efforts in the heartlands. They’re both doing good things, and it’s not as though they’reconstantlythere.”
She took a deep breath, let it out slowly. From inside the aviary came a quiet flutter of wings and the soft trill of a dove.
“It’s just that I don’t think I can stay there forever,” Gemma said quietly. “Maybe if they weren’t ever there, or if they were dead, or…not that Iwantthem to be dead. I certainly don’t. I love them,” she added, then looked at me earnestly. “I do love them.”
“I know you do. But…” I hesitated. It seemed like an awful thing to say, and yet I needed her to hear it, and I needed to say it. I’d beenturning over the feeling of this thing for days, ever since talking with Farrin. “After everything that happened, it would be all right if you didn’t.”
“That’s just it. Everything that happened.” Gemma dabbed her eyes with her gloved fingers. “I love that house so dearly it hurts me sometimes. I stand there and look around at it and see memories everywhere—the good ones and the bad. And lately it seems to me that there’s more bad than good. And the best ones…” She gave me a watery smile. “They all involve you and Farrin. And neither of you are there, so why should I be?”
She sniffled, looked up into the trees, and blinked hard. “And if I have to see Mother and Father waltzing around the house all gooey-eyed one more time, I’ll scream. How can you be happy that two people have found each other again and at the same time almost hate them for it? How can you love a person so much it makes you cry and also wish you’d never have to see them ever again?” She looked at me hopelessly. “Does that make any sort of sense?”
“It does,” I replied, “though it being sensical doesn’t make it feel any better.”
“Do you love them?”
“I do,” I said truthfully, “but if I had to live with them, I’m not sure how much longer I would.”
She laughed and hugged me, her pinned-up curls smelling like honeysuckle and meadow grass, even in the dead of winter. When she pulled back from me, she was no longer crying. We continued toward the aviary, arm in arm.
“Where will you go?” I asked her. “You and Talan, if you won’t stay at Ivyhill.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. Maybe we won’tstayanywhere. We’ve become rather adept at traveling together. And anyway, it doesn’t matter where we go. Home is wherever we are, together.” Then shegasped, her eyes shining, and released me to duck into the aviary. “Oh, hello, you beauty!”
She held out her hand to a snowy owl—the familiar of one of our newest recruits—who after a moment started gently nibbling her fingers. I watched them, still reeling from her words. She had said them so simply, and yet to me they seemed extraordinary.
Gareth had told me something very like that as he’d held me on the shore of the lake.
Then we’ll build a new home together.
We’ll fill it with happiness.
At the time, I’d been so delirious with pain and sadness that the words had seemed lovely but distant, like a star to wish upon.
Now though, with Gemma’s declaration hanging triumphantly in the air, Gareth’s words took on a new shape in my mind.
I looked back at the priory, its red-brick walls towering over the snow. Could such a place truly ever be a home? I had lived there for years, slept and eaten and loved and mourned there, but ahome?
I listened to the distant chatter of my Roses. If I closed my eyes and let my focus drift without direction, I could almost imagine that this was not a base of operations for soldiers but merely a house—rambling and drafty and old, with strong walls and snug nooks and centuries of stories inside it.
Hushed and dour, Gemma had called it—but it wasn’t anymore.
Our home.
I opened my eyes, my nose tingling. I sniffed hard and wiped a hand across my face.
At my elbow, a white-gold light flickered gently. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Ankaret.” I found her sitting on a bench near the aviary wall, gazing up adoringly at the perches full of birds above her. She was small, sparrow-sized, and nearly translucent, and it had taken days for even an ember of her to reappear after what she’d done for me at thelake, but she had kept her promise; she had come back to us. “I thought you were in Fairhaven with Farrin.”
“She was, and she will be again. But she fears she no longer has the stomach for governing.” Ankaret sighed, making a face. “Ino longer have the stomach for it. It is difficult to speak properly when she—Iam this new. She will get better at it.” Then she glanced up at me. “You will too.”
“Better at what?”
“Becomingyournew self.”
The thought made me suddenly weary. I leaned against the wall and asked a question I’d been too terrified to voice to anyone. “Do you think we’ll ever manage to free all the Roses? Is such a thing even possible without ruining everything?” I thought of the Warden’s face, my throat clenching up. “Without death?”
