Chapter Text
“That’s it. If I don’t get a break from you mopey sad-sacks, I’m going to start another war,” Margo declared, when the awkward silence in the reception hall had gone on too long.
Quentin shifted on his throne. Eliot swirled his wine in its goblet, watching light shine through it. He said, “I don’t think there are more countries to go to war with, Margo. You’re sort of in fights with them all already.”
Margo stalked closer to him, gold and white gown swishing across the floor with each stride. “I will find a way to make it work, do you understand me? I’ll go to war against raindrops. I’ll declare wars against you.”
She poked Eliot in the chest, then in the chin, to make him look up at her. “This is obviously hyperbole, Moping King Eliot. I don’t have the money, I don’t have the time, and I don’t have the energy to go to war again right now. But I also don’t have the energy to coddle the two of you and your delicate. little. fee-fees.” She poked him again, this time in his Adam’s apple, leaning close to stare into his eyes. “Take him, take the Muntjac, take a week off: I don’t care. I don't care where you go, or what you do, just get out of here. Do you understand? Fuck. Or I’ll fuck you up.”
Eliot let his lashes fall over his eyes, leaning into the pressure of her finger against his throat. “Tell me more about how you’ll fuck me up, Bambi,” he breathed, smiling at her. Sometimes he still felt something stirring inside himself, dark and uneasy, but less often every day without the monster in his consciousness. Julia had said it might not ever go completely away: possession by gods could never be entirely undone. They left the thinnest film of themselves behind when they were drained away. It would be up to Eliot to figure out how to live with that.
If he could.
Eliot sighed, slouched away from Margo and took a sip of his wine. “Will it be worse than anything else recently has fucked me up?" he asked in something more like his normal voice. "That's a high bar, you know. What with the being possessed and murdering an awful lot of innocent people—and some really nasty gods—while also having to confront the worst moments of my life.”
Margo’s lips tightened. “Which is a lower bar than thinking you were dead, Eliot.” She crossed her arms over her chest and looking down her nose at him as he sprawled insolently on his throne. “Now you’re back, and you’re being such a miserable prick that, frankly, there are days when I think the monster was easier to live with—”
“Same,” Quentin muttered. Then he shrunk back in his seat as Margo whirled on him.
“You're not going to get off lightly either, Q,” she hissed. “You’re not any easier to live with than he is right now. Neither one of you is dealing with your trauma—or your ill-fated love affair—and I won’t take it anymore.”
She took a deep breath and drew her shoulders back, lifting her chin. Eliot had to take a second to admire her: she looked like a high king, regal and commanding and bad as fuck in every detail. She pointed at him, pointed at Quentin, and said, bitingly, “This is it. By royal decree. Get out of here and deal with your shit before I deal with it for you.”
Quentin scrambled to his feet and sputtered at her. “We aren’t your subjects—I’m not going to just—Margo, we, I—we can’t just—”
“Actually we can,” Eliot said, sitting up straight and beginning to smile. An idea had been brewing in the back of his mind, but he hadn't been able to follow through: he'd barely been able to drag himself out of bed for a while, exhausted on a cellular level, and it had been a slow crawl out of a deep hole to get well enough to even consider leaving Whitespire. But if Margo was going to kick them out anyway, they might as well do something worth their time.
He stood and reached out to grab Quentin’s hand, holding it even when Quentin scowled at him and tried to draw it back. “Come on. I’ve been thinking about something. You’ll like it, you’ll see. Thanks Bambi, bye,” and he dragged Quentin, protesting, from the reception hall.
#
“We won’t need the Muntjac, at least not for the first bit,” Eliot told Tick, who made a note, his expression sliding between obsequious and worried.
Eliot tossed clothing into a case, frowning over this waistcoat, that cravat. He’d scraped a dozen layers of skin off in scaldingly hot showers during his first few days back in control of his own body, and gotten a haircut, then let Margo pamper him with tailoring sessions and the most gorgeous fabrics she could find. It had all helped him reconnect with himself. If he’d been a bit extra fastidious since they’d driven the monster out: well, no one who’d gotten close to his unwashed body was complaining. “We’ll start with the carriage. Our first stop isn’t far.”
