She stared again into the blackness of Charach’s eyes. For five days she thought she had found her father, a family, a haven, a home. But now she didn’t know what she had found. Who was Rueshlan? Who—or
what
—was her father?
Abisina felt even more alone than when she’d fled Vranille. At least on the journey north, she had hope to follow. Now, she had nothing.
The despair crushed her. She could not rise from that root. Not ever.
But she did rise. With one thought in her mind. The same thought that had sent her from Vranille.
Run
.
The stillness of the garden surrounded Abisina—the coolness of the dewy grass; fruits’ sweet odors drifting from the boughs overhead; bees’ soft hum; a light wind caressing her skin. But the peace of the garden eluded her.
She sat on the bench at the base of one of the fruit trees, the rough boards biting into her thighs. Her elbow and knee ached from falling as she ran along the River Deliverance. Her fingers were ripped ragged from clawing her way up the slopes of Mt. Sumus. Her right foot throbbed where her toe had been taken. And she was tired, so tired, after her flight from Watersmeet.
She hadn’t slept at all during the two days and nights it took to return to the garden. And she slept little once she got there, unable to find the alcove where she’d spent the nights of her first visit. Mostly, she walked among the trees waiting in vain for the release of her anger and pain.
This was where Haret found her. She was wandering through the orchard, so distracted by her thoughts that she didn’t hear his approach.
“Human.”
She spun to find Haret’s black eyes fixed on her. His tunic was soiled, and a trickle of dried blood snaked across his shin. “Haret! How did you know I was here?”
Haret shrugged, his gaze never moving from her face.
“You want to know why I left.” Abisina answered his unasked question, “It’s about my—Rueshlan.” Abisina looked at him pleadingly, but his eyes were cold.
“I know about your father. And though I hoped otherwise, I knew that’s why you ran.”
“You knew about my father and you didn’t tell me?”
“I didn’t tell you for the same reason that he didn’t. You’re Vranian.”
“I am not!” she seethed.
“Well, you’re acting like it, human. You’ve learned nothing from Hoysta, nothing from me. Nothing even from Watersmeet. You found out Rueshlan is a shape-shifter, and like every good Vranian, you fled.”
“He lied to me!” Abisina cried, the disdain in Haret’s voice stoking her anger. “He’s a—
centaur
!”
“He had to lie! What choice did he have? He knew you’d see him as a demon.”
Abisina looked away, hating her silence but unable to disagree.
“Was Hoysta a demon then?” Haret demanded. “When she saved you? Nursed you?”
“Of course not.”
“You can’t have it both ways, human. If you listen to the Vranians about centaurs, you have to listen to them about dwarves. Are you prepared to condemn us all?”
“Stop! It’s not fair! Hoysta and you are different. I know you—as people.”
“We are
not
people!” Haret was yelling now. “You can’t stop thinking like a Vranian, can you? Judging the whole world with yourself at the center. Look at me! What do you see?”
“What do you mean?” Abisina stepped back.
“When you look at me, you think short, hairy, ugly. Don’t deny it.”
“Haret—”
“But that’s only because you’re holding up some human form, some form of yourself, as an ideal. To me,
humans
are ugly. Spindly. Weak. Blind.”
“But don’t you understand, Haret? I can accept that he’s not Vranian, or human—or even that he’s a shape-shifter. . . .” She waited for Haret to nod in agreement, though she knew that what she had said wasn’t all true.
But Haret didn’t budge. His eyes bored into hers.
“No, you couldn’t understand.” She turned away. “Icksyon didn’t hold you. He didn’t put his hands on you, bite you—You will never convince me that he isn’t evil.”
“I have no intention of trying,” Haret said flatly. “I’m not saying evil doesn’t exist. But you’ve met one evil centaur—”
“One?”
“Fine, Icksyon’s whole band is evil. But from this experience you’ve decided that
all
centaurs are evil.”
“You don’t understand,” Abisina repeated. “My whole life I’ve been called a demon. I tried to ignore it—to believe my mother when she said I was gifted and beautiful. But I worried. What if it were true? I could feel something inside me—something different—something bad. But I hoped that what they said was wrong.” The words hurt, sand raking across the flesh of her tight throat. “Now I know. I know that what he is—it’s part of me. In me. I
am
a demon.” Abisina had just spoken her deepest fear, and she sank to the ground under the weight of the words.
Haret sighed, his own shoulders slumping. “We all have evil in us, Abisina.” The sadness in his voice made her look at him again. His cheeks were hollow, and shadows lingered under his eyes, a reminder of his time in the Mines. He sat down next to her. “Come back with me to Watersmeet. Your father’s sick with worry. Search parties have been formed. They’re wondering if you were taken by überwolves. . . .”
“I can’t. I can’t face him. Or any of them.”
“Then let me bring him here.”
“No—Haret, I just need to think. To figure this out.”
“Human, he is your father.”
Haret’s voice reached her from a distance.
“Abisina?”
She knew he was waiting for her to get to her feet, to fight back.
But she didn’t. And after a while, she felt Haret rise quietly and move away through the grass.
Still she sat on, Haret’s words tumbling through her mind in fragments—until one thing he said rose to the surface—fully formed and heavy with meaning.
He is your father.
The storm broke.
Her sobs were the shrieks of an infant left alone while her mother worked behind barred doors; the pain of a child bruised by cruel words; the suffering of a girl hating herself as a demon, the bastard with dark hair and skin. She wept for flame and heaps of ash. For cold metal against colder stone. For Icksyon’s mad eyes staring into hers. She cried for disappointment, betrayal, anger.
And finally, she cried because she had believed. She had believed that her mother could protect her, that her father was the hero she had come to love.
They were both gone now.
When Abisina’s sobs quieted at last, she was lying face down on the ground. She rolled onto her back. The sky stretched endlessly above her, framed by shifting leaves. She felt empty.
