Tempered (A Daughters of the People Novel) (Daughters of the People Series) (24 page)

She condensed
the Legend of Beginnings into its most basic parts. The deaths of Mother and
Father at the hands of the men of the People. The enslavement of the men’s
wives in the name of safety or property or some other ideal not yet discovered.
The Sanctuary the Seven Sisters sought where they tamed wild horses and honed
their skills with the bow and spear. The dream the eldest sister had that led
the young women back to the People, where they avenged their parents’ deaths
and freed the women of the People. The curse laid upon them by the god An, who heard
the cries of the men as they died, but ignored the injustices those men had
perpetrated. And finally, the nature of the curse, that the Sisters and their
daughters would live on, forever without the comfort of love or the ability to
bear sons.

“Wait, you mean
after all the sisters went through, he cursed them anyway?” Aaron shook his
head. “That’s just wrong.”

“Do not fret,
love. Ki, the Lady Goddess, was unable to ignore the plight of the Sisters. She
tweaked the curse, allowing each one to break it if she could submit her will
to the man who held her heart. Thereafter, that woman would be mortal and could
bear the sons denied her by an angry, ignorant god.”

He was silent
for a long time, so long Hawthorne’s nerves grew short and frayed. “Later, it
is said, Ki bestowed a prophecy upon the People. In it, she detailed a way that
the curse might be broken once and for all.”

“That was what
Isolde was talking about, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. The
Prophecy of Light. Its existence passed from reality into memory and then to
rumor. Until recently, the People had no concrete knowledge of it. Not even the
eldest of us could ascertain the truth of its existence, as it was so closely guarded
before it was lost.”

“Back up a
little bit and explain this submission thing to me.” His hand found hers where
it rested on his stomach, pressing her closely to him. “So, a Daughter has to
love someone before the curse can be broken and then what? I mean, what happens
to her? Is she still immortal?”

“Once the curse
is broken, she becomes mortal, free to love and live as she wishes.”

“But it can only
happen when she falls in love.”

“There must also
be trust.”

His head made a
gentle thud as he rested it upon the wall. “Well, damn.”

She twisted
around, peered at his expression with concern. “What is it, love? Is your wound
aching?”

“No, I’m fine.
My head is anyway.” He breathed out a quiet, sad laugh. “Don’t think my heart’s
gonna make it, though.”

“What do you
mean?” She sat up and patted his chest as alarm shot through her. Had Isolde
harmed him in some other way, some way that could not be detected by modern
science? “Should I call the doctor?”

“No. Hey, cut
that out.” He grabbed her hands, holding them to his chest, stopping her from
running them over him in the hopes of discovering what ailed him. “There’s
nothing wrong with my physical heart, Hawthorne. I was talking about my
feelings, the way you’ve wormed your way inside and taken over until I can
barely go a minute without thinking about you and needing you. God, I love you
so much.”

“You love me?”
She sat back on her heels. “Truly?”

“Yeah, truly.
I’m so, so sorry I didn’t believe you before.”

She inhaled
deeply, searching for the correct words. “Many men do not, regardless of what
is in their not-physical heart.”

“Could you… Do
you think you could ever love me enough to trust me like that, to become mortal
and live with me and make a family together?”

She glanced
away. “The love is there.”

“But not the
trust. Damn me for not believing you the first time, for not giving you a
chance to explain.” He scrubbed his hands over his face in short, sharp motions.
“So what happens now? You go on being young Hawthorne and I grow old, wishing I
could have a do over and make things right between us?”

“It would not be
the first time such a relationship has existed among the People.”

“Yeah? Well,
those people weren’t us.” He dropped his hands and stared at her with such
bleakness in his chocolate eyes, it twisted into her heart like a thin-bladed
knife. “I’m not a fool, Hawthorne. I know what’ll happen. Eventually, I’ll be
nothing but a burden to you and you’ll wonder what you ever saw in the foolish
old man I’ll become. I don’t think I can handle watching you learn to hate me.”

She said
nothing. There was nothing she
could
say. When a Daughter could not
bring herself to trust the man who had captured her heart, it seldom ended
well. Every school child heard the tales whispered from ear to ear, a warning
to the unwise.
Give your heart carefully
, mothers schooled their
immortal daughters,
else your love will wither before trust is earned and
the curse shall never be broken
.