“I won’t be going anywhere,” Quentin said. He sat on the edge of Eliot’s bed, eyes on the floor, arms crossed over his chest. Eliot glanced at him, then gave Tick a reassuring smile.
“Ignore him. He’s going to want to go, after I tell him where we’re going. Stock the carriage for, oh, two days worth of travel?" The blue pinstripe suit would be difficult to leave behind, but they'd need room in the carriage for bodi—no. That was the monster's concern, not Eliot's. Eliot had his priorities in order. He opened another travelling case and carefully laid the blue pinstripe suit inside it. "We’ll resupply on the road.”
Quentin watched him with narrowed eyes. “Easier to supply for one than two. You can tell me about your trip when you get back to Whitespire.”
Tick looked back and forth between them, fretting over his notes. “Sires, while I appreciate the toll that the, the recent difficulties have taken on you both, and I understand that perhaps relations between yourselves are more peaceful than I can judge by observation, I’m afraid I simply can’t be asked to supply what feels terribly like an abduction.”
Quentin pointed at him. “That’s the spirit, Tick. Glad someone has some sense around here.”
Eliot smirked and threw another scarf into the travelling case. He was feeling better than he had in weeks, frankly. Quentin would see—they’d get on the road and he would find his way back to where he belonged.
Eliot would drag him there kicking and screaming, if necessary; and that wasn't the monster thinking.
“You’re not supplying an abduction, Tick,” he lied soothingly, putting his hands on Tick’s shoulders. “King Quentin and I are headed out to see our grandkids.”
Quentin’s head tilted, his mouth dropping open. “Eliot—”
Eliot pushed Tick, shocked speechless and unprotesting, out of his room. “Carriage,” he repeated cheerfully. “Two days of supplies. Be ready in two hours.” He closed the door behind Tick and leaned against it, smiling at Quentin.
“Did you think I wouldn’t be thinking about them, too?” he asked, and nodded when Quentin’s eyes grew wide. “Why not take advantage of this downtime between disasters?”
“I can’t believe it hadn't even occurred to me—but it’s a good idea,” Quentin said, dazed. “The grandkids. The grandkids are probably—Eliot, they’re old. Older than us.”
“And we are young,” Eliot said. “Young, and recovering from a great deal of trauma, and a little bit sad, and we have some things to work through, and Margo is going to eviscerate us if we don’t get out of her hair. So no better time than now, right?”
Quentin shook his head. “But we can’t. Teddy—I can’t lose my father and my son so close together, El.”
Eliot breathed out, slow. In his memory, Teddy was all ages all at once: the little boy who ran to him with arms held up confidently, assured that Eliot would catch him and lift him high overhead; the young man off to seek his fortune; the steady husband; the loving dad. Alive, always, because the universe had been kind enough to take Eliot before Teddy, in Eliot’s memory.
In this reality, Teddy had grown old and passed long before they’d remembered he existed. And Quentin’s father’s death was so recent, so freshly painful. Quentin had every right to throw that warning flag. If Eliot wanted to earn back a place in Quentin’s life, he had to heed it.
He reached out and dragged Quentin close. Quentin fit neatly against him—just short enough to be enveloped, but solid enough that it felt like he could handle whatever Eliot dished out. Eliot really should have taken their perfect fit as a clue years ago.
He rested his chin on the top of Quentin’s head, swaying with him, while Quentin slowly relaxed into his hold. They hadn’t been close like this for weeks, since they’d banished the monster. Eliot had made the mistake, afterwards, of assuming that because he had realized he was wrong, he and Quentin would be back on the same wavelength. But while he’d been repressing his feelings about their relationship—Quentin had been resolving his.
Convincing Quentin that he’d been right all along might be the work of another lifetime. Especially considering that he hadn’t yet convinced Quentin to let him try.
