Page 30
“No,” said Sera.
Theo unleashed the full force of his pleading puppy eyes on her. “Pleeeeeease?”
“I can’t do it,” Sera said, refusing to allow that look to melt her heart. “I refuse. I’ve taken you there three times already, Theo. Three. Times. Alex, your grandma can take you both.”
“She says she’s done it three times too,” Alex said with a grin. “She says it’s your turn.”
“No,” said Sera at once.
Theo spun around to look at Luke, who didn’t even wait for the question before saying, “Not a chance.”
Theo protested this injustice immediately. “You haven’t ever been there. Not even once!”
“And I intend to keep it that way,” Luke insisted.
Alex giggled. “I don’t think we’re winning this one, Theo.”
“Why don’t you ask Malik?” Sera asked impishly.
On cue, Malik strolled into the living room, a sleeping baby propped against his shoulder. “Ask me what?”
“Can you please, please, please take Alex and me to Nicholas’s tourney at the Medieval Fair this Sunday?” Theo asked at once.
Malik, ever amiable, said, “Yeah, why not?”
“Yay!” Theo whooped. “You’re the best , Malik! Thank you!”
Having thus achieved this most ardent of goals, Theo and Alex dashed happily out of the room.
“Ta,” Malik said dryly to Sera, who grinned back at him. “Joke’s on you, though, because apparently this means I’m the best . Luke, do you want me to take Posy too?”
“God, no, she’d hate it,” said Luke. “Thanks, though. I’ll take her to the coast for the afternoon instead. She’ll get to splash about in the obscenely cold sea and eat her weight in salty chips, so she’ll be happy.”
“I owe you,” Sera said to Malik, and she meant it with her whole heart.
If Nicholas were to ask, she would perjure her soul without hesitation, but the truth was she found jousting mind-bogglingly tedious.
There were only so many times she could watch two people riding full tilt at each other with wooden sticks in hand before she started to wish she were one of the wooden sticks so that she might be swiftly demolished and put out of her misery.
Theo and Alex, on the other hand, being youthful and therefore not yet jaded by the cruel passing of time, loved it.
“Has anyone ever told you you’re a grouchy old codger trapped in the body of a young woman?” Malik asked when she repeated this observation.
“How do you feel about cabbages and peppers planted side by side, Malik? Do they, perhaps, make you a bit grouchy?”
“Don’t you bloody get me started on that,” Malik said affably. “God, I need a cuppa. No, actually, I need a triple espresso. Here.”
And, displaying highly questionable paternal instincts, Malik deposited baby Evie in Sera’s arms and walked off to the kitchen to procure himself a hefty dose of caffeine. Sera was aghast. “Really?” she shouted after him. “Me? When everyone knows I’m about as nurturing as a dustpan?”
“If by everyone, you mean just you, then you’re absolutely right,” Luke agreed equably.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re the only one who thinks it” came the withering reply. “Everyone else knows that you are, in fact, a nurturer. You’re scowling at me while simultaneously snuggling that baby.”
“I am not!” Sera could not quite resist rubbing her cheek against Evie’s downy brown hair, but that was for the sensory enjoyment and most certainly not because she was doing any nurturing.
Luke shut the book he’d been reading. Firelight flickered in his eyes. “You smother Theo in kisses. You’ve stuck with Clemmie. You keep Matilda’s plants alive because you know she loves them. And,” he added, with an unexpected, wicked grin, “I’ve seen the photographs.”
Sera froze. “ What photographs?”
“The ones on Jasmine’s phone. Of the zombie chicken last winter. Wearing a sweater you took off one of your old dolls. Because you were afraid he might get cold.”
“And just think,” said Sera, “I could have spared myself this mortification and kept my magic if I’d just let Jasmine go meet her maker all those years ago.”
“I heard that!” Jasmine called sunnily from her bedroom next door.
“You were supposed to!”
Evie stirred awake, regarded Sera for a few fraught seconds, considered bursting into tears, and then, apparently deciding Sera was an acceptable substitute for her father, went promptly back to sleep.
Luke’s phone vibrated with a text. He glanced at it and, abruptly, the warmth in his face was gone. Without a word, he left the room.
It took Sera a good three minutes to wriggle off the sofa without jostling Evie.
She returned the baby to Malik and went outside.
All three kids were kicking a ball around under the oak tree by the side of the house, and Matilda was gardening on her beloved patch, but Luke and Jasmine were standing at the edge of the patio, looking expectantly down the length of the garden.
