Authors: Cyndy Aleo
Not for the first time, Bożena thinks of Edyta as a small child, full of curiosity and overly emotional when she doesn't get her way. She wishes she could step over Edyta and leave her to her tantrum as she does the little ones. Unfortunately, Edyta can cause a great deal more damage than a three-year-old if left to her fit.
Bożena tries her best to calm the rest of the sisters, to reassure them that all will be well, that this will be better for them, that charging in too quickly would have been disastrous.
But she doesn’t like how Edyta and Zuzanna are talking. How a few other sisters linger near them and nod when Edyta starts another one of her rants.
Bożena continues with her preparations and tries her best to ignore the grumbling. So long as it doesn’t rise in volume — either noise-wise or numbers-wise — she still thinks there’s a chance everything will work out in the end.
What she doesn’t know, however, is how much Edyta is willing to risk in order to gain control of the sisters. Or if she’s willing to divide them in order to amass power.
25: Accommodation
There’s one voice, Edyta’s, which seems most focused on their destruction, but she’s not much of a leader. Desiring power, perhaps, but Bożena would be the one called leader if they had one, and she seems torn. It’s possible that when his mother first fled she was the first one to call for death, but now, the years have weakened her somewhat. He needs more information. He needs to find the sister who still feels closest to his mother. Maybe it’s Bożena.
The others he can sense — Janina, Agnieszka, Adela, Helena, Beata, Zuzanna — he can't get enough of a reading to know where their sympathies may lie. Edyta and Bożena, however, may be key to any strategy he can come up with. He’ll have to pay closer attention, if he isn't distracted by things going on at the hotel.
Edyta is all anger; it bleeds off her and follows her on her path through their forest area like a long train on a wedding gown. How the sisters haven't noticed that much anger in their midst over the years, he's unsure, but she’ll be easiest to identify; her anger pulsing red all around her.
Bożena, on the other hand, should be the one with Edyta's anger. From his mother's accounts over the years, he knows Bożena was her closest ally and confidant before his birth. They’d been born around the same time — certainly within a few years of each other — and his mother's ultimate decision and defection had to have both hurt and angered Bożena.
Yet he feels none of the anger in her that’s so prominent in Edyta’s thoughts. The greatest emotion he senses from Bożena is sadness: that she must ask her sisters to move against another; that her reunion with her former best friend and true sister may be far too short; that she may be the one to bear the most responsibility for Grażyna's death when — if — it comes to pass.
She may be helpful.
As for the rest, their emotions cross lines and bleed into each other until they’re indistinguishable. Some feel the lines being drawn within the tribe, and have some dim awareness that there are two sides, and sisters may be asked to choose. For a tribe used to everything being unanimous, it's unsettling for them: another undercurrent.
His mother goes through the motions of checking them all into the hotel, even though the staff keeps looking to him to give direction. The temptation is there to smirk at them every time his mother draws their attention back to her; how anyone can look at her and think she'd let anyone else speak for her is beyond his understanding, but perhaps the hotel staff is a bit slower than most to adjust to his mother’s presence.
One older woman in the lobby makes the sign of the cross when she sees his mother, and he hears her mutter under her breath, “
Dziwozona
.
”
Idly, he wonders what the woman would do if he turned to her and confirmed her superstitious fears.
Instead, he bends his head toward Donovan to ask for perhaps the hundredth time if he can do anything for her. Each time she tells him no, but she's still not settled, still not back to being “his
”
Donovan. The trip has sent them all off their normal axes, and nothing will be right again until whatever confrontation is to come is over.
His mother refuses the staff’s offer of help with their bags, and between the two of them, they manage most of the luggage, with Donovan pulling a single suitcase behind her. The suite they reserved has two bedrooms, and his mother lifts one brow in silent question. The small part of him that’s still Vance wants to chuckle at her unspoken question, but the time for their joking camaraderie is gone.
“She'll stay with me,
”
he says, and his mother heads toward the bed in the main living area to start unpacking.
Taking Donovan's hand, he leads her into the other room, where the two single beds have been pushed together. It takes only one look at the crisp, white sheets on the beds for him to know Donovan will kill him if he even suggests she get into bed without washing off the grime of travel, so he finds the bag his mother had hastily thrown Donovan's toiletries into when they'd packed at her apartment.
