Aísē: My Five Supernatural Wives

Chapter 155 155: The Walled Garden Part II

She heard me coming. She always did.She didn't turn around. But her shoulders changed slightly.... not tense, the opposite, the slight softening that meant she knew who it was and had decided not to maintain the full posture.

I stood beside her.

The light was warm here. Properly warm. The kind that didn't ask anything of you.

"You've been quiet since the coffee shop," I said.

"I'm often quiet."

"You're quiet in different ways. I've learned them."

She was silent for a moment. Looking at the far wall.

"The goddess chose you," she said.

"I gathered that."

"Not as a servant. Not as a champion. As a.... recipient. She gave you something." A pause. "The way you give something to a person you have already decided matters."

I said nothing.

"I find that," Aisha said, carefully, "difficult to process theologically." Another pause. The kind that meant she was working up to the real thing. "I have spent my entire adult life in the Church. I understand holy power as something you are granted in service. Something you earn through devotion and sacrifice and obedience. You don't.... receive things. You prove yourself deserving and then you are permitted to be a vessel for something larger than you."

She turned to look at me.

"And then there's you," she said. "Who walked into a goddess's presence apparently looking like an absolute disaster and was handed an elixir because she decided you needed it."

I looked at her.

"I was not the one who described me as an absolute disaster," I said.

"I am describing you now."

"I see."

Her mouth moved. Not quite a smile but the shape before one.

"I don't resent it," she said. Quieter. Being honest with the specific cost it took her to be honest. "I just.... I'm recalibrating. Everything I understood about how the divine worked has been quietly shifting since I met you and I'm still...catching up."

I looked at the light on the old stone of the wall.

"I've been catching up since before you joined the list," I said.

She looked at me. A pause.

"The list," she said.

"The list of things about my life that I did not plan for and have no framework for and am managing anyway."

"Am I on a list."

"Near the top," I said.

She went slightly still. The specific stillness of Aisha de Transilvania receiving something that had gotten through every layer and arrived properly.

She looked at the wall again. The light. The flowers growing into themselves along the base of it.

Then she stepped sideways and put her head against my shoulder.

No preamble. No announcement. Not romantic exactly... just real. The gesture of someone who had been managing themselves very hard for a long time and had decided, in this particular light in this particular garden, that they could stop for a moment.

I put my arm around her.

She didn't say anything. I didn't say anything.

The light did what it was doing and the garden held its quiet and we stood in it.

...

Across the garden Victor had found the iron bench and had sat on it and was looking at the sky with the expression of a man doing absolutely nothing and finding it surprisingly acceptable.

Mariabell was sitting beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched, her hands folded in her lap.

"You alright?" she said.

"Yeah," he said.

She looked at him.

"Victor."

"I'm fine," he said. The real version of fine, not the deflecting one. He looked at his hands. "It's a lot, is all. All of it. Every day for months it's been a lot. I'm just.... sitting with that for a minute."

Mariabell was quiet.

"I'm glad you came," he said. Quietly. The specific sincerity that arrived when Victor wasn't performing anything. "When all of this started. I'm glad you were there."

Mariabell looked at the side of his face.

Then she took his hand and laced her fingers through his and leaned her head on his shoulder in the uncomplicated way of two people who had arrived somewhere they hadn't planned to be and had decided, somewhere along the way, that they were glad they were there together.

"Me too," she said.

...

Liliana had found the flowers.

She was crouching in front of a cluster of them near the east wall, examining them with the focused attention of someone who found things beautiful and saw no reason to be moderate about it.

Eva was beside her. Also crouching. They were not quite talking.... just existing near each other in the way they'd developed over the morning, which was the way of two people who had not known each other long and had discovered, without making anything of it, that they were comfortable in the same space.

I approached.

Liliana looked up at me. The pink eyes had settled back to their usual purple but there was still something in them that hadn't been there this morning. Something that had arrived with yes and hadn't left.

"Do you know what these are called?" she asked.

I looked at the flowers.

Purple. The same purple as the cart outside the coffee shop.

"No," I said.

