My mother used to say that family, blood or found, was our salvation. It was the net that caught us when we drowned and gently lifted us up out of the raging waters. She was wise, my mother.
My niece would be sad when she awoke, but then she’d get over it. She had a husband and a son to look after, and the Shar no longer troubled her. It was time to let her breathe. We’d meet again and soon.
The brush on my left side stirred again. The third time now.
“Come out,” I said.
A black-and-white horse edged her way out of the woods, carrying a pale-haired rider. Julie.
“Running away from home?” I asked.
She raised her chin. Funny child.
“Yes,” she said.
“Is this about your sticking it to your mother?”
She shrugged. “Yes.”
“Go back. I don’t have time for liars.”
The child of the steppes looked me in the eye. “It’s about me. She promised to never do the thing she did, and now she’s done it. It will eat at her. She will hate herself for it. She will think that for a few seconds she turned into Roland. I don’t want her to feel bad about it. She took me in when nobody cared if I lived or died. I don’t want to be a walking, talking reminder that she didn’t stick to her promise. It will make everything complicated.”
Life was complicated. Being dead was a lot easier.
“Either way,” she said, “it’s time for me to go. I could stay, wait for her to get over it, and go on just like I have been for years. Never changing. Never leaving the city. But I want more. I want . . . my own. I thought about it for a long time, even before everything happened. It’s time to go.”
“Where are you going?”
“Anywhere but here. I left her a long letter, so she wouldn’t think I ran off in a huff.”
I sighed. “I suppose you can tag along.”
She rode up next to me. She sat like she was born on a horse. Blood always breeds true. I’d told Im this and he didn’t believe me. My brother with his crowded mind, so filled with ideas. He often forgot that people weren’t simply cogs powering the machine of his ambition. Well, look who was sitting in a dragon lair now.
“What’s our first stop?” Julie asked.
“Mishmar. I have a promise to keep to my mother.”
“If Kate is my mother, does that make you my grand-aunt?”
“Possibly.”
“That’s sort of like a grandmother, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Can I call you Granny?”
“Not if you want to keep your teeth.”
She laughed like a little silver bell. The sun rolled above the horizon, shining on us.
Julie looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, “She’s his grandmother too. Should we tell him? Can we take him with us to Mishmar to visit her?”
“Maybe,” I said.
The boy would need to meet his grandmother at some point. But right now, he had his hands full and I doubted his wife would appreciate us dragging him off on family business.
It wasn’t so bad to have a granddaughter, I decided. I’d never had one before, and this one brimmed with magic.
There was so much I could teach her.