“Do you need any help showering?
”
he asks.
She jumps, then stares at him with a smirk and a single raised eyebrow.
“Oh, I don’t mean me. I mean, my mother. Unless you wan
t
—”
He's useless at this. It was stupid, stupid, stupid to let things change from just friends to something more right before heading into who knows what, and he's simultaneously crushed and relieved when she shakes her head and trudges to find the bathroom with her arms full of shampoo and soap.
He slides to the floor, not wanting to go back out into the main living space, where he’d have to deal with his mother, and he waits for Donovan to be done in the shower. For the first time, he wonders if bringing her was the right thing to do — if he'd made the decision with his head instead of his heart. He wants her near him all the time, but this promises to lead to insanity.
26: Displaced
Should she have locked the bathroom door? The glass shower enclosure leaves no privacy at all if Grace — or, god forbid, Jakub — should walk in.
Before she's even halfway through washing her hair, she's already replaying their conversation in her mind. When everything has become surreal, having Jakub offer to help her in the shower makes it ten times more so.
Was he serious? Did he expect —?
Even thinking about possibly having sex with him makes her move faster, nicking herself twice when shaving. She curses knowing she'll leave blood stains on the hotel’s immaculate white towels. It's crystal clear she doesn't belong here, but he wants her with him for whatever reason, and she promised she'd see this through.
After her near breakdown before their flight, he's been distant — until his shower offer, that is — and she thinks there’s a distinct possibility he’ll send her home on the next return flight. She doesn't know the language here or his history or anything of value. How can she do anything but be in the way?
Stepping out of the shower, she dries everything but her legs, which she blots with toilet paper, leaving clumpy wads of wet paper spotted with blood on the counter. She sits on the toilet and puts her head in her hands, cursing herself for being such a complete idiot and klutz on top of everything else she’s not bringing to the table here.
Unsure of the time, she'd grabbed pajamas rather than clothes from the bag he'd opened for her. She now finds herself stuck with nothing else to put on. Either she wears the pajamas out of the bathroom, even if it's morning, or she waltzes back into the bedroom wearing nothing but a towel, which would look like an invitation for sex, something she's not sure either of them wants.
Pajamas it is.
She gathers her things and walks back to the bedroom, only to find he's already heading to the shower on his own. He hurrying so quickly that he barely acknowledges her, so she walks to the room they’re apparently going to be sharing and stows her things.
While she takes her turn waiting for him to come back from showering, she blots at her wet hair with the towel she put around her shoulders and tries to come up with something witty, or at least, not stupid, to say when he comes back.
She's still mumbling things under her breath hoping to find the right one when he comes back wearing a tight white t-shirt and a pair of gray sweat pants. Gaping at the definition shown by the t-shirt, and the way the sweats hang from his hips, she blurts the first thing that pops into her head:
“What time is it?”
Very together, Donovan
, she thinks.
You definitely sound like you’re sophisticated and ready for whatever sex and violence may be coming your way.
He laughs before he answers, “A bit after lunch time here. Are you hungry? There are things in the minibar, but I thought it might help with the jet lag if we take a short nap then try dinner and getting more acclimated tomorrow.”
Nap. A nap would be good. She’s tired, and could definitely nap. Only —
“Do we ‘50s sitcom the beds or leave them as they are?
”
she asks.
He laughs again.
“If it's okay with you, I'd feel safer if you're closer to me.”
She nods awkwardly and pulls back the covers on the bed farther from the door, guessing he'll want to be closer to both the door and his mother if safety is a concern. She assumes he'll climb into the other bed, but he crawls over it instead, pulling back the other side of the covers, and squeezing into the too-small, twin-sized bed with her.
“I don't expect anything,
”
he says. “I just need to hold you. I need to know that you're safe, or I don't think I'll be able to close my eyes at all, much less sleep.”
She's glad her back is toward him so he can't see her smile. When he drapes his arm over hers, she laces her fingers with his and is soon asleep.
