Chapter 3: Unspoken Longing
The fire in Felicity’s hearth was down to embers, painting the woven willow walls in pulses of amber and shadow. Rolan busied himself with the kettle, a simple copper pot he’d brought from his shop. He snapped his fingers, and a twist of blue flame, neat and contained, leapt to life beneath it, casting bizarre, dancing shapes on the mossy shelves. It hummed a low, arcane note.
“Show-off,” Felicity murmured from her nest of cushions on the floor. But she was watching the flames, her pale eyes following their restless shapes. A slight, unconscious sway of her shoulders. Dancing with the fire.
“Practical,” he corrected, settling onto a low stool opposite her. “Your wood is damp. It would smoke us out. And after the miasma of… well, everything else tonight, I think we could do with clear air.”
He’d meant the psychic weight of the clearing. The sick heartbeat. The words hung between them, acknowledged but not pressed.
She pulled a knitted shawl tighter around her shoulders. It was a deep forest green, worn at the edges. Astarion’s, he realized. The recognition was a small, sharp stone in his gut.
“Chamomile?” he asked, already reaching for the tin he’d brought.
“Please.” She paused. “It was his favorite. For winding down after a long watch.”
Rolan’s hand stilled for a fraction of a second above the tin. Then he popped the lid. The smell was sweet, hay-like, innocent. “Mine too. For winding down after a long day of customers asking for love potions to use on unsuspecting bakers.”
That got a flicker. A faint, almost imperceptible upturn at the corner of her mouth. Progress. He measured the dried flowers into two clay mugs, his movements precise. The blue flames hissed as the kettle began to sing, a rising, thin whistle.
“It’s less a song and more a shriek, your kettle,” she observed, tilting her head.
“It’s enthusiastic. I appreciate enthusiasm.” He poured the hot water, and the scent of chamomile bloomed, softening the air. He handed her a mug. Their fingers brushed. Hers were still cold.
She held the cup under her chin, breathing in the steam, eyes closed. “He used to say it smelled like sunlight. Which is wrong. Sunlight has no smell. It smells like heat on pine, or on dry stone. But it’s what he said.”
She spoke quietly, not to him, but to the memory. Rolan stayed silent, sipping his own tea. It was too hot. It burned his tongue. He welcomed the distraction.
“We grew it,” she continued, eyes still closed. “In the little terraced garden out back. He was terrible at gardening. All thumbs. He’d overwater the mint and forget the tomatoes existed. But the chamomile, for some reason, it thrived for him. He’d bring me a handful, all crumpled and warm from his pocket.” Her voice hitched, just once. “We’d make tea. And we’d talk about… the future. Simple things. The apple tree that needed pruning. Adding a room to the cottage.”
She opened her eyes then, but she wasn’t looking at him. She was staring into the depths of her mug as if it were a scrying pool. “We were trying. For a child.”
The words landed in the quiet room with the weight of fallen timber. The hum of the blue flame seemed to gutter. The fire’s crackle was the only sound.
Rolan’s breath stopped. All the air left the room. The previous confession—the land’s sickness, her grief—was abstract, cosmic. This was specific. This was physical. Intimate. A raw, anatomical hurt.
“Oh,” he managed. It was a stupid, inadequate sound.
“It wasn’t happening,” she said, the clinical tone she used for blighted crops creeping in. “Not for years. We’d started… looking into things. He was going to travel to the city, to a proper cleric, next season. After the harvest.” She took a shuddering sip of tea. “My body… it still feels like it’s waiting. Every month, it’s this… furious, empty rehearsal. All that potential, just circling. Aching. With nowhere to go.”
She finally looked at him, and the sadness in her gaze had sharpened into something like bewildered rage. “How do you grieve for someone who never was? How do you mourn a ghost of a possibility?”
Rolan’s mind was a blank, white page. All his wit, his sarcasm, his shelves of prepared responses—ash. He was stripped bare before her pain. He saw the years of hope in her eyes, the monthly disappointments, the private plans whispered over chamomile tea. He saw Astarion, clumsy and gentle, dreaming of a family in this mossy cottage. The image was a physical blow.
