“Tend to your business, if you must,” she says. “But do not speak to Briar with such disrespect. She has tended to you every hour since you arrived dying in that hallway. You’ve always been prideful, Avery, but do not be cruel.”
“I’m not—I don’t have—”
But was it not my pride that spiraled this entire situation out of control? Kassandra returns to brushing her hair while Briarlooks at me with a fatigue that makes me wince. She points to the floor near me.
“I gathered them yesterday from your room,” she says.
My pair of tan slippers, worn and molded from years of use. I haven’t put them on in months, and the sight is odd, like finding a well-loved recipe I don’t remember cooking.
“Thank you,” I say, voice cracking, as I slip them on. She places a hand on my forearm, guiding me toward the servants’ exit. When we are out of my mistress’s earshot, I speak again. “I’m sorry for everything.”
“Kassandra has been at your bedside even more than I have. She has been relentless.”
“As she is with everything.”
Briar squeezes my hand. “Saving your life is not a balance you must repay, but if you can only think in those terms, I will remind you that you saved both her life and mine in different ways.”
My bitterness slides away. In its bedrock remains something unnamable until now.
Unworthiness.
“I will make it up to you,” I insist.
“You don’t need to.” Briar nods to her forearms with only three rings total. “Besides, I wouldn’t have hesitated to help. I care for you.”
I am a child again, confused. “Why?”
“Oh, Avery.” She touches my face, and I feel my mother’s cool palm against my cheek, a ghost of the past, a promise in the future. “Because you’re you. And I like that person very much.”
I am speechless.
“You are not alone in this,” she says, her tone final.
An echo of another voice.You are not alone, little moth,the bird had said.
But I’ve made mistakes. I keep making mistakes.
And yet they still wait for you.
I thought the bird meant my mother and Jeremee, but now Iam not so sure. Now I wonder if Kassandra and Briar had been waiting for me to wake.
Then a new thought blooms, a radiant, enveloping thought, and with it, the sweetest pain growing in my chest.
How wonderful it is—how lucky am I—to have family waiting for me on every plane, in every existence. How beautiful it is to be loved, then and now, and in the next. I will never bargain it for anything.
Chapter Forty
I shuffle through the bustling Illusionkitchens and steal a jar of jam from the end table, where a faerie is bottling an array of preserves. A loaf from the breadbasket by the door. Glancing up, I see the red-haired cook staring at me. The one who ratted out my mother years ago for five copper coins.
She grips her wooden spoon. As I stand in a worn robe over my nightdress, pockets bulging with stolen food, hair uncombed and face bruised, I know what she sees. Another night servant gone mad.
I raise my chin and stare down the cook, unblinking. “Hello.”
Her gaze flicks to the food in my hand, to my bulging pockets.
Do it,I think.Report me.
The cook takes a step back.
