[This post is from J.T.’s point of view.]
“I often think the same thing of Seamus,” Leinth continued, crossing her arms. She was in jeans today, jeans and a tank top, revealing pale arms with blue-gray tattoos spiraling across her collarbones and shoulders and down her arms. Her hair was gathered into a thick rope down her back, steps echoing along with his as they walked across the concrete that had already begun to crack with the shifting of the ground beneath it, with the change to the world they lived in.
How many years would it survive?
J.T.’s brows rose. “You do?”
“I think everyone does, sometimes,” she admitted, then smiled faintly. “One thing I knew when I met him, though—he was too good for any of us. For any of my ilk down in the south. For all that my father cajoled and demanded and negotiated—Seamus was beyond our depth. I wonder, sometimes, if Teague might have been but in my heart of hearts I know that whole clan was well beyond anything we deserved or ever should have desired.” Leinth shook her head slightly, her gaze far away. “And yet, somehow, my father managed to demand just such a thing and get it.”
A shiver crept down J.T.’s spine. “I—I don’t remember it,” he admitted quietly. “The feeling I get is that my soul was spun into someone close to Teague’s wife back then. I remember—” he broke off, took a deep breath, then started again. “—I remember seeing her choose her death.”
Leinth squeezed his shoulder. “Memories of a distant long-ago must be strange for all of you.”
“Not all of us have them,” J.T. said. “Just some of us—and not all of us talk about them, either.”
“Probably a wise decision.”
He nodded. They were coming up on the Shakespeare garden. Roses and other flowers grew in a wild profusion there, tangling over each other, hiding the ruins left behind by the destruction of last autumn. His heart gave a painful squeeze. Perhaps it would heal.
Perhaps it wouldn’t.