"Me neither." She looked at them. Then back at me with the small smile that was the real one. "They're nice though."

"They are."

She stood. Brushed off her knees. Then she stepped forward and took my face in both hands the same way she had this morning at the apartment.... the correction, she had called it. But this time she didn't stretch anything. She just looked at me. Close. Examining.

"Better," she said.

"Than this morning?"

"Than the morning after the cathedral. And the morning after that. And most of the mornings in between that I wasn't there for." She held my face for another moment. "You look less like you're solving something."

"I'm not solving anything right now."

"Good," she said. She leaned forward and kissed my cheek, slow and deliberate, the way she did most things when she meant them. Then she kept her forehead against my temple for a second.

"I'm here now," she said. Quiet.

"You are."

"So stop looking like you're doing it alone."

Eva, still crouching by the flowers, had tactfully become very interested in one specific petal and was not looking at us.

I looked at the side of Liliana's face. At the pink light catching the edges of her hair. At the garden around us, warm and old and patient.

'I know,' I thought.

I didn't say it. I pulled her in and held her properly instead, my arms around her, her face against my neck, her hands finding the front of my coat.

She made a small sound. Not words. Just..... the sound of something releasing.

We stood there for a while.

...

Éve had been watching from the wall.

When I looked up she was not pretending not to watch. She simply met my eyes and then looked away at the garden.... at Victor on the bench with Mariabell, at Aisha standing in the light a little further on, at Eva and her flowers.

Then she looked back at me.

She crossed the garden. Stopped in front of me. Liliana had drawn back slightly, not away, just.... giving room.

Éve looked at me for a moment.

Then she reached up and adjusted my coat collar with both hands. The same precision she'd given to the bookshop window. The same attention. Straightening something that didn't strictly need straightening.

"You keep forgetting your collar," she said.

"It's a persistent problem."

"I've noticed." She finished. Smoothed it down once. Her hands stayed at my chest for a moment before she dropped them. "The walled garden is nicer than I expected."

"Eva's pigeon had good information."

"It did." She looked at the space around us. Then back at me. "We should come back. When autumn arrives. The moss will be different then."

"I'd like that," I said.

She looked at me the way she looked at things she intended to keep.

"Then we will," she said.

...

We stayed until the light moved.

Eventually Victor stood and announced that he knew somewhere that did a proper lunch and that the only other acceptable option was going home and eating whatever was in the kitchen which he had looked at this morning and described as, quote, a philosophical question.

Mephistopheles, who had spent most of the garden's quiet sitting against the wall with her arms folded and her eyes on the sky.... stood without comment and fell into step at the back of the group.

I looked at her as we went through the gate.

She caught it.

"Don't," she said.

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"You were going to ask if I'm alright."

"I wasn't."

She looked at me. The look that she used when she was deciding whether she believed me.

"The garden was nice," she said finally. Flat. The specific flatness of someone who has decided to admit something and chosen the most minimal available phrasing for it.

"It was," I said.

She looked forward.

I looked forward.

We walked.

...

The city arranged itself around us the way it had been doing all morning... old and unhurried and entirely indifferent to who was walking through it, which was its own kind of comfort.

Liliana had her hand in mine.

Eva was on my other side, slightly behind, watching a pigeon with the focused interest of someone conducting an ongoing professional consultation.

Éve was ahead with Victor, and I could hear her asking him something about the neighbourhood that he was answering with the focused enthusiasm of a man who had been born knowing things about London and was finally being asked to share them.

Aisha walked beside Mariabell.

They were talking quietly. I didn't catch the words. But Mariabell was nodding and Aisha had the expression she got when she found someone genuinely interesting to talk to.... the full attention, the questions arriving one behind the other.

I watched all of them.

'This is what it looks like,' I thought. Not a resolution. Not an ending. Just a fact that had finished arriving the same way most true things arrived.... quietly, without ceremony, stating itself and then simply being true.

This is what it looks like when things are alright.

Liliana squeezed my hand without looking at me.

I squeezed back.

The city did what it always did and we walked through it.