CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Vi
The waves were choppy and the wind not yet chilled with winter’s edge as the tide pulled us out once more into the sea. Mal and I had booked our passage on the maiden voyage of the smallest, fastest ship to come out of Brenna’s shipyard in the last year. The first class of students had just been welcomed into the halls of the new university, and judgment had at last been handed down for the wrongdoings committed by the anchorites. It was a new era for the Alskad Empire, and unlike the last time I’d left Alskad, I felt a pang of sadness as I watched Penby fade into the horizon.
“Will you be homesick?” Mal asked.
I wrapped an arm around his waist and pulled him close to me in a sisterly embrace. “I’ll miss Bo and the brats. I’ll miss Gerlene. But homesick? No. I don’t think so. I don’t know that Alskad is really home anymore.”
“Where’s home, then?”
I rubbed the pearl I’d saved from my hoard, now set on a gold chain around my neck, and watched the waves churning in the boat’s wake as I thought about his question. I loved the ocean, and the answer that sprang immediately to mind was that home was anywhere where the salt air kissed me good morning and tucked me in at night. But I also loved books and good food and having my brother by my side.
But if all of that disappeared, it wouldn’t end me. I’d keep going, keep working, keep living. As I watched Alskad disappear, I thought about the choices I’d made and the things I couldn’t live without. The little cottage by the sea I’d always imagined would become my home.
It seemed to me that home was more of a feeling than a place. Home was hard work for a cause I cared deeply about. Home was resisting the easy choice in favor of the right one. Home was an honest conversation with someone I loved. Home was every moment of a life I’d learned to never take for granted.
Home was the difference I made in the world.
* * *
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is important, I think, to acknowledge that I wrote this book in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. I poured my fury at the state of the world into these pages and left poor Vi and Bo to deal with it all. Vi’s experience with depression very much mirrors my own, and as I read back over these pages for the last time, my heart yearns to reach out and hug her and everyone else who battles this disease. For those of you living with depression or anxiety, www.depression.org and www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org have some tremendous resources. And, if you can, talk to someone you trust. Depression thrives in the shadows and does its best to keep us silent and suffering alone. Talking about it brings it into the light.
And now, thanks.
Thank you to my editor, Lauren Smulski, for loving Vi and Bo as much as I do, and for helping me bring them to life on the page.
My eternal gratitude to the Inkyard Press team for your support of these books. Y’all are the best.
Thank you to my readers and writer pals and friends and Fighters. I owe my ability to finish this book and the next one and the one after that and on and on to you.
Thank you to all the booksellers who have embraced and championed my work. I owe you the moon—and not a broken one.
Thank you to Brent Taylor for having a vision for my twin books about twins. I am grateful for your friendship and support.
A big thanks to my family. It means the world to me that you understand when I have to buckle down and put my head into an imaginary world for weeks at a time. I love you the most.
Many thanks to Molly Ker Hawn, a bright light and a steadying force, for whom I am deeply grateful.
To Cody—within these pages is your horse chase scene, one of a multitude of suggestions you’ve made that make my stories a thousand times better. I couldn’t do this without you. I love you more than black holes love warping time.
And to my readers—thank you for taking this trip with me.
ISBN-13: 9781488034305
The Exalted
Copyright © 2019 by Kaitlyn Sage Patterson
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