She lowered the weapon and crumpled. Fell apart. I stood there trying to figure out what I should do, until it occurred to me, I could embrace her.
“Keep it. All of it,” I whispered when her sobs subsided. “He would have wanted you to have it.”
“I have nowhere to keep a bow and arrows. I don’t even have a permanent home. I sold everything before I took the internship in New York. I was kind of hoping that maybe…if you needed a diplomat with a few connections and not a lot of experience, maybe you’d consider letting me stay here. I’ll do anything I can to help.”
I needed an assistant I trusted, and it seemed one had just volunteered.
“If you don’t mind getting paid in the worst-performing currency in the world, I’d love it if you stayed on, Scarlett.”
“Thanks. Kenton always promised to show me his home when it was safe to visit. Being here makes me feel as though I’m still close to him.”
We went through the rest of the boxes, setting two aside. Raina’s and Lorcan’s sat untouched. Raina’s will travel to River Bend with Scarlett and our foreign visitors, when they arrived, while Lorcan’s…I didn’t know whether he would ever come and claim it. In leaving me, has he walked away from his entire past?
My heart ached. I missed him. I knew I didn’t deserve to ask him to come back, and that even if he did, we would probably confront the same disharmony that drove us apart this time. But I hadn’t stopped loving him just because he wasn’t here. Even death couldn’t change that bedrock.
What was he doing, now?
I had no way to know, but there was one person I could ask—assuming I could summon the courage to call Rya.
FLOWER
CHAPTERTWENTY-EIGHT
The German tech billionaire and his Canadian wife arrived with three children in tow. Despite the fact that our auction had only included four tickets and a week, I didn’t balk when they asked to bring their youngest child, age thirteen. I also invited them to stay an extra week, so they could complete a full circuit of the island’s interior, similar to the route Lorcan and I took earlier in the summer.
The one sticking point wound up being a silly detail I never once considered until Mr. Knauss asked when they had to go through customs. By then, we were already having dinner at the castle.
“I was looking forward to showing off my Auralian stamp,” his wife pouted. We’d defaulted to English, the one language we all shared.
“I, uh, will have to see if I can find one. Our passport office burned down during the war, and we haven’t had a chance to reorder supplies.”
Reorder supplies, from where? Arya’s paper shop? I wasn’t born, the first time my parents went abroad. I don’t know how they jumped through all the hoops to get that set up. A passport was just something I had, from birth, unlike most of my people. Until it was lost the night of the invasion.
The next morning, after my new daily ritual of staring down the goddess statue for a quarter of an hour, I ransacked my father’s study and then his private rooms in search of anything that might function as a passport stamp. I eventually found a prototype in a locked drawer.
We never opened to outsiders, and thus the stamp never made it to the official passport office that burned. Triumphantly, I went to mark their booklets, only to realize that I had no ink pad.
Shit. Now, what?
I texted Saskaya for advice.
You have one of those vials of energy liquid, right? The dark blue kind that glows, not the diluted version? It works as ink, in a pinch.
After searching through the few items Lorcan had left behind, I found one. The Knauss family posed with me while I stamped their passports with the faintly-glowing substance, imprinting a deep violet celestia symbol on paper.
It soaked through to three sheets. Oops.
“Dramatic,” Mrs. Knauss said tightly.
“Sorry. We’re still working out the formula.” I tried to spin it. “You’re the only five people in the world with a stamp like that.”
“Six,” Scarlett seized the stamp and pressed a symbol into her own. The Knauss family did not look best pleased with having to share their unique stamps, but since she was acting as one of their translators for the trip, they chose the better part of valor and didn’t complain.
“Do cell phones not work here? I keep trying to text pictures to my boyfriend, and he’s not getting anything I send,” the eldest Knauss child said.
“There isn’t a single tower in the entire country. You’ll be issued a satellite phone, but you’ll have to share it. We don’t have very many.”
“Share?” Mrs. Knauss said, almost comically put out. This is clearly not the multimillion-euro luxury visit with princesses she’d envisioned.
