‘She was born as music — a single, mellow note suspended in the air….

‘Suspended as if strung from nothing, held into possibilities of sound.  Her clear note hung a lone, sweet tone in the midst of us all; as silence captured its ache and tenderly, reluctantly released it, dipped it lower into a breath of melancholy only to lift again to its earlier height both rich and real and complete — one solitary note swaying into the early dawn.  

Emily arrived in the cold, grey hours of the newborn year, between the breathing dark and the pearl, winter light.  A child of the dawn, before dawn broke.

            Her mother, my beloved daughter Aria, lay with her face to the window watching thick flakes of snow brush against the glass panes, seemingly unaware of her daughter’s cries, embalmed still in her world of sorrow. 

They thought the baby would bring her out of her cocoon, but Emily’s birth seemed to have the opposite effect on her.  Like the thread she weaved between her fingers, Aria hung suspended somewhere between form and dissolution. 

The nightmares still closed in on her and she fought sleep with every ounce of strength she possessed, which wasn’t much.  She was withering before our eyes; a slackening figure with dark circles under her sunken eyes, a sickened pallor stole over her skin, erasing the previous beauty of her pale complexion.

“She won’t last long if we don’t do something,” Magdala said.  She was leaning over Aria, pressing a warm cloth to her cold brow.  “It’s as if her body refuses the warmth.”

Paul took his sister’s hand in his own, looked into her faraway gaze.  “Aria, where have you gone?” he said to her.

She turned slowly, as had become her custom since she had escaped from Bremistan Lind, as if she were in some half state of petrification.  She looked through her brother, beyond him, to where Samuel stood.  “The moon,” she whispered.

“Yes?” Paul, in his anxiousness, urged her.  “What about the moon?”

“I can see it in his eyes,” she said as if she were looking at Samuel.  “Like a scar,” she looked down at her hands.  “Here, in the lace.”

Her fingers shed the lace she was spinning, Paul held it up against the dimming afternoon light.

“I’m going to find your father,” Magdala said to Paul, rising to leave.  “Maybe he can make some sense of it.”

“Can she see you?” I asked Samuel.

He shook his head, a slight frown.  “I don’t think so.  Her eyes are vacant.” 

“She’s captured you in the lace,” I said.  “She’s looking for you there.”

 “How do you do know that?”

 “It’s what I used to do with Alex.”

From her cradle near Aria’s bed, Emily cried a kittenish mew.  Paul picked her up, cradled her in his arms.  Ilaria appeared at the door. 

“Again?” she asked, pulling a shawl around her shoulders.  Paul shifted the delicate bundle to his wife.  “Tiny belly, Sweet Baby,” she cooed as she rocked and fed Emily warm milk with butter and molasses. 

Magdala returned with Leve.  He had held true to his unspoken promise — no whisky had touched his tongue for almost eight months, since the day he’d left his flask on Aria’s bedside table.  Instead he’d allowed Magdala to administer her own brands of relief into his pain.  Nettle ointment rubbed into his hands several times daily, nettle tea swallowed with a grimace as often as he had once downed his liquor.  It was a continuing struggle for him as he was strained now to a mild relief while his other senses remained sharp and aware, unlike the apathetic whisky effect that had masked its numbing self in the pretense of solace.

His nerves were taut, laid bare, and other than Magdala, his visits with Aria and occasional meals with his other family members, he kept to himself, away from the grange lest his bald senses, which sometimes rankled him into a melting frenzy, should cause an unrest among the herd.

Now, in the hall behind Magdala, he scowled in his silent demeanor as they made their way to Aria’s chamber.  But he listened as Magdala filled him in. 

“…and I’m afraid we may lose her, Mr. Greyson, if we don’t find an alternative to what we can offer her.”

“And you’ve come to me for alternatives?”

“Sir, you are the patriarch of this family.”

 “Patriarch?” he snickered.  “A patriarch with nothing left to offer.”

“It is you to whom Aria may still respond.  She responded only to you when you gave her fingers the will to weave.”

“Well, then,” he jested in his gravelly voice.  “Maybe I should get her out of here.  Hell, I could use a break!”  

They stepped into the room, Magdala set her candlestick down and stepped to Aria’s bedside. 

“Maybe that’s not a bad idea,” she said quietly.  “A place where she’s not faced with constant reminders.”  She was speaking to herself more than Leve.  But he heard her nonetheless.

“I was jesting, you blasted Chrysalan.”

She whirled on him.  “What would you give to see her recover?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” he returned.  “I already gave up everything!”

“Whisky is hardly everything,” she maintained.  “Sir.”

“It is to me,” he growled.  “Maybe I should—”

“It’s not everything to her,” Magdala indicated a still-staring Aria, her hands working a new piece of lace. 

Ilaria, cuddling Emily yet, tactfully excused herself.  “Hush, Baby Girl, your mama will wake soon,” she lulled.  Magdala, without a word, left also.  Paul rose to follow her, not wishing to witness the gathering thunder of his father’s black mood.

“Father,” he acknowledged, “she spoke.”  

Leve’s eyes grew wide and in his haste, he almost shoved past his son as he knelt by Aria’s bedside.  “Speak again, My Darling Girl!” he urged.  But when she didn’t, he looked around.  The room, as far as he could see, was empty, save him and his daughter. 

“She couldn’t stand him,” Samuel said to me.  “Why would he think she’d speak to him now?”

“Aria’s unpredictable,” I shrugged.  “And as much as has passed between those two, he really loves her.”

“His love is blind then.” Samuel’s voice sounded hollow.

“Maybe it’s a good thing it is,” I said.  “It might just be the thing she needs.”

Aria didn’t look at her father, but she breathed deeply, her breath shuddering as if she’d been crying.  “He’s gone,” she said.

Leve nodded.  “But I’m not.  I’m here, My Girl.”  He patted her hand.  She dropped her lace and patted his hand in return.

Slowly, in her agonizingly painful way, she turned and looked at him, into his dark brown eyes.  “Are you?”

• • • •

The strange balm of father and daughter worked itself in Aria in ways that brought her gleaming undercurrents of emotion to the surface.  It wasn’t what I expected — a sorrow and grief that would find solace in the love that surrounded her.  Instead, a hard glare shellacked itself in Aria’s eyes.  Silent to all but her father and to him, she was spare in her words. 

Anger.  Resentment and when that resentment embedded itself in her core, she grew bitter.  Not with her father, but with Samuel.

“He’s cruel,” she murmured.

Her father sat in her room slowly rolling a twig of birch between his thumbs and forefingers watching it turn over in the glow of the burning fire.  He didn’t speak but looked at his daughter with a long gaze, then bent his face toward the fiery hearth.   

“He left me to die without him,” she said quietly against the crackling embers.  “And for that I hate him.”

I watched Samuel slip out of the room, unseen, unfelt by all present except me.  And no matter where I sought, I could not find my beloved friend.  And so the days passed by in a different vein, leaving me wondering for not just my beloved Alex, but for Samuel now, as well.

And I, feeling every bit the tangent that I was, grew restless.

_________________________________