Mirren
“Did you hear what I said, Mirren?”
I startle, the manor dining room coming back into sharp focus. Calloway blinks at me with large, russet eyes, his lips curved in concern. I smile at him ruefully. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I said, if Denver is feeling up to it, we can prepare to leave tomorrow. Maybe the day after.”
I swallow roughly. I haven’t seen my father since we returned to Nadjaa, when he was carried up the manor stairs strung between Cal and Max. I only know he lives because of the tendril of my power that lingers inside him and the small bits of information offered by Cal, even though I’ve never asked.
It isn’t that I don’t care—I do. It’s just that so much of the ugliness inside me is tangled up in him. I know what happened wasn’t Denver’s fault, but the black hole that opened inside my chest in that dungeon has enmeshed itself with every ugly feeling I’ve ever felt. And he is at the root of so many.
But Denver isn’t the reason Shaw is gone. I am.
Shaw. Not Anrai. I refuse to think of Anrai, with his viciously loyal and longing heart, beholden to the Praeceptor. Refuse to think of the vulnerable and good parts of him being swallowed up by the Darkness. Thinking about him at all opens a gaping chasm within me, one that scrapes against my skin and tears at my lungs. It has been better not to think at all.
“Have you talked to Denver? About going with you to Similis?” Calloway asks, his voice careful. He speaks to me the way one would speak to an injured animal, and I can’t blame him. He was the first one I healed in that dungeon. After Shaw and Cullen disappeared, my magic came back to me in a flood that I wished only to drown in. But when it receded, Shaw’s words still lingered. I hauled myself across the floor and pressed my hands to Cal’s chest. I poured everything into my magic—my grief, my heartbreak, all the wretched pieces of my soul.
As he studies me now, his face a mixture of pity and sorrow, I wonder if I poured too much. If he can feel the depths that seethe inside me.
When he came to, I was half feral. All the tears I tried to cry when my magic was stifled poured over my cheeks and the only words that came were broken and uneven. He tried to comfort me, but I threw him off, focusing on the only thing my mind could hold onto—heal them, Mirren.
I healed Max next, pouring my anger and sorrow into my hands, watching as the magic stitched her insides back together until her abdomen was smooth and unmarred once more. Her demands for the story of Shaw’s fate bounced harmlessly off me, as if shouted from a great distance.
Then I knelt beside my father’s broken body. His injuries were much more extensive than Max and Calloway’s, but I put my hands on him anyway. I fed my power every terrible piece of my anguish. I no longer feared falling too far in the depths; in fact, I hoped for it. I gave every last bit of myself, unleashing every terrifying tendril until the world went dark.
When I woke, I was on Dahiitii’s back. That was a week ago.
“No,” I answer Cal tersely. I stare at the untouched plate in front of me. It’s piled with Rhonwen’s cooking, but food turns to ash in my mouth lately.
Shaw’s words still echo in my mind.Heal them, Mirren. Heal Easton.I still have more to do. My brother still waits for me on the other side of the continent and I have wasted enough time. Talking to my father is no longer a choice.
“I will,” I tell Cal.
He looks like he wants to say something more, but I turn away from him. A clear sign there is nothing else to say.
I shove away from the table and leave the dining room in silence. I climb the stairs on weak legs. I have lost too much weight in the past week. I will need to fix that if I’m ever going to make it back to Easton.
I pad down the well-worn hallway, ignoring the room where I held Shaw at knife point and then kissed him. Where I claimed him for mine before I knew what that could cost. Before I understood that if nothing is yours, you have nothing to lose.
I pass Shaw’s bedroom, where I’ve been whiling away the hours rifling through his library and wrapping myself in the blankets of his bed. I breathe his scent like a drug, half-mad, as I pour through story after story. At first, I wondered if anyone would come for his things, or scold me for being in there, but so far, no one has commented.
The door to Denver’s study looks the same as every other door in the manor, but it stops me in my tracks anyway. Shame showers me as my cowardice displays itself. I am not ready to face him. I don’t know that I ever will be. I thought I would feel victorious and fulfilled when I finally found my father; now, all I feel is numb.
I knock softly and Denver’s voice sounds from the other side of the door. I let myself in. The office is lushly appointed, all leather and deep wood and old books. But it is impersonal. No pictures hang on the walls, no artifacts on the shelf. Nothing that hints at the life he leads as the Chancellor of Nadjaa.
Denver looks up at me, his eyes the same green as mine behind a pair of wire rimmed glasses. His chestnut hair has all been shorn to one length and it sticks up from his scalp. On his face, angry red scars still gleam. His internal injuries were so great that I barely managed to knit them together before passing out. His external injuries have been left to heal on their own and he will never again be as handsome as the man in my memories.
“Mirren,” he says, his eyebrows jumping up in surprise. He stands at once, leaning on a cane and limping toward me. His arms stretch as if he will hug me, but then, thinking better of it, he stops and lingers awkwardly. “I…I’m so glad you came to see me. I really wished to speak with you but didn’t want to press.”
How Similian of him.
“I’m not here for me,” I tell him brusquely. I want nothing to do with his explanations of why he left Easton and I to the whims of the world. I don’t want to hear how he found a broken boy and then lost him once again. I swallow, willing my rising panic to recede. I fear that once I let it out, I will be lost in it.
Denver’s face sobers, the hope that lingered there extinguished as quickly as it started. “Of course,” he says, nodding, “I know you wouldn’t leave your brother and your mother without a good reason. Calloway tells me you weren’t Outcast.”
I stare at him, my reasons for coming to his study ebbing away as the impact of his words hit me. “My mother?” I ask dumbly, my voice sounding strange, even to me.
Denver nods fervently, rounding his desk once more and settling himself in the plush armchair behind it. His desk is tidy, but sparse. I wonder if it is the Similian in him that keeps him from owning much of anything.