“I wish your dad could have met Teddy,” he said, somber. “I don’t know much about him, but I bet he’d have loved being a grandfather as much as we did.”
Quentin didn’t respond. His chin dug into Eliot’s chest for a second and then he turned his head, resting his cheek against the brocade of Eliot’s coat. His chest expanded with a slow breath, held too long.
The terrain here was so delicate. A wrong word, and Quentin might decide Eliot wasn’t taking his accumulated losses seriously enough; too much sympathy, and Quentin would scratch him like an irritable cat forced into a cuddle. The truth, the careful truth, was the only possible route, but Eliot hadn’t taken it often to be sure he could navigate it.
He thought, be brave; be brave the way Quentin would; and said, “I’d like to know what happened to Teddy.”
And then, in the interest of being half as open and vulnerable as Quentin had let himself be, over and over again, he said, “I don’t just want to do this because I think it’ll remind you of what you said the day we found out about our life together. I’ve always felt like he was my son too, Q. I want to know how his story ended.”
He held Quentin tighter. “But I haven’t been through what you have, with your dad. With the monster. If you really don’t want to go, we can wait, or I can go by myself if you want. But I’d rather—it feels important to do it together.”
Quentin stood frozen in his arms. For a moment, Eliot thought he’d fucked up after all, but then Quentin let out a sigh. His hands clutched in the fabric of Eliot’s coat, tight enough to threaten the fabric. “All right,” he said, and held onto Eliot for another moment. When he drew back and looked up, his face was calm. Resolute. “Together,” he said. “Okay. I’ll get some clothes.”
#
The carriage came for them two hours later. It was late afternoon by then, the suns of Fillory setting, casting golden light and long doubled shadows across the landscape. The route to the cottage was as clear in Eliot’s mind as the walk between the back door and the barn of the farm in Indiana. He sat across from Q and closed his eyes and pictured every turn in the road from more than a hundred years ago as if he’d traveled it yesterday.
It was just before dusk when they arrived.
Eliot had known, when he was trapped in his own memories, that he could have spent the time reliving the lifetime he’d spent there. He could have walked through the best moments of his life with his memory of Q. He’d been tempted more than once.
It had felt wrong, though, somehow. His memory of Quentin wasn’t quite the real Quentin. Plus, the real Quentin was out in the real world fighting monsters for him. It didn’t seem fair for Eliot to wallow in memory while Quentin was in danger.
So the image of the cottage in his mind, though as fresh as the day he and Quentin had remembered it, was of the cozy home they’d lived in for decades. Their decades there were decades ago. Time had passed, and yet no time had passed, all at once.
Eliot hated fucking with the linear passage of time. It gave him a headache.
Now, as they came around the corner, the well-maintained old cottage turned out to be a tumble-down shack. Parts of the roof had caved in, and some of the windows had broken. The chimney had developed an alarming lean. The familiar gnarled trees had fallen—the tree that had been struck by lightning their first year at the cottage; the tree where they had made Teddy a swing; the tree that produced nuts that were like a cross between chestnuts and almonds—and the young apple trees they had planted were old.
The only thing that remained the same was the atmosphere: the cottage was still a shaded, protected place, leaves falling gently on the breeze.
“It still feels like home,” Eliot said, picking his way through piles of leaves. “Should we go inside?”
“I don’t want it to fall down if we open the door. And anyway, I cleaned it out before I went to live with Teddy, near the end.” Quentin rested his hand on the doorframe. “There’s nothing of ours in there.”
“Nothing but memories.” Eliot stood behind him, put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed.
“Memories. Yeah, I guess we made a few.” Quentin ducked his head, spreading his fingers out wide on the faded, rough wood around the door.
Eliot looked down at the nape of his neck. So many memories—they spun through his mind in no particular order; their first year, their last year; Teddy as a boy and a man; the grandkids; the times they’d had loud sex on the ground outside the cottage; the first time they’d fucked in the bed they’d built with their own hands, which they’d slept in for the rest of Eliot’s life.