27: Anticipate
In next to no time, she is across the castle grounds and on the very edge of the forest. She can see the destruction wrought in her absence; the trees are smaller and let more light into the forest than they did when she lived here last.
She listens carefully, but even the language of the trees is different now. They do not speak to her at all, but they carry messages for her sisters. If she tries hard enough, she can hear some of them, but she doesn't listen long. It only makes her feel more lonely.
Being back isn't the homecoming she thought it would be. Each time she has imagined this, it has always been a moment of great joy followed by her death. It's why she has always been so at peace with the idea of dying here; the relief she thought she would feel at being back where she belonged would make up for it. She has always known she cannot stay, but even having a moment or two of bliss, of finally being home, would make all her sacrifice worth it.
She finds, however, that she is in limbo: caught between. She belongs nowhere. Not in this place with the too-thin forest made of trees that do not recognize her or speak to her. And not back where she has just come from, in the boxed house with the tiny greenhouse and the small forest and the
angelskie
name while she watched her son slowly killing himself so she could keep him hidden.
She has no place at all.
Still, there is a place in the center of the forest that’s calling to her. The trees may not speak to her, and she may not recognize them by sight, but her soul could find her home there, even all these years later. Closing her eyes, she takes a few steps forward.
What if she walks into the forest right now? What if she goes in alone, without Jakub? Without Donovan? If she offers herself willingly to accept the fate she should have accepted all those years ago, will they still hunt him? Or could she save him?
She shakes her head at her ridiculous thoughts. Of course they would still hunt him. The sisters are probably no longer concerned with her, other than as a token gesture to show the younger ones what shouldn't ever be done. Jakub will always be the focus, his power something to be feared. She can sacrifice herself time and time again, and it will always be the same unless she can change their perception of what he is.
A few more steps take her beyond the tree line. Her sisters will never listen to her, never see Jakub for what he is: so much more, and at the same time, so much less than the legends had told them. They may, however, listen to the trees. It takes so much concentration for her to do this; it has been so long since she has done anything more than listen. She begs the trees to ask the sisters to listen to her, to open their minds to something
other
.
Opening her own mind, she tries to give the trees all that her son is, all that she thinks he will become, all that he may mean to the sisters. If she doesn't belong anywhere, he belongs everywhere, both here as well as with the humans. He could bridge the gap that has existed between the two worlds for so long. They just need to give him time, and a chance.
~
Bożena steals away from her sisters as they bicker, waiting for a final command to head into the human world to hunt Grażyna and her son.
She’s tired of listening to them.
It’s only once she’s away from the heated whispers of their squabbling that she hears the message in the trees. Grażyna is obviously out of practice; it sounds like one of the children learning to speak through
Matka
, the language stilted and babyish.
It’s only by listening hard and repeating what she hears aloud that Bożena understands what the message is trying to say:
I am sorry. But I was not wrong. He is peaceful. He is kind. He has no wish to rule.
Bożena sighs. She won’t relay the message to any sisters who don’t hear it for themselves. She’ll wait until they tell her they’ve heard it, wait until they tell her what they think of Grażyna’s attempts to explain to them. There’s no point in telling them that she believes Grażyna, that if the boy child was so intent on causing them harm, he’d probably have done so long ago while he was still in the human world.
She can’t ignore that they came here, however. Why bother returning if it wasn’t to assert his power? They all felt it when he arrived; there’s no denying that whatever he is, it’s more than they are, more than they ever want to deal with.
But Bożena is so tired. She doesn’t dare meet with Tadeusz while Grażyna and her son are about, doesn’t dare leave her sisters in the forest. She’ll have to get a message to him, tell him something’s come up, that she’s out of town, that she’s ill.
It’s doubtful that he’ll ask questions, so she doesn’t have to worry about explaining that her wayward sister has returned after two centuries with the son she was supposed to kill. She should be glad he doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t ask for more information than she’s willing — or able — to share.
But sometimes…
Sometimes she wishes that he would demand answers. Would ask her why he can’t ever pick her up where she lives. Why she owns so few outfits. Why she never speaks of a job or what she does all day.
Sometimes she wishes she could have more than her sisters in the woods, bickering over decisions that may have been fated since before their creation.
Sometimes she wants everything to be different.