108. Maureen

Today, they are easy.

The terraced roof is a useful distraction when they are not and when they are easy, it makes them happy.

There is a trellis that grows roses my mother cultivated, with the help of Edie’s magic, offering a fragrant aroma that seems to calm them.

They like to sit in the chairs we placed up there and chat during the day and in silence in the evening, they watch Pikestully lose sunlight.

There is a small room that is closed in, the only part of the house like it, on the roof.

It has a window where I can watch the two of them while I illustrate and write my manuscript that our old friend, the queen, has commissioned.

They rarely get into trouble, but they are two old women both with the opinions that they have the capability of their youth.

My mother is forgetful, if still spry and Edie, also spry, does not forget where she put her slippers, she forgets who she is on some days.

While both can still go up and down stairs, I know I should move them to the first floor, but they like this terrace, so I put that off for another day.

They are both into their seventy-fourth summer now, which is much longer than some folk get to live.

At sixty-six, Mischa acts like she is much younger than them, but I have caught her having her own fragilities.

She will soon come into the house, bustling and complaining about her students that day and tell me my sister has annoyed her in some way, reminding me, yet again, that she helped raise Agnes.

And I will agree that Mischa knows best.

Later, in another conversation, Agnes will tell me some ‘funny story’ about how Mischa disagreed with her and that my affable sister thinks our Aunt Mischa is terribly amusing.

I am forever amazed by all of the souls that lived in this house, past and present.

I do not believe I have ever catalogued it here, in my journal.

Perch and Mischa never married, but they had two sons together.

He would insist on them marrying only to make Mischa declare she would never marry.

They would fight and not speak for weeks, only to reconcile eventually.

She did set aside her temper when she had their children and they tried to be harmonious in front of the boys.

Then, as captain of the Procurers, my stepfather and Alric having retired from the unit, Perch Spinner died in a battle with one of the last clans of Helmsmen who still refuse to treaty with Tintar.

Mischa, who had often called him ‘big, dumb animal’ or ‘fish man,’ proclaimed, in earnest, now that she would really never marry, that she would never find such a man again.

And she did not.

My stepfather and Alric both retired shortly after my sister was born and they were part of Peregrine’s court of advisors and their duties were lighter after retirement.

Hinnom died not a full four seasons after the Day of the Drakes, his younger brother coronated and married to Catrin afterward.

My stepfather and Alric pooled their savings, along with what Perch had saved, and bought this house with its three stories, small stables and terraced roof.

Some nobleman’s family had used it for visits to the capital and sold it for something fancier.

It was not a house a retired soldier could afford, but the two of them managed it together.

It was near enough to the keep for those of us employed there to walk every day.

Edie and Alric took the top floor, my mother, Thatcher, Agnes and I took the second and Mischa lived on the first floor with her sons, Minnow and Mackerel, whom we all called Mack.

The two boys went from having no father to having an abundance of them.

Alric and Thatcher treated them as their own and they were absorbed into the rowdy brotherhood of all of the Angler men, both generations.

Anwyn and his husband visited our house often and now Minnow works in the Angler forge, making fine swords, his mentor, a now elderly Anwyn, sitting and watching him work.

Mack, having a gifted air Tintarian for a father, is a priest of Brother Air, much like my sister, our father also blessed by air.

Perch, an expert swordsman and having always been so devout to his god, would have been proud of both young men.

When I married, I was in my twenty-sixth winter and wanted my own lodgings with my wife.

After winters of steady friendship, one night I watched Eefa serving in the brewery and saw her in a new light.

Time had been kinder to her as she left her teens, rounding out her once pinched face and her straw-like hair was healthier with well-fed winters behind her.

I had had both men and women as lovers, the first of them being a misbegotten adventure with Luka, who wanted a bride when I wanted to explore what life had to offer.

I did not know Eefa, then, to have paid much attention to anyone.

I did not know if she even looked at women that way.

I had lived long enough with my stepfather and I had watched him court my mother, that I felt I should just tell her she was beautiful that night.

And I did.

She blushed.

I kissed her.

We married a season or two later.

I cannot remember now how quickly it progressed.

I only remember that she has been my wife for many winters and that I have a loving stepson.

And I remember that my stepfather wept at my wedding like I was moving away from Pikestully for the rest of my days, not leaving the house.

My mother was simply happy for me and she laughed at his emotive manner.

Though we lived out of this house for some time, Winger was also absorbed into the family circle, playing with Agnes, Minnow and Mack, running wild with some of the younger Angler boys.

We moved back into the house when Alric and then Thatcher passed.

In his mid-sixties, Alric caught a chill that never left his chest.

