“Never,” he told her. “I would never harm Alice, though I’m not sure she felt the same about me. I believed her when she said she tried to stop you from traveling. To protect you.”
“She told you that?”
A rebellious thought rose in her. Alice trusted him.
“After you disappeared, I stayed with her,” he said. The words slammed through Etta’s heart, making it throb in her chest with a mess of relief and gratitude and envy.
“Her last thoughts were only of you.”
She wasn’t alone. Alice didn’t die alone.
Etta pressed a hand to her face, drawing in breath after breath to stave off the crush of tears. “She wasn’t alone.”
“She wasn’t alone,” he said softly. “She shouldn’t have suffered that at all, but at least…there was that one small bit of mercy.”
Etta heard him shift, his feet moving against the carpet, but he didn’t reach for her, didn’t feed her comforting lies. He remained nearby, silent, ready, until the metronome of her heart slowed enough for her to find her center again.
“Thank you,” Etta managed. “For staying with her until the end.”
He nodded. “The honor was mine. Are you satisfied with your answer?”
“Yes,” she said. “What was your question?”
“Did your mother give you any sort of traveling education and training?” Henry asked. “The fact that you so willingly followed the Ironwood girl made me think not, and yet it’s so unlike your mother not to have thought through something five steps past everyone else, and there should have been any number of precautions to protect you against this.”
Etta gritted her teeth at the humiliation that itched inside of her. The embarrassment at being so unprepared for a traveler’s life was familiar, but feeling it now meant that she cared what this man thought of her. She didn’t want him to somehow think less of her.
“I didn’t know I could travel until the night of the performance.”
His hand rasped over the faint stubble along his chin and jaw, eyes softening in a way that made her hate herself, just a little bit, for how much she appreciated it. “None of us are born speaking a half-dozen languages or feeling at ease in the Roman Empire. You’ll pick it up quickly enough, and there are many here, myself included, who would be happy to help you in any way we can.”
Etta raised her eyebrows at that—from her unscientific survey, less than half of the Thorns she’d met had been willing to look her in the eye.
“She did what she had to do,” Etta said. “Mom, I mean.”
“She did what she was told to do,” Henry said, rising again to his feet. He was tall, but not imposingly so. Yet, when he moved, he took command over every inch of the space around him. “How can you not be angry with her? How can you defend her after everything she’s subjected you to?”
There were so many ways she would have answered that, even a few days ago, but now Etta felt all of her explanations crumbling, slipping through her fingers like the hot dust of Palmyra.
“She didn’t come for you when you needed her most.” His face was strained as he spoke. “She let you fall into Ironwood’s trap.”
She had…Etta had taken care of herself the best she could, tried to wrest some control from the situation, but it didn’t change that simple fact.
“He’s holding her prisoner,” Etta explained. “There was nothing she could do. He might have…” Already killed her.
Henry made a noise of disgust, waving the thought away. “Your mother was free of Ironwood’s men within days. I had numerous reports of her scampering about, staying well clear of you.”
“She’s alive?” Etta breathed out. The fear released like a sigh, blowing hot, then icy as what he didn’t say finally set in. She’s alive and she didn’t come to help me.
“I can forgive her for what she did to us. She betrayed the trust of this group by lying and saying her family no longer had the astrolabe. The Thorns loved her, cared for her, and she took the key to everything we hoped to accomplish.” He raked his hand back through his hair again, mussing it further. “We’ve known each other since we were children, Rose and I. For a time, I truly believed I understood her better than I knew myself. I’m not proud to admit it, but I did not see just how ruthless and hopelessly misguided she had become. She is no stranger to using people, Thorns or Ironwoods, but for you to bear the brunt of it is cruel, even by her standards.”
Etta didn’t like that line of thought, the way it worked her stomach into disarray. She wanted to argue in her mother’s defense, to call his own bias into question, but when she reached into her memories, she found she’d already run through what little evidence to the contrary she had.
Making his way to the window, Henry looked out, keeping his face from her. “There’s so much darkness to this story, there are times I feel suffocated by it. Our lives became a tapestry of family and revenge and devastation, and it wove around us all so tightly, none of us escaped its knots, not even you. I should have seen the signs, but I wanted to believe she was beyond it. You have to know that if I had known she was with child when she left, I never would have stopped looking for you. I would have gone to the very edges of time to save you from this.”
“What are you talking about?” Etta pressed. Her fingers twisted around each other in her lap. She could almost hear the way her thoughts were swelling, racing through the beats of lies and secrets to one final, crashing crescendo. She didn’t want to hear.
She had to.
His gaze met hers over his shoulder. “All of this—this journey she’s sent you on—is rooted in nothing more than delusion and lies.”
RATHER THAN STAY SEATED AND speak to his back, Etta pushed the chair from the desk and padded over to him. Sunrise edged ever closer with each second, adding to the unrelenting pressing of time’s swift march away from her. The sky near the horizon had lightened to a soft violet and, in the gentle light, she saw what wasn’t there: the footprints of the decimated buildings and streets hidden by rubble, streetlights that had been twisted and snapped like dry long grass.
