“Nineteen.” Jesstin remembered his nameday had passed while he had been away. “No, twenty.”
“Ah, to be twenty again.” Emrys’s head fell back as he closed his eyes and breathed in the chill air. “I’d just met my wife. Finola. She was such a striking beauty. I was never worthy of her, but that was no secret.”
“Was?”
“Spent her promise two midwinters past.” Emrys’s mouth formed a tight line. “Lived long enough to get to know her only grandchild, thank the Guardians.” He kissed his hand and waved it at the sky. “Have you a wife and children, Gennady?”
Jesstin shook his head. He had always liked Finola. She’d been kind and with enough patience to fill a lake. She’d put up with Emrys’s indiscretions early in their marriage and helped him deal with the mental anguish he’d shouldered after learning about Mathias’s erasure of their memories. Jesstin hoped Emrys had been a better husband after that, but he’d never know.
“Not yet?”
Not ever, Jesstin thought, but he’d managed to go almost an hour without thinking of Elloven, and now she was right back to the front of his thoughts. “Time will tell.”
“A man needs a son to carry his name,” Emrys said. “Mine will need to soon enough. Three decades was plenty for me. Have you met him? Anduin?”
“No, sir,” Jesstin replied. Anduin had been young, perhaps five, when Jesstin had left for Rivenholde, and he probably wouldn’t have remembered Jesstin even without the Conductor’s interference.
“He’s a good lad. Takes after his mother. His older sister, Nara, she’s chosen a monastic life as a magus at the Sepulchre. She’s more like me.”
“In what way?”
“Immovable.” Emrys frowned at him. “You do look so familiar. It’s not just the hereditary resemblance. Are you certain we’ve never met?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“It’s only... There’s something about you that feels very, very...” Emrys wagged his head at his lap with a wince. “Anduin tells me my mind is going. Maybe so. Maybe so.”
Jesstin’s throat felt thick. To be sitting in the garden he’d played in as a boy, next to a brother he no longer knew, and pretending to be someone who didn’t exist was needless masochism, even for him.
He shot to his feet. “I should go, Steward. I have plans in the village.”
Emrys’s head was cocked, his eyes glossy. “You’ll tell Rhiain to come for supper soon, won’t you?”
“I... What?” He was so startled, his words emerged as a sharp whisper. “What did you say?”
“We started wrong, you and I, but you’re a good man, Asterin, and you’ve been good for my sister. Can’t ask for more than that, can you?” Emrys nodded to himself. “Perhaps I’ll come to you for supper. She shouldn’t be traveling with the baby coming along any day now.”
Jesstin’s eyes stung. “Um, I’ll tell her. Of course I will.”
“Good man.” Emrys leaned back and spread his arms along the back of the bench. “I think I’ll stay here a bit. It’s such a pleasant evening.”
Emrys was lost to the past, just as Jesstin was barred from it.
Both states were a prison, but Jesstin had the key to his, if he were brave enough to finally turn it.
He whispered his good-bye to his brother.
To all of them.
To everything he was and could have been.
Survive in the now or die in the then, those were his only choices, and neither was much of one.
Today is what you have. Today is all you have. The past doesn’t belong to you anymore. Tomorrow isn’t real, not yet. He couldn’t remember whose wisdom that had been.
Jesstin had spent so much of his life just trying to get by that he’d never given much thought to his future. Not until Elloven.
But that was over. His days as a Skylark were behind him. The past no longer belonged to him. He had to let it go.