Had she not
cautioned her own daughters thusly?

Yet every
Daughter, or mostly so, wished to find the man who could earn her trust, a man
who would love her fiercely and give her the sons denied her by a vengeful god.

“You will not
leave,” she told him.

His smile was
gentle, tender. “Is that a command or a request?”

“It is what it
is. If you leave, we shall never know if I can learn to trust you.”

“True.” He
reached out, drew her in until she rested against him, heart to heart. “How long
will you let me cling to hope?”

“As long as you
can stand doing so.” She curled her fingers into his shirt, willing her heart
to trust where, she was very afraid, trust would never again grow. “Come. Lali
will wake soon. If you are not there when she does, she will become
frightened.”

“What happened
to making her learn to stand on her own?”

“She is four.
Such will come in time.”

He tilted her
chin up, cupped her face in his graceful hand. “I love you.”

“I know.” She
pressed a testing kiss to his lips, and another, simply because she could. “I
know, my love.”

They made their
way to Lali’s room hand in hand, uncertainty stretching between them. As they
passed the painting displayed in the alcove on the second floor, Hawthorne sent
a weary prayer to the Lady Goddess.

Please help my
heart learn to trust
.

It was the first
time she had ever uttered that plea in her long, lonely life. She suspected it
would not be the last.

Aaron’s heart
teetered between the love he felt for Hawthorne and disbelief over her story.
Even after her explanation, he had a hard time buying it. That she believed it,
lived it, really, there could be no doubt. He’d known her long enough to
understand her basic nature. Hell, it hadn’t taken him three days to know that
whatever else Hawthorne might be, a liar she was not.

As he alternated
his time between helping with Thanksgiving preparations and caring for Lali,
his mind lingered more and more on the one reason he had for not giving in.

It had nothing
to do with the incredulity of her story or the thinness of the evidence she’d
laid before him. He had a sneaky feeling that the more time he spent in her
vault, the less those would be a problem. No, what bothered him the most was
the fact that if everything she said was true, they could never be together.
Forever for a mortal man was only a few decades. For an immortal Daughter who’d
already lived nearly two thousand years, eternity took on a whole new meaning.

Believing that
she was immortal meant coming to terms with having to give her up, not in a few
decades when death claimed them, but in a few years when he began to age and
she remained forever trapped in her youth.

He rubbed
absent-mindedly over the ache gathering in the region around his heart and, for
the umpteenth time, cursed his own lack of faith. The memory of Pop’s voice
drifted through his mind, and with it came the antiseptic stench of the
hospital and a hopeless sense of impending loss. Pop had been weeks from death,
his strength siphoned off trying to fight the cancer eating him alive from the
inside out. His faith had never flagged, not once, and it had pissed Aaron off.
His own faith was being tested under the twin pressures of his father’s illness
and the growing knowledge that his marriage would fail, and there’d been
nothing he could do about either one.

One day, sitting
there reading a dog-eared copy of
The Old Man and the Sea
to his father,
his mind had wandered from the story and Aaron had snapped. How could a
merciful god allow a good man to wither and die?

“Death comes to
everything, Aaron,” Pop had said.

“Not like this,
Pop. You don’t deserve this.”

Pop’s hand had
twitched against the sterile white of the sheet he lay on. “No man deserves the
death he receives. God has nothing to do with it. It just is, like the sun
setting over the ocean or the moon hanging in the sky.”

Aaron’s laugh
had been bitter and hard.

“Laugh if you
want, my son, but remember this. Without death, there can be no life, no
rebirth, no beginning, and without beginnings, we have no reason to hope or
believe. Faith is what carries us through. Every morning when you get up, do you
worry that the sun might not rise? No. That simple faith tells you to worry
about something else.”

“That’s not
faith, Pop, that’s science.”

“Science,
faith.” Pop’s hand had twitched again. “There’s not such a big difference
between the two. Use your brain a little less and your heart a little more. And
pray. You young people never pray enough.”

A few days
later, Pop drifted into a coma, and not long after, he was gone. Aaron had
never found his faith, not the way Pop had wanted him to. Praying had gotten
easier, yes, but faith? It wasn’t such an easy thing to come by with the world
falling apart around him.

