Free Web NovelChapter 112: Chapter 112 Her arrival
_Author’s POV_
The Ebonmoon private plane was quiet and comfortable in the way that things were comfortable when money hadn’t been an obstacle in the planning of them.
Rowena sat by the window with her bag at her feet and watched the city disappear beneath the clouds. It happened fast. One moment she could see the roads and the buildings and the specific grid of the place she had been living and fighting in for months, and then the clouds came up and it was gone and there was just white and then blue.
She exhaled.
Alaric was across from her with a folder open on the table between them that he wasn’t really reading. She could tell because his eyes hadn’t moved in three minutes.
“You don’t have to pretend to work,” she said.
He looked up. “I’m not pretending.”
“Your eyes haven’t moved.”
He closed the folder.
She looked back out the window. freewebnøvel.com
The flight was two hours. She had known this and had thought she was prepared for two hours of sitting still with her thoughts, but now that the city was gone and there was nothing outside the window except sky, the thoughts arrived faster than she had expected.
Her father.
She had been managing the idea of this trip for weeks. Planning it, working toward it, using the logistics of it to keep the emotional weight of it at a distance. But the logistics were done now. The plane was in the air. There was nothing left to organize and nothing left to prepare and all that remained was the destination and what she was going to find there.
She didn’t know exactly what she was going to find.
That was the honest truth of it. She had read the reports. She had gone over the accounts of what had happened that day more times than she could count. But reports were documents and documents were words and words were not the same as standing in the place where something happened and understanding it with your whole body instead of just your mind.
She needed to understand it with her whole body.
“Rowena.”
She turned.
Alaric was looking at her with the direct attention he always gave her, no performance in it, just present.
“You went somewhere,” he said.
“I’m still here,” she said.
“You went somewhere in your head,” he said. “You don’t have to talk about it. I’m just noting it.”
She looked at him for a moment.
“I don’t know what I’m going to feel when we get there,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about this trip for a long time and I’ve been very organized about all of it and now we’re in the air and I don’t know.”
“That’s alright,” he said.
“I’m not usually uncertain,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “That’s also alright.”
She looked back at the window.
The sky outside was very blue and very clear.
She let it be quiet.
They landed at a small regional airfield two hours later.
A car was waiting, which Alaric had arranged, and they drove into the city in the late morning light. It was smaller than she had expected. She didn’t know why she had expected something larger. The reports had described it accurately. She just hadn’t translated the description into the reality of narrow streets and low buildings and the stillness of a place that didn’t have the constant motion of a capital.
She looked out the window the whole way.
The driver took them to the location without needing to be told twice. Alaric had sent the coordinates in advance.
They stopped and Rowena got out.
It was an open area at the edge of the city. Not marked or memorialized. Just a stretch of ground beside a road that looked exactly like every other stretch of ground beside every other road except that this one was the one.
She stood at the edge of it.
Alaric got out and stood behind her, far enough back to give her the space but close enough that she was aware of him, which she was grateful for in a way she didn’t have words for yet.
She walked forward.
She stood in the middle of the space and looked at the ground and the trees at the edge of it and the road beyond and the ordinary unremarkable sky above all of it.
Her father had stood here.
Her brothers had stood here. freeweɓnovēl.coɱ
She closed her eyes.
She didn’t cry. She had thought she might but she didn’t. What happened instead was quieter than crying. Something settled in her chest that had been unsettled for years, a piece of something that had been displaced and was now, in this place, finding where it belonged.
She stood there for a long time.
Alaric didn’t move behind her. Didn’t speak. Didn’t check on her or redirect her or indicate in any way that she had been standing there long enough. He just waited.
She opened her eyes.
She looked at the ground one more time.
“They weren’t afraid,” she said. She said it quietly and to no one in particular, or maybe to them, or maybe just to herself. “I know they weren’t. That’s not who they were.”
She stood there another moment.
Then she turned around.
Alaric was looking at her. His expression was open in a way she didn’t often see from him, the composure he always carried had softened at the edges and what was underneath it was something genuine and careful.
She walked back to where he stood and stopped in front of him.
She didn’t say anything and neither did he and then she did something she hadn’t planned. She stepped forward and leaned into him and his arms came up around her and she stood there with her face against his chest.
He held her without making it into something.
Just held her.
After a while she stepped back looked up at him.
“Thank you for coming,” she said.
“I know,” he said simply.
She almost smiled.
They walked back to the car.
She had needed to come here.
She had known she needed to and now she had done it and now she knew something she hadn’t known before, not about what happened but about who she was in relation to it.
She was her father’s daughter.
That has always been true.
But now she had stood where he stood and she knew it in a different way.
She was going to make it mean something.
