by Aleo, Cyndy
“You have a lot to think about,” Grace says while she fills the kettle at the sink, her back to Donovan. “I am guessing my son was inelegant in his explanations and made you feel awkward and overwhelmed, which is why you are down here with me instead of upstairs with him. It's also why he is upstairs sulking in his room instead of down here with you.”
Donovan flutters her hands. This may be the longest conversation she's ever had with Grace, and she can’t even think what she wants to ask her now that the door’s been opened for her. So many things run through her mind, all begging to be the first questions asked.
“So what's your real name?” is what she blurts out before she can even think of what she wants to know first.
Donovan wants to pound her head on the tile counter top, but Grace tilts her head back and out peals a full-throated laugh.
“That was not the first question I thought you'd ask, but I like it. Start with the easy things and work your way around to the tougher things. My birth name isn't that far off, actually. It's Grażyna. The English translation is Grace.”
“Why is Van — Jakub's — so different then?”
Grace hands her a cup, the steam rolling off the top of it and a bright sunflower dangling over the side with which to pull the tea ball out by once the tea is done steeping.
“More protection, I suppose,” Grace says, setting down her own cup. “It would be too obvious if both our names were the same in English. 'Vance' means 'from the fen' which is where we are from, in a way.”
“And Jakub? What does that mean?”
“Supplanter.” Grace takes a sip of her tea, grimacing at the heat. “In a way, that's exactly what he was. He took the place of everything for me: my life, my sisters — everything.”
“You miss them.”
Donovan knows it’s true; she doesn't need to ask. But she wants confirmation of something more and doesn't quite know what it might be or how to ask the right questions.
Silence stretches between them, broken only by Grace's deep breaths and both women sipping their tea.
“I miss … the idea of them,” Grace finally says. “I miss being part of something larger than myself. I was less me and more part of a whole when I was with them.
“We all had names, but no surnames; we were simply part of the sisterhood. But then when my Jakub was born, everything shifted and changed and nothing was the same. That whole I was part of? Was now against me and wanted my child dead, simply because he had been born with the wrong parts between his legs. As quickly as that, my sisters were now nothing to me. They turned against me."
“Could you ever go back?”
Grace's eyes narrow and a noise comes from her throat that sounds something like a growl. Donovan is off her stool and backing out of the kitchen toward the front door as quickly as she can, knocking things over while Grace advances on her.
Jakub, hearing things crashing in Donovan's wake, hurtles down the stairs in two giant leaps. He reaches the front door at almost the same time she does, placing himself between her and his mother.
“What the hell is going on here?”
“She wants to know,” Grace says, “If I can go back to my sisters.” She all but spits the words, fury boiling off her. Donovan cringes away, feeling the waves of Grace’s anger sweeping over her.
This is her limit, the one she’s been wondering when she’d hit. She knows what it is now, and she’s finally reached it. She wants to go back to her tiny apartment, curl up under the covers, and go to sleep and then maybe she'll wake up from this horrible nightmare soon.
“She doesn't understand,” he says to his mother. “She's trying to. She doesn't know what she's asking. I didn't tell her everything. Let me explain. Please.”
Before Donovan can reach behind her back and get her fingers on the doorknob, he grabs her elbow and pulls her along, dragging her back upstairs to his room. When they’re back inside, he shuts the door and gestures her back to his bed. She hears the door slam downstairs, so hard the windows in his room rattle in their frames.
Exhausted and frightened, she breaks down, curling up on the bed and giving in to the sobs that have been threatening since she first realized the man on the stairs trying to kiss her wasn't her Vance. And that makes her angry, because she’s not a girl who cries. She’s put up with a lot, okay, and she’s never once cried over it. Now she’s some wilting ingenue, weeping at the drop of a hat.
He gingerly sits down on the bed beside her, offering a box of tissues and a light touch on her back, hesitant at first, then a bit more confident as he gently strokes her until the racking gasps subside into staccato hiccups.
She takes one of the proffered tissues and blows her nose, loudly.
“That has to be attractive,” she says.
His token laugh is a brief burst of air combined with a half-smile.
“That question you asked my mother downstairs. What did you mean by it?”
Donovan is wiping under her eyes, where she's sure makeup must be running in sooty rivers. She stops her attempts at cosmetic damage control and rephrases her question, hoping her second try won't be as offensive as her first obviously was.
“All I meant to ask was, after all this time, and seeing how great you turned out, and how you wouldn't hurt a fly, if she says she's sorry and you agree to stay here with humans, will they let her go back? She seems like she's lonely without the rest of her people.”
He scrubs at his face with the heels of his hands before resorting to his nervous hair rubbing. She thinks that means attempt number two went just as poorly as the first.
“I don't think you understand,” he says. “There is no going back for her. Their laws say that male issue are to be killed immediately. They don't get fed. They don't get held. If they see the genitalia, they kill. That's all. Allowing a male child to live is a crime punishable by death. And there’s no jury trial.”
