“All right.” Iona got out the boxes, began to assemble them. “How many of these?”
“Half dozen, thanks.”
“I think you’re right if you want my opinion.”
“About the boxes?”
“No, not about that. About what happened. About it being another power that pulled you and Fin together.”
“I’m not sure I’m right, or I’ve concluded just that.”
“It’s what I think.” She brushed at her cap of bright hair, glanced up. “Maybe—I hope I don’t push too hard on a sore spot—but maybe both you and Fin want to be together, maybe that wanting stirs up from time to time, and maybe last night, for whatever reason, was one of those times.”
“A lot of maybes in your certainty, cousin.”
“Circling around the sore spot, I guess. There’s no maybe in the wanting or the stirring. I’m sorry, Branna, it’s impossible not to see it or feel it, especially the more we all bind together for this.”
Branna kept her hands busy, her voice calm. “People want all manner of things they can’t have.”
Sore spot, Iona reminded herself, and didn’t push on it. “What I mean is, it’s very possible the two of you were a little vulnerable last night, that your defenses or shields were lowered some. And that opened the door, so to speak, to that other power. Not Cabhan, because that absolutely makes no sense.”
“It hurt us.” And left a terrible aching behind. “He lives to hurt us.”
“Yes, but . . .” Iona shook her head. “He doesn’t understand us. He doesn’t understand love or loyalty or real sacrifice. Lust, sure. I don’t doubt he understands you and Fin are hot for each other, but he’d never understand what’s under it. Sorcha would.”
Branna stopped working on the candles, stared at Iona. “Sorcha.”
“Or her daughters. Think about it.”
“When I think about it, I’m reminded Sorcha’s the very one who cursed all that came from Cabhan, which would be Fin.”
“That’s true. She was wrong, but that’s true. And sure, maybe, considering he killed her husband, tore her from her own children, she’d do the same thing again. But she knew love. She understood it, she gave her power and her life for it. Don’t you think she’d use it if she could? Or that her children would?”
“So she, or they, cast the dreaming spell? Where we were together, and all defenses down, so we came together.”
She began to walk about, deliberately, running it over in her mind. “And when we did, used the power of that to send us back. But both too soon and too late.”
“Okay, think about that. Sooner, whatever happened in that cave might have pulled you in, beyond what you could fight. Later, you wouldn’t have spoken with the old man—potentially, and I think right again—Cabhan’s father.”
Iona got out the ribbon, the bottles as Branna worked in silence.
“I think you saw what you were meant to see, that’s what I’m saying. I think we need to find a way to see more—that’s the work. They can’t hand it to us, right? And I think—sore spot—it had to be only you and Fin together because the two of you need to resolve—not gloss over or bury or ignore—your feelings.”
“Mine are resolved.”
“Oh, Branna.”
“I can love him and be resolved to living without him. But I see now too much of it was hazed in my mind. All that feeling I couldn’t quite set down. You have good points here, Iona. We saw what we were meant to see, and we work from that.”
She glanced over, smiled before she poured more scented wax. “You’ve learned a great deal since the day you came to that door, in all that rain, in that pink coat, babbling away with your nerves.”
“Now if I could only learn to cook.”
“Ah well, some things are beyond our reach.”
She finished the candles, and together she and Iona made up the half dozen pretty gift sets. When her cousin set off to Cong, Branna took her solitude with tea by the fire, with Kathel’s head in her lap.
She studied the flames, let her thoughts circle. Then with a sigh, set her tea aside.