He coughed for some winters and then passed in his sleep, arms around his wife.

Thatcher’s heart gave out while he was lifting something he likely should not have been at his age.

My mother started sleeping with Edie in her bedroom on the third floor and that is where they live now.

Eefa suggested we move into the second floor and help Mischa watch over the two of them, hinting that one day it would be the three of them that needed help.

Agnes, having had to work with Mischa every day, agreed that all three needed monitoring.

It is the five of us and Queen Catrin that are left from our original Eccleston nine.

River and Quinn have both passed after many winters of matrimonial bliss, in service together as scribes for Sister Sea.

River finally had a seizure she could not endure when she was in her dotage.

And Quinn, we believe, died of a broken heart.

Edie often comments that they both got to watch the other’s hair turn gray and that is for all two lovers can hope, but she also becomes melancholy when she talks about them, especially Quinn.

Bronwyn died four winters after our abduction, but she died content and comfortable, after a hardscrabble life.

Occasionally, for old time’s sake, the five of us dine with Catrin in the Shark’s Keep.

Most noble families were not pleased that their prince had wed a girl from Eccleston instead of one of their daughters, but Edie, lauded savior of Tintar, spread a rumor that Catrin was her distant cousin.

This seemed to placate them.

She is the first reigning queen of Tintar, not a dowager waiting for her son to take the throne.

Peregrine changed the law before his death, after getting a son with sea magic on her, knowing he was twelve winters her senior and likely to pass away first.

He did, sooner than expected, a Sibbereen stallion throwing him when he was not much into his forties.

My friend rose to the occasion and continued the work he had done making our country allied and at peace with the rest of this continent.

He had known his bride was not just a pretty face, but an intelligent woman of morals.

Except for several clans of Helmsmen, the rest of this continent trades with Tintar in peace, the echo of my aunt’s summoning monsters of stone an ever-present threat.

Catrin, wisely, incorporated a sigil of the five drakes into Tintarian insignia and this sigil is worn by any Tintarian leaving the country, as a reminder.

Peace was our first choice, but we were not to be forgotten as a country of powerful magic.

What she did that should truly be her most celebrated accomplishment as queen was turn the temple of Brother Air into a public school.

Channeling all of her grief into this, she asked Archpriest Yro, somehow still alive back then, if his antechamber, large but always half-empty, usually littered with mystics and sages, could be transformed into a school for the children of Pikestully to learn to read and write.

Yro, never a practical man, always more consumed with cosmic goings on, did not understand the need for this and told his queen so.

Catrin, newly widowed and trying to establish herself as the ruling monarch, complained of this to our circle of women.

Mischa, herself only a few winters from the start of her own widowhood, marched right into the air temple and berated the old seer, saying her man had been the most dedicated worshipper of Brother Air there ever was and Perch would be disgusted to know the temple was not being put to its best uses.

The old man was flustered and agreed to the school.

I think he did so mostly to get Mischa to stop her tirade.

Catrin set her plans in motion.

Now, most of the staff of the air temple, currently under the archpriest leadership of a man also interested in expanding young minds, are teachers and instructors.

Mischa told Jeremanthy she was sick of infantry paperwork, left his employ and she teaches languages there.

And she bosses my little sister Agnes, a priestess of air and fellow instructor, who has never taken her Aunt Mischa seriously a day in her life and thinks Mischa’s outrages and snipes are funny.

Before retirement, Quinn and River, once tutors in Eccleston, helped create a system for teaching the students arithmetic, penmanship and the like.

As I age, I cannot help but think on all of the love this house has held inside its walls.

Memories blend together but I can pick out several.

When I had been married for a handful of winters, I had a fight with Eefa.

Over what, I do not remember.

I had stormed my way into this house, hunting for someone to watch me lick my wounds.

It was a day of rest.

Mischa, my mother and Thatcher had taken the children to hear music played in the city center.

I ran up to the terrace, hoping to find Edie, sunning herself and reading a book.

I found her and her husband passionately kissing, his left hand cupping the back of her head, the other hand sliding up under her sling to feel her bosom.

Her right arm was around his back.

They had always been reserved around each other and I had never seen this from them.

Despite the gray and some white that shot through the brown of her hair, he kissed her like she was his bride of twenty.

I turned and ran home, asking a surprised Eefa to forgive me.

I remember my stepfather always had a child in his arms or on his back, his own, my little sister, one of Mischa’s boys or Winger.

He was loud and demonstrative.

He seemed to go out of his way to make my mother turn red or be appalled at something, but he made her happy, always kissing her in front of others until she batted him away.

