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“Are there potatoes in your stew? I’m not partial to them. It’s a textural thing.”
To surrender and forget appeals more than to resist and remember. I am weak, and I do not like pain. The voice is so beautiful, so tempting, so strong, that I nearly let it consume me. And yet . . . I cannot. If I let go, I will lose something important. Someone important. I cannot remember who it is. I cannot remember who I am.
Fuck that. You’ve worked too hard and too long to give up now. Come on. You want more than oblivion. You want to live.
One bites deeper than the rest. An open wound. I shy away from it instinctively, though it pulses with whiskey-colored eyes and curling lashes and soft, lyrical laughter. It aches with a lanky arm around my shoulders, a warm hand in my own. It throbs with empathy, with a feigned accent and a stolen bottle of wine, with shy blushes and not-quite birthdays. It burns with the sort of loyalty that no longer exists in this world.
“What are we supposed to do, then? We have an empty bandolier, a negligent god, and”—he gestured to Nicholina in distaste—“an abysmal poet. Oh, don’t give me that look. Your work is derivative at best and juvenile at worst.”
I repeat the names like a litany in the darkness.
Hope matters most, I say fiercely. Hope isn’t the sickness. It’s the cure.
“Dreams are never dreams, Mademoiselle Célie. They are our deepest wishes and darkest secrets made true, whispered only under cloak of night. In them, we are free to know ourselves.”
Forgiveness was a painful thing. A sacrifice in itself.
Do not mistake me for porcelain. Do not mistake me for weak.”
She looked at me like I belonged to her and she belonged to me.
Though I’d lost our past, I refused to lose our future too. Even death wouldn’t take it from me.
It wasn’t poetic. It wasn’t grand or heroic or momentous, like one might’ve expected. The heavens didn’t part, and the earth didn’t swallow them whole. These three women—the oldest and most powerful in the world—died just like anyone would: with their eyes open and their limbs cold.
“Honestly, Jean, what did I tell you? We want it to appear artfully strewn, as if the daisies sprang up from this very chair. You’re tacking them on too neatly.”
