Chapter 38
I run through town,heart racing well before I’m winded. I run with skirts tangling around my knees, hair loose to the wind, tears streaming down my cheeks. But I don’t know what I’m running from—or toward. I don’t know why I’m crying.
All I know is there is this hurt deep within me, deeper than I’ve ever known. It’s gnawing, insatiable, and impossible to describe. Even though I have calmed the redwood throne, its roots are still in me, calling me back.
No, these aren’t the roots of the redwood throne. These are roots of my own making. These roots have grown from something I never asked for and never wanted. They’ve shaken the very foundation of my world—my duty—and now I’m falling into a deep abyss from which I might never escape.
I sprint beyond the edge of town, slowing as I reach the rolling hills by the woods. I see the river that runs through the forest, winding through the Fade. I think of following it, but Eldas’s magic is no longer on me. I would be just as hopeless at navigating the Fade as I was the first time I got lost.
I can’t bring myself to go into the forest, either. I don’t belong there. Those trees grow too closely to my memories. I look over my shoulder and back down at town. Most people are still in the square. I can imagine their confusion and hurt.
My damp face burns. They’ll be angry with me. After all they invested in me, after all I did to return to them. I ran.
And I ran because…because…because I don’t have a place in Capton any longer. My former position in the community is still here, but nothing seems right. This place isn’t my home anymore. Am I to spend the rest of my days here, longing? Making potions with half my heart? I turn to the sea, wandering toward the cliffs, and stare out over the horizon line, looking at the vast expanse of land beyond Capton.
I could explore this world now, I suppose. If I don’t belong here anymore, and didn’t belong in Midscape, then maybe I’ll find where I belong out there. As I think those thoughts, guilt rises up in me, drowning them.
My chest tightens and I let out a strangled hiccup. Not quite a sob, not quite a laugh. “Well, you got what you wanted, Luella,” I mutter with a note of self-directed anger. “Now what?”
“And what did you want?” My mother’s voice cuts through my thoughts. I turn, surprised to see her standing there. Her fiery red hair is struggling to escape its braid in the sea breeze.
“Mother…” I say weakly. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t apologize; you’ve been through a lot and I suspect the Keepers—while kind—didn’t properly check in on you,” she says gently. “May we sit?”
“Sure.” I sit on the grasses where she motions.
Mother sits next to me, pulling her skirts around her as I do the same. “I told your father it was too much, too soon for you. He’s been worried about you. Funny enough, I think he’s more worried for you now than when you left.”
“What?” I turn to face her. My mother wears a tender but otherwise unreadable smile. “But I’m back…”
“And you’ve not been the same.” She tucks some hair behind my ear. “What was it that you wanted?” she repeats her question.
“I wanted to live up to everyone’s expectations. I didn’t want to let the people of Capton down after they invested so much in me,” I say. “I wanted freedom. I wanted purpose. I wanted…”
“You wanted?” she encourages.
“I wanted to know if what I felt for him was real,” I admit, both to her and myself at the same time. The words are small and fragile, as if saying them aloud might shatter these trembling feelings in my chest.
“Him,” she says softly. “You mean the Elf King?”
“Yes, Eldas.”
“What did you feel for him?” Her expression is unreadable. Will she be mad if I admit to finding a way to love someone she has only known as a brute of a man? Could she understand that even though he took me from her, there’s a gentle and thoughtful side to him? That he sent Poppy back, and stayed with me when I was weak after the throne because he cared, and cooks bacon, and does that thing with his tongue that I—
I blush and turn back to the ocean, the heat reaching all the way to my ears. “I don’t know.”
“What do you think it was?” Mother isn’t letting me get out that easily.
“Love,” I admit.
“Tell me why you think that?” she says in that plain voice, void of any clues as to what she might really be thinking.
I take a deep breath, and tell her about my time in Midscape. Unlike the Keeper, who got the necessary overview of basic facts, I tell my mother everything but the moments we shared at the cottage that still make me blush. She hears of every ugly, beautiful, and improbable emotion I discovered within those gray castle walls.
My voice is as raw as my heart when I’m finished and stars are blooming in a distant sky.
“I see,” she says thoughtfully.