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“You must always remember that all the answers you need are in the written word,” she continued. “In scrolls, in poems, in songs, in books. Find the right words and you will have your answer.”
A single line in the book had caught my attention and changed the entire course of my life. Only the eye of the goddess can restore Locris.
They had fallen in love the first time they met. I still remembered the way they were with each other—the laughter, the secret touches, the longing in their eyes, the stolen kisses.
They had openly declared their love for one another from the beginning. Saying “I love you” to a romantic partner was an unbreakable bond and commitment. Doria had once told me that saying the words had stitched her soul to Haemon’s in a mystical way she couldn’t properly describe.
“It’s easier for women to believe in magic because we have the ability to make life and carry it inside us. We’re already magic. And it is a magic no man will ever understand.”
And as soon as I saw his face, my heart whispered, Oh, there you are. I’ve been waiting for you.
A recognition, a remembrance, rather than encountering someone for the first time. As if we had been destined to meet. My soul calling to his.
“I would hate to kiss you and ruin you for any other man’s kisses.”
There was never any guarantee, of course—a man who could be bribed was a man without honor.
This belief that women were special enough to be pleasing to the goddess, but that we were ultimately easy to discard and unimportant. Strong enough to be slaughtered but not important enough to fight for.
“Weren’t you the one who told me the greatest pleasure in life is doing something everyone says is impossible?” I asked. “I want to live by my choice, not by chance.”
“Yield to me.” He murmured the words against my skin and I both heard and felt them. “Give in.”
My grandmother had taught me that wisdom had always been passed down through the written word—through the stories told, through songs that were sung, through poems read aloud. If women couldn’t read, they couldn’t access that information. They would never know what the women before them had done. How they had been heroines and overcome trials and obstacles.
“There’s a reason that gardening is my favorite thing. Putting your hands in newly dug earth? Coaxing life to grow from nothing but soil, water, and sun? There’s something so healing about that. It can mend hearts and souls. It helps you to realize that even a desolate land can be healed and made green again.”
I had been down this path before and knew that this was the way of grief—that it would come and go in waves, surprising with its overwhelming intensity in a moment where you thought yourself past it, imagined you’d become accustomed to the constant pain. Walking along the shore as the water harmlessly lapped at your feet until a wave came along that knocked you over and dragged you back into the ocean, drowning you in sorrow. But even when you made it back to shore, that grief would continue to flow and ebb and there would be moments where you felt like your old self again.
“Sometimes it has to hurt before it can heal,” she said.
“Sometimes you’ll have a healthy plant where a stem or leaves have died. The plant’s instinct is to divert all of its energy to restoring the lost parts, which inhibits its growth. And so, as the gardener, you have to cut those pieces away so that there can be new leaves, new flowers, new life. Sometimes you have to brush away the parts of your life that no longer serve you so that you can move forward.”
“I know there can be heartache from being part of a family, but there is also a great deal of joy.”
I only knew how to speak from my heart and I had to hope that it would be enough.
It is because men have always feared women’s destructive potential. Knowledge gives us power. Your power is a threat.
“Is it my fault that you’re so fascinating that I have to understand everything about you?”
“I like how ordinary things seem special through your eyes.”
“I pledge to you my whole heart. My entire soul. Every part of my being already belongs to you. Ask for anything and it is yours.”
