Though the bookcase had been cleaned out, the place wasn’t entirely devoid of decor. Something that looked like a crystal ball registered faintly to my senses as magical. Dimitri’s psychic neighbor would probably love it.
I drifted to what might be considered a desk, though it was round, and where I would expect drawers, there were cubbies covered by what looked like living lily pads. Thinking they were like cabinet drawers, I tried to grab the edge and open one. It twitched at my touch and furled to the far side.
A few ordinary-looking if aged envelopes lay inside atop what might have been a journal. It had a green plant-like cover with a silver ribbon holding it shut. Even though I knew I wouldn’t be able to read anything, I pulled out the contents of the cubby.
I started to open the journal, but the writing addressing one of the envelopes to Eireth caught my eye. My stomach did a weird flip-flop. That writing not only used English letters but was familiar.
All of the envelopes were addressed to him and all written by the same person. Even though they had all been opened long ago, my fingers had an uncharacteristic tremble as I pulled out one of the letters inside. It was normal Earth stationery, but the color—a pale blue—had faded with time. The writing was in pen and still legible. Even before I glanced at the signature at the bottom, I knew my mom had written it.
What did it mean that these letters had been left behind when all the books had been taken? Had my father known he couldn’t take them home where his elven kin might see them? Or had he known it was over between him and my mother, so he had simply shoved them in a desk and left them behind?
It had little to do with me, but the idea made me hurt on my mom’s behalf. He’d been the love of her life. To waste that on someone who hadn’t returned her feelings or had dismissed her as some inconsequential fling…
I stared at the page without reading it, not sure I wanted to read it. This had been a private letter from my mother to Eireth.
Warily, I skimmed the first paragraph. It wasn’t gooey, and there weren’t any love poems or sonnets or whatever it was infatuated people had written to each other back in the seventies. It said she wasn’t sure his people would find her letter and give it to him, but she’d enjoyed meeting him in the woods and fishing in the creek and playing the elven gambling game he’d taught her.
“Huh.” I imagined Mom and Eireth playing Tic-tac-toe in the dirt beside some waterway.
As I skimmed more letters, they became more friendly, and she referenced things that he’d said or that he’d written in letters to her, so it grew clear they hadn’t been one-way communications. Not that I’d expected that. I’d come from somewhere, so things had escalated at some point. But of course, there weren’t any letters here from Eireth. If they still existed, they were in a desk drawer in Mom’s cabin somewhere. Even if they hadn’t been a state away, I doubted she would have shown them to me. She was an even more private person than I was, and she would give me the frostiest glare imaginable if she knew I was reading her old love letters.
Feeling guilty, I put them back in the cubby, but my guilt didn’t keep me from checking the journal. It was in a different hand, the penmanship elegant and fluid—and in the elven language. My translation charm allowed me to understand the spoken language, but as I’d learned on previous occasions, it didn’t help when it came to reading.
I sensed Freysha heading toward me. My first instinct was to shove the journal back into the cubby and shut the leaf-door before she caught me snooping. But we’d come here to snoop. It had been her idea. And she knew how to read this language.
The idea of asking her to read my father’s diary, if that was what this was, weirded me out though. He was her father too, but if he’d been writing about my mother instead of hers, Freysha wouldn’t want to read that. But it was possible he’d been writing about fishing and trapping here on Earth or taking weather readings for scientific studies. Maybe this had nothing to do with Mom or she was only mentioned sporadically.
I was still looking indecisively down at the journal when Freysha walked in.
“You found something?” she asked.
“Some letters in English. A journal that’s not.” I lifted it with feigned indifference. “Want to see if he wrote it?”
“Our father?”
After so many years without a father, it was odd to think of myself as having one at all, much less sharing him with someone else, but I managed to say, “Yeah.”
As Freysha came forward and took it from me, thumps and clangs came from outside.
“Is that trouble?” I asked as she opened it to read. “Or is Gondo further battening down the hatches?”
“The latter. So far. I shouldn’t have told him that trogwarths can climb.”
“I shouldn’t have told him where we were going. Wait, I didn’t.”
