Page 120 of Bitter Burn
“We’re going inside now,” he says firmly. “And I’m staying. And this is hard enough without you arguing, so please just shut up and let me wash the blood out of your hair. Okay?”
I want to fight this. I want him to be with her so that they’ll both be safer, so that they’ll both be consoled, so that two of us can be fully happy at the very least.
But I’m exhausted and Tristan is beautiful, and I don’t have the heart to fight him or anyone right now. I’ve been fighting since I was eighteen years old; half my life has been war. Out of pure fatigue, out of reflexive desperation for the peace of strong hands and green eyes, I whisper, “Okay.”
Forty-One
Isolde
“Are you sure you’ll be okay?” asks the First Lady a week later. She and the president and their assortment of children are getting ready to leave their riverside enclave (whimsically named New Camelot) for the bustle of the capital, and I’ll be left here alone.
Well, not quite alone.
“I’ll take good care of her,” comes a warm voice from next to me. It’s a voice filled with the kind of certainty and assurance that makes the whole world feel sturdier and sweeter. A voice that could inspire an entire nation.
“You better,” mutters Embry Moore as he expertly loops a scarf around the neck of a jumping, spinning toddler. “Or Mark will kill us. Divorce or no divorce.”
Greer Colchester-Moore gives me a wincing smile over the tiny baby snoozing in her arms. “Embry means that we’re all happy to take care of you.”
Maxen Ashley Colchester—who is very much not dead—leans in to kiss his…wife? Not-so-much-a-widow? on the cheek and then gives the baby a loving nuzzle. “Embry means that Mark makes him nervous.”
“The man made me help him kill a pope,” the president says, exasperated. “I thought you were Catholic! Surely you see the gravity of this!”
“If it helps, I was the one to actually kill the pope,” I volunteer, taking a stab at levity. It almost works. The others smile at least. Even if I feel the same dissociative jolt whenever I remember that I killed my uncle less than two weeks ago.
Embry grumbles something about pope killing still being a classic Mark Trevena idea, and Greer leans in to kiss my cheek goodbye. “Call me if you need anything at all,” she says, a gracious hostess even when she’s absent. “We’ll be back soon. We never stay away long.”
“Not enough spreader bars at the White House,” whispers Embry.
Greer closes her eyes briefly in a put-upon expression and then opens them. “We are leaving now,” she announces, and Embry flings open the front door while Maxen takes a discreet step backward so he can’t be seen by the Secret Service agents outside.
I wave goodbye as the brood hustles through the cold February air to the waiting Beast.
Maxen watches them climb into the car and then roll down the drive with a pain that feels too private to witness.
When they’re finally out of sight, I close the front door.
“There are few things worse than having happiness within sight but not within reach,” the former president says and gives me a sad smile. His eyes are even greener than Tristan’s. “But that’s fate for you.”
“I don’t believe in fate,” I say automatically.
Surprised amusement flickers in his eyes and pulls at the corners of his smile. “You don’t? Not to be trite, Isolde,” he says warmly, “but I think fate very much believes in you.”
Maxen Colchester mostly keeps to himself while I’m here. He chops wood and tends to the horses and reads alone in his study. I don’t bother him, partially because he’s Maxen Colchester, and it would be like bothering St. Michael or St. George or some other holy warrior at rest, but also because I find the solitude almost…settling. So different from the solitude at Lyonesse after I returned. With the trees and the half-frozen river and the quiet, I find my thoughts tearfully, softly, achingly, coming to a kind of order.
In my room, a black-and-white folder sits at the bottom of a dresser drawer, along with a holy card and a small chip in a plastic bag. I still wear the honeysuckle ring on my finger.
At night, as I usually do without Mark or Tristan, I dream, although my nightmares have been replaced by something else, a half nightmare, a memory.
I’m standing in the lobby of Lyonesse, the divorce papers in one hand, a bag of clothes in the other.
Tristan stands in front of me, sorrow carving his features.
Stay, he pleads in my dream, just like he did in real life. Don’t give up on what we could be.
We can’t be anything, I say back, again just like in real life. We were made up from the very beginning. Put together like dolls, like he said. This isn’t real—we aren’t real.
He touches me then, a hand sliding into my hair and cupping my head. We said we aren’t real in the dark. But we always were, Isolde.
