Page 42

CHAPTER 42

Turning Page

“ J ames? James, open up. Please .”

I rapped my knuckle on the door, repeating the same jig I’d heard him make countless times. By my third pass through the song, the bed creaked loudly and feet shuffled across the floor.

It’d been three days since Essie died. Three days since I’d seen James carried out of the hospital between Bryn and Tye. Three days that he’d been closed up in his room, not eating, not talking. He hadn’t returned to Ruhaven, to the memory now forever missing something vital.

So when James opened the door at last, I was prepared. Or I thought I was.

I swallowed hard at the sight.

The gaunt cheeks, the hollow eyes and oily hair, the paleness of a man who’d been blessed with skin a few shades darker than my own. Yet now it was as worn and pink as the walls behind him. Wrinkles lined the corners of his eyes where there had been none before.

“James?”

His cracked lips moved, but no sound came out. He cleared his throat, a hard, rasping sound that caused his bony frame to shake. “What do ye want, Roe?” James asked, voice as dull and brittle as he looked.

I clenched the tray in my hands. “Bryn made soup. Better than mine. I thought you’d like to try—”

“No.”

When James started to close the door, I caught it in my fist, nearly dropping the scalding soup on my feet. “James, I don’t know what to do for you.”

He plucked at the collar of his thin sweater, the material loose and ruffled like he’d done that a hundred times today. “Do?” Agony flickered behind his dark eyes. Strange, to see them without the glasses. “Nothing, Roe. There’s nothing to be done.”

I should know that better than anyone. Still, I pressed the toe of my boot to the door, stopping him when he made to close it again. “James, talk to me at least. Come downstairs, we can go for a walk, or—”

“Don’t ye understand, Roe?” he choked out. “There’s no moving on for me. I’ve nothing. I’ve nothing . No body to bury, no headstone to mourn at. I’ve nothing but a memory. How do ye grieve a bloody memory?” Fat tears rolled in dark tracks down his cheeks. “Where do ye bury dreams, Roe? Tell me!”

This time, when he went to close the door, I didn’t stop him.

I n the week that followed, Naruka sank into a bitter void that mourned Essie’s loss as much as James. It was like the house was a part of him, or maybe some part of Ruhaven, and its roots had reached into the earth and connected with the Gate. Every time a gust blew, the windows rattled worse than a jailer shaking their bars, and I’d had to replace five fuses that shouldn’t have blown.

Because I hadn’t wanted to leave James, Bryn had gone to the Gate for me, but he’d only returned to report that though he was with Nereida, there had been no appearance by an Inquitate. Whatever had happened with Essie, the Inquitate who killed her was gone, and so went any clues about why she’d been attacked. Whatever James might have witnessed, he kept it to himself.

He said little, ate even less, and spent most of his days reading the same newspaper or staring at the television. He wouldn’t speak to anyone—including Kazie, and she tried singing, dancing, and reciting his favorite Irish poems. When she butchered a cream of mushroom stew so badly the house smelled for days, I expected James would at least complain, but he’d only wrinkled his nose and returned to his book.

If anyone should know what to say to him, it was me. Wasn’t his loss as hard as losing Willow? Essie was real to him, even if he’d lived with her through someone else.

When my twin had died, I hadn’t been able to talk about it; everything people said seemed cliched and tired. Like Ruhaven, my bond with Willow had been beyond description, and no words, poetry, or song would ever be enough to bring that to life.

So I stood in the kitchen doorway, the tray of tea I’d prepared wafting steam under my neck, and studied my brother.

He slouched on the chesterfield with the granny-square quilt drawn around his legs. The television’s blue light did little to offset his puffy eyes. A pair of winged glasses lay on the coffee table, leaving his nose oddly delicate without them. He was like the dolls Willow once played with, looking sad with their dark saucer eyes and thick hair, as if they were upset she’d grown up and moved on to practical things.

How would it feel to visit the Gate without Essie?

I’d refused to leave L’Ardoise after Willow died. I’d wanted to feel her around me, as painful as it was. To wrap myself in every memory of us. And each time I’d walked into the Blue Nose, I could look at the piano and remember. Even if no one else did.

James lifted his eyes from the television to me.

“Do you remember when Essie convinced you to swim in that weird yellow marsh?” I asked.

He looked away again. “No.”

“Because you weren’t there,” I continued anyway, setting the tray on the coffee table. “I was, though. The normally white waters were this awful bubbling goo because there’d been some ceremony for a dead tree—or something like that. But Essie, she convinced Jamellian that it was a new type of lake she’d found, that it would taste amazing, that she just had to get to the opposite shore. Then, when you jumped in, she laughed so hard her eyes bled these tiny little jewels.”

James’s lips twitched. “So that was why I’d gone yellow for a week. I wondered.”

I set the tray on the coffee table’s lace doily. Took out the sugar, milk, lemon.

“Sometimes,” James said on a heavy breath. “Sometimes I wonder what it’s all for. To live as we do, to love in the Gate, to bring Ruhavens here.”

I poured the tea, letting the trickle of it fill what I couldn’t with words. When I offered him the cup, he rolled his sleeves back three times, then took it.

“What happened, James?” I hadn’t wanted to push on the details, but I needed James to fill in the blanks Kazie had left.

His nostrils widened on an inhale, held, then he seemed to just deflate into the cushions. “I know I owe it to ye, Roe, to tell ye about what happened. I just—”

I stopped him. “James, you don’t owe me anything.”