And now, that
lack of faith had come back to haunt him.

He reclined on
Lali’s bed, brushing a hand over her fine hair as she slept deeply, sprawled
across his lap. She clung fiercely to him, had since she’d scrambled away from
Isolde two days before. Since then, she’d been subdued, quiet, her eyes wide
and watchful. Lali’s faith had been broken, too, and it hurt, knowing he’d had
a hand in it.

Was this what
Pop had felt when he’d lectured Aaron about faith, this quiet pain of knowing
you’d destroyed your child’s ability to believe?

If he’d been
stronger, Lali would never have been taken. If he’d trusted Hawthorne the first
time she’d told him of her past, when everything between them was still new and
good, he would’ve had time to learn how to protect the little girl, or at least
to be more cautious. But no, he’d fallen back on his natural skepticism and
refused to entertain the possibility of what had seemed like an impossibility.
Worse, he’d allowed his relationship with Jeanne to color his view of
Hawthorne, as if the women were in any way similar.

He was pretty
sure the only things they had in common were their sex and him. They didn’t
even live in the same reality.

Jeanne’s
delusions had been an excuse, a way for him to protect his still-fragile heart,
and like an idiot, he’d been blind to his own reasoning, ignorant of his own
lack of faith.

It had destroyed
the one hope Hawthorne had of living a normal life. How could a man profess to
love a woman, believe it with all his will, and still be the root of her
deepest misery?

Though she
wouldn’t say it directly, he knew she loved him. After everything he’d done to
her, all the doubts and hurt he’d caused, how could she let him into her bed
otherwise? How could she make love to him night after night without loving him,
knowing their time ticked steadily toward its end because he hadn’t been able to
believe in her?

Because of his
lack of faith.

He smoothed his
hand over Lali once more, gently eased himself out from under her, and dropped
a kiss to her forehead. There were no easy answers here, no paths he could take
to redeem himself and erase the past. He would work harder at believing
Hawthorne and find a way to regain her trust. That was all he could do now.

Building trust.
Hadn’t they been doing that all along?

He snagged a
baby monitor and crept quietly out of the room. Somewhere buried deep in Hawthorne’s
past, there had to be a way to repair his faith, and with it her trust. Two
thousand years of accumulated knowledge lay beneath his feet. It had to be good
for something.

* * *

The hectic rush
of Thanksgiving absorbed Hawthorne’s attention, drawing it from the quagmire of
her relationship with Aaron. What was left of her far-flung family assembled in
her home, accepting his role in her life with a surprising equanimity as gossip
passed from mouth to ear and the meal was presented and eaten. No one looked
askance when Lali clung to him, no one dared question his place at the opposite
end of the table, in the seat of honor usually reserved for a Daughter’s
husband.

No one asked if
she had laid claim to her mortality through his love.

Would that it were
so
.

The thought
whispered through her heart. How she ached to be with him, sharing a life,
loving him, carrying the son denied her by that wretched curse. Her gaze fell
on the sons borne by her daughters or their daughters, through generations of
her female progeny, seated at irregular intervals around the massive table in
her formal dining room. She adored them all, down to the last child, but it
wasn’t enough, would never be enough until she was blessed with a son of her
own.

Her needing time
drew near.

In a few short
weeks, she would ovulate and enter into a short frenzy of need so strong she
would be unable to deny it should Aaron remain. They would copulate again and
again, drawn by the heat of lust that overtook a Daughter this one time each
year, a side effect of the immortality laid unwillingly upon them all, and she
would in all likelihood become pregnant with his child.

Would he wish
for such a circumstance or would he spurn her, leaving her to raise their
offspring alone?

Her gaze met his
down the long table, across the plates of food and the centerpieces of flowers,
and through the curious stares of her kin. His face softened, lighting with the
love he claimed to carry for her, a love not quite deep enough to extend into
trust.

Why did his disbelief
linger?