“There's no way of —“
“She could slay me this instant, in front of them all, and they would still kill her for her transgressions. She knew the decision she was making. She gave up her life for mine. She's just been biding time until they come for us both.”
“There's no way out of it? For either of you?”
He won't look at her, won't raise his eyes from the floor.
“Not that she's ever been able to see,” he answers. “And I know nothing about them other than my mother's stories.”
“Do you have to forget me again? Is it back to the same old thing now?”
She'll bear it to keep him safe. Now that she understands, she's sure she can live with the endless cycle of wanting more and never getting it. It will hurt, but she'll do it. Much as his mother has for a hell of a lot longer.
“No,: he says. “Whatever I am, apparently I’m at — or nearly at —the the age of maturity. There is no going back. We can only go forward."
She'll lose him in the end, then. Not that he was ever really hers. It doesn't stop her from sitting up and throwing herself at him anyway. He hesitates before he wraps his arms around her, gently stroking her back again.
They say nothing; she has no words and he's said everything that he can.
18: Sacrifice
Grace is nearly to the main road before she stops running. Her breathing is still even, and she's oddly pleased that, old as she is, she can still run at least a mile or two without breaking a sweat. It will probably come in handy soon, although who knows what her sisters have become in the intervening years. Maybe they are even more healthy. Maybe they can run faster. Maybe their bodies appear even younger than hers.
She entertains herself for a few moments with a ridiculous fantasy of the sisters emerging from the forest, discovering the Internet and the joys of online shopping, and becoming slovenly and obese by eating newly discovered junk food and being unwilling and unable to give chase. She shakes it off before she finally turns and starts her walk back to the house, her return much slower than her run, giving Jakub and Donovan tim
e alone before she returns.
It will be impossible for Donovan to understand, she knows. She can't find the words to say it aloud. From the moment Grace decided to meet Jakub when he returned, to prod his memory until it all came spilling out like marbles rolling under couches and down into heating vents, never to be retrieved, she knew she was letting something loose she won't be able to put back.
Jakub hasn't accepted it yet, but she knows she will not come out of this alive. Her one hope is that her son will. From the moment she'd run with him, she'd known she had one best hope: get out, keep him safe for as long as she could, and hopefully, by the time her sisters caught up with them, he'd be powerful enough on his own to survive without her.
She reaches the stream that surrounds their property and crosses it halfway, choosing a large boulder in the center on which to sit. There's a small break in the trees: just enough to let dapples of sunlight through to dance over her and the rock and the water.
The movement of the sunlight distracts her from her thoughts for a few minutes, and she enjoys the peace of her mind shutting off. It seems like it has always been working, the gears incessantly turning and her thoughts always assessing, looking for some small error in every moment of the day that will lead them straight to her.
Now there are no errors. Just simple deliberation.
Stretching out on the boulder, she raises her face to the sky, wondering how many of the sisters' myths are true. She knows they live an unnaturally long time — she herself is proof — because she has been able to track that time by the calendar of humans. And their life span is far healthier than that of humans, with much less illness. She knows they are larger. What she doesn't know are some of the other things, like whether the myth of a male born will bring about their eventual destruction, or whether some kind of afterlife really exists.
Some humans believe in life after death as well. Then again, some humans believe the Dziwozony are witch-creatures whose breasts are so huge they throw them up over their shoulders as they run through the forests of Poland like the fabled Sasquatch.
The first time Grace had seen that in a book after she'd taught herself to read in order to research what information the humans had on her people she'd nearly been kicked out of the library she was in for laughing so loudly.
That idea is still enough to get her laughing, even years later. She and her sisters tend to leaner, muscular builds. She doesn't think any of them had large enough breasts — that she could recall — to even require thinking about supporting with some kind of cloth as humans wear, much less being of the size to sling over one's shoulders.
Still, it’s an amusing idea and intriguing to think about why humans would come up with such a story. Does it make the sisters more fearsome somehow?
Reaching out, she tries to feel Jakub and Donovan in the house. He'll need her. He wasn't raised with the sisters, nor was he raised to be entirely independent. He was raised as a human: to need companionship, and to believe in love.
This is all second-guessing. She isn't sure if she taught him too much about surviving in the human world after her and too little about what he'll need to know to fight in the first place. In all the research, all the stories, all the short, offhand mentions in books, there is never anything about a male survivor. Never a hint that one might have gone before and succeeded.
There are myths about everything, but the one thing she wants most to believe in: is that someone has been able to do this before her. While occasionally a sister would cry for a day or two after killing a male infant, none ever spoke of regret or of doing things differently or wishing she could have kept the child. And now she will never know how they bore it.
Deciding Jakub and Donovan aren't ready for company yet, she rolls off the boulder and into the stream. She floats face-down, her hair bobbing on the surface the only movement for long minutes.
