“Alone?” she now asked. Beneda had become fond of rhetorical questions and purely exclamatory phrases, needing to fill all silences with little explosions of sound, like a string of firecrackers which once lit could not keep itself from popping, set off no doubt to keep her own demons away. So she repeated herself. “Ah well, Stavia, so you return alone, as I have done, as we all have done. We grieve, Stavia. We grieve.”
Stavia, who had loved her dearly once and still did, wanted to tell her to be quiet for heaven’s sake, but instead merely smiled and reached for her hand, hoping Beneda would silence herself for lack of anything to say. What was there to say? Hadn’t they all said it to one another, over and over again.
Septemius, on the other hand, knew how to be comforting. “Come on along, Doctor. I’m sure it’s no more than you expected, and these girls of mine have been to the Well of Surcease for a kettleful. There’s a nice cup of tea waiting.” His arm around her shoulders was firm and wiry, as though it belonged to someone half his age. Next to Corrig, who as a servitor could not appear in the plaza with her, Septemius was the one she found most comfort in.
As they returned through the empty streets, the observer Stavia, now in command of herself once more, noted the quality of light. What she had thought was nostalgic and sweetly melancholic was now livid and bruised. The light was a wound, and like a wound it throbbed and pulsed. If it had not been for the old man’s arm about her shoulders, Stavia might not have managed the last few steps into her own house where Morgot and Corrig waited with the tea, where Stavia’s daughters, Susannah and Spring, waited with questions.
“So Dawid chose to stay with the warriors, Mother.” Susannah was thirteen now, her face already firming into a woman’s face, with serious dark eyes and a strong jaw.
“Yes, Susannah. As we thought he would,” said Stavia, telling them the truth she had refused to tell herself. She had not really let herself think he would stay with the warriors, even though both Joshua and Corrig had known that it was certain.
“I wish for your sake he’d come home to us,” Spring said, repeating some adult comment she had overheard. Spring was only eleven, still a little girl. She would be slenderer than Susannah, and prettier. For Stavia, looking at Spring was like looking into the mirror of her own past. Now the girl added her own perceptive comment. “I knew he wouldn’t come back. He never really cared about us.”
She knew more than I, Stavia thought, looking deep into Spring’s eyes.
“What are you thinking?” Corrig murmured into her ear as he warmed her tea.
“Of me when I was almost Spring’s age,” she said. “Long before I knew you. Of my first trip to the Warrior’s Gate when we took my little brother, Jerby, to his warrior father.” She turned to her mother, murmuring, “Remember, Morgot. When you and Beneda and Sylvia and I took Jerby to the plaza.”
“Oh, so long ago,” Beneda, overhearing, interrupted with a little explosion of breath. “I remember it well. So very long ago.”
“I remember,” said Morgot, her face turning inward with a kind of intent concentration. “Oh yes, Stavia. Of course I remember.”
STAVIA HAD BEEN TEN. SHE REMEMBERED KNEELing in the kitchen, picking at her bootlace to make it lie absolutely flat. It was a bargain that she had made with the Lady. If she learned the whole Iphigenia play, word for word, and if she cleaned up her room and did the dishes by herself and then dressed perfectly, without one dangling button or wrinkled bootlace, then they wouldn’t have to give Jerby away. Not ever. Not even though her older sister, Myra, was already standing in the doorway, impatiently brushing the five-year-old’s hair to get him ready.
“Stavia, if you don’t hurry up with those boots, Myra and I are going to leave you behind.” Morgot had arranged the blue woolen veil over her head for the tenth time and had stood before the mirror, running her fingers over her cheeks, looking for lines. She hadn’t found any lines in her beautiful face, but she had looked for them every day, just in case. Then she had stood up and begun buttoning her long, padded ceremonial coat. Time to go.
“I’m hurrying,” ten-year-old Stavia had said.
“Stand still,” Myra commanded the little boy she was brushing. “Stop fidgeting.” She sounded as though she were about to cry, and this took Stavia’s attention away from her boots.
“Myra?” she said. “Myra?”
“Mother said hurry up,” Myra commanded in an unpleasant voice, fixing her cold eye on Stavia’s left foot. “We’re all waiting on you.”
Stavia stood up. The arrangement she had made wasn’t going to work. She could tell. Not if Myra was almost crying, because Myra almost never cried except for effect. If something was bad enough to make Myra cry for no discernible advantage, then Stavia couldn’t stop it, no matter what she did. If she were older, then she could have tried a bigger promise, and maybe Great Mother would have paid attention. At age ten one didn’t have much bargaining power. Of course, Morgot and Myra would tell her there wasn’t any reason to make promises or seek changes because the Great Mother didn’t bargain. The deity didn’t change her mind for women’s convenience. Her way was immutable. As the temple servers said, “No sentimentality, no romance, no false hopes, no self-petting lies, merely that which is!” Which left very little room, Stavia thought, for womanly initiative.
This depressing fatalism swelled into a mood of general sadness
