Covenant's End - Ari Marmell Page 0,47
old times. I've been back two days, and I'm already a bloody mess, and you're in danger and hiding again.”
Robin's chuckle was faint, but it sounded genuine. “I'm surprised it took that long, really.”
“Well, I am out of practice.”
Another soft laugh, from both this time. The atmosphere in the chamber remained thick as gruel, but Shins found herself breathing just a bit easier.
“So,” Shins said again, a brief eternity later. “Faustine?”
“Yeah.” Robin's ministrations halted for perhaps a second, then resumed. “Does that bother you?”
“I…no. No, Robs, it doesn't bother me. I just…never noticed some things, I guess.”
“No.” A tinge of bitterness, now, subtle enough that Shins would have missed it coming from anyone else. “You wouldn't have.”
What the hopping hens is that about?
As this didn't seem quite the right time to ask for clarification, however, she chose a different tack. “Is she taking care of you?”
As Shins had practically heard her friend's scowl earlier, so she swore she heard the broad smile now. “When I need it. And the other way around. She's good for me, Shins, if that's what you're asking.”
“I'm glad. You need good people in your life.”
In the distant corner of her deepest thoughts, Olgun slapped a nonexistent hand to a nonexistent forehead. That had been, Shins realized when Robin's hands tensed, exactly the wrong thing to say.
“Oh, figs. Robin…”
“Faustine's been with me every second I needed her,” Robin replied in a near monotone. “Renard's been by the Witch pretty regularly. Always somehow manages a free mug of something out of the deal, but it's nice to have him around. Also that guard, once or twice. Julien's friend; what was his name? Paschal, right?”
“Uh…”
“Never for very long, just sort of poking his head in. Even Evrard's been in a few times.”
“Ev—he—what?”
Robin's shrug shifted the mattress a hair. “Well, he has.”
“That's probably guilt, you know. From the whole ‘kidnapping you’ thing.”
“Probably. But at least he was here.”
“Robin, come on! I told you, I had to…had…”
Had to get away. Couldn't face losing Julien on top of everything else that'd happened, everyone else who's been taken from me.
She'd said it before, aloud. She'd said it a thousand times in her head. She'd believed it, wholeheartedly, when she left.
She had not believed it since Aubier, not since she'd nearly died in Castle Pauvril. Not really. She'd admitted as much at the time, to herself, even to Olgun. So why cling to it so stubbornly now?
And once she'd asked herself the question, the answer came as clearly as if Olgun had spelled it out for her in the stars.
She'd been wrong, selfish; and it meant she could no longer justify, even to herself, any of the hurt she'd caused.
Widdershins wasn't sure precisely when she'd begun weeping into the pillow. She knew only, now, that she couldn't stop. Her sobs were gasping, ugly, leaving splotches of tears all over the fabric. Her shoulders heaved, tugging, if only lightly, on wounds and bandages.
When she felt Robin's hands on those shoulders—gentle again, comforting, no trace of their earlier rigidity, no hint of anger—it only drove her into further, more copious tears.
“I'm sorry.” Less than a whisper, less than a rasp, ground out between hiccoughs, gasping, and sobs. “Gods, Robin, I'm sorry.”
“I know.” Her voice, too, had grown unsteady. “I know you are, Shins. And I know you didn't mean to abandon me—any of your friends. That you weren't thinking clearly.
“I understand, but do you? Do you get why ‘sorry’ isn't enough? Why I can't forgive you yet?”
Something inside Widdershins crumpled into a tight mass at those last words. She wanted, literally, to pull the covers over her head, to break into a crying jag that would make the previous look downright celebratory.
She managed not to. Barely.
“Tell me. I want to make things right.”
“Other than Genevieve, you were the only person I can even remember trusting—until Faustine, anyway. You were the one I counted on. Even when things were at their worst, when you were hurt and crying…I knew that, no matter what, you would be there when I needed you, and there was nothing you couldn't handle.”
Shins felt something trying to reopen the wound in her gut, from the inside. “And then I left.”
“And then you left.”
“Robin, nobody could be what—”
“I know. I've figured that out. I'm not angry at you for being human, Shins. But that's where I was. That's who you were to me. And when I learned you could let me down…”
Shins nodded awkwardly into the cushion. “You felt betrayed,” she hazarded.
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