“Aye, I do. Ye’ve been looking for answers for yerself and Willow, and I want ye to have them.” His throat worked. “When I was—when I was— No ,” he said when I tried to tell him it could wait. “Let me get this done. Essie and I were in Drachaut with Kazie, but yerself and Bryn were somewhere else. I think we might have been looking for ye, to find out whether ye’d discovered why the Tether broke, if it could be repaired.” He took another breath, one that was painful to watch. “We encountered another Ruhaven, and we traveled together for some time. I didn’t know. We didn’t know.

“It turned on us, Roe—not a Ruhaven at all, but an Inquitate wearing the skin of one. It made to strike me when Essie stopped it. Then she—she—”

I gripped his hands, warmed them between mine. “James, I’m so sorry.”

He squeezed out a breath. “I’d accepted that Essie wasn’t in the Ledger , but I never thought she’d die before I did.”

And he’d had to witness it.

“It’s not fair. It’s never fair.”

“But in Ruhaven, things are supposed to be in balance, every action is to have an opposite reaction. That’s why we’ve mates and Tethers and Marks.” He held up our joined hands. “Connections. Energy. Ruhaven and Drachaut. ‘Tis a closed system of energy. Entropy—‘tis the only thing that changes it.”

Yet Essie’s death wasn’t the only thing out of balance. Wasn’t that exactly the issue with Bryn, Tye, and I coming over together? Maybe the Inquitate were trying to right some wrong.

I pulled the ratty blanket over my legs so it covered both of us, and let my head rest against James’s shoulder. Kazie’s voice floated in and out of the kitchen, bickering with Tye, but I ignored it as I asked, “How did you and Essie meet?”

James hesitated, then slid an arm around my shoulders. “I never told ye? Funny story, so it is.” He chanced a sip of his tea and winced. “Ye know how Ruhavens have to complete a trial of a sort to earn our Marks?”

“Like puberty, you once said.”

He chuckled lightly. “Aye, and so it is. When I was eleven, I got lost in the Faruthian Mountains. Sure, it dazzled me speechless at the time, what with the trees being pure marble. Our Mark, they become what we need when we need them most. I was a wee lad, starving and sick in the woods when Essie found me, and only a young girl herself. I like to say I saved her.” Then James snorted around his biscuit. “Or how she explained it to me was…” In that soothing way of his, James spun a story of talking trees and riddles, ones only Essie had been able to solve, and a love that had grown up in the woods when he was a boy.

James lifted a thin finger. “Nereida never went through her trial, but maybe she would have if she hadn’t passed through the Gate. There was time.”

Would my spirit have been like James’s? Something derived from Ruhaven’s earth, an element, like soil or water or grass as I’d once joked.

“So,” James said in the same tone he’d used in the kitchen to ask me about Sahn. “Have yerself and Bryn…resolved things, now?”

I felt the tips of my ears pinken. We hadn’t resolved that yet, but maybe we were on the right path. “I think so.”

James’s chest swelled against me before a sigh followed in my ear. “I wish that langer had told ye earlier about O’Sahnazekiel, about all of it. Sure, if me Essie was here I would’ve confessed me sins on the first day. Begged her to take me any way she likes.”

But Bryn hadn’t done that. He hadn’t fallen to his knees and begged, hadn’t even appeared to like me at first. Just because he thought I was with Tye? How could that keep him from someone he’d supposedly spent years waiting for?

Or Tye was right, and Bryn never risked something he couldn’t win.

“I guess that’s not Bryn’s style,” I said at last.

James slid his gaze sideways. “Suppose not. Although ,” he drawled, “I can’t say Essie ever did make me struggle home half-naked in a storm like.”

Not my finest moment, but I snorted when he elbowed me playfully.

“Did ye know Bryn confronted me in Oslo?” James asked.

“Yeah, I was there for the warm welcome,” I said dryly, thinking of the man who’d circled me in his office. And how much different he was now.

James chuckled, the first laugh I’d heard out of him in weeks. “No sure, at the bar before ye took off after that Inquitate. Bryn pulls me aside, explaining Tye called him, and told Bryn that he and you—” James paused, coughed. “Suppose Bryn wouldn’t want me repeating the thing. But he was accusing me like, saying, ‘Is this how ye let Ruhavens get recruited now?’ Sure I didn’t know what he was on about, for if Tye and yerself were together, it was news to me so it was. I told him that, and to stop being such a bloody bollocks.”

Tye had so many tricks up his sleeve, he should just open a show. “I guess that’s partly why Bryn hated me at first.”

“Ah, Roe,” James said, understanding me perfectly. Sympathy softened his face into melted butterscotch. “Ye know that’s not true, and if ye think Bryn feels differently about ye than I do about Essie, yer wrong. He’s been punishing himself, in a way, I think. Ruhaven broke him, Roe, living with the memories of friends ye’ll never meet, a mate ye’ll never know.”

I gazed up at James. “You live with it—seeing Ruhavens come and go, saying goodbye when they make the Fall.”

He plucked at a loose thread on the quilt. “Ah, but sure I’ve had Kazmira, O’Sahnazekiel, and then, eventually, I had me own sister.”

Because emotion clogged my throat, I offered James the tea and biscuits he’d set down.

He sighed and lifted a cookie, rolling it between his thin fingers. “Trying to feed me now, Roe? Sure, I thought I’d never see the day. What’d ye call me before? Nurse Jamellian?” He bit into it. “Ye sure know how to wind me up.”

I smiled and settled against him in the well-worn cushions.

Then James let out a gusty exhale.

I lifted a brow. “What is it?”

“Roe,” he sighed, “ye make a feckin’ shite cup of tea, ye know?”