Todos os capítulos de The unloved Luna's one-night mistake : Capítulo 91 - Capítulo 100

The morning after the supper, I woke before the household and went down to the kitchen to find Lyra already there.She was sitting at the table in her traveling clothes, with her satchel at her feet and her hands wrapped around a cup of tea. The window beside her was gray with early light. She did not look up when I came in, and I knew at once that she had been waiting for me."You're leaving today," I said."The cart goes at dawn.""I know." I sat down across from her. The chair creaked. "I was hoping you'd forget.""I never forget." She smiled, a little ruefully. "You know that."I did. I reached across the table and took her hand, and for a moment we simply sat there, listening to the tick of the clock and the faint scrape of a branch against the window."Mama," Lyra said. "May I ask you something?""Anything.""Are you ever afraid I won't come back?"I had not expected it. It struck me under the ribs, soft and sudden, like a hand pressed to a bruise."Every time," I said honestly.

The years did what years do. They passed without asking.I noticed it first in small things. A gray hair in the mirror, which I decided to keep. A stiffness in my knees on the stairs. But the larger changes came faster, and they were not mine.The twins turned twenty-four in the spring of a wet, green year, and on the morning of their birthday I came down to the yard and found that I could no longer tell which of the figures crossing it was my husband.I stood very still. It was my son. He was walking from the stables with a saddle over one shoulder, in the unhurried, rolling stride that I had watched for more than twenty years. He had Kael's shoulders now, and Kael's way of squinting into the sun. He was even, I realized, humming under his breath, a tuneless thing that I had heard a thousand times from the other man."Mama." He stopped when he saw me. "You're up early.""I'm always up early.""I know. I was hoping to surprise you." He grinned, and the boy I remembered flashed through

Kael wore a groove in the corridor floor.I had never seen him so restless. He had been pacing since midnight, up and down the long stone passage outside the birthing rooms, with his hands clasped behind his back and his jaw set like a man awaiting a verdict. Every few minutes he stopped at the door, and listened, and turned away again."You'll wear through the flagstones," I said."They've been there four hundred years. They can take it.""I'm not worried about the flagstones. I'm worried about you.""I'm perfectly fine." He did not look at me. "How long does it usually take?""You were there. You held my hand through two of them.""That was different. Then it was you." He rubbed his face. "This is my son's wife. My son. It's his first. I do not know what to do with my hands."I laughed, and patted the bench beside me. "Come and sit. You're making the healers nervous."He sat. He did not stay sat. After a moment, he was up again, and I let him go.It was a long night.I had thought I

I knew it was a dream, because I was walking without pain.My knees had been aching for years. They ached on stairs, and in the cold, and on the long walks that I still took along the northern ridge out of stubbornness. But in the dream I moved lightly, barefoot, over a surface as smooth and pale as polished bone, and there was nothing in my body but a quiet, buoyant ease.I looked around.I was standing on a vast, still plain. There was no grass, no tree, no landmark of any kind. The ground was a soft, luminous silver, and it ran flat to the horizon in every direction, glimmering faintly, as though it had been dusted with crushed pearl. Above me, the sky was the deep, clear black of a winter midnight, crowded with stars so large and so close that I felt I could have reached up and gathered them in my hands.And in the center of the sky, enormous and serene, hung the moon.It was fuller than I had ever seen it. It filled a third of the heavens, round and white and brilliant, and its l

The snow came early that year, and it stayed.I watched it from my bed through the tall window Kael had cut into the east wall of our bedroom the year the twins were born, so that I could see the orchard from my pillow. The branches were white and bare. Somewhere under all that quiet, the roots were sleeping, waiting for spring.I did not think I would see the spring. I was not sorry."You're looking at the window as though you're saying goodbye to it," Kael said from the chair beside me."I'm saying hello to the snow.""Liar." But his voice was soft, and his hand, wrapped around mine, did not loosen. He had not left that chair in two days, except when my daughter shooed him out to eat, and even then he ate standing in the doorway where he could see me.I turned my head on the pillow and looked at him. Truly looked, the way I had on the morning I first woke beside him, with my heart in my throat and no idea who he was.Those eyes had not changed. Everything around them had, and I love