Freysha flipped the page. Since she was engrossed in reading, I didn’t speak again. I resisted the urge to pace, though I did walk over to check on Gondo. That trapdoor was doubly secure now.
“This is getting… intimate,” Freysha said after a time. Her cheeks had grown pink.
“You don’t have to read it. I just wondered what it said.”
“Some of it talks about the reason his group came here—they were studying the plants here and on other wild worlds to see if any had medicinal or magical promise that could be useful for our people—but then it goes into detail on a local woman he met. Sigrid.”
“My mother.”
“Yes.”
Freysha sounded like she’d already known. Eireth must have told her something about my origins when he’d sent her to spy on me.
She bit her lip, read a few more pages, and then closed it.
“You don’t have to read it,” I repeated. “I’m sure it’s weird when it’s not about your mother. I mean, that would probably be weird to read about too. If elves are like humans—or at least Americans—they get uncomfortable thinking about their parents having sex.”
“It’s not that. Well, it is a little that. But it’s strange because he cared about her so much, and as I was telling you, I’ve never seen evidence that my parents feel that way about each other.”
“But have you read any journals or letters they wrote to each other before you were born? Maybe they fell in love back then. You’re older now, and they’re older, so maybe they’re just not as passionate about things as they used to be.”
“I have read some of their correspondence from before I was born.” Freysha twitched a shoulder. “I’m a curious person.”
“Obviously. You led me here.” I smiled, hoping she would too.
But she looked forlornly down at the journal. Now I wished I’d put it away and said I’d found nothing.
“It makes me sad that they married only for political reasons and didn’t care for each other,” Freysha admitted softly. “And that my parents don’t truly love each other. You probably don’t feel fortunate, since he left, but…”
“No, I don’t. I always thought he was a jerk for doing that, even though I never knew him.”
“His parents and our people pressured him. He must have felt honor-bound to do the right thing. He may have also realized that since humans are not long-lived, it would have been difficult for them to have a relationship. For him to watch her grow old when he barely aged, for him to lose her.”
“If that’s a reason not to have a relationship with someone, then I guess I shouldn’t be hanging out with Zav.”
Freysha lifted her eyes. “That is not what I meant to imply.”
“I know, but it’s been on my mind.” I walked toward the empty bookcase, though there was nothing to look at.
“Maybe they made a mistake. Maybe he made a mistake.” Freysha put the journal away. “I think that if you’re lucky enough to fall in love with someone, you should take a chance and pursue it and not worry about the rest of the Cosmic Realms. Though I wouldn’t exist if Father hadn’t gone back to do what he believed was his duty, so perhaps I shouldn’t vote for that.” Freysha smiled, but it was a sad, miserable smile.
“It’s good to exist.”
“Yes. But there is a part of me that wonders what it would be like to have come from people who genuinely loved each other, rather than out of some political arrangement.”
“You can’t change how other people feel about each other, and you’d be a different person if you’d come from different parents. Do you want to change who you are? You seem pretty rocking.”
“Rocking?”
“Smart and badass.”
She mouthed, “Badass?” but she must have gotten the gist, because she smiled. “Thank you. You are also rocking.”
I snorted, but she seemed genuine. Maybe I needed to learn how to accept a compliment. Since I’d started meeting dragons and full-blooded elves, I’d begun thinking of myself as the mongrel most of them called me at one point or another. A half-breed. They had all made it out to be a bad deal, as if I was a deformed mutant that had crawled out from underneath a rock.
Before I’d met them, I’d appreciated my elven blood. In my line of work, having extra agility and better healing had helped me survive many deadly missions. It was sad that the perceptions of others could change one’s perceptions of oneself.
Freysha gazed around the room. “I was curious, and now I have satisfied some of that curiosity. I want to peek into one of the other dwellings, and then we can go.”
After she left the room, I grabbed the journal and stuck it in my waistband. Mom might be interested in reading it, and I doubted anyone from Elf Land was coming back for it.
I walked out, ready to head home, only to find an unfamiliar elf standing on the deck. An unfamiliar elf with blazing red hair and the powerful aura of a dragon.
Damn it. How had she gotten down here without me sensing her?
12