When she tries to think about them (and she often does), it is too much. It is overwhelming, to ponder what she’s done, what has been done to her. That somewhere in between every riverbank and hazel branch they created something, a kind of sickening romance – love, but more than that.
What they have consumes like a wildfire, leaves them blackened and burnt.
What they have is a virus, destroying them from the inside out until their bones rattle to dust.
What they have spawned silver girls and a boy who trespasses in time and space, creations who – like their parents – should not exist.
They are quantum physics – strange and unnerving and indescribable.
If she saw her every day for the rest of her life she would not forget this moment, a woman returned after being gone far too long.
If she saw her every day for the rest of her life she would go mad from the beauty of it, the way people’s lungs collapse and bend when they ascend from the depths too quickly, raptures of the deep.
If she saw her every day for the rest of her life she would still be on her knees at heaven’s gates begging for one more day, one more moment.
You’re hurting me.
The words jolt her from the reverie she’s in. She recoils as if burnt, thinking the lightning came back. But there is nothing. Her magic is not on her skin now, it remains in the marrow.
She wouldn’t hurt her.
Would she?
“I’m sorry,” she says. She is. She isn’t. She doesn’t know anymore.
“Perse is alive, Spyndle,” she says. She’d felt the link in the boy, his memories of speaking with their daughter, now grown (still the dead spit of Cordis, but scarless, save for a mark on her crest, a mark that turned her stomach).
“She saved herself.”
‘Like we couldn’t do,’ she does not add.
(Little does she know Perse loved every moment, loves Him, even.)
she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
Cordis
(and she learned a lesson back there in the flames)