The Last Place That Still Gelt Like Hers

 "You can't be in here." 

 

The voice caught Marie before she'd even crossed the threshold, but she didn't answer right away. She was still looking at the room. 

 

She'd woken before dawn, the way she always did now, her body still keeping prison hours even with a soft bed under her. The house was quiet, the kind of quiet that came before a big day, everyone saving their energy for the King. She'd walked the halls without really deciding where she was going, and her feet had taken her here anyway, down the east corridor, past the old servants' stair, to the glass-walled room that used to smell like soil and crushed mint. 

 

She and Isolde used to spend whole afternoons in here. Isolde teaching her which roots eased fever, which leaves calmed a racing heart, the two of them elbow deep in dirt while Isolde talked about nothing in particular, just talked, the way mothers do when they want their daughters to feel safe enough to talk back. It was the one place in this house that had never belonged to anyone but the two of them. Marie had let herself believe, foolishly, that it might have stayed exactly as she left it. Some part of her had needed at least one thing to still be hers. 

 

It wasn't a herb room anymore. There was a piano against the far wall, polished black, sheet music open on the stand. An easel stood near the window where the medicinal shelves used to be, half-finished paintings stacked against the glass. The dirt smell was gone, replaced by something floral and expensive. Every trace of what this room used to hold, the drying racks, the little clay pots with her handwriting on the labels, all of it was gone like it had never existed. 

 

"You can't be in here," Sera said again, standing in the doorway in her nightclothes, hair still mussed from sleep. "This is my room. Well. My space." 

 

"I can see that," Marie said. 

 

She wasn't sure what she felt. It should have been smaller than the bedroom, smaller than the portrait on the stairs, and somehow it wasn't. The bedroom had just been a room. This place had been the one thing in the house that meant her mother had chosen her, specifically, once, before everything else had gone wrong. And now it held a piano. 

 

Footsteps came up behind them both. Callum, already dressed, hair still damp, stopping in the doorway when he saw the two of them standing there. 

 

"What's going on." 

 

"Nothing," Sera said quickly. "Marie just wandered in, I think she didn't know." 

 

Callum looked past his sister to the empty shelves, the piano, the easel, and something shifted across his face slowly, like a man doing math he didn't want to finish. Marie watched him understand, in real time, that this room used to be something. That he had walked past this door probably a hundred times over the last two years and never once wondered what had happened to what used to be inside it. 

 

"This was," he started, and stopped. 

 

"The herb room," Marie said. "Mother's and mine." 

 

He didn't say anything for a moment. She watched the guilt land on him properly this time, differently than it had in the carriage, differently than the bruises on her wrist. This wasn't about her body. This was about a room he'd let disappear without noticing, the same way he'd let two years disappear without noticing. 

 

"I didn't," he said. "I didn't even think about it. I'm sorry, I should have." 

 

"It's fine," Sera cut in, already moving toward Marie with her hands out, voice climbing toward tears. "I didn't know, nobody told me it mattered, I'll move everything out today, I'll have it put back exactly how it was, I promise, I never meant to take anything from you." 

 

And there it was. Marie watched it happen exactly the way it always did. Sera's guilt turned into a performance of guilt, loud enough and fast enough that somebody had to comfort her before she'd even finished apologizing. Callum's hand went to Sera's shoulder without him seeming to decide to put it there, the same easy, automatic gesture he hadn't managed for Marie once since the gate. 

 

"It's alright," he told her. "You didn't know. Nobody told you." 

 

Marie stood there and watched his guilt slide off her again, the way it always did, redirected onto comforting the person who'd taken the thing instead of the person who'd lost it. 

 

"I don't want it back," Marie said. 

 

Both of them looked at her. 

 

"The room. I don't want it back. Keep the piano." She kept her voice level, flat, nothing in it for either of them to grab onto. "I didn't come here to take anything from anyone." 

 

"Marie," Callum said. "You don't have to say that. If it meant something to you, we can fix it." 

 

"I'm not asking you to fix it." 

 

"Then what do you want?" 

 

She looked at him for a long moment. He still didn't understand, and some tired, distant part of her almost pitied him for that. 

 

"I'm not staying long enough for it to matter," she said. "I came back for Mother. I'll stay while she needs looking after, and then I'm going." 

 

Callum's face did something complicated, disbelief mostly, the particular disbelief of a man who assumes any hard feeling in a woman is temporary if you just wait it out. "You're upset. That's fair. But you don't mean that." 

 

"I do." 

 

"You just got home." 

 

"This stopped being home a long time before I got back," she said, and turned to go before either of them could answer that. 

 

He caught up to her in the hallway, footsteps quick behind her. 

 

"Marie. Wait." 

 

She stopped, but didn't turn around right away. When she did, her face was calm in a way that unsettled him more than anger would have. 

 

"I'm not staying in this family forever," she said. "I need you to understand that now, so nobody's surprised later." 

 

He opened his mouth to argue, and then didn't. She watched him decide, the way he seemed to decide everything these days, that this was just grief talking, or anger, or exhaustion, something that would wear off once she'd had time to settle back in. He didn't know her anymore well enough to know it wouldn't. 

 

"We'll talk about it later," he said instead, already turning back toward the room, toward Sera, who was still standing in the doorway looking fragile and lovely and entirely undisturbed by anything Marie had just said. 

 

Marie watched him go back to her. 

 

She walked away without waiting to see what came next.