But the emptiness did not last. Memory filled her: she felt her mother’s lips pressed to her hot forehead testing for fever; she recalled the comfort of Paleth’s pebble tied into her tunic; she heard Hoysta’s chuckling prattle in the warmth of her cave; she saw Rueshlan before her, his face filled with joy at the discovery of his daughter. And always there were the questions: Would he come to her? Did she want him to?
She had avoided the clearing with the rowan tree and grave. Vigar had said:
We are all with you—those who wore the necklace.
But the necklace hung around her throat like a weight: cold, hard, dead.
When she had clawed her way up the mountains from Watersmeet, no path appeared, no archway, not even a crack that she could slip through to return to Vigar’s garden. For hours in the dark, she had groped her way along the face of the mountain, slipping her fingers into any fissure until they bled. As the sun rose, she found a dusty cave with a low tunnel at its back. And then she had wandered through inky tunnel after inky tunnel. No reddish light glowed at her approach, no odor of fruit beckoned to her. She had even tasted the dirt, but her parched tongue told her nothing, and she was left with greater thirst and less hope.
When she at last stumbled into the garden, exhaustion and despair had so dulled her senses that she didn’t recognize it for what it was. The midnight sky heavy with clouds left the archway indistinguishable from the darkness she had wandered through, and only when she fell and felt grass on her cheek did she realize that she had found the orchard.
It was fury that drove Abisina to seek out Vigar after days in the orchard.
“Where are you?” she cried, as she stepped into the clearing. “You said the wearers would be with me—but they’re all gone now. My mother. My father. And now you! Watersmeet is readying for war. Isn’t that what you wanted, Vigar? You need nothing more from me and so you’re gone!”
After her shouts died away, the silence was thick, impene- trable. She yanked the necklace over her head, threw it onto Vigar’s grave, and ran.
She ran until she came to the wall, and then she fell, curling into a ball, as if she could squeeze into the empty space at her center.
Before her panting had quieted, Abisina knew that Vigar had come back—and was with her in the garden.
But the voice that spoke was real, not the ethereal voice of someone long dead.
“Abisina?”
For one glorious second, she was dazzled again—the sun glinting off his black hair, his bronze face, and broad frame. The word almost came to her lips: Father.
But the instinct drowned in the wash of anger that pushed her to her feet, ripped the words out of her throat, and blinded her to the pain in his eyes: “Get away from me! Get away!”
He stopped. “Abisina—”
“No!” She put her hands in front of her, warding him off. “Don’t say anything.”
“Please, Abisina.
Daughter
.”
“Don’t call me that! Do you know what being your daughter”—she said the word as if it were a curse—“has meant to me? Bastard they called me! Dwarf-dirty! Demon!” She relished the anguish her words brought to his face. “Because of you, I was outcast. Spit on. They wouldn’t even touch me. And they were right! I am a demon.” She fixed Rueshlan with her green eyes. “I am a demon,” she repeated. “I’ve got
you
in me.”
She had expected—no,
wanted
—him to reel back, crushed. But now, with her greatest insult ringing in the air, he met her gaze steadily.
“No, Abisina. You are not a demon. Neither am I. I have many flaws, but I am not evil—as a man or a centaur. I am not Icksyon.”
“Icksyon! Kyron! Rueshlan! It’s all the same. You’re all monsters! Perversions! And you’re worse! You are a
shape-shifter
. Like Charach. And now that’s part of me.” She collapsed against the orchard wall. “And you
lied
to me,” she choked out.
“Abisina, you are
Vranian
—”
“I don’t want to be!” she yelled, back on her feet.
“But you were raised Vranian. I couldn’t risk losing you. As I lost your mother. I thought you’d despise me—”
“I despise you for lying to me!”
“Abisina, please try to understand!”
But she rushed on. “I don’t want your excuses. You left my mother! You knew what Vranille was and you left!” It felt so good to yell and rant. She could no more stop the words than she could stop the shaking in her hands or the tightness in her chest.
When Rueshlan next spoke, his voice seemed to be pulled from deep within. “I know. I’ve thought the same thing every minute since you arrived in Watersmeet. If I had known about you, if I had stayed, if I hadn’t been too proud to go back for your mother . . .”
“You never loved her, and you’ve never loved me. You’ve moved on. To Frayda.”
Rueshlan took a step toward her. “This has nothing to do with Frayda. I loved your mother deeply—but I could never stay in Vranille. They would never have accepted me. And I had Watersmeet to think of. Sina felt she had to stay; she had work to do there.”
“You should have come back. You should have tried harder.”
“You’re right,” Rueshlan said. “But I was hurt. She had rejected me. Or that’s how I felt. And she didn’t even know that I was a shape-shifter.”
“So you lied to her, too!” Abisina sounded triumphant, but it hurt to say it.
“I planned to tell her the truth.” Rueshlan’s words were labored. “I should have. . . . Abisina, your mother was different, but she was still Vranian. Would she have been able to accept who I am? Can you? When you came to Watersmeet, you were terrified of centaurs. With good reason. But I thought if you had some time to get used to me, if you could know
who
I am before you knew
what
I am . . . Abisina, I can’t lose you again.”
At his pleading words, Abisina’s anger was replaced by a sadness that threatened to engulf her. She couldn’t lose him either, but how could she love him—as a shape-shifter and a centaur?
Then Rueshlan’s hand was there to hold her up, to pull her into his warm and solid embrace.
She fought for a moment. “No!” she whispered. “I hate you!” But his arms were strong, his tunic smelled of the Sylvyads, and his words were balm for her wounds.
“I love you, Abisina,” he said, his voice rumbling through his chest. “You can hate me all you want, but I will always love you. I will always be your father.”