Woven Delights, The Painted Ladies
Most of all, Ava thought, she wondered if she really ever had been someone else. It was impossible to imagine. Ava thought of her aunt; she remembered getting a scolding for something or other when her aunt had been pregnant with Archie, remembered being told that the baby’s soul was there even now, and that if she upset her aunt and her aunt got angry, it might ruin everything for the baby to come. Ava remembered, wryly, how unfair she had found that.
Ava wanted to lie to Tom and pretend that she understood; she wanted to let him stop there, to feel like he didn’t have to drag any more out of himself today. She wasn’t the only one opened bare inside this little silken room, Ava thought; Tom was too.
“No, Mr. Cooke,” Ava said, gently, sorrowfully. “I wish I could give that to you.” Proof of something. Proof he wasn’t some moony old galdor? Proof he wasn’t really Anatole? He had said it earlier, and she had let it slide past. Was that what he meant now?
Or proof of something more, and terrifying proof at that? A raen a century old, who have lived more lives than they could count on their fingers. And Tom? He would keep living on, then, in new bodies - or at least he hadn’t argued with her characterization of it that way. But, she thought, he wouldn’t forget.
Ava shivered, faintly, unable to help it. She would. She would be born again, and she would forget. She might be anything - a fisherman in Plugit, an imbali bookseller in Thul Ka. A galdor.
Ava’s jaw tightened, and she held herself still through the wave of revulsion. “And if we’re wrong about the circle?” She asked, aware that it was utterly blasphemous, tempering her own disbelief with that if, as if she could pretend it was a purely academic sort of thought. “Maybe the rest of us just fade to nothing, but you - you hold together a little longer. And if they are right - if when we die the soul is washed clean of everything we have suffered and reborn to suffer again -“ too bitter, Ava thought, the words like a bite of unripe fruit, “why do you remember?”
It was too personal. Ava wanted to draw back into the academics of it, but she wasn’t just over her head; she was drowning in a sea of philosophy and finding it deeper than she had ever imagined, so deep she didn’t think she could see the surface above.
But -
“If it’s being him that worries you,” Ava said, quietly, aware that she might have misinterpreted, that she might be responding to a fear that existed only in her mind, “then - whatever it was that made him him - not his body, not his ley lines, but the mind, the soul or something else we’ve no name for - I’ve never felt it in you. I can’t cast any spells to be sure,” not envy, but a faint revulsion, something under the surface of her voice she couldn’t manage to hide, “but I believe I would know. You may not be the Tom Cooke that you were, but you’re not Anatole Vauquelin either.”
That name was heavy and raw in her chest, heavy and raw on her tongue; Ava couldn’t keep the meaning from it, and she didn’t try. She sat next to Tom still - inches between them, and with how close they had been now it almost did feel like feet. She felt the buzzing of his field beneath her skin, something angry and itching; she looked down at his hands, painfully familiar, then looked up at his eyes once more, and didn’t pull back this time, didn’t cry either, eyes clear and dry, as if she could let Tom see the pain and the certainty all together.
Saying the name wouldn’t summon him back to life, Ava thought. Nothing would. The memories were ghosts, and Ava wanted so badly to exorcise them. Did speaking to them keep them alive? Or was it the only way to banish them?