She lowered her gaze,
hiding the hurt clawing its way through her. She was a fool to continue their
charade, in spite of his attempts to understand, to know. The day before, he
had snuck into the vault and retrieved the volumes he had been reading when
Isolde had bludgeoned him, along with a stack of back issues of
The World of
the People
, and then the questions had begun. Why is the Sandby borg site
significant? What is the Eye of Marnan? Which Sister are you descended from?
Why are Sons so protected? How do you worship the Lady Goddess? And on and on
in the bits and pieces of time they had snatched since she had led him to her
vault.

He was trying.
It should have been enough. Much as her grandsons were no substitute for the
son she desired, though, Aaron’s attempts to believe were not as good as belief
itself.

And still, she
could not bring herself to push him away.

Was she so
desperate for love that she lowered herself to this? Was she not worthy of a
man who loved her enough to accept her past and earned her trust because of it?

Or had her heart
discovered a truth her mind refused to acknowledge, that Aaron was the one man
she had met to whom she could actually submit her will, if only she were
patient enough?

A slight breath
stuttered from her chest. After two millennia, her patience had at last petered
out.

She peeked at
him again and her heart melted. He and Lali were bent toward one another, their
heads nearly touching as they talked softly. The two had been inseparable since
Isolde’s ill-begotten attempt to kidnap Lali and thus gain leverage over
Hawthorne. It had not been a bad plan, all in all, and might have worked if
Isolde had not discounted Aaron’s fierce love for the little girl, a love that
was returned equally and openly.

Aaron had proven
himself worthy of the little girl’s faith and continued to do so each time he
placed Lali’s well-being above his own. Another man might have hesitated in
that hallway. A weaker one would never have dragged himself after another man’s
child the way Aaron had.

Hawthorne
stilled. Here, she trusted him implicitly. Her fingers clutched around the
napkin in her lap, wrinkling it into an untidy wad as she prodded the emotion. Yes,
she trusted him with Lali, enough to concede to his reason and logic where her
granddaughter was concerned.

She
trusted
him.

Her lips lifted
into a smile and laughter bubbled up in her chest, spilling out. The table fell
abruptly silent and the shocked gazes of her kin turned toward her.

The trust was
small and would never be enough to break the curse on its own, would never be
enough for her to subsume her will to his, but it was a start.

Aaron grinned
and raised his half-full glass of water. “A toast. To Hawthorne, the matriarch
of our family, and to the love and laughter she shares with us all.”

Chairs scraped
back, scuffing against the carpet as her family stood, raised their glasses,
and drank to the woman who had finally learned to trust.

* * *

The day went
much as any other family gathering. Hawthorne played the gracious host as her
family came and went. She cuddled children and discussed finances with their
parents, listened attentively and doled out advice whether her family wanted it
or not.

Through it all,
Aaron never strayed far from her sight, as if he knew she drew comfort from his
presence.

Near the fall of
evening, Levi stopped by with an unwelcome surprise in tow, a familiar looking young
woman and her son. The woman was nearly a foot shorter than Levi with dark
waves of hair floating down her back and gently rounded curves. The boy had his
mother’s silver eyes, a like intelligence shining from them, and was slender as
a whip. His hand was tucked in Levi’s, though when he saw Hawthorne, he dropped
it and threw his thin shoulders back, meeting her gaze steadily.

Envy tugged at
Hawthorne’s heart. Did this mortal woman know how lucky she was to have such a
son?

Hawthorne rose
from her seat on the living room couch, her gaze as cold as the frost gathering
on the grass each morning. Beside her, Aaron rose as well, and with him Lali,
who gasped.

Levi met
Hawthorne’s gaze with a level stare of his own. “Nana, this is Sera Noland and
her son, Peter.”

“Petey!” Lali
ran to the surprised little boy and threw her arms around his waist, nearly
knocking him over with her exuberance. “I been waiting and waiting for you.”

Petey sent a
helpless look to his mother, who looked at Levi, who winked at the little boy
and said, “Peter, this is Lali, my cousin.”

“Ah. Um. Hi?” Peter
laid a tentative hand on her shoulder and patted gently. “Um, maybe you could
not squeeze so hard.”

Lali unwound her
arms and slipped her hand into his, beaming up at him. “I gots so much to tells
you. My puppy came to live with me and I gots to carry a sword and the mean
cushion came, just like the pretty lady said she would. Do you want to play
dolls with me?”