“I—” she began. But the story wasn’t about her, not yet.
“I don’t know what you know of the Thorns, of us,” he said, giving her a sidelong glance as he clasped his hands behind his back. “I cannot claim we are without fault and failures. Many of us lost everything in the war against Ironwood. Families, fortunes, homes, a sense of safety and independence. But the people here are good and decent, and want do something meaningful. We want to protect each other. It was your mother, you know, who came up with the name. It was something she used to say, that she could no longer be a rose without thorns. She nearly destroyed every hope we had of succeeding when she disappeared. Rose turned our castle to glass and left us exposed and one strike away from shattering.”
“I know about all of that,” Etta said. Rose had infiltrated the Ironwoods for a time to keep them from finding the astrolabe. She knew now she’d come back to the Thorns briefly before leaving for the future, with child. “I want to know what you meant by delusion. That’s a strong word.”
“I’ve never told anyone this, the more fool I,” he murmured. The reluctance in his tone made Etta step forward, as if to seize the secret he was offering. “After her parents were murdered, Rose claimed she was visited by a traveler, one who warned that if Ironwood were to possess the astrolabe, it would result in some sort of endless, vicious war, which could destroy everything and everyone.”
Etta made a sharp noise of surprise. Henry glanced over at her again, and seemed to be measuring her response. “You have to understand that she was deeply, deeply unwell after their deaths. She witnessed them herself as a young child, and they were so gruesome I feel I must spare you the details.”
Etta’s gaze sharpened on him. “So you just dismissed it? Because she was an unwell little girl?”
He held up his hands. “I would never use that term lightly. She described this traveler as shining like ‘the sun itself,’ go
lden, his skin and form flawless. She told me once that when he spoke, it was as if she heard his words in her mind, and that he could plant images in her thoughts. That even our shadows served him—shadows.”
Etta was at a compete loss for words, trying to reconcile this image of her mother with the stiff, immaculately put-together woman she’d grown up with.
So…all of this was…not a fantasy, but…Her mind stumbled over the words. Hallucinations and delusions. If she was following Henry’s thinking on this, Rose’s parents’ deaths had been so deeply traumatic, the psychological aftershocks so damaging, it had eventually ruined not only Rose’s life, but compelled her to ruin her daughter’s as well.
All of this was a lie.
Her blood was pounding wildly inside of her, like the flapping of a bird’s wings struggling against a fierce wind. A tiny figure at the edge of her memory tiptoed forward, hesitating, curling the ends of her bright blond hair with her small fingers. Quiet, as always, so as not to disturb. Perfect, as always, so as not to disappoint. Only watching the careful, meticulous strokes of her mother’s paintbrush against canvas from the doorway of her bedroom.
Wondering if the reason her mother seemed to rarely speak to her was because her language was color and form, when Etta’s was sound and vibration.
Henry reached out a hand for hers, but jerked it back when Etta flinched.
After a moment, he continued, “As a child, her grandfather helped put her off the notion, but years later, after she’d joined me in trying to restore the original timeline, she had a dream about that meeting with the ‘golden man,’ as she called him. Her fixation was renewed. The fierce, lively person I knew withered away, and in her place grew someone who was paranoid, erratic. Rose would go for days without sleep, then disappear for weeks, only to return more levelheaded, folding away more and more secrets inside of her. I wanted to help her, but she didn’t believe she needed help; not even as her delusions worsened, and she claimed she could feel people watching her from the darkness.”
Each word pulled at a new thread in Etta, slowly unmaking her.
“I should have fought her on her plans to spy on the Ironwoods by ingratiating herself to them, but it was like trying to bend steel with my hands. And then she vanished, and for years, I was afraid…I thought for certain she had…ended her own life.”
Her mother would never have surrendered. Forfeited her life that way.
“Are you all right?” he asked, his brow creased.
Who would be? she wondered.
“Why did she hide it, then, instead of just destroying it?” Etta asked instead. “That’s the only way to truly keep it out of Ironwood’s hands, right?”
“It gets at a struggle we’ve felt for years, the debate we’ve been locked in.” He reached down to the satchel near his feet, removing a dark leather journal. “This came into our possession almost twenty years ago, when your great-grandfather Linden died. It’s one of his ancestors’ journals, one of the old record-keepers who compiled information from old traveler journals and tracked changes to the timeline. From her understanding of her old ancestor’s legends, destroying the astrolabe would have a nullifying effect on any alternations to the original timeline.”
“Meaning,” Etta said, “it would revert to the exact thing you and this group are after—the original version of the timeline?”
“Yes, but at a steep cost,” Henry said, placing the journal back on the desk. “Do you know that passages collapse when a traveler nearby dies outside of their natural time?”
Etta nodded.
“Imagine losing the one thing that could reopen them in the event of someone becoming trapped—being forced to wait out years or decades in an unwelcoming time, separated from your family,” he said. “There used to be thousands of passages, and now, there are only a few hundred. Many would argue that, as more of us die than are born, our way of life will vanish as the last passages close.”
“But not you.”