When he died, she was quiet in her mourning, but it was a profound sadness.

After one week of sleeping alone, she took Alric’s place in Edie’s bed.

She had a nightmare in those ten nights.

I, having chosen to move into my old room on the second floor while she weathered the initial loss of Thatcher, woke to her crying in her sleep.

Thinking she was awake, I went to her only to have truly woken her from her phantoms.

“He thought I was you,”

she gasped upon waking in my arms, seeing my face.

I do not know what she meant by this, but we lay awake until morning and she recounted to me how her Caleb had won her over despite them being two unalike people, how he was both brash and gentle, how he both wept and laughed easily.

I recounted to her how he had appeared to be fascinated by my art, how he had taught me to ride a horse and use a knife, how he had considered me his older daughter and Agnes his younger.

Most men marrying a woman with a girl of seventeen going on eighteen would not have bothered fathering that child, but he made me feel like I was an extension of the prize he had won in wooing my mother.

These are the memories I ponder now that both men are dead and the children they raised in this house with the three women my stepfather referred to as ‘the scribe brides,’ are all grown.

This is what I think on as I watch my mother and my aunts age.

For a barren woman, Edie was surrounded by children in this house and outside of it.

Everywhere she went, women who remembered the Day of the Drakes, approached her, saying things like ‘my son was born two days before, I was still bedridden, I could not have evacuated,’ or ‘my daughter and I owe you our lives.’ They asked her to kiss their children’s cheeks and to bless them.

Everywhere she went, people held their left hands, palms laid flat, over their hearts and nodded to her.

I know this embarrassed her as well as edified her.

Her left arm never fully recovered from acting as a pipe into which the magic of the stone drakes surged.

The bones healed but were frail.

She tried to exercise the arm, but the temple of Mother Earth is a busy one and she kept it in a sling during her winters as archpriestess.

As she only wore her elaborate robes outside the actual work of the office, she wore a simple cloth sling over her regular dresses.

Women from all parts of Tintar learned this and hundreds of slings with embroidery, hand-painting and patchwork patterns were delivered to the earth temple.

They sewed her ones made of netting for hot days and ones lined with fur for cold days.

They were each made with love and some of them were of exceptional craftsmanship.

At the end of her priesthood, she had acquired over a thousand of them.

They are neatly folded in trunks stacked on one side of her and my mother’s bedroom.

My mother says all women are mothers in different ways, that we all give birth, just not all to children.

She says some women give birth to revolutions, to movements, to sanctuary, to art, to brilliance.

Some women, like my mother, give birth the traditional way and by making art.

Though she began her career as an illuminator working in small detail, she flourished as a muralist in Tintar and the Shark’s Keep walls are illustrated with the wonders of The Farthest Four, scenes from Nyossa and the ocean, swirls of color to represent air and bright red shapes to represent fire.

Some women, like Thalia, grasp their womanhood out of thin air and make it their own, for themselves, then turn that inner strength outward and create shelter and refuge for others.

Some women like my aunt willingly throw themselves in front of dragons to keep others from being set aflame and they give birth to life in that way.

Love is cyclical.

I know this no more than when I watch my wife care for Edie.

Once a girl of fifteen, snapping her teeth at my aunt, refusing to be led by anyone, she now acts as Edie’s left hand, as Alric can no longer be it.

She cuts my aunt’s food and helps her dress and undress.

Eefa bathes Edie and works lavender oil, her favorite, into my aunt’s hair.

She tells Edie about the beer she is brewing, for my wife is an accomplished brewer, her recipes sought after by all who drink in Pikestully.

She tells Edie when Winger will next visit.

She brings our cat up to the terrace to sit on Edie’s lap.

She reads to my aunt.

Edie’s few moments of mercy towards Eefa as a girl resulted in her being cared for like a mother in her old age.

When Eefa is in the house, my wife will not rest unless she knows Edie is comfortable.

Mischa has just brushed through my little room that looks out on the terrace, fussing about something, her curls now iron gray, still worn in a scribe’s braid crown.

She has dragged over, making a lot of noise, a third chair to sit with my mother and Edie.

My mother sits in a chair Thatcher built for her with a little desk extending from one armrest for her sketching.

She does this tonight, drawing Edie’s profile as my aunt, one-handed, combs out the ends of her white hair that lay over her right shoulder.

Eefa brushes Edie’s hair with a fine comb made of copper, but Edie insists on a cheap, tin soldier’s comb when she brushes her own.

I have to assume this makes her think of Alric.

On my mother’s other side, Mischa now sits and she is telling the two of them that over thirty winters past, they used to flirt with our old master at the scriptorium in Eccleston.

