I know there’s more to it than that. He left because in staying, he was hurting other people. Norah unwittingly stomped on the wounded part of him that will always feel guilty for getting a maid fired. We’ll both have to get better at managing our emotions, especially since it’s hard to tell where my trauma stops and his begins. But we can be gentle with one another. That’s why we work so much better in private, away from public pressure. It was why Norah’s intrusion into our privacy cracked us apart so easily.
I squeezed his hand lightly.
“If we do get a chance to fix this, I will do everything in my power to protect her, encourage her, and keep her safe. Including protecting myself. I will never leave Zosia’s side.”
I squeezed his hand. We looked at one another, then at the pool.
“I’m not going in there,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s a bad idea. We’d both freeze to death.”
“Guess we’re done here, then.”
Lorcan cocked his head. “Have you ever explored this area?”
“A little. Killing time while my father and the priests left me to freeze. Why?”
He scanned the shrine without responding. Inscrutable as ever. Auralia doesn’t work miracles; I can say that with certainty.
“I want to check something out.” Lorcan strode around the edge of the pool and nimbly leaped over the meter-wide gap between the main platform and the rivulet feeding out of the pond. He reached back to help me over it as well. “It looks like there might have been a bridge here, once. See the marks?”
Once he showed me where to look, I can’t understand how I missed seeing them before. “Yes. Like small pylons for an ice bridge that melted or was washed away.”
He nodded. “Let’s see what’s back here.”
We edged forward. Lorcan got ahead of me and slipped between the ice splinters. A passageway opened.
“No fucking way.” I exhaled in a cloud of pure astonishment. An optical illusion. Auralia’s favorite trick on this island.
From where we stood before, it appeared to be a solid wall. Lorcan spotted the nearly invisible crevice that led to a larger passageway. We pressed on, hand in hand, shielded from the wind by the ice towers. Ice became rock. I can barely make out the marks from axes, worn smooth with time and weather, as we venture carefully down the passageway. My eyes tried to adjust to the rapidly increasing gloom. I stumbled into Lorcan’s back. He kept me close as we inched forward.
The passageway curved and opened. Heat blasted my face. I gasped.
“What is this place?”
“No idea.” Lorcan stopped, so I pressed close to him. “Am I imagining it, or do the rocks glow?”
“They’re glowing.” Faint blue light emanated from the solid surface. As my eyes adjust to the dimness, I slowly released Lorcan’s arm and move in front of him. He doesn’t like this, taking my elbow and trying to hold me back.
“It’s okay. Listen.” Water. Bubbling water. Steam on our faces. The skin on my hands ached from the sudden heat. “I think this is a hot spring?”
Lorcan exhales with relief. I can hear him trying to restrain his laughter.
“The water is warm…if you believe…”
I can’t take it in, I’m so awed by the sight of the glowing rock grotto with impossibly blue water fizzing in a deep pool. “This is what they meant. It was a secret. My mother died before she had a chance to tell me. My father…he…”
“Didn’t know. Couldn’t have known.”
Tears on my cheeks. My mother came here, spent a few hours in a natural spa, thinking and decompressing. Then she came home refreshed and ready to face the world again. I’m laughing, but I’m crying for the horrors my father put me through in his ignorance. Ten years of near-death experiences in that stupid frozen pond nobody was ever supposed to set foot in. It’s a decoy. To protect this.
It’s easy to imagine my sisters and aunts and grandmothers making this trek once a year. A reunion of wise women meeting to share knowledge and friendship in secret, handing it down through the ages. To outsiders, they looked like tough women who could withstand hours in a frozen pond and come out beaming. In reality, they were having a spa day together.
In my imagination I hear voices. Laughter echoing from rocks. Women strategizing and parceling out the burdens of leadership so it doesn’t fall too heavily on any one individual.
Until me. I didn’t get lucky. No aunts. No grandmother. No mother to show me the way. No sisters to share the load. Only I went into the frozen pond. Because I was a child who didn’t know better, trying to do her best with what little information she’d been given.
“Oh, Zosia. I’m so fucking sorry.”