And without his brain’s permission, a truth he’d never voiced, small and fierce, pushed past his lips.
“You’d have made a radiant mother.”
The words were just a whisper, softer than the fire’s sigh. He hadn’t meant to say them. They were just… there. Hanging in the steam between them.
Felicity blinked. The bewildered rage in her eyes fractured, replaced by a stunned, vulnerable confusion. She wasn’t used to direct, emotional statements. Sarcasm she could parse. This plain, unadorned truth left her unmoored.
“I…” she started, then stopped. She looked down at her hands, clutching the mug. “I don’t know about radiant. I would have been… distracted. I forget to eat sometimes. I talk to squirrels more than people.”
“You’d have taught them the secret names of things,” Rolan said, his voice finding a little strength. “They’d have known which berries were sweetest, how to listen to tree roots, how to dance when the rain came. They’d have never felt lonely.”
A single tear escaped, tracing a hot path down her cheek. She didn’t wipe it away. “That’s not… that’s not what the parenting manuscripts say to do.”
“The manuscripts are written by bureaucrats in cities made of stone. They don’t know anything.”
She let out a sound—a choked half-laugh, half-sob. She put the mug down carefully, as if it might break. She wrapped her arms around herself, rocking slightly, forward and back. Her gaze was turned inward, toward that lost future.
Rolan’s heart was a wild drum against his ribs. He had crossed a line. He’d stepped out from behind the facade of the witty friend and shown a piece of the raw, watching admiration that had lived in him for a century. The terror of it was electric. But so was the relief.
The silence stretched, but it wasn’t the sick silence of the clearing. It was fraught, tremulous, but alive.
Finally, she spoke, her voice rough. “The land aches because I do. You said to change the tune. To give it a different memory.” She looked at him, her eyes clear now, sharp with a new, painful determination. “I have to find a way to make my body forget its own waiting. To make it… just a body again. Not a shrine to a might-have-been.”
It was a terrifying, monumental task. To decouple grief from biology. To silence that inward-facing ache.
Rolan set his own mug down. The blue flame under the kettle flickered out with a final, soft pop. “How?”
“I don’t know.” She stood up suddenly, the shawl slipping from her shoulders. She began to pace the small room, her movements loose, uncoordinated. Not quite a dance, but the restlessness that preceded one. “But if my grief is a song the land is singing back to me, then I need a new song. A whole new composition. For me. Not for him. Not for the ghost.” She stopped, facing the dark window where their reflections hovered like spirits. “The primrose memory helped. For a moment. But it was a memory of us. Of you and me, before any of… this.” She gestured, a vague swirl that encompassed Astarion, the loss, the empty yearning.
She turned back to him, and for the first time since that night on the porch, he saw a flicker of the old Felicity. The one driven by a curious, relentless need to understand and fix. “I need to make a memory that is only mine. Now. Something the land has never felt from me before.”
Rolan understood. The gravity of it settled on him. She wasn’t just asking to heal. She was proposing an act of magical, emotional severance. A risky, profound rewrite of her own soul’s resonance.
“That,” he said, pushing himself to his feet, “sounds like the kind of problem that requires research. And possibly… significantly stronger tea.”
She almost smiled. A real one, brief but undeniable. “Your shop? Tomorrow?”
“My shop,” he confirmed. “Early. Before the customers start asking for their fool’s remedies.” He moved to the door, collecting his cloak. The night air whispered through the cracks.
She followed him, standing in the pool of warmth from the dying fire. “Rolan?”
He turned.
“Thank you. For… feeling the heartbeat. And for saying that thing. About the radiant mother.”
He nodded, unable to trust his voice again. He gave a small, awkward wave and stepped out into the chilling dark.
As he walked the path home, the forest felt different. The sickness was still there, a bass note under the rustle of leaves. But layered over it, from the direction of her cottage, he thought he could hear something new. A faint, stumbling rhythm. The sound of someone, alone in a room, beginning to dance.