~
Bożena is tempted to pack bags and leave if only to get away from Edyta and her group of warmongers. There’s really no other way to describe them; if they had swords, they’d be rattling them as a background for the incessant clamor of their demands.
They are convinced Grażyna and her son must be hunted. Immediately. Every second she delays is one in which he grows stronger. One in which he has more time to prepare to wage war against the sisters.
Bożena rolls her eyes so much when they aren’t looking she’s convinced she will end up with one of the headaches humans are always complaining about.
Let him, she wants to scream at them. Let him come and take over. At least that’s the best chance she’ll have of shutting Edyta up.
After the initial shock of feeling the boy child’s power again had passed, Bożena is back to being indecisive. All they have are stories that were passed down by sisters who came before her. They’ve never let a male live in her time. None of the sisters she’d asked had known of one that survived either.
So how do they know he will bring destruction? How do they know he will end them?
Bożena is aware that women all over the world, women far away from their forest home, are subjugated to the wills of men. She acknowledges the issues that have resulted when men have come to stay with the sisters, and when more than one sister has rutted with the same man.
But that doesn’t mean one they raised would do the same.
What if there was a male the sisters were able to teach, to train? What if they allowed a male to live with them and be one with them? Would he share the same way of thinking? Would he be kind and giving? Would he act as a sister, sharing their communal thoughts?
Bożena can’t help but wonder if they’ve been wrong all along. And if that wrongness is what’s keeping her from acting even now.
So she waits. And angers Edyta and the rest of Edyta’s group, sowing strife among the sisters.
But it’s important that she not be wrong. That she not be the one who leads them to their end.
Then again, maybe no matter what she does, they’re already there.
19: Connection
Jakub is torn between his mother's pain and Donovan's. One wraps itself in anger like a rose with thorns, daring you to try to touch it without drawing blood. The other turns inward, spikes jamming into the delicate organs, soft tissue and causing damage no one can see.
Right or wrong, he chooses Donovan. His mother's pain is old and scarred over. He knows he can’t reach her. With his memories restored, he knows he's tried and failed many times over. She’s lost without her sisters and knows she can never go back. She has believed for well over a hundred years that she will die for her choices and there’s no other way for this to end. He can talk to her for the next hundred years and get nowhere in convincing her otherwise.
Donovan is a different story. Her pain is new and fresh: an open wound he can still attempt to heal. She lacks the history of his mother's self-flagellation for violating the single most important law of her tribe.
He crouches beside where Donovan has curled into a ball on the floor, hugging her knees to her chest and hiding her face in her crossed arms. She tries to hide that she's crying, but her breath hitches every so often.
Carefully, he lowers himself fully to the floor and pulls her into his lap, resting his chin on top of her head. At first, she remains stiff, but she starts to relax when he rubs her back in concentric circles.
“I didn't know,” she says into his chest.
“No one expects you to.”
He continues rubbing her back, and they lapse into silence again. She's so still that he's sure she's asleep, but then she speaks again, sitting up and brushing some of her hair out of her eyes.
“Why am I here? This is so much bigger than I am. I can't possibly begin to understand everything that you know and are and …”
"Stop. I want you here. And beyond that, my mother has always wanted you here. She’s the one who first encouraged me to be friends with you. I was content not having any friends at school at all, but she kept harassing me ab
out the girl who came home with me that one time to work on a project.
“She said you had eyes that were centuries older than you were, and that they followed me around the room, even when I wasn't talking to you. I won't try to second-guess her motives, but I think she means for you to be here for whatever is coming.”
“So these other women — her sisters — you're sure they will come after you now?”
He stalls answering her for a bit by lifting her off his lap and helping her up after he's standing. He drags his fingers through her hair trying to make the snarls do his bidding and fall back into the smooth sheets he's used to.
“They always have,” he says, finally. “We've moved every time they’ve found us. They only stopped coming after us once we found a way to remove my memories. Doing that has hidden everything about me they could track because I looked — and felt — like a regular human boy.
“We’ve still had to move every so often, as I age much slower than other children, but at least we weren't constantly running while looking over our shoulders, and we weren't living constantly in fear.”
Her hands grasp his and hold them still, almost as if they’re moving of their own volition. His nervous tics have moved on to fidgeting with her hair instead of his own now, and he freezes. Is this wrong? Should he not be touching her?
Before last night, he was so nervous all the time. Either he was in the process of remembering her, or he'd remembered enough to know he wanted her and couldn't have her. He’s kept a mentally constructed forcefield around her, which meant they rarely touched, and when they did, it was usually by accident.
Now, after last night, and her opposite reaction this morning, he isn't sure what he’s allowed to do. He finds he wants — needs — to touch her. He feels better when his skin is in contact with hers in some way, like he can feed off her energy and simultaneously protect her as long as they stay in physical contact.