by Laura Legend
This drew an actual “harrumph” from Dogen and, before Cass knew what was happening, he’d started across the courtyard in Richard’s direction, rolling up his sleeves as he went. Cass didn’t get the impression that he intended to give Richard a hug.
“Gentlemen—” Cass called as she pulled her jacket tight around her and shuffled after Dogen.
Richard moved to greet Cass, but Dogen stopped him with a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt. The two of them exchanged a hard look.
Zach was still hanging back, his hands stuffed in his pockets, scuffing the ground with the toe of his sneaker.
Cass gently pulled Dogen’s hand aside and politely embraced Richard.
Richard kissed Cass on both cheeks, a little more extravagantly and a little less politely than Zach probably would have liked. Cass blushed in response.
Richard, with a hand still resting gently on Cass’s arm, turned to greet Dogen and Zach.
“Dogen,” Richard said curtly, nodding.
Dogen furrowed his brow and narrowed his eyes.
“Zach,” Richard said, nodding now in Zach’s direction.
“Richard,” Zach said flatly, his arms folded across his chest.
From the start, there had a been an obvious tension between Richard and Zach. Recently, though, something had changed. Before, the tension had boiled down to a competitive clash of personalities, but now it had the quality of a shared secret—a secret that neither of them was anxious to acknowledge. Something had happened in Singapore when they’d teamed up to stop the theft of the sarira. It was something that Richard had glimpsed and that Zach, beyond the vaguest sketch, didn’t want to talk about. Whatever had happened, it had frightened them both.
Zach, frowning in Richard’s direction, shielded his eyes from the morning sun and absently rubbed at his temples.
“I’ve come because I need to speak with Cassandra,” Richard said, meeting Cass’s eyes.
When their eyes met, Cass immediately felt that familiar, electric charge that always played between them.
Then, for Zach and Dogen, Richard added, “Though it was certainly a pleasure to also see you both.”
It was hard not to take that last line as a dismissal, but Zach and Dogen both held their ground.
“Perhaps,” Richard addressed Cass, his hand at her elbow, “there’s someplace we could speak in private?”
“Of course,” Cass answered. Then, to Zach: “Save a seat for me at breakfast?”
Zach nodded, gathered Dogen, and they continued on to breakfast. In short order, Richard and Cass were alone in the courtyard.
Once they were alone, though, the silence stretched awkwardly and, uncharacteristically, Richard seemed unsure of how to start. For her part, Cass could barely pay attention to what he wasn’t saying because her mind kept looping back to last night. Standing there in the courtyard, she couldn’t stop looking at the well. Even now its waters were quietly calling out to her. A shiver ran down her spine.
This wasn’t going to work.
“Um, let’s go for a walk,” Cass said, keeping tabs on the well out of the corner of her eye.
Richard, relieved, agreed.
“Yes, a walk.”
Cass led them across the courtyard, past the well, through the gate, and along a path that wound upward into the mountains.
The guards at the gate were, of course, elated about Richard’s dramatic arrival and the wrinkle he’d just added to Cass’s story.
Cass and Richard started up the path and soon they were out of sight, past the tree line, and into the forest.
The air was significantly cooler up here. The world, in general, felt significantly simpler.
They walked in companionable silence, occasionally passing through rocky terrain, and, as they walked, the sense of connection between them grew stronger.
Richard had a cool, patient way about him that drew you in. Soon you ended up feeling like you shared the strength and clarity that, beneath his sheen of propriety, defined him. This was, in fact, one of the things Cass loved best about him. She was starved for all the strength and clarity she could get, and if he was willing to share, she could hardly resist the invitation.
They continued along and the path grew steeper.
Once the silence had deepened enough that it no longer felt like an obstacle, Cass spoke up.
“Does Maya know you’re here?” she teased by way of an icebreaker.
Cass was well aware that Maya Krishnamurti did not approve of Richard’s interest in her.
Richard smiled. “I’m sure she does. Very little escapes her. But that doesn’t mean I asked for permission or even told her I was coming.”
“So you snuck out of the house to come see me?”
Richard’s smile expanded into a chuckle. “Yes, I suppose I did.”
They continued on for a minute, then Cass tried again.
“Why are you here, Richard? Why did you come? Why now?”
They were a good half-mile into the forest. The midmorning sun occasionally broke through the canopy. The path was leveling off. They were quite alone. And Cass could sense that Richard was ready now—at least as ready as he was going to be—to talk.
He didn’t start, though, where Cass expected.
“Cassandra—” Richard began.
He stopped abruptly in the middle of the path and turned to her. He tucked a strand of her embarrassingly tangled hair behind her ear—and kissed her softly, tenderly on the lips.
“Richard . . .” Cass said, pressing a hand against his chest, feeling surprised and elated and ashamed all at the same time.
Richard leaned his forehead against hers, his hand squeezing her shoulder.
“I’m very old, Cassandra,” he said, as if this were an explanation. “In comparison to most people—yourself included—I have already lived many lives.”
He squeezed his eyes shut tight.
“My first life was human. But my other lives have been . . . less so.”