He wondered what Quentin remembered. He wondered if the memories felt as good and warm to him, or if the year Eliot had spent shutting him out had tainted this treasured thing.
Eliot rubbed his thumb over the nape of Quentin’s neck. Quentin jolted and turned. He looked up with startled eyes, like he’d been drawn deep enough into whatever he was remembering that he’d forgotten Eliot was with him.
Eliot didn’t move away, leaving Quentin trapped between him and the cottage. Maybe Quentin had gotten used to being alone, but he wasn’t anymore. Eliot wanted to take every opportunity to remind him of that.
He smiled down at Quentin and put a hand on the door, leaning closer. “Do you remember the time we fucked against this door?”
Quentin raised an eyebrow at him. “We both got splinters. You whined for a week.”
“Two weeks,” Eliot corrected him. “You never wanted to do it again.”
“Can you blame me?”
“No,” Eliot murmured. He touched Quentin’s cheek, dragging his fingers gently against the grain of Quentin’s stubble. “I’m just remembering you.”
Quentin tilted his head, let his cheek rest in Eliot’s palm for a moment. “I remember you, too,” he said. They stood like that for a moment, lost in time, before Quentin put his hands on Eliot’s chest and gently pushed him back.
“Come on,” he said. “I want to see if there are any tiles left. I want—I want something to take with me.”
Eliot let him lead the way to the mosaic, buried under a thick layer of leaves. They knelt together and brushed the leaves away, finding a lot of crumbled, color-faded pieces of tile, and a few that were whole. Quentin carefully bundled the whole ones together and tucked them away in his pack, and then stood. He turned in a slow circle, dusk through the trees painting his skin gold and blue, his eyes closed. Eliot watched him, heart aching.
“It’s almost hard to keep it straight,” Quentin said, tentatively. “When are we? Are we now—or are we then? Has this happened yet, or—”
“Yes,” Eliot said, and Quentin opened his eyes and smiled. Eliot reached out a hand to take his pack, and Quentin let him. They went back to the carriage, to the horses stomping and shifting, the driver half-asleep on his perch. Eliot woke him and gave him directions, and they climbed back inside, one on each of the benches.
“We should fix it back up,” Quentin said as the horses trotted away, the carriage jolting over ruts in the barely-used track. “You know. It’s not too far from the castle. We could use it as a retreat.”
“A love shack,” Eliot said.
Quentin darted a cautious look at him, then away. “Your words, not mine,” he said, and dug through his pack for a tile, turning it over and over in his hands as the carriage took them through the woods to Teddy’s village.
#
There was only one place to stay in the village: an inn on the outskirts. It had grown over time—the whole village had grown, becoming something much closer to a town. They didn’t arrive until after dark. The streets were quiet but crowded with new houses. Their carriage rolled over gravel instead of mud.
“Sophisticated,” Eliot murmured. He took Quentin’s pack and tossed it over his shoulder as Quentin scrambled down from the carriage.
Quentin quirked a smile at him while he stretched, twisting his spine. The ride in the carriage had been rough. Eliot was going to teach the Fillorians about how to make a real spring the second he had time to bring them a book and a good example.
“Urbane, compared to how we left it.”
“I like to think we were a positive influence, Q. Come on.” They passed through the inn’s narrow front door and into a clean, cozy lobby. An older man, wearing the old-fashioned wide trousers of Fillory, paired with a neat white shirt and blue apron, stood at a podium by the back wall. He turned the pages of a register. To their left, the inn’s pub bustled. To the right, a wide set of stairs led up to the bedrooms.
The man at the register looked up with a smile that widened when he took in how well Eliot was dressed, even though Eliot had gone for a simple traveling suit. “May I help you, gentlemen?”
“A room for tonight, please. We’ve come by carriage; the horses and driver will need accommodation as well.”
“Two rooms,” Quentin corrected him.
