“She hated Crow’s Nest, she hated everything about it, every reminder of it and I… I just wanted her. At any price. And this one was small, since I hated the craft by then anyway.” She took a deep breath, trying to shake the hold of memories. “I enacted the barrier spell. Goddess, I’d have given her my blood if that would’ve brought her peace. It wasn’t enough. We became a tug-of-war where nobody won. And then she was dead and there was no more battlefield left to fight for. I’m sorry. I’m so damn sorry.”
Rhiannon, lips still on Pru’s skin, had no idea what, in particular, she was apologizing for. There was so much, and so much more to tell, the apologies getting all jumbled in one mass of guilt in Rhiannon’s mind. Pru reached for her hand gently and then enveloped her in an embrace that seemed to go on forever.
“Are you blaming yourself, Rhiannon? Is that why you are still denying the craft even though she’s gone?”
Rhiannon closed her eyes, the words trembling on the very tip of her tongue. She gulped them back. She couldn’t… She couldn’t…
“I have been carrying a box of her diaries with me for a year and have finally gotten enough courage to open them. Some are old and rather mangled by weather exposure, water, spilled alcohol, so it’s somewhat fitting that nobody but me would be able to read them.”
Rhiannon looked in the direction of her home office and thought of the big and small things she had never wanted to know about Margaux.
“Are you restoring them as punishment? Why read them at all?”
“Someone has to. After all the years and all the blame, all the misery, it feels like someone has to give voice to everything she carried.”
Pru’s scoff was salve on a wound.
“I have a feeling you’ve heard most of that anyway.”
Rhiannon smiled and chose silence. How to explain the depth of this guilt? The sheer helplessness to change something that seems to be entirely in your power, yet no matter what you do, nothing is working.
Prudence just kept looking at her, and Rhiannon sighed. Why did she even bring up the diaries? Margaux had taken enough from her.
“She had been miserable long before we met, Prudence. She had been married before Jerome, and that fell apart. Then she saw the old man as her ticket to some sort of stability and enough money to never worry about anything ever again, but that brought her nothing but more misery. And on the island, she never found her peace. I chose to skip the diaries of her Parisian years, since they were mostly about art and her first marriage, which didn’t have anything to do with me anyway. So I am halfway through her years on Dragons, and even here she was apparently being blackmailed and never left to just be.”
“Blackmailed?” There was a loud, incredulous note in Prudence’s voice.
“I don’t know if I can quite interpret it like that, but she was being pressured by someone. To what end, I don’t know.”
“It’s so like you, you know?”
“Like me?”
“To still feel pity. To still feel empathy for someone who essentially pushed you to lock away the part of yourself that made you who you are.”
Prudence’s voice was kind, tenderness permeating every word, and Rhiannon felt tears sting the backs of her eyes.
She lifted her face and kissed Pru, who sighed, understanding her gambit and yet giving her the grace she definitely didn’t deserve by kissing her back.
And Rhiannon’s heart, already battered and bruised, simply turned over, opened, and lay in the ruins of her guilt and her ache.
Why her? Why now? And why this late? When I am the empty husk of my former self, cursed and with blood on my hands?
Rhiannon straddled Pru’s lap and Pru undid the sash of her bathrobe, and then it was all slow caresses and tender kisses. To her throat, to her breasts, to her chest, everywhere Pru’s mouth could reach.
Rhiannon clutched that blonde head, her fingers in those silky waves, and let her tears to finally come.
As Pru’s fingers found her, pierced her, took her, undid her, Rhiannon buried herself in the moment, in this place, in this feeling of tender mouth and those strong hands and in the one who simply allowed her to surrender, to open, to give and give and give till she was empty.
“You’re still alive.”Ceridwen threw her a look over her shoulder and continued to pot something, her hands covered in dirt.
“You’re still a pain.” Rhiannon parried without much malice and sat close to her sister on the workbench.
It was a tossup who was more surprised by this visit, judging by the set of Ceridwen’s shoulders and the tentative way her fingers moved over a task she could do in her sleep.And Rhiannon even in her more honest moments couldn’t quite pinpoint why she was here. She owed nothing to no one.
Well, there was the first lie, and she tried to tell fewer of those—at least to herself—these days. She did owe Ceridwen this one thing.
“I came to say thank you. For the herbs and for making sure Prudence had food and her things.”
