Fate Forgotten (37 page)

Athena touched his arm.

Thor shook his head and walked away.

Chapter Thirty-five: Present

She slept most of the evening, dimly aware of Lars at her bedside, and Garrit coming and going. The conversations she heard, half-conscious, made no sense to her, though they were whispered so urgently that she felt they must be important, somehow.

“You shouldn’t stay,” Horus was saying. “It’s obviously causing her distress.”

“She’s meant to know me, Ra,” Lars said. “Perhaps now is that time.”

“If it were, she would not be married. And she would have understood by now. Instead, she’s been pained by it.”

“Pained by her brother. And if I go, what then? She’ll be left open to him, to his mind, to the pain he shares with her.” Lars sounded miserable. “Part of me wants to believe that she does this to keep me here.”

“And what of her husband? Marriage protects her from Adam as much as anything else. If she breaks that covenant, there will be nothing left to stop him next time. This is not the time, Thor. You’ve waited so long, what’s one more life?”

Lars’s fingers tightened around her hand. “You were always against this.” His voice was hoarse.

“If God’s messenger has spoken, I will not argue. But it is clearly not yet.” Horus was silent for a moment. “And perhaps I was wrong about your relationship with her. With this family. With this world.”

“I will never belong. No matter how much I wish to.”

“Time will tell,” Horus said. “I will stay with them for as long as I’m needed. And remain in the country for as long as you wish me nearby. But for her sake, now, it would be best if you left. Whether it’s what she wants or not.”

She sank back into her dreams then, and Lars’s response was swallowed up in memories of fishing with Thorgrim off the shore.

Garrit’s voice roused her later, because of the anger and accusation in his tone. “Horus could have done all this. We didn’t need you here, too.”

“Garrit!” René hissed. “You forget yourself.”

“No, René, he’s right,” Lars said. He sounded calm. Tired. Almost bored. “I’ll be gone soon enough. As soon as I’m sure she’s well again.”

“We’re grateful for what you’ve done,” René said. Eve thought he was trying to apologize. “My son forgets how much we owe you.”

“I don’t see you offering him
Maman
in repayment,” Garrit snarled. “You realize that’s what he wants, don’t you? My wife. And you can’t expect me to stand by and let him try to take her without a word of objection.”

“Are you really so afraid she’ll leave you?” Lars asked, his voice mild.

“I would be a fool to think I deserve her. That I can offer her what you can.”

“You do your wife a great disservice, Garrit.”

“Do you really think I haven’t seen the way you look at her? The way she looks at you? The way that she talks about Thorgrim? Am I supposed to believe that you’re not a threat?”

“I’m not half the threat to her or you that Adam is. You’ve seen what he’s willing to do. And while I have been content to wait, Adam has already shown himself to be impatient.”

“She doesn’t love Adam. She doesn’t dream of her life with him. She was never Adam’s wife.”

“Don’t be a damned fool, Garrit,” René said.

Lars sighed. Tired again. “She would never turn her back on you. On her vows. On her family. Not for me, not now.”

“Then why do you stay? Why show yourself at all, if you have no hope?”

“For the same reason that Adam married Mia, knowing it would infuriate her. It has been a long time since I was allowed the indulgence of an association. And being part of this, part of her family however distantly, is a gift that I find difficult to give up.”

She wasn’t sure if it was memory or dreams, but the conversation faded, and she was sitting with Thorgrim on the narrow bunk in the hospital. Bunk was a generous term for what she slept on and she found herself missing the straw pallets of earlier lives. He stroked her hair, and she curled up on her side, her head pillowed against his thigh.

“I wish I could take you from here,” he said. “I wish I had found you in time to prevent this.”

“It isn’t the first time I’ve suffered this way. It happens sometimes, when I forget. When I tell too many stories as a child, and my parents realize how sincerely I believe them. They used to think I was possessed somehow. By the devil, or evil spirits of some kind. Now they call me insane. I think I preferred the exorcisms to the pills though.” She rolled onto her back, and looked up at him. Memorizing his face. Comparing it to memories of him in their little village. “At least the exorcisms didn’t cause me to hallucinate.”

“Does it upset you to see me?”

“Should it?” She reached up to touch his face, tracing her fingers over his lips. If she kissed him, would the delusion hold? Or would it ruin the realness? Force her mind to recognize he wasn’t actually there? “I don’t mind being crazy if it means I can be with you. Feel you. Touch you. Even if it’s all in my head. Maybe it won’t be such a bad thing to spend this life living in the past, in my memory, in my dreams.”

“What do you dream of, Tora?”

She smiled. “Isn’t that obvious? How else do you think you got here?”

“Only when you’re unhappy?” he asked, caressing her cheek. She was surprised by the warmth of his fingers, and the way it made her heart race.

“Always, Thorgrim. I always dream of your love. Of your kindness. I wish so much that you were real. That you were really here. That you lived, and we could run away together. To France. To the mountains. I always loved the mountains.”

“Not to the Norse lands?”

She grimaced. “The winters there are so bitter.”

He chuckled. “I would build you a warm house.”

“And wrap me in your arms. In your warmth. In your love. We could stay inside all winter, with a fire and blankets.”