Richard straightened, took Cass’s hand, and continued walking, their pace more urgent now. His eyes were fixed on the trail ahead. Cass’s eyes were fixed on him.
“In my first life,” Richard continued, “I was married. That marriage was arranged, but we were lucky. We liked each other. And, eventually, we loved each other. She was quite different from you—though, to be honest, I was very different too. At first, we weren’t able to have children. We waited and hoped for years. Then, in the end, she died in childbirth. Together with the child.”
Richard went silent but their pace didn’t slow. After a few moments, he picked up the thread, his voice uneven.
“Losing them broke me in half with grief. After that, I stumbled along, only half alive, until . . . until I learned that it was possible to intentionally live a less human life. When I learned about the Turned, I sought out the transformation they offered, hoping that, if I submitted to the process, the change would silence my grieving heart. In large measure, it did. It worked. Once I was Turned, my mind opened wide and my heart grew distant and quiet.”
With her own heart still raw from last night’s vision of her mother, Cass welled up in tears at the thought of Richard’s loss. She knew how grief could break a life in two.
“I’m sorry, Richard,” Cass whispered, slowing their pace. “So sorry.”
Richard ceded to Cass’s slower pace, his grip on her hand softening.
“In the hundreds of years that followed,” he added, “I’ve shared my life with many women. But it was never the same. Though lovely, those relationships were all practical, rational, deliberate. They were . . . reasonable. In all that time, they never tipped over into something more than the sense they made in my head.”
Where is this story going? Cass wondered. Why is he telling me this? Why now?
They came to a small clearing in the forest. The air was quite cold. Winter had almost passed, but a final snow was still possible high in the mountains. Cass wished she’d brought a warmer coat�
�or, at least, another layer of clothes.
When they came to the clearing, Richard stopped and turned to face her again. He was a whole head taller than Cass. She had to tilt her head upward to meet his eyes.
“Until last year, it had been centuries since I’d heard my own heart beating. Then, on the train to Bucharest, you unbuttoned my shirt and leaned in and listened with your whole body until you heard it, faint and irregular, but beating. You heard my heart beating. And then I was nearly destroyed in the castle and you didn’t know I was alive and I lay for months in bed, trapped in casts while my body knitted itself back together, and the whole time I lay there I could hear what you had heard. I could hear my own heart beating, and I felt, for the first time in a long time, alive again.”
He trailed off, still searching for words.
“I felt . . . human.”
Part of Cass wanted to run. She was afraid of what might come next. She didn’t want to be responsible for it.
She didn’t want to be forced to decide.
But instead of running, she stepped closer to Richard, caught the scent of his cologne, and unbuttoned the top three buttons of his shirt. She slid her cold hand inside his shirt and pressed it against his chest. She could, in fact, still feel his slow and irregular heart beating.
Richard smiled and relaxed into the softness of her small palm. “Cassandra, since that night on the train, I’ve felt what you felt when you touched me. And since then I haven’t been able to think of anything else. I haven’t been able to feel anything else.”
Cass pulled her hand back, as if Richard’s skin was suddenly too hot to touch.
“Since that night, I haven’t been able to feel anything but you.”
Cass didn’t know what to do with this. She could barely meet his eyes.
“Cassandra,” he said, “I love you.”
There it was.
And, now, Cass was at sea. She felt like the solid ground beneath her feet had disappeared.
And more than that, she felt like something was breaking open inside of her. She felt the same way she had when she’d stepped inside of Zach’s or Kumiko’s minds.
Or, she felt as if she’d been passing a locked door in her own heart for years—passing by the same door every day and always wondering what was inside—only to find, today, that the door was suddenly, casually ajar.
Richard let go of her hand and reached into his pocket.
“I know this is embarrassing and abrupt. And I don’t know how you’ll feel or what you’ll say,” Richard said. “But I have to ask.”
He pulled out an ancient ring—worn and plain and beautiful—and held it up in the light.
“Cassandra Jones, will you marry me?”
8
CASS DID NOT make it to breakfast.
In fact, after some mumbled excuses about how she needed to go home for a day or two, it was nearly nightfall by the time she arrived back at her old apartment in Salem, Oregon via the Underside.
She’d been here infrequently since she’d begun training with Kumiko. Though many of her belongings were still here, the apartment felt deserted. A thin layer of dust coated everything.
Her couch looked sad and lonely. It looked disappointed at how little use it was getting, even after revealing its secret. Cass stuffed the couch cushion back in place, pulled a blanket off the back, and wrapped it around her. Her Wing Chun practice dummy was brooding in the corner, its wooden arms empty. Cass give him a friendly punch in passing, rattling the arms in their sockets. A handful of dirty dishes still sat in the sink. She blew dust out of a glass, filled it with tap water, and took a long drink.
She leaned against the kitchen counter with her empty glass in hand and eyed the piles of books, journal articles, and manuscript materials from her rejected doctoral dissertation that still covered the surface of her desk.
At the moment, her heart felt like her desk looked: a jumbled mess of only partially compatible things that, despite everything, she still loved.