Jasmine turned to Sera. “Posy and Luke’s mother is dropping in for a visit, but, well—”
“She can’t find us,” said Luke.
“Her satnav’s not working?”
“Her satnav’s fine,” Luke said in a clipped voice. “She says she’s driven up and down that road over there half a dozen times now, but she can’t find the inn.”
Sera couldn’t help feeling like she was being accused of something. She crossed her arms protectively over her chest. “I don’t decide who the magic lets in, and I don’t decide who it keeps away. It obviously doesn’t want her here.”
“Sera, this is not Nicholas’s father,” Jasmine said gently. “When the magic kept him away that time, it had good reason. More to the point, Nicholas didn’t want him here.”
“Do you want her here?” Sera asked Luke. “Does Posy?”
Luke’s jaw clenched. “She is our mother.” Sera couldn’t help noticing that wasn’t an answer. “If she wants to see Posy, if she wants to see where Posy’s living, she gets to.”
“Posy’s happy here. What if your mother decides she doesn’t like what she sees and wants to take Posy back to Edinburgh with her?”
“ I’m going to do that sooner or later.”
Why did he keep saying that? Yes, it was true, but why did he feel like he had to keep telling them? And why did it hurt every time he did?
Sera suppressed that thought and said, “If you take Posy back, you’ll be doing it because it’s what’s best for her. Your mother, on the other hand—”
“—gets to do it anyway,” Luke said shortly. “Whatever you think of her, whatever I think of her, she’s still Posy’s mother.”
“Apparently only when it’s convenient for her!” Sera said sharply. She looked down, scuffing her socked foot against the stone slab beneath her. “I’m not being difficult, Luke. I just don’t know what you want from me. I’m not what’s keeping her away.”
“It’s your spell. You could ask it to let her in.”
Every single part of Sera hated that idea. Pushing back against her own spell? She trusted her magic. It had earned that trust, over and over again. Pushing back against a choice it had made felt wrong.
“My love,” Jasmine said softly, crossing the patio to take Sera’s hands in hers, “I know you think you’re responsible for everybody here—”
“I am responsible,” Sera replied at once. “I didn’t plan it, or ask for it, but I’m the gargoyle of this particular castle. It’s my job to keep everybody in it safe.”
“But you don’t have to do it alone,” Jasmine insisted. “You don’t , Sera. I’m here. We’re all here. Maybe it is a mistake to let Posy’s mother in. Maybe it isn’t. Either way, this is not all on you.”
Sera gave in. The night sky in her mind wheeled, the stars glimmering with a question, and she answered it. The magic pushed back, gently, doubtful, but she repeated her request. Make an exception. Let her in. The magic relented.
A minute later, a car came to a halt outside the garden gate. Sera went back inside.
It had been easier than she’d expected, asking the magic to make an exception, but it had left her feeling unsteady and exposed, probably much like Nicholas felt if someone asked him to take off one particular piece of his armour.
“Come on,” Malik said, taking one look at her, “we’re going out.”
“Where to?”
“Nowhere. We’ll just drive.”
So that was what they did. Up the narrow, twisting roads lined with crumbling stone walls, down into the green valleys, past bare, leafless trees. With music on and a baby asleep in an infant seat in the back. Talking about nothing in particular.
Theirs was the sort of old, familiar friendship where talking about nothing in particular was the kindest, most comforting thing they could do for each other.
The other things, the big things, were understood but went unsaid because sometimes saying things out loud made them hurt that much more.
It was why Sera had never told Malik in so many words about the magic and the clipped wings and the terrible sadness that snuck up on her with no rhyme or reason, but he had seen wildflowers blooming in teacups and he had seen glimmers of translucent Seras out of the corner of his eye and he had held her hand when she’d cried about big things and small things.
It was why Malik had never said in so many words that he was rootless, banished like his parents and grandparents before him from his ancestral homeland, but she had sat beside him all through the night his mother had died and she had seen the rusted key he wore around his neck and she had stared, time and time again, at the old cartoon framed above his fireplace of Handala, a little boy who never grew any older and never would, either, not until he got to go home again.
They didn’t talk about the Immigrants Out!
poster they’d once seen at the Red Lion, their favourite local pub until that exact moment, but it wasn’t a coincidence they’d started going to the Red Rose after that.
They didn’t talk about the way it messed with their heads to belong to this country, at least on paper, and still know from experience that that white flag with a saint’s red cross on it was something to be afraid of.
Table of Contents
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- Page 30 (Reading here)
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