“Not me,” he said. “I understand that not everyone uses the passages for their own selfish ends, the way Ironwood does. Many simply need them to visit members of their family and friends who can’t travel, or to conduct studies and research. Even your mother felt that way—unwilling to potentially risk losing her family in other centuries. But recent events have proven to me that this has become a necessity if we’re to restore what’s rightfully meant to be.”
The buzzing static in Etta’s ears finally exploded, swallowing his words. Some part of her strained against what he was asking of her; she didn’t want this information, didn’t want to know this, or put the pieces together.
“This doesn’t make sense,” she said, hating the desperation in her voice, as she reached for logic to protect her heart, “none of it. She wanted me to destroy it. She told me that herself.”
Unless he was lying about wanting to destroy the astrolabe, or what destroying it would do—but then, what was the point? He would be trying to convince her of all the reasons it needed to exist, and what they intended to do with it. But none of her usual red flags were being raised. If anything, he just sounded tired and angry—there was nothing calculating in his eyes or tone. He believed what he was telling her.
“Then she should have returned to us the moment she was able, but she didn’t,” Henry said. “Instead, she concocted a scheme to force you to do the work for her. She endangered your life every step of the way, and somehow, worst of all, she kept you in perfect ignorance. Because—my God, because she needed events to play out the way this special destiny required. She knew that Ironwood would eventually learn of you and try to use you, and she allowed it.”
Etta leaned heavily against the desk, and used her very last defense. “She did it to save my future.”
“Ironwood’s future,” he corrected gently. “I see you struggling with the lack of logic. There’s simply none to be found. Instead of destroying the astrolabe, she created this game to justify—to reinforce—what she believes she saw as a girl. It is the only explanation for this charade.”
“Because if she had wanted to save my future,” Etta said around the knot in her throat, “she would have told me to protect the astrolabe, not destroy it.”
Her mother would have had her be the means of her own future’s destruction, all the while lying about that being the only way to save it. The pain of it stole her breath.
When Etta was young, she had come to understand that loneliness had a pitch—that high whine of static that coated silence. Sometimes, she’d sit at her bedroom door and watch her mother paint in the living room, quiet and lovely. Cool and sharp. Etta would count the wish, wish, wish of the brushstrokes.
She stood in the silence, asking, Do you see me?
She played concert after concert to the empty seat beside Alice’s, asking, Can you hear me?
As a child she went to her bed at night, leaving the covers near her feet, her light on, until her mother’s bedroom door would squeak shut. Etta would cry the question into her pillow. Do you care?
All of her life, Etta had been quiet, and determined, and gifted, and caring, and patient, and so hopeful, even in the unbearable loneliness of her own home. Now she could barely breathe. She could not hear Alice, she could not find her way back to those memories, because then she’d have to see, she’d have to accept, that the one person who’d cared for her, about her, with her, was gone. She would have to see her life not as a seed sprouting into bloom after years of work, but like an orchid her mother had precisely clipped and watered just enough to survive.
“It’s not true,” she said.
But Henry only watched her, a hand rubbing his mouth and jaw. He looked as if there were something else he wanted to say, something that could possibly be worse, but he held it back.
It’s not true, she whispered.
She knew she was crying too late to stop it.
“I don’t—” Henry began, forcing his arms down to his side. His fists clenched, curling with each agon
ized word. “Please—I don’t even…I don’t even know how to comfort you.” He repeated it, in wrenching disbelief. “I don’t know how to comfort you. She did not even let me have that.”
Etta felt herself dissolve into her own pain, pressing a fist against her throat to lock in her sob. The cruelty of this—the viciousness. How much her mother must have hated her to try to trick her into destroying her own life.
“As it turns out,” she managed to say, “nothing about her has ever been real, except her indifference.”
“Oh, Etta, Etta—” He shook his head, and whatever had held him back before was gone. The warmth of his fingers as they curled around her own reached her, even as she shook. “Etta, you’re wanted, you’re everything, don’t you see? My God, it breaks my heart to see you like this. Tell me what I can do.”
Henry’s anger was real, and it was palpable, building a charge with each word he spoke, until Etta wasn’t sure which of them would explode first. In some strange way, Etta was grateful he was there, that his fury was flaring, mirroring and building upon her own. It validated every doubt. It spoke to all of those times she’d cried herself to sleep, wondering if that would be the night her mother finally heard her, or if the silence would swallow that, too. Etta wasn’t stupid, but like Henry had said, she’d been blinded by her own love, and the pointless pursuit of her mother’s love.
And somehow the worst part of it wasn’t how Etta had been used, but how Rose’s plan for her had created collateral damage. Nicholas. What would he say to this—would he hate her, knowing that her family, not his, had ultimately been the cause of so much of his pain?
She was shaking, and tried to hide it by moving to the other side of the desk, sucking in enough air, smearing the tears from her face, until she found some calm undercurrent in herself to grasp.
“Can you tell me what’s going on? I need to understand what happened. The last I knew, your men had nearly killed me and N—” She caught herself, because her feelings for Nicholas weren’t something she wanted to share, not with this virtual stranger.
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