Faerie Winter - Janni Lee Simner [45]
“You thought he was reckless to make promises to humans,” I said.
Karin looked sharply up, and I remembered I only knew that from my vision. “If I thought Kaylen reckless for releasing your mother,” she said in a level voice, “I had some cause, given what Tara did next. Once her thoughts were her own, once she understood what had happened to her, she grew wild with anger and fear, like the child she was. She fled from Kaylen, back to her human home.”
I’d seen that, too. Wind blew ice pellets against the trailer walls. I shuddered, remembering how the Lady had bent my very thoughts to her desires. “Of course Mom ran.” How could Karin have expected her to do otherwise?
“You do not understand. Tara told her father everything. She gave no thought to who he was. She thought only of her own pain. Yet she found no comfort in the telling, and so she fled her father as well. She returned to Kaylen, seeking—I don’t know what she sought. Love? Protection? A means of forgetting her pain? You’ll have to ask her, for I truly do not know. I know only that her father followed after her, and that much grief resulted from that in the end.”
“The War resulted from it.” My words were nearly lost to the noise of ice and wind. “But Mom couldn’t have known what would happen. She wouldn’t have gone back, if she had.”
“We all would do differently, could the seers read the consequences of our actions more clearly. That doesn’t make us any less responsible for those actions, no matter how much we wish it otherwise.”
Wind gusted through the hole in the ceiling. Mom had to tell someone what had happened. She hadn’t been wrong about that. Maybe her father hadn’t been like mine. Maybe she hadn’t known he was the wrong person to tell. “It wasn’t her fault. Not all of it.”
“Nor did I say it was.” Karin gazed at the ivy around her fingers. “I know well enough Tara did not move my hands and my voice when I commanded the trees to attack your people. I’m responsible for my actions, too. And so I save those I can, where I can, and will continue to do so as long as I draw breath. Can Tara say as much?”
“Mom’s saved people, too. In my town.” How many more would have fallen to magic, like Jayce’s granddaughter, if not for Mom?
“I know. Kaylen told me.” There was no forgiveness in Karin’s tone. She brushed her hand over the vine, and it retreated to wrap back around her wrist.
I wasn’t sure I forgave Mom, either. She hadn’t saved me, after all. Why was it so much easier to hate Mom for her failures, when Mom had never wanted the War to happen, than to hate Karin, who had attacked my people of her own will once it had? “Karin, why did you fight in the War?”
Karin was silent so long I thought she’d decided not to answer. Kyle stirred in his sleep, throwing off the blanket. I got up to wrap it back around him. He muttered something about mean ants and fell back asleep. I put my hand to his forehead. His skin was cool. Which mattered more—the people we saved or those we failed to save? I thought of Ethan, surely dead or near to it by now. I thought of Johnny, still with the Lady. I rubbed my wrist. The skin beneath Matthew’s hair tie was red where my sweater had tightened around it.
“I fought in the War because I believed it necessary to protect my people.” So quiet, Karin’s voice behind me. “And I fought because I wanted to please my mother.”
Kyle had flung his frog from the couch. I picked it up. How could anyone fight a war to please someone else? I squeezed the soft plastic in my hand. Once I might have killed for my father if he’d asked it, too. I tucked the frog in beside Kyle and returned to Karin’s side, drawing my arms around my knees. “Were things simpler Before?”
Karin laid a hand on my shoulder, and this time, I let her. “Few things were ever simple, in your world or in mine.”
Kyle sighed in his sleep. Karin shut her eyes, though her posture remained watchful. “My mother alone would not have acted differently had the seers told her what was to come. The Lady was known for many things, but forgiveness was not among them. The memories