Chapter 5

The bad weather held up for another three weeks. I couldn't help wonder if the weather was as bad on the other side of the curtain, in that other world that had claimed so much of my life, and if so what the weather man on the television had to say about it. I relished that storm. That biting wind and flying snow that kept my love close to me. It was a strange and beautiful bubble in time. The future was too uncertain and the past too painful to talk about, so we lived in the moment as much as two people just starting out and expecting a baby in the middle of a war could.

I remember waking up with Rowan on that first morning after his return. His smile. The warmth of him. The fact that what he always said to me was true. There was something about waking up together that made everything that was painful in our lives just a little bit easier to bear. I woke feeling Rowan's strong arms circle around me, and the worry that I'd woken with every morning since he had left, melted away and with it half of the nausea. For a brief time, things were as they should be. I rolled over and smiled. I stretched and sank further into Rowan's arms and dozed until a knock came from the sitting room letting us know that a tray of food awaited us. We ignored it for a few minutes, then lounged over breakfast. Once we were fed and ready to contemplate rising Rowan smiled and said, “Humour me and put the red dress back on, if it isn't dirty. I want to look at you and imagine you coming to me in the snow over and over again.”

“Alright. I think it's clean enough. You were pretty grimy yesterday when I hugged you, but I think that all of the dirt was so frozen onto you that it didn't really come off onto me,” I said, looking over the dress then slipping it on and unbraiding my hair. I sat down at the dressing table and brushed my hair out, making my brush strokes outwards and away from the dress so that I wouldn't snag it. Rowan took the brush from me. I looked at his reflection in the mirror as he stood behind me running the brush over the ripples of my hair. The dark circles that had been around his eyes the night before were almost gone now, but I could still see the toll that the last two months had taken on him. I could see that the fighting was eating away at him. “It seems such a small thing, but at least I can get the tangles out of your hair,” he said, almost a whisper. And I sat until he was satisfied with the job he had done, then I stood and put my arms around him because I couldn't bear the look on his face.

“Rowan? What's wrong?” I asked.

“I'm just tired, that's all. Five years this war has been dragging on, and now we are closer than ever to ending it, and being so close is just making me feel how profoundly I want it to end. Especially when I'm here with you.”

“Shh . . .” I whispered and stroked his hair as he buried his face in my neck. I couldn't think of anything better to say. What could I say? I wanted to stop his tears and take away all of the hurt that a man who was faceless to me was inflicting on us, but I was helpless to do anything about that. What does a little gardener fairy do against an army? Nothing. I'm good at growing things. Plants. Flowers. Babies apparently. So I took his hand and said, “Come. I want to show you something.” I lead him over to the fire and pulled him down on the settee next to me. I picked up the little trunk that sat on the floor by my feet and opened it. “This is where I keep all of the things I've been collecting. Ingrid has been teaching me how to sew and embroider.” I took out a tiny linen baby dress that I'd finished, and a bonnet, and showed him the one I was still working on. “Finn found these amongst my mother's old things.” I pulled out a tiny silver spoon that had the first letter of Liam's name engraved on it. “She must have fed Liam with this,” I said, “And I think this must have been hers.” It was a tiny string of coral beads with a little gold heart engraved with the symbol for the “S” sound. “Ingrid made these.” I passed him the knitted booties. “And Sarah made this,” another baby dress. Soft blue cotton. “And I keep these here too,” I said, pulling out several wooden objects. Rowan smiled in recognition as soon as he saw them.

Each time Nuriel or Mikail had flown to the castle, Rowan had sent with them a little carved something. The first was a rattle made of three interconnected wooden rings carved out of a single piece of wood. “This must have taken you a long time. I'm always taking it out to look at, and this,” I took out a carving of a seal. It was sweet, simple, and sleek and it jingled when you shook it. “I've been half tempted to carry this one around with me but most of the court thinks I'm eccentric already. How did you get the bell inside?”

Rowan chuckled and took the smooth little seal from me and shook it. His eyes twinkled. “Fairy magic,” he said. “I found the bell in the road and when we made camp that night I found a small very old tree that was near the end of its life. I woke it from its sleep and I told it that I wanted its wood to make a toy for my child. The tree agreed and asked me if there was anything that it could do for me and so I asked if it could grow itself around the bell, so the tree used the last of its life force to grow around the bell and then died. So I cut the part that had the bell inside it and whittled away at it until it found a shape.” He shook the seal so that it jingled.

There were little bowls carved to look like flowers, like buttercups, with scalloped edges that formed the overlapping petals, and seven little swallows swooping and diving.

“I'll ask Wilhelm for some oil, beeswax and some pumice and I can finish some of these . . . tonight maybe. The swallows,” he put the seal back in the box and picked up one of the little birds. “I'll plant little hooks in the backs and we can hang them from ribbons over the cradle so they swoop and dive.” He smiled.

I smiled.

We sat for an hour like that before I finally, reluctantly, said, “I usually visit Nimue for a little while in the morning. I don't want to upset her by not showing up when she's expecting me.”

Rowan sighed. Nimue was one of the subjects that we had been avoiding. Cole had been dead now for five weeks. I didn't know the details of his death but Rowan told me. “You saw the scars on my back right? I mean the new ones.”

“I did,” I answered quietly.

“It was shrapnel. From a grenade. Cole was with me when the bastard threw it at us. He took the brunt of the explosion. I was with him when he died. He had something that he wanted me to tell her.”

I nodded. “Do you want to come with me to see her?”

“How is she?” he asked in a cautious tone. “Will seeing you and I together upset her? If she's recovering I don't want to drag her back down by talking about Cole. Not if she's trying to move on.”

I wasn't sure exactly what to say or how to tell Rowan about Nimue. I'm not a doctor, obviously, but Nimue seemed to me to be experiencing more than just grief. I questioned her sanity. “I don't think that it will upset her,” I told him. “But she's not herself. She's manic one moment and practically catatonic the next. It might help. It might snap her out of it.”

“Do you think it will make things worse?” he asked me.

My heart turned to lead in my chest as I thought of my sister. I loved her. I had never thought of what it would be like to have siblings before. I hadn't expected to love Nimue as much as I did and I hurt so much watching her suffer. Rowan could see all of this in my look and repeated his question.

“Do you think that it will make it worse?”

“I'm not sure that it can get worse,” I whispered.