Eliot didn’t let his expression change. “Two rooms for tonight.”
“Only one available,” the man said apologetically. “Busy time of year, with the Wanderer Lost festival, and all. Of course, we could try to set you up in someone’s home; Old Mr. White Hoof’s family might be able to free a room—”
“One room,” Eliot said, victorious. Quentin sighed.
Their room wasn’t large, and the bed was just barely wide enough for two, but the floors were nicely-polished wood, and the linens smelled fresh. They washed their hands and faces and bickered over who would get what side of the bed, which sat close against the wall. Quentin lost and got stuck with the squeeze.
Just like at the cottage.
They went back downstairs to the pub. The crowd there hadn’t subsided; if anything, more people were crowding around the bar, squeezing in at small tables. Quentin and Eliot had to wait a few moments to be seated, and their meal choices were limited to a roast with vegetables, or just the roast, or just the vegetables; Eliot found the bustle and simplicity entertaining. Quentin seemed content to stay lost in his own thoughts, at least until the serving girl set their plates in front of them.
“Excuse me,” he said to her, abrupt. She paused and looked at him with a barely-hidden wince, like maybe she was expecting a complaint, or to be hit on. Quentin smiled at her, a little awkward, but examining her closely. Eliot felt the remnants of the monster take notice—the girl was too young, but pretty—and he stomped them down, paying attention to the anxious twist of Quentin's fingers on his napkin. “We’re here to—well, we have an old friend whose family used to live around here. The Lewis family? Do they still—you sort of look like—”
The serving girl straightened, her smile warming. Eliot looked at her more closely and: yes. Golden hair with the faint gleam of copper, wide brown eyes, a familiar mouth. She was a little bit tall, with broad shoulders, and narrow hips. “That’s my mother’s family,” she said warmly, and it was no surprise at all.
They’d taken fake names, just in case something happened and they changed the Chatwins’ story. Quentin had picked Lewis for C.S. Lewis, followed by a twenty minute speech explaining why and worrying about the sexist and racist implications until he’d almost talked himself out of it, and Eliot had picked Pullman, just to be a jerk. But Quentin had married Arielle as Quentin Lewis, and Teddy and his children had all inherited the Lewis name.
“Oh,” Quentin said, his eyebrows rising. He picked up his glass of wine, put it down again somewhere different, picked up his fork. “Oh, well, that’s—that’s so nice, that’s—it’s really nice to see—nice to meet you. I wasn’t—”
Eliot leaned forward, smiling, to rescue him. “Your mother’s family,” he said warmly. “Let’s see, how long has it been… would Meg have been your grandmother, then?” Meg, Teddy’s youngest. Their only granddaughter, copper-haired and naughty, the laughing heart of her family.
“My great-gran,” the girl said. “I’m named for her, although I haven’t earned the honor, really, so they call me Maggie. She was mayor by the time I was born, you know. She transformed this town. I only work in it.”
Quentin’s throat worked. “Meg was mayor? I’m, uh. You’re very young. Of course. Meg’s great-granddaughter. You have lots of time to accomplish whatever you want.”
“Or accomplish nothing,” Eliot said. “I’m sure your great-gran would be proud of you no matter what.”
The girl—Maggie—laughed ruefully. “Oh, she certainly is not,” she said. “Come by the house tomorrow. You can ask her yourself.”
Quentin went white as a ghost. Eliot reached out and rested his hand over Quentin’s, gone limp on the table. “We absolutely will,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Your great-grandmother’s house. How will we find it?”
Maggie looked back and forth between them, a wrinkle forming between her fair eyebrows. “I’ll take you myself,” she said, a little slowly, like she was suddenly unsure.
Eliot turned up the warmth of his smile to reassure her that, although they were weird people, they weren’t weird people with bad intentions. “We would love that,” he said. “Name the time and place, and—is there anything we could bring her? A gift she might like?”