Richard’s proposal had pulled the rug right out from under her. Her heart had, simultaneously, leapt with joy and cracked in shame. The thought of making a decision—of hurting either Zach or Richard—tied her stomach in painful knots.
Cass took a long look around the apartment. She missed the couch and she missed the dummy. But, especially, she missed the books. She stopped at her desk, flipped through some of the books near the top of the stack, and buried her nose in one of the oldest. There was nothing like the musty, reassuring smell of old paper and neglected scholarship.
She hadn’t come back, though, to visit her apartment. She’d come back to go home. She needed to talk to someone she trusted, someone impartial, someone who loved her unconditionally. She needed to talk to her dad.
Cass grabbed her keys from the counter and headed for the lot where she parked her old Volvo. The car door creaked when she pulled it open and the engine squealed and belched smoke when she cranked it back to life.
Her father’s house, her childhood home, was out in the suburbs, but it didn’t take long to get there. She parked in the driveway and hesitated for just a moment at the door before knocking. Through the window, she could see her father in his armchair with a book and a glass of wine.
When she knocked, he glanced up at the window and saw her. He almost spilled his drink in his hurry to get the door while she smiled and waved.
Even standing at the door, Cass’s mind was spinning fast, trying to rewrite what she thought she’d known about her parents and her childhood in light of what she’d recently learned about her twin brother. There were too many holes, though, for her to make much progress and, for now, other issues were more pressing. This wasn’t why she’d come. She would leave those discussions for another day.
Gary Jones opened the door with a book under one arm and his glass in the other. The two of them did a little dance trying, despite the obstacles, to negotiate a quick hug. He ushered Cass in, setting down his book and inviting her to sit in the other armchair.
He looked older.
Cass knew he lost sleep worrying about her now that she was mixed up with Kumiko and a Lost Miranda. He’d done what he could to shape her as a scholar rather than a fighter. In the end, though, Cass hadn’t chosen one over the other. Life had chosen for her.
As her father was about to sit down again, his glass still in hand, he thought to offer her a drink. Cass was tempted, but decided against it. She needed a clear head.
“Actually, Dad, this is probably more like a cup of coffee conversation.”
Her father took the hint, nodded, and left his drink with his discarded book. He headed toward the kitchen and waved for her to follow.
He shuffled along in his evening slippers and his cardigan sweater but, through the layers of age and loss, Cass could still clearly see the outline of the younger man that her mother had loved. As unassuming as her father was, he was a man of deep intelligence, discipline, and commitment. Whatever their disagreements, Cass could count on the fact that he knew more than he was saying and that he loved her more than she knew.
The kitchen was small, tucked into a corner of the house. This was one of Cass’s favorite things about it. Just sitting in the room, you automatically felt close to whoever shared it with you. Her father pulled out a chair for her at the kitchen table and set about making coffee. He put some bland cookies on a plate and placed it in the center of the table. Once the pot was brewing, he took a seat himself.
“Have I ever told you that you look like your mother?” he asked, pushing his glasses back up nose.
“Yeah, you’ve mentioned that,” Cass smiled.
“You do. Especially when you show up with that fiercely determined and deeply confused look on your face. She specialized in that look. And I always found it utterly entrancing.”
This same table had sat in this same spot in their kitchen for almost thirty years. It was the same table that the three of them had used when Cass was little. Cass leaned back and
looked under the lip of the table for the little heart she’d drawn there when she was six.
Her father caught her looking and instantly knew what for.
“It’s still there,” he assured her, as if he’d recently checked.
The coffee was ready. He poured one cup for Cass and one for himself. Cass thoughtfully thumbed her hand-drawn heart under the lip of the table, and then held her mug in both hands, grateful for the way its warmth seeped into her cold fingers and up her thin arms.
“So this is a conversation about the heart?” her father asked.
Cass tilted her head in acknowledgement, but kept her eyes on her cup of coffee.
“I’m glad,” he said. “It’s nice to talk with you about something happy for once.”
Gary took a long sip, waiting.
Cass tried to start. The words tripped on her tongue, trapped by her uncertainty and doubt. How could she ever explain her current situation, loving both Zach and Richard in their own ways? Was that even love? She felt unmoored, unable to trust her own feelings.
“I was just hoping you’d tell me a bit about what attracted you to mom. How you knew you loved her. That kind of thing,” Cass finally managed to say.
Her dad nodded thoughtfully.
“Everything I know about love I learned, first, from your mother. She was a patient teacher. I was an eager student. In the beginning, though, I had a hard time seeing her. I was looking for the wrong thing. When I met your mother, I met her and Miranda at the same time. I was visiting Japan and they were training with Kumiko. I was struck, initially, by Miranda. She was loud and beautiful and funny and flamboyant. She always stood out in a crowd. But—thank God—she didn’t have any interest in me. So I became friends, instead, with Rose. She was quieter, more reserved, and harder to read. She was beautiful in that severely unassuming way that reminds me of you. She didn’t wear makeup, she didn’t care about what she wore, and, in the end, her beauty was all the more alluring as a result. Her carelessness magnified her charm because it made room for her heart and mind to shine as part of the mix.”
