Chapter 183: The Quiet game

BONNIE

I stared at them, waiting for the familiar glow to appear, for the warmth to gather beneath my skin, for that gentle humming sensation to climb through my wrists. In every waking version of this memory, I had been certain this was the day I first showed my mother my healing gift, the moment I had discovered what I could do and rushed to share it with her. I had imagined her fear as the understandable shock of a mother witnessing something extraordinary, followed by wonder, perhaps even pride.

But there was nothing extraordinary about my hands.

There was no light... No warmth or even healing powers stirring beneath my skin.

What stared back when I looked at my hands was just ten small fingers spread wide, and the empty air beyond them.

Then I looked beyond that.

And I noticed what was wrong.

The bench was a long way below me.

I was floating.

The child hadn’t noticed... Or perhaps she had. What else could she have been showing her mother? She literally hung a full arm’s length above the seat, her bare feet dangling over empty space, her braid drifting gently behind her. Beside her, the bowl of barley had risen from the table, hovering at an angle while the spoon turned in slow, lazy circles inside it.

Behind me, the shutters trembled against their hinges.

On the shelf, a row of fine ceramic cups began to chime against one another, their delicate clinking growing louder as they knocked together in an uneven rhythm.

I had never remembered that sound.

Not once in all the years I had returned to this kitchen in my sleep.

I had been lifting the entire kitchen. At least, I had been trying to and succeeding at it.

"Look, Mama," the child sang, delighted, rising another inch. "I can do it without even trying!"

All the air left my mother’s lungs.

"Bonnie."

Her voice had changed. The thin brightness was gone, replaced by something low, urgent, and trembling, the voice of a woman standing at the edge of a cliff and watching the ground crumble beneath her feet.

She dropped the spoon. It clattered against the stone hearth, and she crossed the kitchen in three hurried strides. For one terrible moment, I thought she was going to seize me by the arm and drag me down herself.

Instead, she stopped just short of me.

Her hands hovered at her sides, fingers twitching, as though she couldn’t decide whether to reach for me or keep her distance. She was afraid to touch me, afraid, even now, of hurting me.

No... That did not look like it. She was afraid of hurting herself.

Then she sank to her knees on the kitchen floor, bringing her face level with my dangling feet.

"Sweetheart." Her voice cracked. "Sweetheart, look at me."

The child blinked. The cups fell silent, and the bowl of barley dipped a little closer to the table.

"Why are you crying, Mama?"

I hadn’t noticed the tears until she said it. They streamed down my mother’s cheeks in silent lines, catching the sunlight, and she made no attempt to wipe them away.

It was as though she gained faith there and then.

Because she then raised both trembling hands and cupped my little face between them.

The moment her skin touched mine, I dropped.

It was not sudden or violent. I descended as gently as though something unseen had caught me and lowered me back to the ground. I realized what it was then. The gifts of small miracles. I had used it long before Fia had introduced it to me. I just did not... I just... Did I lock the memory?

My bare soles met the cold floorboards, and the world settled around me. The bowl landed on the table with a soft clink. The shutters stilled. Somewhere behind me, the last of the ceramic cups knocked against its neighbor before falling quiet.

My mother barely seemed to notice.

"Listen to me." She was whispering now, the words tumbling over one another as her eyes darted to the window and back. "I need you to listen very carefully, my love. This is the most important thing I will ever ask of you."

"Okay."

"You must never do that again." Her thumbs pressed against my cheekbones, not hard, but firmly enough to keep my attention on her. "Not here. Not outside. Not when you’re alone or think that you are, not when you’re happy, not even when you’re asleep. Never, Bonnie. Do you understand me?"

"But it’s just floating, Mama." The child’s smile faltered, though she still seemed more confused than frightened. "It’s fun."

"I know it is."

A sob broke through my mother’s whisper. She bent forward until her forehead rested against mine, leaving me with nowhere to look but into her eyes. They were grey and silver and swimming with tears, and beneath all that grief was a terror so profound that even the grown woman inside the memory felt the urge to pull away from it.

"I know it’s fun," she repeated, her voice breaking. "And you are not in trouble, sweetheart. You haven’t done anything wrong. Do you hear me? You did nothing wrong."

The child nodded, uncertain now.

"But there are people, Bonnie." My mother swallowed hard. "There are people who would take you away from me if they ever saw what you can do."

Something in me went very still.

Take you away from me. Somehow those words lingered.

"Do you remember what I told you about the quiet game?" she asked. "About keeping our secrets inside, even from the people we love?"

The child nodded slowly, the first shadow of understanding clouding her bright face.

"Even from Aunt Abra?"

My mother went very still.

It lasted only a heartbeat, but I would have missed it if I had been anyone other than the woman I was now, the woman who had spent years learning to read the faces of those who wanted her dead. Something passed across my mother’s expression, grief and guilt and something older than both, and then it was gone, folded away like a letter she could not afford to be found holding.

"Especially from her," she breathed.