“Doesn’t that sound better than your French mountains?”

“Perhaps. If it were just the two of us somewhere hidden away. With no one to tell me what I should believe. What god to worship. What prayers to say.”

“I would like that for you. That freedom.”

“I think I would like it for me, too,” she said, hiding her face against his body. He smelled like rain and the moment before a thunderstorm when you know what’s coming. The only thing that wasn’t quite right was the color of his hair. For some reason, she couldn’t remember the right shade of brown, and it just looked strawberry-blonde. Almost red. “But anything is better than here.”

He leaned down to kiss her.

And she woke up.

It was dark. Garrit slept heavily beside her. Dead to the world. She slipped from the bed and tiptoed out of the room with her robe, closing the door silently behind her. She could feel him outside and thought that maybe he had called her. Maybe that was what had woken her from the dream.

He was standing at the edge of the field. Waiting for her. When he saw her, he smiled. “I wasn’t sure you would come.”

“I shouldn’t have.” She wrapped the robe around her more tightly and shook her head. “I shouldn’t have done any of this.”

“It isn’t your fault. I should have left.”

Looking at him now, after having dreamed of Thorgrim, made her ache. “You’re leaving.”

He nodded, and stepped toward her, reaching out to stroke her cheek. “I shouldn’t have ever come. I just wanted to know you. Even if it was only for a moment.”

She shook her head and stepped back. All of this felt like more of the dream. Of the conversations that made no sense to her. But she couldn’t let him touch her. “I keep thinking of Thorgrim. Remembering him. Dreaming of him. And then I see you, and it’s like I’m still in the memory. I just want to fall into my past and stay there. Stay with you. But you aren’t Thorgrim.”

He ducked his head, not meeting her eyes. “Garrit is a good man. If he’s jealous, it’s only because he knows how great a gift it is to have your love. I can’t blame him for feeling as though he’s unworthy of it. But he loves you. He’ll take care of you if you let him.”

“Where will you go?” It was cold. She had goosebumps, standing there. “I thought we were your family.”

“Always.” He smiled again. “No doubt I’ll return. Though with you here, there’s less need of it.”

She didn’t understand that, but she wasn’t sure it mattered. “If you ever need anything, come. I owe you at least that.”

“You owe me nothing, Eve.” He raised his hand as if to touch her, but closed it instead, and his arm dropped back to his side again. “Just stay out of your brother’s mind until he’s healed. I can’t imagine it will be much longer, regardless, but please, promise me that much.”

“I’ll make every effort.” It wasn’t exactly a promise, but it was the best she felt she could offer.

“Don’t let Garrit trust him. He wants to. I don’t know why. Maybe just because he dislikes me so. But don’t let him.”

“Juliette said you used to play together. That he loved you once.”

Lars laughed. “Yes. Once upon a time.”

“What happened?”

He met her eyes, and his expression grew serious again. All humor fading. “He realized that we both loved the same woman and he worried I was the better man. I had kept it from him. The whole truth of my feelings. He considered it a betrayal.”

“Oh.” Love. All those years she spent without it. All those lives she spent with men who didn’t care. Who weren’t interested in anything but her body when their need drove them to her, and now in this life she was overwhelmed by love. “I’m sorry that you lost your friend.”

He shook his head and his smile was forced. “You should get back to bed. You’re freezing.”

She wasn’t, though. She felt warmed from the inside out. “Goodbye.”

It seemed totally inadequate. Empty of real meaning. But if she said more, did more, she knew it would be too much. Too painful. Her hold on her present was still tenuous, and it was tempting to get lost in her past for a moment. To let him kiss her, and pretend that it was Thorgrim. It wouldn’t be fair to anyone. Especially not her husband.

She turned to walk back to the house. Somehow, she barely noticed the cold anymore, a warmth swelling up inside her from her bare feet into her heart, radiating down her limbs. As if she basked in the glow of a fire. When she reached the house, she glanced back over her shoulder. He stood there still, in the field. Watching her. He raised a hand in farewell. She went inside, but couldn’t stop herself from going to the window. To catch one last glimpse of this man who reminded her so forcefully of her past, so familiar and so strange.

But he was already gone.

She crawled back into bed with Garrit, curling up in his arms. He sighed into her hair, falling into a deeper sleep. She lay awake until morning, just so that she wouldn’t dream of Thorgrim.

Chapter Thirty-six: Future

Eve stared at the ceiling for a long time after that, turning Adam’s words over and over in her thoughts. In her heart. She listened to his breathing beside her, curled against his side. It didn’t seem as though he was sleeping either. But he didn’t say anything more, didn’t try to argue his point any further, or even reach for her response.

She let out a breath and wished she had a clear view of the stars. As if their patterns held any answers. But she still remembered Reu’s story, about the god who had given up his eye for the wisdom to save his son, his people. Sometimes, reaching for power was the right thing. She had made that decision once before, taken the fruit, eaten from it and gifted her descendents with the strength to live freely, to choose their own fates. In the process, though, she had bound Reu and all his sons to her protection, and she had wandered ever after, lost, from one life to the next, without purpose, without understanding.