Gone. Like she’d been on an extended holiday. “And how... did I get... here?”
“You don’t remember?”
Again, she shook her head. Her energy was slowly coming back, but it would be a while yet before she could carry on a conversation.
“Jesstin said he was going to bring you home, and the fool did exactly that.” Taven went quiet. “I’m afraid that’s all I know. They don’t tell me as much as they used to.”
“They?” She remembered the spiral, the fight. The rest was filtered through the shards of her hazy dream.
“Sesto and Daire took me in after my wife passed on. My son had already gone to live with his wife’s family in Curia Rosedown.” He turned a coughing fit into his pillow. Where he’d pressed his mouth were the faintest specks of blood. “Jesstin must be with Daire and Sesto.”
Wife? Son? He’d lived an entire life. “Jesstin... I don’t know where...” Elloven rubbed her hands across her face. It felt incredible, and she wanted to do it again but was so cursed tired. What she most wanted was some water.
“Do you remember Mythgarde?”
She nodded. Of course she remembered Mythgarde.
“In the Infinitum, you returned there. Or was it an old man’s dream?”
It had been real. Jesstin rebelling, conspiring with Taven to have her taken away so she couldn’t intervene. His parting words, mouthed but unmistakable: I love you. I will find you. “How?”
He launched into another bloody coughing fit. “Some mysteries are never solved.”
“Can the healers...” She breathed deep and groaned through her exhale. It felt good to empty her lungs, then fill them again, but the effort hadn’t come easy. “Do nothing?”
“I haven’t asked.” He seemed like he would smile but drew his mouth tight instead.
“Why not?”
“I’ve lived my life, Ellie. I’ve known love. Twice. I’ve been a father. A grandfather, though I only have a sketch of little Mona.” He nodded at a small, framed drawing of a young girl, perhaps five or six. “Gen, my son, says in his letters she’s got a spirit about her.”
Elloven wrapped a tremoring hand around her throat. “You named your son Gen?”
“He was a brother to me, even if he didn’t like me much.” Taven’s laugh was strained. “Didn’t like the way I looked at his sister. I shouldn’t have ever set my sights on you, Ellie. I should have let you run free and grow into a woman at your own pace. I chose the time and place for you, and that was wrong. I was wrong. Never would I ask for your forgiveness. I only needed you to know I see the wrongness of what I did to you, and I’d change the past if it were in my power. I’d never have forced my way into your bed, and had fate still swept you off to Whitechurch, I’d have killed that man myself the moment I learned what he was. I never would have listened to the voices and put all my faith in them. And I never... never would have tricked you into the bond. Of all the things I’ve done...” He reached for a rag lying on the side of his bed and dabbed his mouth. Only some blood made it onto the cloth, and what remained on his face was dried. “But history remembers what a man did, not what he wishes he’d done.”
She didn’t know what to say. Her feelings about his deathbed apology were far more convoluted than she could manage when she was still coming to life, still trying to reconcile the Taven in front of her being the same man she’d grown up with. His betrayals were still so fresh to her, but he’d had over thirty years to find peace.
But he was dying. If nothing else, that was real, and she had a choice.
“Wait. Let me...” Taven ignored the concern in her eyes when he struggled to sit and then when he hobbled to her bed.
“Taven... No, you’re...”
But there was still enough of the old Taven in there to do as he pleased. He reached for a half-empty cup of water and helped her drink some. Nothing had ever tasted so wonderful. He stopped when she couldn’t swallow anymore and started spitting it back up.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
When he didn’t return to his bed, an old anxiety formed. She was fourteen again and hadn’t yet learned how to balance his sensitive feelings with her own need to feel safe.
But then he placed his unsteady hands on her arm and wrapped his fingers around the flesh still warming and softening, and she understood she had nothing to fear. Not from him. Not anymore.
“I don’t need...”
“Let me do this, before I forget how. Before I forget you.” He closed his eyes with a slow smile. “No, you never needed me, Ellie. I see that now. But you’ll recover so much faster if I do. Don’t you want to...” He coughed into his arm. It was another moment before he continued. “Stretch your legs? Run and run, like you used to?”
Her eyes welled. “Will it hurt you?”
“You’ve never asked me that before,” he said. “I suppose I never asked you either.”