“A book?” Maggie said, thinking. “She hasn’t been to the bookseller in a few weeks, since she broke her leg.” She laughed again, bright and affectionate. “Bring her something new to read, and you might be able to keep her from trying to run your life.”
“We’ll do that,” Eliot said, when Quentin cast him an imploring look. “Anything she’d like.”
“She likes fantasy novels.” Maggie rolled her eyes. “The melodramatic ones, where there’s no magic, no kings, no queens, no quests. Places where they run things by invention, you know? We tease her, of course, but she’s never lost the taste for them.”
“Of course,” Quentin said faintly. Eliot squeezed his hand.
“Well.” Maggie hugged her tray to her chest. “I’ve got to get back to the kitchen. I’ll come around and check on you, would that be all right?”
“We’d like nothing better,” Eliot said. She bobbed them a little curtsy and turned, weaving her way through the crowd, and they both watched her go.
“Meg’s still alive,” Quentin said when Maggie was out of sight. “This morning I wasn’t even thinking about finding them, and now I’m going to see my granddaughter tomorrow. This is unreal, Eliot. This is.” He shook his head.
Eliot was doing the math. “If Meg is her great-grandmother, we just met your great-great-great-granddaughter. Is that like, a human first?”
Quentin’s color had started to improve. “Eliot, who cares? Our Meg grew up to be a mayor. She bosses her great-grandkids around. She reads fantasy novels about, I don’t know, cars and shit. That goofy little baby—do you remember when she peed in the middle of the mosaic? And now she’s—” He laughed. “A formidable old matriarch, or whatever.”
“Our Meg,” Eliot said, and twined his fingers with Quentin’s. “Imagine that.”
#
After dinner, they went up to their room by silent, mutual agreement. Eliot watched Quentin squeeze in on his side of the bed and had a sharp sense of déjà vu, although they’d never stayed at the inn before. It was the difference between memory and reality. He’d seen Quentin edge sideways from the foot of the bed to the head, grumbling, for more than half his life. And he’d never seen it before at all.
“We’re not having sex tonight,” Quentin said sternly. He dropped onto the mattress with a cranky grunt. “I haven’t changed my mind.”
“Yet,” Eliot said. He crawled onto his side of the mattress and rolled to his side, tucking his hands under his head. He looked at Quentin steadily. “I know it’s going to take you a while to believe me, Q, but we’ll get there.”
“You keep saying ‘a while’ but I don’t know if I’ll ever—” Quentin pulled the blankets up to his shoulders. “I spent ‘a while’ learning to think of you as a friend again, Eliot. And then as. As him. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to think of you the way I used to. The way I did when we were here. The way I did when we remembered this.”
“You’re a generous guy, Q,” Eliot said. “One day, you’re gonna generous yourself right into letting me suck your dick again, and then it’ll be all over for you.”
Quentin flushed. “I don’t just fall in love at the drop of a blowjob,” he muttered.
Eliot smiled and inched closer to him. Quentin watched him with wary eyes, but didn’t object, and didn’t flinch when Eliot brushed a hand through his hair. “No. You love me for a lot of other reasons, too.”
Quentin rolled away onto his other side, facing the wall. Eliot followed him, wrapping an arm around his waist. Quentin shivered when Eliot leaned close and whispered into his ear, “The blowjobs really helped boost me over the edge last time, though. I’m not above using that in my favor.”
“What are you above,” Quentin muttered.
“You, soon,” Eliot said. When Quentin just huffed out a snort, sounding more amused than anything else, Eliot snuggled close to him with a satisfied sigh. Soon. He had faith.
Faith, and plenty of time.
#
Meg was indeed a formidable old matriarch.
“Who did you say you were again?” she asked, squinting at them through an enormous pair of bifocal lenses that she held up with a thin, sturdy hand. She was all tucked up under layers of quilts, her broken leg—fell off a horse, Maggie told them with a sigh—elevated on a stack of pillows. She’d accepted the newest fantasy novel available, and a pound of chocolates, with all the dignity of a queen, and then started frowning at them.
