Movement Sixteen — What Eremos Noticed, Without Being Told Why

I want to leave you with one last small scene, because I think it belongs at the very end of this account more than anywhere else I could place it.

Eremos found Iris later that same evening, sitting alone in the conservatory among her one patch of real, living earth, the particular quiet she keeps for herself when she doesn't yet want company but hasn't quite managed to be entirely alone either. He did not ask her what was wrong. He rarely does, with her — some old, patient instinct in him seems to understand, without ever needing it explained, that Iris receives questions the way most people receive demands, and that the kindest thing he can offer her is simply his presence, unhurried, undemanding, ready to be used or ignored as she chooses.

He sat down beside her in the dirt, the way he sits beside everyone he loves, and said nothing at all for a long while. It was Iris, eventually, who broke the silence.

"Do you ever worry," she asked, "that the things you love most might also be the most dangerous things in your life?"

He considered the question with the same unhurried care he gives most things, turning it over the way he'd once turned over a philosopher's riddle about a soul never asked what it wanted. "I think everything I love is dangerous, in its own way," he said finally. "Grief is dangerous. So is hope. I don't think danger is a reason to love something less. I think it might be a reason to love it more carefully."

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Iris did not answer that right away. She only leaned, slowly, into his shoulder, the way Flora leans into him, the way half this household has learned to lean into him over the centuries, and let the quiet hold whatever else needed holding, for a while longer, without asking either of them to name it.

He did not know, sitting there, what she'd shown Flora that evening. He did not know about the mirror, or the shattered glass, or the shape that had worn shadow too dark to be called shadow. He simply knew, the way he has always known the things that matter most, that someone he loved was carrying something heavy, and that the carrying would be a little lighter, however briefly, for not being done entirely alone.

I think that is, in the end, the truest thing this whole strange, sprawling household has ever managed to build for itself, out of nothing but gray and patience and the stubborn refusal to let anyone carry the worst of it by themselves. I don't know what waits in the vision Iris carries. I don't know what wore that shape in the glass, or what the toy will eventually become, or whether the future that changed once can be made to change again, the way Flora so simply, so confidently believed it could.

I only know that tonight, at least, no one in that castle carried anything entirely alone. I think, whatever else this account has left unresolved, that is worth ending on.

— End of chapter—