Corabeth had only mentioned her mother once. When they were still unsure whether they would become predator and prey. And even then, she had mentioned her death, not who she had been in life. The memories of someone’s life were always more precious, more carefully shared.
“What was she like?” Rooke asked.
“She was stubborn,” Corabeth said, her smile filled with warmth. “Whatever they threw at her, she didn’t let it break her.”
The needle pierced the fabric. Pulled the thread through. Closed the hole a little more.
“They?” Rooke asked, “You mean the village?”
Corabeth nodded. “And she was fiercely protective of me. When she was around, no one dared to mock me. It was partly why she was in trouble so much. The night she died…” Here, Corabeth’s voice faltered.
Rooke hung on her every word, feeling as though he was watching the petals of a flower unfurl, revealing its tender insides. He suspected not many had been witness to this. He wanted, needed her to continue.
Corabeth swallowed hard several times before she continued. “She’d given me some coins to buy myself sweets. It had been so long since we could afford such a thing. We couldn’t afford it even then but… Anyway, some village boys took the coins from me. When she heard, she marched over, punched one of them straight on the nose and took my coins back. Of course, this got back to the Village Elder and the Marshal, the boy accused my mother of stealing and that’s why she was put in the pillory. Where she was forgotten.”
The needle pierced. Pulled the thread. Closed the hole.
Rooke tried to remember if his own family had ever loved him that much, if he had loved them back with as much fierceness.His father was certainly out of the question. Perhaps his own mother. If he could only remember…
Corabeth cleared her throat which was thick with emotion. “She liked people who were honest and resilient. Like her.”
The sewing stopped.
“Sometimes,” Corabeth said, but hesitated. She drew in a breath, lips slightly moving but not daring to make a sound. When she spoke again, her voice was barely above a whisper. “I think she would be ashamed of me.” When she looked up at Rooke, her eyes were round and bright, as though the confession had surprised herself.
Rooke blinked as he let her words sink in. “Why would you think that?” he asked.
Corabeth lowered her gaze to the shirt, inspecting the stitches she had already done. “I could not bear their mocking as well as she did. I did not fight back.”
“Not everyone needs to have teeth and claws, Corabeth,” Rooke said, finding a seat by the large table that occupied the center of the room. He wanted to be closer to her without being too overbearing.
Corabeth shot him a bitter smile. “No, some of us just take the hits and turn the other cheek if one side is beaten badly enough.”
But Rooke shook his head. “There’s a vine calledBoquila.It can change its leaves to match whatever tree it’s climbing, sometimes multiple trees at once. It doesn’t fight. It becomes whatever it needs to be.”
Corabeth looked at him, her brows furrowing for a moment. “Why?” she asked.
“It hides in plain sight. It does it to survive.”
She was quiet as she mulled it over in her mind, struggling to see things from this new angle. Perhaps she was considering which shape to take. Rooke suspected he would find them allequally lovely. The only thing he wished for was that she didn’t shape herself after him.
“Do you have books about this?” Corabeth asked after a while.
A barely perceivable smile tugged at Rooke’s lips. This, he could do. He could offer Corabeth a new perspective. Make her see that not everyone needed to fight. That it was okay to let others do the fighting.
“Yes, come,” he said, standing up. “Leave that. Let’s be honest, no one’s wearing that shirt.”
Corabeth huffed a laugh as she tossed the shirt aside and followed Rooke.
Fifteen
Corabeth
Corabeth had a few good days—the day in the garden when she laughed and the one in town when she saw strangers with no hate in their eyes. When Rooke spent the day telling her about vines that changed shape and animals that mimicked their surroundings. But then the heaviness returned.
In her dreams, she was groped by strange hands while a cacophony of laughter rose around her. She wanted to scream, but her mouth was filled with ashes, her eyes watering from the smoke. In the thick white fog, she could not see who touched her or who laughed. The only thing she saw was the frozen body of her mother in the pillory, her last breaths crystallized in the dark hair hanging in front of her face. It was then that Corabeth realized that her mother was the one laughing. She laughed so much, her frozen lips cracked, blood dripping down her chin.
She was awake. She knew she was awake because her eyes were open and they were wet with tears, and a line of sharp light came from the crack between the heavy curtains. She could trace it if she had the will to lift her hand. But she didn’t.
