She does not want to take credit for her daughter’s beauty.
Not when she looks so much like her father.
And the child stays as still as she can when her grandmother kisses her head. And the child feels her first bitter pang of guilt when she thinks about how she’d yelped and squirmed and shrieked at her mother that she would not go on walking any further. Because her grandmother is kind and her breath is warm where it falls heavy across her forehead. The child decides that she likes her, that she’s glad to have met her.
“She looks like her father, Thorn,” Prayer murmurs. And she tries not to think of the betrayal she’d seen in his eyes when he’d looked at her, when he’d asked why they’d come. But she cannot allow her grief to sully this moment, not when she is so relieved to see her mother. So content to press herself close and breathe her in. She has never been gladder, she thinks.
She listens, quite intently, while her daughter loiters at her hip. Dacre. She thinks of him and smiles, nodding quietly against Sabbath’s shoulder. And she can hear all that emotion in her mother’s voice, but chooses to mistake it for pride. Because she had awoken from some awful dream all full of panic, bleeding from two small holes in her neck, but had no reason to believe it real.
“I’m sorry, mother,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry I left.” She lifts her head then, summons a watery smile, presses her forehead flush against Sabbath’s. “I’m here now,” she says, gentle, “tell me their names. The new children. I can’t wait to meet them.”
@[Sabbath]