Chapter 644: Rain and Star

I opened my mouth to respond, but the words did not come.

They sat in my throat, heavy and useless, and I realized with a start that I did not know what to say.

My daughters had something of a father complex.

However, I could not pretend I bore no responsibility for it.

Years earlier, when they were still small enough to sit on my knees, I had spoken too freely and too often.

The world beyond our walls, I told them, was filled with bad men—greedy men, cruel men, false men who would smile while they slid a knife between your ribs.

Only Papa could be trusted. Only Papa was truly good.

I had meant the words as a father’s careless protection, nothing more than the clumsy shield of a man who had seen too much of the world and wanted to keep his daughters from seeing the same.

Of course, I never imagined they would take the lesson so completely to heart that.

Even after they passed thirty, they would still refuse to leave the house, still treat every man who came near them as a threat to be watched and measured, then quietly rejected.

"Grandpa! I want to marry this person!"

The bright, eager voice belonged to Star, my only granddaughter, still in her teenage years and still far too quick to trust.

She stood in the middle of the hall pointing openly at Hawthorne, the large, quiet lady-man who had been nothing but gentle with her since the day he arrived, speaking little and moving carefully.

Nevertheless, her proposition left me momentarily speechless, my thoughts scattering like startled birds.

"Goodness, Star!" I turned fully toward her, folding my arms across my chest in a gesture I hoped looked more stern than flustered. "I have told you more times than I can count—all men are devils. Only Grandpa is the good one. How can you even think of such a thing?"

I let out a long breath.

This was precisely why the thought of her stepping into the wider world filled me with such dread.

She remained so open and easily pleased by simple kindness, so ready to see good in people who had not yet earned it.

That said, I could already picture the years ahead if she followed the same path as her mother and her aunt—clinging close to the house, treating me with the same stubborn attachment that sometimes made my days heavier than they needed to be.

Where exactly had I gone wrong in raising them?

The question returned to me more often than I liked to admit, usually in quiet moments when I was alone.

Inside the house, the smell of cooking herbs and warm bread drifted from the kitchen, filling the hall with a comfort that belied the complicated thoughts turning in my head.

My wife, Mandarin, was there with Saharit.

The two of them worked side by side at the long wooden table, chopping roots and stirring a pot that hung over the low fire, their movements synchronized in a way that spoke of hours spent together.

It still surprised me. When Saharit had first stepped through our door, Mandarin’s face had gone so pale and tight that I half expected to meet my end before nightfall, to be found in the morning with a kitchen knife between my shoulder blades and my wife’s fingerprints on the handle.

Somehow, against every expectation, the two women had found common ground.

Zanya had proven an even greater test of household peace. One night she had sleepwalked straight into our bedchamber and settled herself firmly between my wife and me, claiming a share of the marital bed without the slightest hesitation, or any apparent awareness that she was doing anything unusual.

Mandarin had spoken kindly to the younger woman the entire time, offering her an extra blanket and asking if she was warm enough, and if she needed another pillow.

The moment Zanya drifted back to sleep, however, my wife’s hands had closed around my throat with a strength I had not known she possessed, and I had spent the next several minutes explaining—in a hoarse and hurried whisper—that I had done nothing, and that I had been as surprised as she was.

I valued my life far too much to invite such a thing.

Yet for all the disruption, the presence of these Apex Girls had not been without some benefit.

Hawthorne, for all his size and silence and strangeness, proved to be a patient teacher.

In the span of only two days he had begun showing Star the first steps of low-level magic—simple lights that danced at her fingertips, small shifts of air that stirred the dust in lazy spirals, the basic shaping of energy into forms that held for a breath or two before dissolving.

She learned with a speed that left me both proud and faintly unsettled. Techniques that had taken me years to grasp seemed to settle into her hands after only a few careful explanations.

She asked questions I could not always answer, and Hawthorne answered them without impatience or condescension, without any hint that he found her curiosity tiresome.

My eldest daughter, Rain, had held a long sadness since the day she gave in to a moment of loneliness and found herself with child by a man who vanished the moment the news reached him.

The gravity of it had sat on her shoulders for years, pressing down on her smile, dimming the light that had once lived in her eyes.

Then Zanya, in her usual blunt fashion, had spoken of her own children—several of them, born of different men, each one taken care of and watched over under threat of severe punishment if they failed to report.

The story did not erase Rain’s past, or undo the years of shame and the nights spent wondering why she had done it.

But something in it eased the sharpness of that shame. She began to carry herself with a little more ease, as though she had been granted a strange sort of privilege by comparison.

The two women now spent long afternoons talking, their voices drifting through the house in low murmurs. Their growing friendship was genuine, even if it often ended with Rain turning her irritation on me in the form of sharp pinches or well-aimed swats whenever Zanya’s jokes grew too bold.