That hurts to hear, but I don’t let it dissuade me. “But how can you stand not knowing? Don’t you think it’s at least worth looking into?”
“I don’t want to lose two children.”
That shuts me up. I stare at my mother, reeling, trying to figure out what to say next. But to my surprise, she goes on, slightly softer.
“We’re not meant to love people from other worlds,” she says in a low voice, the last word trailing off in a whisper. Like she’s trying to be gentle but doesn’t quite remember how. “We can’t save them. We can’t follow them. It’s better to just keep our heads down.”
How can she say that? I stare at her, stunned into silence. Coming to Sterling Correctional, the long boring drive, the invasive search—as depressing as it all is, I felt hope on the way here that I hadn’t felt in years. Hope that my mother was finally going to come alive, and we’d save my brother together. But now I feel that hope slowly being snuffed out inside me. “Are you saying I was—I am—wrong to love Nate because he’s a Solarian and I’m a human? He’s my brother.”
“No—just …”
Mom shifts in her seat, and I register a flicker of twisted satisfaction that I’m making her uncomfortable. For ten years she lied to me about what had happened to Nate, sat here in safe silence while I tore myself apart with grief and guilt.
“I’m not saying—” Mom seems flustered, a bit of color rising to her sun-starved cheeks. She shakes her head, her ragged braid swinging from side to side. “It’s because of love that the traders found us.”
I blink. “What do you mean?”
Mom bites her lip and turns her face away. But there’s just a blank wall there, nowhere else for her to look except at me. And in a sick moment, I’m grateful for it. I want her to be forced to meet my eyes. I want to understand.
“Tell me,” I insist, leaning forward about as close as I can to the plexiglass without pressing my nose against it. “Please, Mom. I promise I won’t do anything stupid, I just want to know.”
For a long moment she doesn’t say anything, and I brace myself to sit here for twenty minutes of painful, loaded silence. But finally, when I’ve just about given up on hearing more, she lets out a heavy breath and speaks.
“I fell in love with a man of the Realms,” she says, so quietly the mic barely picks her up. “I fell in love, and everything fell apart.”
My heart is racing, even as I sit as still as a statue. Inside, I’m rifling through my memories for any mystery man in our childhood, but I can’t picture a face, just a tall shadowy figure that might well be a manufacture of my imagination.
“Did he betray you?” I whisper.
She nods. “He would have never had knowledge of us or Nahteran if I had been wiser. But I trusted him. I was a fool.”
“What was his name? The man you loved?” I ask.
The question falls from my lips breathlessly, thoughtlessly, like a little kid eager to hear the ending of a bedtime story. For a moment, I don’t care that the name might be the key to cracking the soul trade, to finding Nate. I just want to know this one thing about my mom, who has always been so mysterious to me. I want to know the name of the man she loved.
She waves her hand dismissively. “It’s not important.”
“Please,” I whisper. My hand is against the glass, and I don’t remember putting it there. “Mom …” I don’t know what makes me say it, but I hear myself say, “I’m in love with someone from the Realms too.”
Her eyes narrow a little at that. “I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that it’ll never work.”
“Then tell me why not,” I challenge. “Tell me what happened with you and …”
After a stretching moment, my mother sighs. “Magpie,” she says. “That wasn’t his name, but that’s what I called him, what everyone called him.” She closes her eyes for a long moment, and when she opens them again, they’re burning. “His name, though, was Cadius.”
6
Once I’m back at Havenfall, I dream about birds. I don’t usually get nightmares here, with the mountains surrounding us like massive, steady sentinels. But tonight I dream about birds filling the sky, birds diving and falling and screaming, birds with broken wings and accusing eyes. I dream of moonlight flashing, glittering, just like the key under the windowsill on my nightstand. It was the last thing I saw before I went to sleep. The key to my mom’s long-untouched suite, borrowed from Willow, since I knew Marcus wouldn’t give it to me.
The third time I wake, I sit bolt upright in bed, drenched in sweat. It finally sinks in that I’m not going back to sleep after the clamor of the dream-birds. Using the light of my cell phone to supplement the moonlight, I pull on the sweats that are closest at hand and pad out into the hallway, closing and locking my bedroom door quietly behind me.
Mom’s old room is on the first floor, near Graylin and Marcus’s suite. As I creep down the hall, I’m nervous about getting caught by my uncle, but everything is still and quiet. Not even a cleaning crew is about. Everything in the inn is silent, so much so that I can hear the rustle of the wind through the pines outside. It makes the scrape of the key in the lock to Mom’s suite extra loud. The mechanism sticks, resists, and for a moment I think I’m not going to be able to get in. But then the tumblers give way, and the door swings open.
The hinges have been kept oiled, even after all this time, but it’s clear as soon as the door closes behind me that the cleaners haven’t been inside. The curtains are drawn, leaving the room in near-total dark. I use my phone light to pick my way across the room—the phone screen illuminating only a few feet of floor at a time—and pull back the curtains, releasing the moonlight as well as a cloud of dust. Pressing my sleeve over my mouth, I turn around to look at the room for the first time in a decade.
It’s just as I remember it. Well, almost. Marcus seemingly hasn’t touched Mom’s stuff—whether out of sentimentality or the wild hope that somehow she might come back, I don’t know. But everything is still here. There’s the big fluffy bed that could hold the three of us: Mom, with me and Nate on either side. Her blanket was woven of Fiorden wool so thick it seemed to give off its own heat. There’s the fireplace with its ledge of mountain granite, and the picture window with an alcove full of pillows and blankets, where I loved to curl up and pretend I was a princess in a castle. Even the ancient portable TV Mom had toted up here at some point, a gray cube with a bulbous screen and a slot for VHS tapes.
I have a vague memory of snuggling under the blankets with Nate, watching cartoons while Mom worked across the room at the big oak desk. I remember her bent head, the way she bit her lip when she concentrated. What was she doing back then that required such focus?
The moonlight is enough to see by, so I slide my phone into my pocket as I pad through the room. Dust has accumulated in the corners. It softens hard edges and swirls in the air as I pass, giving everything a surreal, dreamlike appearance. I feel separate from my body, like I’m floating somewhere above myself and looking down as I proceed through the deserted room. I’m aware of feelings—recognition, shock, sadness, grief, anger—but they’re all muted, like my heart is wrapped in cotton gauze.