Even after his father had abandoned them, life fell back into a rhythm almost normal, almost peaceful, a brief tranquillity after the storm. Marie-Rose continued to teach Luke the things he needed to know of her world, if anything, the urgency of her desire to make him truly a part of both worlds in which he lived grew even stronger. She saw to it that he attended the small school in Lovell, refusing to accept his youthfully fierce determination to stay by her side, protect her as his father had failed to do. Because she wished it, he had learned—focused all of his intensity on amassing the knowledge she insisted was vital to his future. It didn’t matter that she herself knew little of the outside world.
Her son—he would know and understand the things that had so fatally eluded her.
So much of this he had come to grasp when it was too late.
He remembered the long days when he had struggled with his own alienation from the other children, doggedly working his way through years of schooling. He grew up with few friends and with no knowledge of the hidden village in which his mother had been raised.
Something—some subtle shift in Joey’s posture, some night sound that broke the inward focus of his thoughts—made Luke suddenly aware of his own voice, reciting the memories as if they were no more than a tale of hypothetical characters in another existence, incapable of giving pain. He broke off, looking away from the hypnotic spell of the flames, away from Joey’s rapt face.
“It was only because of my mother that I did well in school,” he said at last. “Because she wanted it, I learned about my father’s world.” He heard his own voice catching on the word “father”, a word he had never voiced to anyone but her, and one other, in all the time since his mother’s mate had left them. “He had left us money to live on, in his vast generosity—a tidy sum in the local bank, plus all the land he had bought for my mother. Sometimes new deposits would appear in the bank. She never touched it, except what she needed for me.”
The mournful hooting of a great horned owl punctuated his words, he paused to listen, to a language far simpler and more honest than the one he’d found. Outside It seemed a melancholy and appropriate comment on his mother’s fate.
“When I turned fourteen, my mother changed. She’d lived the past many years changed already, though I didn’t know it then; I was old enough to see it on the day she began to talk to me about my future. I didn’t care about any of that, but because it was important to her, I listened.” Luke closed his eyes. “She told me there would be changes in me as well, things I wouldn’t always understand. She explained that there would be things I would have to deal with, and she wouldn’t always be there to help me. Even then I didn’t realize what she meant.”
Luke caught himself then, remembering the limits on what Joey could comprehend. There were things he had no intention of telling her—could not tell her, even now. Her lovely dark eyes never left his face, she could have no conception of what he left unsaid, the thoughts that went through his mind as he spoke so dispassionately.
He shook his head, dismissing what could never be. “My mother told me about the village she’d grown up in. She’d always kept me from exploring in that direction, only then did I learn that she had left the village and her family behind forever. But she told me that I could find my own people there, if I needed them.” It was hard, now, to keep his voice level. “She apologized for all she had been unable to give me, made me promise to complete my education. None of it warned me of what was to come.”
Silence fell, only the crackling and popping of the fire marring the perfect emptiness of it. “After she had talked long into the night of things I had just begun to grasp, she stood over my bed and waited until I’d fallen asleep. I remember her face in the darkness: all serene sadness, a face out of a medieval painting. There were tears, but I had seen those often enough in the past not to be alarmed.”