“I’m Penn,” Eliot said smoothly, for the third time. “He’s Teller.” Quentin rolled his eyes.
“And you know which old family friend?” Meg looked between them. Her owlish, bifocaled gaze lingered on Quentin.
Eliot had subtly gotten names and dates out of Maggie on their walk over, with all the interest of a keen conman. “Your daughter Octavia’s old boyfriend is my uncle,” he repeated cheerfully; Maggie had said that Octavia, an herbalist, was out foraging for truffles with the chef at the inn. “He always used to tell me what a nice town this was, and when we found ourselves so close, we couldn’t resist stopping in to see for ourselves.”
“Harumph,” Meg said, which made Eliot beam with delight. She’d said that as a toddler, too, and they’d all laughed—they’d never known that anyone actually said things like that, and she’d come out of the womb with them. Harumph, and tsk: like she’d been born a sassy old grandmother, and he and Quentin were finally just meeting her true self. “You don’t look a bit like old Hogarth,” she said to Eliot suspiciously, and he laughed.
“Thank gods, right,” he said. He didn’t know what Hogarth looked like, but with a name like that—
Meg sniffed, and turned her bifocals back to Quentin. They stared at each other in silence for a long, awkward time.
“You want a chocolate, great-gran?” Maggie asked, slightly desperate. She held the tray out imploringly, but her great-grandmother just shook her head.
“I want the truth,” she said, and then, to Quentin, “Now, who are you really, son? You’ve got the family look—one of Miriam’s boys, perhaps, on a lark?”
“No, no,” Quentin said. He could pull off a con when he needed to, but didn’t have quite Eliot’s elegance with a lie. Meg, sharp as a tack, saw right through him.
“Not Miriam’s boys. Not Nuzzi’s. Although I’ve heard her youngest is quite the little clone of my daddy—a hero in the making, by all reports, and prone to a wander.” She frowned, working her way through a mental list. “Surely not Minette’s?” She held the bifocals up closer to her eyes. “Now, Minette’s youngest is quite the black sheep—from a line of black sheep. Last I heard, that boy was learning blood magic from an old talking goat.”
“Uh,” Quentin said, panicked. “No, I haven’t, I’m not a big fan of blood magic.”
She ignored him. “Maggie, bring me Daddy’s book,” she said, and Maggie scuttled out to do her bidding.
“Daddy’s book?” Eliot asked. Quentin shot him a wild look and shook his head; whatever this was, he didn’t know of it.
Meg hummed. “My father made it a project in his final days—oh, we had his father’s instructions to deliver his note and basket of bespelled peaches and plums to High King Margo’s wedding; we had the cottage to maintain, but what else did he have of his family? His mother’s tombstone, and her picture in a locket, and nothing of his father’s except an old walking stick. So Daddy started drawing.”
Maggie came back in with a slim book. It was bound in green leather and she held it reverently, wrapped in a cloth. Meg took it from her without a murmur of thanks, and flipped to the back.
“Oh no,” Quentin said faintly, as page after page of drawings flashed by. There was the cottage as it had been. There was Arielle, drawn from the locket and then imagined in various other poses and activities: picking flowers, fishing, as the middle-aged and elderly woman she’d never gotten to be. There was Eliot, sleeping by the river and throwing Meg herself into a pile of leaves.
And there was Quentin, pages of drawings of Quentin, old and young. Cooking at his stove, a hand on his sore back. Frowning over the mosaic. Walking the path to the village, a small hand in his, a smile on his fresh-shaven face.
“Well now, if that isn’t just what I thought.” Meg turned the book around so that Quentin had to look at his own young face, drawn by his son as an old man. Quentin drew in a sharp breath, and Eliot went to stand beside him.
The old lady in the bed tilted her head at them, looking back and forth between the book and their faces. “There you are,” she said, and smiled. “Hello, Grandpa. Hello, Papa. Daddy told me I might see you again some day.”