The children were unusually quiet as they walked. Only when they reached Elya’s terrace and heard the creature chirrup a greeting did they find voice to ask about what Barad must have told them.
“Is it true?” Aaden asked.
“Many things are true. Which one are you asking about?”
“You’re to be the queen,” Shen answered. She did that sometimes, and Aaden did the same for her, finishing each other’s thoughts as they shared them.
Like twins, Mena thought, looking at them. A pale-skinned boy with light eyes; a brown-skinned girl with dark ones. So different, and yet not. Not for the first time since joining them, she wondered what her child by Melio would have looked like. It was too difficult a thought, though. She pushed it away, knowing that she faced a lifetime of wishing she had had that child with him when she had the chance.
“That’s what I’ve been told,” Mena said. “I never planned that. I don’t… know what it means, really. I don’t know.” She looked at the two of them helplessly. “I’m sorry, but it’s too new. I just don’t know.”
“Melio will be king,” Aaden said, “when he comes back.”
Mena had not had time to consider that. Melio Sharratt, a king. Love him as she did, that was rather hard to imagine. “Let’s pray he comes back, then.”
“I always do,” Aaden said. “Every morning, I ask the Giver to let Dariel and Melio return.”
The boy turned his face away. He watched Elya preen, pretending to be fascinated. Mena knew better. She heard the emotion trying to crawl over his last words. She almost said that she said the same prayers herself. She wanted Melio back beside her so much she walked with a perpetual emptiness inside. It had been there throughout the war, but she noticed it much more acutely now that she was home. Finding Wren here on Acacia when she returned, with a wee babe whom she had named Corinn in her arms, made things both better and worse. Mena was so pleased to be an aunt a third time, so pleased to know that Dariel lived on in the child, and that Corinn would be honored by her as well. What a father Dariel would have been! She could not imagine anyone better suited to it. Instead, though, it was the likes of Rialus Neptos who would soon be arriving back to meet his daughter for the first time. Maybe he would make a good father, too. Mena could not say. Despite the animus she might always feel for him, he had played a part in saving the nation.
How very strange, the turning of fate.
Shen said, “My mother is happy. She said this means I won’t have to worry about being queen.”
“Would you have worried about it?”
The girl caught the question on her lips and paused to consider it. “I’d rather you did it.”
“Me, too,” Aaden said, glancing back. “Don’t tell Mother I…” The words fell from his mouth and dropped out of the air, the sentence unfinished. He began to turn away again, but his aunt did not let him.
“Oh, dear, come,” Mena said. She pulled Aaden in, hugging him tight, and then looked up and motioned with her fingers that Shen should join the embrace. Arms around both of them, she whispered, “You two are good friends now, aren’t you? That would make your parents happy. It makes me happy. Listen, the world surprises us all. Me as much as you. It even surprised Corinn and Aliver. Again and again it finds ways to surprise. It makes things tough sometimes. That’s what it’s been lately. But it won’t always be so hard. We’ve come through so much. We really have.”
“Aunt, what will become of us?” Shen asked.
Mena drew back to see her niece’s face. “What a question to ask! I don’t know the future, child. I only know what’s been, and what I wish will be. And even then I know that I’ll never even really understand what’s been. It confounds me all the time. Nor will what I wish to be ever come to pass exactly as I imagine.”
Shen crossed her eyes. It was such an unexpected, bizarre gesture that at first it alarmed Mena. When the girl’s eyes popped back to normal, Mena saw it for the joke it was. Smiling, she agreed, “You’re right. Life is confusing enough to make you go cross-eyed.”
“But what do you imagine?” Aaden asked. “I know-it won’t happen just perfectly-but still. Tell us.”
“You would have me lay the future before you, made only of my hopes and fears?” Both children nodded. “All right. Here…” Mena took a seat on a couch and motioned for the children to do the same. She had one sit on either side of her, turned them so that they rested their heads on her lap. Elya stopped preening to watch them.
Mena looked up and away from them all. “What I imagine is that you will live magnificent lives,” she said, “and that you will live lives of quiet disappointment. You won’t be able to explain why, but there will always be some failures. You will strive for greatness and justice, and you will help to make our nation wondrous. I’m counting on that. Don’t let me down. You will both be great, but you will also fail at many of the things dearest to you, and people-even ones you love-will disappoint you. You will know great loves and you will have dear friends and you will be part of the great tree of Akaran. You will never be alone. And yet some of those you hold dearest will betray you, or envy you, or covet the things they perceive you to have that they do not. At times-even within a throng of people, despite the noise and clamor of attention-you will feel strangely lost. You will find gifts that are special to you, but you will never understand why such things were thrust upon you. You may curse the world for always, always spinning, never pausing, and yet this motion will be the music to which you dance. In the end, I hope, you will come to feel that none of the life you led could have been any different, any better or worse. You will find meaning in accepting many things you cannot understand or change. And if you live a long life, you’ll grow tired and that will be all right, because you will have done the best you could during your lives.”
Aaden shifted his head as if to look up at her, but Mena stilled him with her palm and pressed him gently back against her knee.
“You will take into the future all that ever has been for us. You will take your mothers and your fathers. You will take all that was Acacia, and all that was Talay, and all that was Mein, and you will take more than that-gifts and memories beyond measure. All of it lives inside you. Because of you, the days to come will be better than the days before this one.”
Mena paused. She flexed her fingers where they touched the two children. “At least, that is how I imagine it. I may be wrong. I am not so old myself. Some say the greater portion of my life is before me. But, dear ones, that’s the future I imagine for you. I wish that it were more, and yet I also know it to be a vast thing, beyond what you can imagine now.” She paused again, unsure how they would respond, if they would be saddened unduly. She did not want that, but she could not lie to them.
She was surprised, then, by the calm with which they answered.
“Let that be so,” Shen said.
And a moment later, Aaden echoed, “Yes, let that be so.”
After a silence, Shen said, “Mena?”
“Yes, love?”
But it was Aaden who answered, “You’ve said many of the things that my mother wrote me in her letter. Shen read it, too. Did you read it, Mena?”
“No.”
“Funny,” Aaden said, “because she wrote the same thing. Almost.”
“Only ‘almost’? What did she say that was different?”
Shen responded. “She wrote all that, and then she said that it was our job to make it better than that. When we’re grown, she said, we should make it better in ways she could not imagine.”
“We will,” Aaden said.
Mena closed her eyes. She tilted her head up slightly, as if she needed to scent the air. When she opened her eyes she was glad the children couldn’t see the tears that escaped them. She was glad her hand-that was a gentle weight on their heads-could just as easily hold them in place. She said, “Of course you will. That’s what you were born for.” End of Book Four