My mother says, “It is called manners, not flirting.”

Mischa disagrees and Edie laughs.

The sun’s light is now a rosy color, casting a dreamy glow over the three of them.

This morning, Eefa had to leave earlier than usual, and I was the one who dressed Edie.

Today she is having one of her forgetful days.

She asked me, as I gave her a quick bath with a towel, who she was.

The nights are hot now and I wanted her to have some relief before Eefa gave her a full bath after her dinner.

I hemmed and hawed for a while.

I was unsure what to say, lifting her left arm to place it in a fresh sling.

Eefa has told me on days like this, Edie needs reminding of basic things and to eat a good breakfast.

Then she is herself again.

Though she has perplexed us recently.

Edie insists Mother Earth speaks to her, ‘again, as she used to speak to me.’ We do not know what to make of this.

Thinking of what Eefa would do, I fed her a morning meal of pears and toast and then tried my best. “Well,”

I began, “first you were a girl.”

She nodded.

I went on.

“First, you were a girl.

Then you were a wife.

Then you were a runaway.

And a scribe.

A good scribe.

Then you were a bride again.

And after that, you were a priestess.”

“A priestess?”

she asked.

And it was my turn to nod.

She smiled and it was curious.

“Oh.

I am not a religious woman.”

The End

Afterword

If your church or your god was cruel to you, I am sorry.

Mother Earth and Sister Sea are for you.

The pain inflicted and the violence done in the name of the Christian God, throughout history, is immeasurable and if I were to list all of those injustices and crimes here, I would fail.

I would have better luck standing in the ocean, trying to collect it in a teacup.

Edie’s ‘box’ is symbolic of my own feelings and experiences with American evangelical Christianity, the isolation, the fear of hell, the self-doubt and so on.

This particular religion, I believe, creates a divide between children and the idea of a deity.

This distance carries into adulthood and can act as a barrier between a human and the divine.

From an early age, I could not understand why God did not reply to my prayers and assumed I was lacking.

I liked the idea that a god, Mother Earth, loved and liked her child so much, she could not resist speaking with her.

I always felt the Christ story was a lonely one.

His dark night of the soul in Gethsemane never fails to move me.

When he falls on his face in prayer and says, “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me," he is met with silence.

God turns his back on ‘his only begotten son,’ and we are told it is because he loves us so much.

How terribly sad, isn’t it? Mother Earth is my response to this story.

A female goddess, a mother, would never do that to her child.

She would beg them to set that cup down.

And if her child chose sacrifice, she would be with them to the end.

I repeat, if you were hurt in church, I am so sorry.

You deserved better.

You are not alone.

Mother and Sister bless you.

Acknowledgement

Amanda, ‘thank you’ feels cheap to say.

How about ‘I did not cut a word of Thatcher and Helena?’ That has more weight to it than just ‘thank you.’ But also, thank you.

Yadi, you were sent a mad scrawl of a rough draft that I am not certain was even in English and yet you offered such encouragement.

Thank you.

Laura, the best of sisters-in-law, you read the first twelve chapters, also in terrible shape, and encouraged me so kindly.

Thank you.

Angela and Addison, I owe you many containers, buckets of flowers, carafes of tea and coffee, crates of books and an armful of soft blankets.

Thank you for all of the kindnesses and for the time.

To the beta queens, the gratitude exploding from my stupid little heart is frantic and joyful and overwhelming.

You are all magnificent: Kara Archambault, Danielle Smith, Erika Windtberg, Lauren Wisney, Tia Rowe, Diane Radel, Jessica Redel, Giselle Silveira, Christina Tyrell, Ashley Owens, Nicole Hagan, Kayla Heintz and Joey Wojtowicz.

I have never been hugged via the written word like that.

Mark, this book will be chosen by readers for its glorious art.

The fact of the matter is that we do judge books by covers.

Thank goodness I know you and thank goodness you clothed Edie’s story in laurels of glory.

Seth, my gift, my reward, my heart, there are no words that can say ‘I love you’ the way I want to say it.

I tried.

I wrote one hundred and seventy thousand of them.

I can only wake up every day and try again, saying, in every way I can imagine: I love you.

About The Author

Kara Reynolds

Kara Reynolds is a watercolorist who lives in Florida with her husband and their cats.

Her bookstagram is @karaneedstoread and her watercolors are at @artbykaravoorhees.

If Edie’s story resonated with you and you would like to reach out, please do.

Mark Williams, who designed this cover and jacket, is both a digital and acrylic artist (instagram: @markwilliamsart) and his magnificent art is also wearable (mwilli.com).